Wednesday August 14th, 2013

The exercise:

We're going back to the first line prompt today, so use the following as your opening sentence and then take it where you will:

This pursuit is destroying me.

Harvested a ridiculous amount of tomatoes for the restaurant this morning. I think I ended up with 23 pounds of heirlooms and 12 pounds of beefsteak - plus the bakery wanted 6 pounds of cherry tomatoes as well.

Tomorrow should be a relatively quiet day before we return to harvesting on Friday as we prepare for another market.

I am so behind on replying to comments. My apologies. I will get to them, eventually.

Mine:

This pursuit is destroying me. The never-ending paranoia, a constant urge to look over my shoulder, at every new face that enters my vicinity. Nights filled with too-short snippets of sleep, always waking panicked in unfamiliar environs.

I don't know how much longer I can do this. Days, maybe. Weeks at the very most.

A safe haven, that's what I need. Somewhere I can stay, be at peace, rest a while. Get my feet under me again, breath back in my lungs. Recover.

I am beginning to fear, however, that such a place does not exist for men such as myself.

2 comments:

Greg said...

That does sound like a lot of tomatoes! And I'm sure the cherry tomatoes are in some ways the worst, as it takes so many more of them to make a pound than it does beefsteak... :) Well done!
Hmm, you've covered off hunted for mysterious reasons rather well with your piece, so let's see if I can't take this first line in a different direction, for contrast, then.

Mine:
This pursuit is destroying me. I need to be clear what I mean here – please stop backing away. Well if I put the knife down, you'll just run away, won't you? And I need you to listen. I need you to listen. And then help me.
You're medical professionals, you know that pur- is a prefix meaning pus. This pursuit, this thin, artifiical, pus-filled skin that I'm being made to wear for your experiment, is destroying me. It's eating away my own skin, and I'm sure I've got nerve damage.
See! See that twitch! That's nerve damage. Well, I hardly think a small scar on your pretty little face is as bad as what I've got going on here.
I can't cut the suit off, it heals too quickly. It's corrosive to metal too. Don't press that button. Don't pres– oh dammit.
Fine, the killbots are on their way, but you know something? They're programmed to home in on the pus. So all I have to do is cut myself like this – it doesn't hurt because it's not my skin, you see – and spray you all with the pus.
Damn it, it really it corrosive.
This pursuit is killing me.

Marc said...

Greg - that's a rather hideous scene, though it is conveyed quite brilliantly.

I think I shall choose not to think about it any longer, so that I may sleep tonight.