#workshop writing

Scully had not seen the boy until he gasped in surprise -- the ice taking his feet out from under him. She’d been looking for game on the forested ridge the next valley over, and had been on her way back. Normally attuned to the woods around her, she had not known she was being followed. She whirled in surprise and watched him come down awkwardly on his ankle.

He was 13, maybe 14; on the raw edge of manhood, the pale wisp of whiskers just creeping out of wind-chapped skin. She already knew a bone had broken. It had wret the air with the same sound as a hound catching a treat mid-arc; wet and sucking, the carnassial snap of enamel meeting enamel. It would likely have to be set.

The boy whimpered from where he fell at the base of a large hemlock tree as she approached. He eyed her suspiciously as she whipped the cape from her back and settled it around his shoulders.

“What’s your name?” she asked, trying to distract him as she ran her hand slowly down his shin.

Mulder would be waiting in the rusted shack at the edge of the wood and he would worry if she came back after nightfall -- that was when the faceless men prowled, looking for survivors.

The boy winced and inhaled sharply as her fingers ran over the cleft where the fibula met the talus and she rocked back on her heels, eyeing the darkening horizon. Did he have people nearby? Could she leave him here without guilt?

“William,” he finally croaked, his adolescent voice like a bullfrog. “My name is William.”

Tunnel vision and tinnitus caught her like a noose around the neck — she would have passed out if she hadn’t already been on her knees.

Title: “Perpetuity”

Warnings: non-graphic descriptions of death

It was early afternoon on the East Coast when it started. All the kids coming home from school. So when the buses found that once they started, they couldn’t stop, couldn’t even slow down…

Before the phones got too hot to hold, that’s what people were up to. Ranking grief. Creating a flow chart of gore. “My building is thirty stories tall. I was waiting for the elevator- I can’t get the screams out of my head.” “How many people can an elevator hold? I saw a plane accelerate into the tarmac, go up in a ball of fire. Another one had just turned away from the gate, towards the other terminal, when it shot forward. It was supposed to fly to Orlando. Bunch of families on their way to Disneyworld, gone in an eyeblink. What I’d give for just an elevator.”

empty spaces ring in silence as notes go unlearned and are drained of every ounce of structure.

"This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with me on the toilet writing my morning pages."

(an hommage to T.S. Eliot)