Fiction Exercises

[Willow Oran]

I'm currently taking a creative writing course and I thought it would be fun to post the results of some of the assigments I've had. I'll also post the exercise that was assigned so that anyone who wishes to use said exercise for practice or fun can.

Our first assigment was to describe a gorgeous natural landscape from the point of view of someone who had just commited a murder without mentioning the murder .

Here's what I came up with:

I reach to touch the golden moon and in her light an incarnadine glow spreads from my outstretched fingers. The moon is full, a jewel at the throat of the sky, hung on an irregular chain of stars to dangle above her distant, mountainous collar.

My hand is a stain on her cerulean skin and I lower it that I might better see the cloth of her dress. Her dress is the surface of the world, a form fitting shroud of finest linen embroidered with the intricate threads of geography. Below the collarbone mountains is the forest-bearded expanse of her bosom blending into a grassy corset laced up with weeds and trickling streams. I am standing in front of a mole, in the hollow between the waist and the last, littlest rib.

If I listen, I can hear her, every ghostly sound. The earth beneath me rises and falls with each whispering breath, and when I shift my feet I hear the snap of skin pulled too taut over the coarse flesh and crystallized bones that click and grind out of sight. I can hear every fleshy, echoing thud of her footstep as she dances, spinning slowly through time.

Her breath is sweet, I taste it when I kiss the wind, opening my mouth as wide as my jaw allows to inhale and gulp it down to my lungs. It carries the scent of the surrounding fields of lilies.

I step towards her face, towards the sky above the mountains. I open the gate that stands in my way and it pirouettes outward on well oiled hinges. I step out onto the rode, and wake up.

The wind smells of rot, it is perfumed by the fields of decomposing lilies which glow sickly in the wan starlight. The world before me is a pile of disease ridden rags spread out to cover too many lumps of dehumanized flesh.

Behind me stands a disgusting wart of metal and wood unnaturally manipulated to be a model of sterility masquerading as a home.

This sky, those mountains, the fields, the house, these were all beautiful when I loved.

I could feel them living, when I loved.

I can’t feel them anymore.

I reach out my hand again. My arm strains away, over the indigo mountains, through the humid, sweating flesh of the sky. I stand on tiptoe, desperate, reaching to touch the harvest moon.

And the golden light makes my hand glow crimson
with blood.

Please feel free to offer constructive criticism or to post your own response.

-WO