Rippling Sands

Note : this very short story was part of a creative writing assignment and was inspired by a specific piece of music that, sadly, I can't seem to find.
What I can suggest to you instead is to listen to this somewhat resembling piece of music composed by Klaus Badelt and Lisa Gerrard for the Original Sound Track of the movie Gladiator. The track is called Sorrow and can be listened to on the Youtube platform.

Fred

 

    An overflowing crowd started to gravitate around the juniper coloured tent. Inside was a girl, not past the age of candor, whose disharmonious moans were bleeding out of the makeshift shelter. Whilst her body had laid down roots in a squeaking bunk, her hand was held by a wretched mother praying for hopelessness to lose the battle against innocence. Not a single soul had not been feeling the stings of the scorching sun, nor the fiery sand ambushed between the toes, yet, it seemed the only feeling their hearts had room for was despair. The girl would need a miracle.

A rift carved itself in the crowd, leaving a breach for an old man to seep through. Draped by a scarlet silk tunic, ornamented with golden runic scriptures or arabesques and held together with a perfectly braided cord, everyone recognized the maverick they had known as “The Hermit”, although noone had ever really known him. Whilst a beard as white as his bun concealed his chin, one could not miss his cerulean eyes attesting of his resolve and determination, nor the wisdom time had chiseled over his burnished amber skin.
As if it was an extension of his arm, he was hauled by a hardwood walking stick, choked by two slithering ropes whose colours matched the tunic’s so tightly it was as if the man was waving a miniature of himself much like a puppeteer.

When the assembly came to realize he had finally reached the girl, his left palm was already smothering her forehead whilst his lips seemed to crackle words out of this world. Her whole body chose to answer by performing a series of spasms, off-beating the clamours of her mother.
After a while, the song ended. The girl woke up, her complexion gleaming from dreary ash to radiant bronze, and then everything else stopped, as if time itself had not allowed anything nor anyone to even age, if it were not for the hissing winds which had seemingly deemed themselves beyond the laws of nature.
The petrified state of the crowd suggested that they had not only just witnessed something they had never laid eyes upon, but instead that they had unbeknownstly glanced at the gorgon’s mirror of the soul.

Time eventually resumed its course and then, when the last tear had reached the burning ground, the task to douse the sandhills was taken over by the empyrean domain. This place’s thirst had not been quenched for days, as if its will to live had been wiped out, yet it chose this very moment to start and remember how wetness feels.

The girl turned her head over, and everyone could decipher the single word that had washed up on her swirling lips : “Water”.

Fred

The suicide of Margaret

Philip Lorca diCorcia, Untitled

In a few hours, she’d be gone. This painful sentence turned without interruption in her head, without ever taking a concrete form. It meant nothing. They were just random words, and they wanted to destroy her. For the time being, she was there. She felt the weight of her body sinking into the hotel’s cozy bed. They had assigned her room 13. It was a stroke of fate. But she was not superstitious. Margaret had chosen her destiny with lucidity, without fear and without regret. What could she regret about her dreary and empty life, without friends, children, or husband ? Margaret’s husband had died ten years earlier. She was now old ; her short, cut white hair and the frilled dressing gown she was wearing betrayed her age, like the wrinkles that now marked her tired face.

Her two sons wanted to convince her to go into a nursing home. To end her life like that, she who had traveled the world without release, in search of a meaning, or a treasure that she discovered at each port. How could she have endured the slow and monotonous rhythm of an old people’s home : playing cards, eating daily meals, never raising her voice, always remaining polite, obeying... She had never obeyed anyone, Margaret ; she had always chosen in her existence, and did not believe in fate. Her end would therefore be in her image : free and original. Of a chilling originality.

She watched the calm sea and waited patiently for her hour. She felt no fear. She had faced lions and tigers, famine and epidemics, cold, drought and thirst, storms and frozen desert nights. The sea could never have frightened her. It had been her ally for 40 long years. It always promised extraordinary discoveries. Behind the waves and whirlpools, something unknown awaited her. And this prospect aroused her far more than the dull faces of the old people waiting for death to come and take them without warning. Margaret had decided to call death, to summon her to her bedside ; and death, in a short time, would come to the appointment. Because no one had ever disobeyed Margaret.

In the soberly furnished hotel room, the television looped the images of the hurricane that was devastating the state of New York and approached dangerously close to Manhattan. Margaret had studied the path of the tornado and had booked a room in the most exposed hotel in the city. The institution was now empty. The receptionist himself had deserted the premises. He tried to convince Margaret to follow him, but she refused. She must be crazy, he said to himself.

Margaret’s farewell was not a lament, a complaint or a reproach to the world. It was not a spectacle for men, as were most suicides. No one would know that she had chosen to kill herself. Her children will think of an accident, and will never feel guilty about her disappearance. The sea, the sweet and dreadful sea, would bury her body in secret. Between the two, the union would finally be complete, hidden from the shameless gaze of the world.

Mitia

Escape Game, part 4

The inside one

 

So much noise. It smells fear. It smells like the rabbit I hunted before. Little human seems not to be happy. I can hear it breathing loudly. I can hear .. Mom said that sometimes, I could hear humans. Some dogs of our family can. It comes from our ancestors, the wolves. She used to call it old instinct. It never happened to me so far. I'm still a puppy. 

Still a puppy, yes, but it's not the first time that I could see little humans in this car. The smell is everywhere. I'm so small, hidden under a seat, they never saw me the way I can see them. Tall man is bad, he hit me when I tried to be nice to the first one I saw. He scares me. I don't know the other one. She completely ignored me. I am nothing. 

I am hungry. I am cold. Night is coming, I can feel it, even in the darkness of the car. It's even colder where we are going, in this place where there is nothing but sand and rocks. Nights are so cold, I need tall man for the warming fire, and for the food he gives me sometimes, or I could die. Mom told me to stay with him, to do whatever he asks me to do, if I want to stay alive.

So I stayed. So many times I heard little humans screaming and crying, while I was hidden under the car. The smell of their fear, of their tears, of their blood, almost drove me crazy. When the sun rises, tall man takes them away, somewhere, carrying them on his shoulders. They seem so tiny, so fragile, compared to him. He comes back alone. No friend for the puppy. 

 Crédit image La Vallée de l'ombre de la mort, Roger Fenton

I followed tall man, once. I'm so small, he didn't see me. I followed his smell, and the smell of little human. I saw him digging and putting little human in a big hole. He put rocks on it. I could see many amounts of rocks around us. So many I couldn't count them. I'm just a puppy.

This little human is strange. I don't hear the voice outside, I hear it in my head. Help, it says. I can see images of other humans, big ones and little ones. Little human talks to me, but doesn't look at me. Look at me, little human. Look at me. I'm not that small. Mom told me, when you hear a human, you're a grown up. You are connected with this human, and it's the only one you have to listen to. And it will listen to you too. 

I'm listening. Help, little human said. I must help. But I can't speak. Tall man could hear. Please, little human, hear me. I will help, I promise. You won't join the others in the sand and the rocks. 

Hear me, little human. I am no puppy anymore. 

Sasha