Wednesday January 20th, 2021

The exercise:

Write about: the dawning of a new day.

I'd say things went as well as anyone could have hoped today.

Well, anybody with a heart. Or brain. Or soul.

Anyway. Onward and upward, America.

2 comments:

Greg said...

I'm very pleased that the 45th president doesn't seem to have any remaining attempts to turn the country into a dictatorship under his iron rule; it would be nice to see America focus on dealing with problems again instead of creating them. Though I'm sure there will be hidden unpleasantnesses still to come to light.

So, despite you having a new day dawning, I'm continuing Elise and Mirriam's story to see if they can mend their differences :)

Dawning of a new day
Elise had a guide pole in the ATV which she collected first. No more mistakes. Turning over a new leaf, pretending this was the dawning of a new day. Giving Mirriam no more reasons to be annoyed with her. The guide pole was for checking what was actually underneath the snow she was walking on: two metres of snow would bridge a crevasse quite nicely until you stood on it and walked to the middle; then it was prone to collapsing and dropping you potentially quite a long way down. She cursed that her gloves were a frozen wreck, and then thought to put them in the ATV. She risked frostbite but she did have pockets and knew what she was doing, and if the gloves thawed and dried while she collected the sample, then things were already better. Less of a mistake.
She carefully stabbed her way upstream, not really thinking that she needed to worry about there being no ground under the snow, but the guide pole occasionally sinking up to her wrist helped her avoid falling into snow-filled hollows. The wind blew ferociously, stinging her face and chilling her fingers to numbness. Occasional flurries of snow were blown with it, and she was relieved they didn't get heavier. Snow now would probably end the day's surveying and Mirriam's mood wouldn't get any better. Just where she had thought to take samples the stream bent and she realised that a few metres further the stream went around a rock outcropping, still coated here and there with snow and ice like a Christmas cake. She gladly walked on a little further to use the rock as shelter from the wind. Immediately she felt warmer: an illusion that wouldn't prevent frostbite, but helped just a little bit.
She knelt down, loosening a small workman's pouch from her belt: it was yellow suede leather, stiff and getting brittle in this cold, containing a small hammer, a knife some test-tubes for collection and a few other little tools to help her get the samples. She pulled the hammer out; it was small enough to fit in the palm of her deathly-pale hand, and tapped the ice.
Something tapped on her shoulder, perfectly matching the taps on the ice. As the ice broke, she turned her head, wondering who could have followed her up here and only just caught up. She saw a tall, gangly woman who didn't seem to be wearing anything like enough clothes for the arctic conditions, and she started to stand, horrified that there was someone lost out here, she registered that the woman's head was as smooth as an egg: no hair, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Just pale pink skin, smooth and perfect.
"Wha-" Before the word could fully form an odd, bifurcated hand pressed over her mouth, stealing her voice and then, with a feeling like stitches being pulled from a healed wound, her mouth.

Marc said...

Greg - I was legit annoyed with people at work already discussing things they didn't like about Biden on day one. I was like, he gets a damn pass for like a year from me after what the last president did. Just enjoy the vast chasm of a difference between the two of them for maybe a day or two?

I know he isn't going to be perfect, but he cannot help but be exponentially better than the dumpster fire that just departed.

I'm pleased to see that you'd continued this. Well, I was until I realized what you were about to do. At which point my feelings about this continuation were... altered.