#coffeebreak: powerlines
Today’s coffee break writing challenge. Write for 10 minutes on whatever the below image prompts in you. If you feel like sharing, post an excerpt of what you come up with in the comments field directly below.
Untitled, originally uploaded by Heartbeatbox.
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He is looking up at the stark lines above him dissecting the sky. They seem static, as though the same few metres of cable are hovering above their car. His eight year old mind understands empirically that the car is travelling past kilometers of the stuff but he can’t see any change in size or direction so he finds it impossible to acknowledge the fact of his motion.
It would help if he could see a cloud, the boy thinks. But even Nature had turned a shoulder against him. The sky was glassy blue as though he was looking up from the inside of a marble. It was a perfect dome, and the boy had to force himself to look away, to ignore that feeling that someone, someone bigger, was watching.
When had they left? He couldn’t remember now. The days have stretched out until night had become nothing more than the briefest fog, the slipperiest shawl of unconscious that broke only to once more reveal the black lines slitting the sky.
He feels groggy; memories of falling off the monkey bars and landing on his head. He had vomited in the car that day, after his mum had picked him up from the school nurse. Is that where he was? Was he on that car ride? He can’t remember, but he suspects not. That had happened. This was happening.
They’re different aren’t they? Time can’t repeat itself. Can it? After the monkey bars he had an egg-like bump on his forehead. The boy reaches up to touch his forehead, but his arms are restrained. This wasn’t that day. He looks around. The cracked vinyl of the car seats in front of him are a peanut butter yellow. The person driving is mostly obscured by the seat, but the boy sees a purple knit sleeve, and straight, red hair. The jingle of a bracelet when the purple sleeve pulls down on the steering wheel. The suns reflection off a pair of prescription glasses.
This isn’t that day with the monkey bars.
That isn’t his mother.
“Every month they met underneath the power lines. The taller one always arrived first and turned his lights on so that the other could find him by the unwavering red stare of his brake light. The other would arrive soon after and they might shake hands before they strapped on their helmets and gunned the engines of their dirt bikes. The combination of the padding in the helmets and the blanket of early morning fog muffled their petrol-fed barks to a low grumble as they charged around the course marked out by the black lines in the sky. They reached out gloved hands and slapped the great metal beams as they rode past them, a practise that had been going on for so long and so precisely that there appeared a polished section of metal on each tower.”
Thanks for that Mark, not sure where this one’ll end up, but it was a fun and relaxing exercise. (:
Thanks guys for joining in. As said, the spirit is just to unwind your mind and not think about purpose or placement. Here is a short bit of what I wrote:
“There was only the suggestion that things would continue. The land ahead mid sketch, reality poised and uncertain waiting for the stem of charcoal in a painters hand to return to the page. The headlights behind bought forth daubs of his silhouette upon the fog; ape like arms draped across a smallish head and all of it stretched by the fall of the valley before him. On the metal he could feel the hum of the wind through the wires, the vibration passing through him and dislocating more thoughts on its way through.”
When is it going to end? Where are these lines drawn? Will I ever make a stand? I, lost between the delicate weavings of the fabric of reality and that gaudy vulgarian – fiction. Who am I kidding anyway, do I deserve the happiness I so blindly run toward. I am supposed to shield my eyes from it’s icy glare or is it something to be ardently embraced like the return of a long lost lover. One thing is for certain, once you take a peek over the edge of that void, something changes deep inside you.
It is never just a peek.
The end is something you pray for to witness a halt to your suffering, but the end to me, is a way to forget. From all we have been through and done, you are worthy of a different fate. I can’t just forget and move on. I grapple between the cold energy of the arugment fact presents me and the buzzing of synapses whirring in my mind. Maybe I don’t want an end to this at all, but a beginning. I can in fact, make it through, I can reach you, eventually, I can do this (is this just the spectre of optimism in the fog of darkness talking, or is it something more?). The main obstacle which draws to mind, is, I can do this, but at what cost???
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