The exercise:
Write about: dancing the night away.
Kat and I had fun at the staff Christmas party tonight (though there was no dancing, despite what the prompt might have you believe). The boys had fun with their babysitter. That's a win and a win in my books.
2 comments:
That does sound like a win-win situation! The party sounds like it was fun too -- so who had the worse hangover? You and Kat, or the boys from their party (you can have a sugar hangover, right?)?
Dancing the night away
"When the sun sets, she comes," read Sarah. Her finger slipped on the page of the book and skidded across the oddly smooth surface, hitting the table and jarring her hand. She blinked, reflexively, and lost her place. Before she could find it again the curator, an elderly woman with pince-nez spectacles and a long nose that seemed designed for them, closed the book up and lifted it off the desk with a little grunt of effort. The book was bound in wood and a metre and a half across.
"Time's up," she said.
"But who is 'she'?" asked Sarah. There had been several references to this mysterious 'she' in the parts of the text she'd been allowed to read and she felt like she was grasping at something ghostly that didn't want to be caught. Or seen, for that matter.
"She is," said the curator, unhelpfully Sarah thought. "Really, that's all you need to know."
"Fine," said Sarah sitting back and folding her arms across her chest. Her sweater, thick and woollen, creaked slightly as it stretched. "Fine. What time is sunset then?" She glared at the curator, daring her to say something about not waiting for 'her' to come.
"Never," said the curator.
Sarah sat there thinking about that for two seconds, which was enough time for the curator to slide the heavy book onto a wooden cart on wheels that transported the books around, and lean on it to start pushing.
"Wait," said Sarah. She unfolded her arms, wishing it was warmer in the library. "What do you mean, never? The sun sets every day."
"Not here," said the curator. The cart started to move silently across the thin, hard-pile carpet. "Didn't you see the dancers outside?"
Sarah had: they were gathered around an oil-drum with a fire burning in it and an old radio -- a ghetto-blaster she suspected, though she was too young to have ever seen one -- blaring oddly syncopated music and took up a lot of the space in front of the library. They cavorted and leaped and twisted in the air and were mesmerising to look at, and the ice and snow that seemed omnipresent here was absent where they danced.
"Yes?" she said.
"Them," said the curator, vanishing into the depths of the library. "They dance the night away and keep the sun from setting."
Sarah stood up and wriggled her toes. That hurt a little: they were cold and probably starting to freeze. There were definite problems being this far north in winter and she couldn't believe how the cold seemed to seep into everything. She picked her coat -- a padded, long blue puffy coat that reached her knees and definitely helped warm her up -- from the back of her chair and decided to go outside and see the dancers herself again. She checked the time: it was just after 6pm so it should be dark already. That should be enough to prove to the curator that the night arrived regardless of who danced.
Outside, the sun was shining brightly and it appeared to be mid afternoon.
Greg - I think it was me, as I woke up around 5 that morning and could not get back to sleep. Probably had more to do with the buzz of activity of the party than the one beer I had, but still.
Why do I have a feeling they're not just dancing the night away, but the creatures that would arrive with it?
Regardless, I really like this take on the prompt and you handled it expertly.
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