The Memory of the Sun

        Hello all!  I know I haven't been writing (or posting) much, but I thought it might be nice to post one of the few things I have written in this time.  

This piece was written for a challenge at CleanPlace, one of the writing forums I participate in.  The challenge was to write a piece between 700 and 1,000 words long that began on a dark and stormy night, but that did not use the words "dark," "stormy," or "night."  Furthermore, the story had to start with one of the three phrases provided.  I chose "All I wanted was the feel of sunlight." 

Enjoy!

~/~/~

The Memory of the Sun

    All I wanted was the feel of sunlight on my face, drenching my skin in warmth, lending me its life-force.  Out of all the desires warring in my heart, I had narrowed it down to that one.  The sun.  Give me the sun, give me the light it brought, give me even the weakest beam trailing through a dusty room, and I would be happy. 

            But the sun and all that came with it were still hours and another hemisphere away.  And even when it came, I would be forbidden to touch it. 

            The rain drummed against the window like the fingers of a bored, impatient hand.  The only thing I could see were the streaks they made as they ran down the window, backlit ever-so-faintly by the tumultuous clouds in the sky. 

            I toyed with the flashlight in my hands, running my fingers over the rubber bubble it had for an on-button.  Was it worth it to turn it on, just so I could look at the pictures once again?  Just so I could wade through memories of the laughing, golden-haired girl that had been me only a few short months ago?  Just so I could remember with even greater clarity what sunlight felt like, and long for it all the more?  No.  I thought not.

            A vicious pounding shook the door.  I started and stared at it, feeling all sorts of horrid suggestions of who it could be creeping into my brain.  I didn’t think I dared to open it. 

            The pounding came again, then ceased.  Just when I had dared to breathe again, the door flew open.  Rain and wind blasted into the room around the cloaked silhouette.

            “Locked yourself in the toolshed again?” a familiar tenor voice said.  “Really, Jillian, you are being immature.  What are you doing indoors on such a glorious evening as this?” 

            “You call this glorious?” I yelled over the noise of the wind as I rushed to push the door closed again. 

            “But of course!  What else could it be?”  Heavy boots trod over to the window.  I could just see the outline of well-chiseled his face as he spoke.  “You’re making a mistake, staying in like this.  You should come with me.  I’ll teach you more about what it means to be a shadow nymph.” 

            “Randolph…”  Honestly, I wanted to like the man.  But he seemed to have an uncanny knack for appearing whenever I least wanted him.  And how could he treat what had just happened to me so flippantly, like it happened every day? 

            “Well, why not?” he asked.

            “It’s wet out there.  Look at me.  You just opened the door, and I’m practically half soaked.” 

            He laughed.  “I suppose you would call that hyperbole?  Well then, if it is so very wet, I should stay here, shouldn’t I?  Oh, but we couldn’t have that.  You obviously want me to leave.  Very well, I won’t stay long.  But you might as well come with me.  You know you’d love it.” 

            Impossible, impossible man.  “Oh, sure!” I lashed out.  “Because being a shadow nymph is the best thing since sliced bread, and any other life you might have had doesn’t matter at all.  I don’t know why you can’t see it, but this hasn’t been the easiest thing for me, and I don’t want to go running off and getting all wet for something I don’t care about at all!” 

            Randolph didn’t reply immediately.  Even his silhouette put aside the energy that normally hung about him.  The indistinct void of the tool shed became still, and the noise of the tempest outside seemed far away, removed from the silence surrounding us.  The raindrops continued sliding down the windowpane behind the cutout image of his curly head.  I knew that he was looking hard at me.  I wondered what he could see with eyes that for so long had gone without sunlight. 

            “Jillian,” he said at last, “you are one of us now.  No shadow nymph raised with humans ever came to terms with it right off the bat – but please, at least try to accept it.  It really is a beautiful thing to be.  Once you stop mourning for your old life, you’ll see that too.” 

            “But I was a child of the sun!” I cried.  My fists swung out, looking for a wall to pound on, to push against.  Some glass object fell to the floor and shattered.  “Picnics! Water-balloon fights!  Lying on the beach, watching the leaves change color, running through fields of daisies, laughing with friends, sunbathing, warm summer afternoons, rainbows, wearing sparkly earrings, fresh spring mornings, volleyball…” 

            I felt hands close about my wrists. 

            “I know,” he said.

            I stopped.  I tried to get a hold of my breath before it let out the sob in my throat that would betray me. 

            “We never forget, you know,” he continued.  “None of us do.  All those things… yeah.  All still here, in our heads.  Sometimes you’re so sure it’s not fair.  And a lot of the time, it isn’t.” 

            He let go of my hands.  We both knew I wasn’t going to struggle any more.

            “What do you do?” I asked. 

            For a second I thought that I saw his face, and that he was smiling in a slow, strangely knowing way.  But it couldn’t have been.  Everything on the inside of the tool shed was still as black as ebony. 

            “You remember all the things you can do that other people only dream about.”  He laughed – a delighted, almost bewildered sound.  “You should see, Jillian!  If they knew the things we saw and did… you’d be surprised at the number of people who would trade places with us, just to experience all we experience.  Let me take you out and show you.  Forget, just for a little while, how sad you are.  Come with me.”

            He brushed past me and opened the door. 

            And I went with him. 

 (c) Copyright 2011 Cherise

The Remarkable Profanity

I know the title sounds a little scary, but believe me, I won't subject you to anything profane.  Everything questionable in this post is represented by asterisks. 

I was scrolling through the Word document that is the compilation of everything I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2009 (since in my quest for 50k I didn't exactly stick with one novel).  I found this little tidbit that I had forgotten about, and upon rereading it I rather enjoyed it, so I thought I'd share. 

The Remarkable Profanity
by Cherise

“Corianna, where the ******************** is the next inn located?”

“I didn’t know you knew a cussword that long,” Corianna pointed out. “Twenty asterisks just to bleep it out.”

“I asked you a question,” Pippers said. “Now tell me, or by ******************* I’ll knock your head off!”

“I think you missed a letter,” Corianna mused, swirling the peppermint tea in her mug. “Or perhaps three.”

“What the ******************* does it matter???” Pippers demanded. “Just answer the question!”

“But I have to hand it to you, that still is talent. Where did you pick it up?”

“Corianna, you ********************!!!!”

“Although perhaps if that’s the only colorful word you know….”

“I know more than that! Why, I bet you haven’t heard ***********************************************!!!”

Corianna sat, stunned into silence. “How on earth do you keep track of that many syllables?” she murmured, after the minute of reverent silence had passed.

“Easy,” Pippers said, leaning back in his chair. “You live with a people that use it at least three times in every sentence.”

“And who would that people be?”

“A particular race of dwarf.” Pippers grinned, beginning to take delight in his tale. “They speak an old dialect in which every word is five times as long as it ought to be. *********************************************** is the equivalent of a four-letter word in our language.”

“Like ‘scram.’”

Pippers frowned. “But don’t ‘scram’ have five letters?”

Corianna shook her head. “S – C – R – M. Scram.”

“Ah.” Pippers continued to look at her with a puzzled expression. “You sure?”

“Didn’t I just spell it for you?”

For a moment, Pippers’ face betrayed his cluelessness. But then his pride took over, and he nodded knowingly. “Right you did! Forgive my mistake!”

Corianna nodded, and then hid her face behind her mug of tea to hide her grin. Unfortunately, when the grin slid out it brought with it a laugh, and the laugh happened to immerge at the same moment that she was taking a gulp of tea, the result being that a moment later, Pippers was violently slamming his broad hand into her back to try to dislodge three ounces of tea from her windpipe. At last she had coughed it up, (spewing it, unfortunately, all over the wooden table), and looked up to find Pippers scowling at her.

“***********************************************! Don’t do that to me, Cory! This journey is plenty enough *********************************************** fun without you choking on everything you put in your mouth!”

“I do agree that it is becoming much more a frequent occurrence than I should like,” Corianna said, wiping her mouth and pulling a handkerchief – the only one she owned, which was red with a swirly design embroidered on it in black thread – to mop up the mess she had made.

“A *********************************************** frequent occurrence!” Pippers cried. “If you keep it up, I’ll have to ban you from commestabibles for at least a day, just to teach ya’ to behave!”

“I believe the correct word is comestibles,” Corianna remarked.

“Who cares??” Pippers stomped back to the other side of the table and resumed his seat. “You won’t get any of them, that’s what matters!”

Writing Prompt Wednesday: The Aliens Invaded

I'm starting a new weekly meme for myself.  Every Wednesday, I'll hunt for a writing prompt (or make up my own), then post the prompt and what I wrote for it on here.  If you want to do it with me, then write something and post it on your own blog, and comment to this post with a link to your post.  I would love to see what you write! 




This week's prompt comes from Writing Excuses Episode 4.32: First Paragraphs.  




Writing Prompt: You’re writing in your journal for the first time in ten years, and the last ten years included the invasion of Earth.




What I Wrote:




Well.




If I needed proof that I’ve changed in the last ten years since I actually wrote in a journal, there it is. I’ve practically forgotten how to do it. That was the most idiotic way to start a journal ever. I used to be able to think of the right way to start, and I wasn’t always so nervous about starting. If Dan hadn’t insisted, then I’d feel absolutely horrible about wasting paper like this. I do anyway.




He handed this book to me when he came back to our pod last night, and told me that I needed to start writing again for my own sake. I don’t know what on earth he had to go through to find a book, much less a blank journal, but he won’t tell me. He doesn’t want me worrying. (And if I know my husband, then what happened is something I would worry about.)




And there, look, I’m starting a new page now, and what did I even say on the first page?




Perhaps he was right. I needed this more than I thought.




I am laughing right now. I’m not really amused – it’s more like irony. Laughing at irony can be dangerous. But I used to do it all the time, back when I was writing. It’s funny how paper can make you remember who you used to be. Welcome back, Cheryl.




Where do I start?




Just saying ‘the aliens finally invaded’ sounds so callous. But it’s true. A decade ago UFO’s belonged to conspiracy theorists and strange cults, and then BOOM! There they are! And BOOM! There goes everything we ever knew. All governments, all economies, all nations, all communities, all businesses, organizations, schools – gone! Overnight those monsters set up their own system, using their advanced technology and their unfeeling ideas on how humans should be governed.




Everyone is a widget now. Children are kept in an alien-run ‘education’ camp until puberty, then either drafted to work as soldier-slaves in the human contingent of the aliens’ army of conquest, or put to work on the factories producing their weapons and machinery. If you can work, then you do until you die. Reading, writing, and any ideas are forbidden. The aliens raided every home, business, and library for everything printed on paper and locked it all in a giant archive to be ‘studied.’ As if they’ll ever really look at it. They might have been curious in the beginning. But they’ve been in control long enough to know the one thing they wanted to know – that humanity doesn’t pose a threat at all.




Dan and I are among the lucky few that escaped. Apparently the one place where the aliens hesitate to go is underground. That’s where we are now. ‘The Underground’ is made up of a network of large metal shipping crates connected by collapsible tunnels. Directly above us is a natural cave with a steady supply of oxygen from the surface, so we’ve cut hundreds of air passages up to that cavern so that we don’t suffocate.




I said the tunnels are collapsible. Thank God for engineers – they devised a system so that if one pod is discovered, the press of a button will shut down all the tunnels so that the other pods won’t be discovered. It’s the only way we worked up enough nerve to live in a single, interconnected group.




I try not to think about the way things are too much. It’s so easy to hate the situation that we’re in, but we can’t do anything about it, and allowing ourselves to be miserable is one of the slower and more painful ways to die down here. One learns to be grateful for small things. Like life. And freedom. I think often of all the people on the surface, and how they must wish with all their hearts that they were with us.




But sometimes this all sounds so much like a bad science-fiction film. We’re not even trying to put up a resistance. We can’t. All we dare to hope is that we continue to stay unnoticed and free for another month.




I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that this time, the good guys will never ‘win’.