The exercise:
Um, apparently it's been a reaaally long time since I made use of the Random CD prompt. Like, I'm almost impressed with how long it's been.
Anyway. Let us make amends. Pick a song as randomly as you like, borrow its first line, and then take it from there. Credit where it's due, but of course.
2 comments:
I think we used to get more random CD prompts when you were looking for a prompt late at night and your eyes fell on your Spotify playlists :) Well, let's see who's returning to talk to us with a random CD prompt....
August Hotel - 12AM
"You do this to yourself, you know. You keep yourself awake." Dr. C. sat down on a child's chair: a painted wooden thing that was barely 30cm above the floor. The chair creaked and he was sure the legs splayed a little outwards, and the back of it dug irritatingly into the small of his back. It had been pink for a while, then one of the janitors had half-creosoted it, and now it was sticky but the only furniture in the room.
Lying on a sleeping bag that smelled of old sweat and dead animals was a thin man. There were blankets piled over his legs, discoloured by blood and urine and holed by starving moths. His skull stretched waxy yellowish skin over it so tightly that the skin split at the corners of his eyes and mouth; tiny red rivulets of flesh beneath making him look ghoulish. He stared at the ceiling, his hands playing with a fidget spinner that clicked and whirred.
"You're crying yourself to sleep again," said Dr. C. "Every night this week."
The man shifted in his makeshift bed, and something clattered and rolled across the chipped and cracked beige tiles of the floor. Dr. C. got to his first, and picked up a charged canister like an asthma inhaler.
"X-Boost," he said. "Well, that would definitely keep anyone awake. It was developed before the war you know, to revive whales and elephants after surgery. After they became endangered but before they became too expensive for anyone to care about."
"I can't sleep," said the man. He'd pushed himself up onto one elbow and the sleeping bag had opened out. His chest was bare, lightly dusted with blond hair across the almost-concave pectorals and his ribs were well enough defined you could play them like a xylophone. "Bad things happens when I sleep." He held out a hand; the fingernails were long, ragged, and the same yellow as the rest of him. The palms were ingrained with dirt so deeply they looked like contour maps.
Dr. C. pointed to the bowl of tar-apple soup on the floor on the other side of the man. "Eat," he said. "Bad things happen all the time. There's nothing we can do about that. Not sleeping doesn't stop it happening."
"I'm not hungry."
"Because you never sleep. You never reset your body-clock. You're starving yourself to death."
"It's better that way."
Dr. C. tapped a finger on the X-Boost canister. It was at least half-full. "Why?"
"What?"
"Why is better that you die rather than sleep?"
The man fell back to the floor, relaxing his arms. He bounced, making a noise like autumn twigs being roughly stacked.
"When I sleep they can turn the tracker on," he said. "They put it inside me. Here." His hand moved across smooth, unscarred skin below his ribs. "And when it's on, they come."
Dr. C. opened his mouth, but before he could speak, the man finished. "The Ilmatu."
Greg - I used the prompt more regularly because it was one of my favorite to write on. Now that I don't (or rarely, at any rate) write on the prompts...
Ah, you bastard. How do you manage to nearly always surprise me with the Ilmatu?
Anyway, this is an excellent scene with so many great details and descriptions. Well done, as usual.
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