The exercise:
Write about: an ending.
Took the boys for another visit to Kangaroo Creek Farm today as an end of summer celebration. Hard to believe they're back to school tomorrow.
The exercise:
Write about: an ending.
Took the boys for another visit to Kangaroo Creek Farm today as an end of summer celebration. Hard to believe they're back to school tomorrow.
2 comments:
I think most parents would be writing, "It's such a relief that they're back to school tomorrow," so it's rather charming to see that that's not how you see it :) Unless, of course, it's because you've been using them as unpaid labour for the holidays and the trip to the farm wasn't to see the animals but to earn money cleaning out pens and stables and doing unpaid internships with the vets. Actually, there has to be a story in there, a fairytale maybe, about the wicked King forcing his sons to struggle as commoners while he lives a life of sugar-free luxury....
An ending
Moros seemed to condense out of the air. One moment there was a plainly furnished office: a melamine-topped desk with a barely-cushioned chair on one side (for visitors, naturally) and a much more comfortable-looking chair on the other side; a grey metal filing cabinet in the corner covered with dust and missing its key, and two sad plants on the windowsill whose leaves were more yellow than green. The next there was a swirl of dust in the air, the light darkened and then brightened again as though a hidden television were switching between nighttime and daytime scenes, and out of a spiral of something it was hard to focus on stepped a man.
Moros had set aside his outfit as the Sun King of France and picked something more somber. Death, had he been there, would have approved, though Moros had little interest in the approval of anybody. He looked like a European judge: as though he was about to walk into the International Court of Human Rights and inquire what a Human was and why it thought it should have Rights. And he was smiling, very faintly, as though he'd just remembered a joke he'd been told years ago at a dinner party and had found it mildly amusing then.
The office appeared to be empty apart from the furniture and Moros, but as Moros sat on the edge of the desk and stretched a leg out in front of him, there was a rustling, papery sound from the corners.
"Alecto," said Moros quietly. The room seemed to absorb his words so they faded from memory so quickly that it was hard to believe you'd heard them and not just imagined them. "I know you're here, so drop the veil."
A moment later Alecto, one of the Furies, was standing against the wall holding a sharp-looking knife in one hand.
"That?" said Moros.
"An ending," said Alecto. "For many. The blade is forged out of pure rage, though I have no idea how anyone could condense it into a solid in the first place."
"You cut people with it?" Moros was interested despite himself. He mostly delegated to others so finding out the details of the work always intrigued him.
"Stab them," said Alecto. "There's something more rageful about stabbing someone eighty-two times than just slicing across the femoral artery and letting their life out in one brief, glorious, fountain."
"You might say that one ending has more... finesse? perhaps, than the other," said Moros.
"You might," said Alecto, sounding thoughtful. "But I'm the one doing the stabbing."
Greg - hah, I wish you'd suggested that at the *start* of summer vacation instead of the en... I mean, no, obviously not.
I... I'm not going to say that I *like* Alecto. But... um... I don't not like Alecto?
It's clearly problematic.
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