PROMPT NUMBER FORTY-THREE

Your prompt for this week!

Write a short story of 1-10,000 words based on the following:

She was like a sponge, he mused...

Good luck!

-the absent-so-often-it-seriously-isn't-funny Winter

No Sky For Machines

No Sky For Machines

Second. Minutes. Hours.

Days, weeks, months.

A year.

Rinse and repeat.

There’s a corner of the window where I see a sliver of sky. I feel naughty, like I’m cheating, breaking the law. Ironic that I should be worried about that, considering there is no law any longer. But I do worry, I do feel naughty, and all the while I’m looking at that window, I’ve got my ears pricked for any sign that I’m soon to be in company. I’m on the lookout, lest somebody catches me looking.

I’m also on the lookout because I’m protecting my territory.

Can’t have anyone else in my corner, watching my sliver of sky.

It’s mine.

A good thing there’s no longer a need for food. I’d be oh so hungry. And there’d be fighting and squabbling and rending limb from limb. Just like old times.

Old times are so old now. They’re long gone. But sometimes I get glimmers of recollection, like a blur of movement glimpsed just over the shoulder. Only, when I turn to look, it’s gone. I end up wondering if it was ever there at all.

I’m talking about recollections from my own life, not general knowledge that every creature possesses and retains. There are certain things one can never forget, because we are not permitted to forget them. Personal histories don’t count. It’s the other things that we are programmed to remember.

The thing is, we’re breaking down. We’re malfunctioning more and more. Not that it really matters; nobody is relying on us anymore. But it can be exhausting, having a mind that works as it should only some of the time. Even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else, it matters to us.

Because we’re all we have left.

The cell is dark.

My eyes have long since adjusted, but I still think about the fabled sun. I wonder what might happen to my eyes if I ever saw it again.

In my head there are stories of creatures who looked into the sun only to lost their vision. It’s inconceivable, the idea of not being able to see. I would lose my sliver of sky if that happened.

That can’t ever happen.

I suppose that explains why I fear the sun.

I remember when a fellow of mine asked of our drill sergeant a question. He asked about the sun and the sky, and whether heaven waited up above them both. “Heaven? What the hell’s that? No, no my friend—no heaven for you. You’re a machine. Forget about sunlight, forget about rain. Forget it all, because you’ve got a job to do. No heaven for you.”

We exchanged glances, shrugs, and I thought, Makes sense.

Don’t get me wrong. The sky isn’t particularly bright. It hasn’t been bright in a long time. I’ve always found that the best way to explain it is through quoting poetry. The old rhyme explains it all nicely:

“Night falls and creatures roam

Along the streets ‘fore sun-up

But soon they will discover that

Eternal night has risen up…”

The Eternal Night is all they used to be able to talk about. It was all over the news media, wallpapers and holovision and advertising hovercraft. I wasn’t there to see it myself. Rather, I’ve heard the stories passed down through generations, and I’ve read about them in history logs. I recall one woman’s words, and here I paraphrase:

“It was like the street crazies had taken over—suddenly it was perfectly the norm to proclaim that the Apocalypse had come. We were all going to burn in hellfire and damnation. There would never be a heaven because we had forsaken it, because we were sinners to the very core and this was our penance. The world had gone mad, and we were in the middle of it. Insanity was a pandemic and we were swept away along with everyone.”

Those words, “ETERNAL NIGHT”, plastered everywhere. I can almost picture it in my shorting mind, see the dire words emblazoned all over. I can almost smell the fear and the dirt and the blood and the smoke. Chemical fumes from destroyed industrial plants. The salt of tears flowing freely. The putrid promise of a world coming to an end.

I can almost taste disaster on my tongue.

Except I taste nothing anymore. All I can do is dream.

I’m a sinner, I know. But I’ve forgotten how I sinned.

Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder if I did something really bad. Did I hurt someone? Did I kill someone? Did I join a dissenting cause in opposition of my government? Maybe I spoke ill of the dead. Or the living. Even I know that in the world we live in, speaking ill of the wrong person can get you killed.

I’m not supposed to remember. My mind was formatted for only a certain amount of memory. But though I know what I’m meant for and what I’m not, sometimes I have these…desires. Sometimes I have these longings that lie outside my set parameters. Sometimes I want to remember other things.

Like where I came from.

And what I did to get in here.

What was my crime?

I gaze up at the window, waiting for the dawn. Insofar as it can be called a dawn anymore. Like I said, we’re in the Eternal Night and the sky only lightens somewhat during daylight hours. That word, ‘daylight’, makes no sense anymore, but people still use it. It’s a vestige of a world long gone, and there are a lot of those around. The saying Good morning is still in use, even though there is no real morning anymore. There is still talk of living to see another day, even though none of us have seen a day in far too long to count, and may never see one again.

Oh, and none of us is technically alive any longer.

There’s no such thing as sunlight and shade. There’s moonshadow, and I like that just fine. But history tells me that the shadows created by the strategic fall of sunlight is far more dramatic; the shadows unfathomably richer. I have a hard time grasping that, and I suppose I will never manage. But it’s one of those things I think about when I shouldn’t. It’s one of those things I wish for.

There is a wall in this place that is the most dramatic shade of blue. I’m told that this shade is the same as a daytime sky. I stare at my sliver of real sky, and then I think about the blue of that wall. And all I can really do is doubt. The really young ones have a habit of exaggerating, and I’m convinced they’re exaggerating about this too. I have never read in any history book about a sky being blue. They focus not so much on facts but on historical events. I have read up heartily on all those things. And not once, anywhere that I could see, did any historian of old mention a blue sky.

I’d have to see it for myself to believe it.

I suppose that means I never will.

Time passes and I’m mostly alone. I’m getting a little rusty. In some places, mildew has formed. I feel the occasional tickle, and I wonder why that part of my machinery is still functioning. I suppose there is no reason why it shouldn’t be. Most of my senses still work, in fits and starts at least. The only one that’s gone entirely is my sense of smell. For that, I am grateful. Experience tells me that I should be grateful. I can’t quite remember why, but I’m taking my processor’s word for it.

For the most part, the sense of touch is useless. Taste isn’t much use either, but sometimes it can be…inconvenient. Certain tastes I get in my mouth remind me of the fact that I can no longer smell, and that I’m grateful for that. I am no longer able to connect the two concepts in any logical way, but I know enough to know I’m better off avoiding doing so.

Let us consider the other senses, though. Hearing is fundamental. It keeps me on my guard, ready for any new arrival. But by far the most invaluable sense is that of sight, which allows me to see my sliver of sky.

As long as I can see that, I can dream.

Second. Minutes. Hours.

Days, weeks, months.

A year.

Two years. Three.

Time passes and I lose count of everything.

I lose my senses one by one.

Finally I have only two left: seeing and hearing.

Then it happens. The day arrives that I lose my sight. That’s when I know my the old drill sergeant was right. There is no heaven, not for cold, wired machines. There is to be no heaven, no sunlight for the likes of me.

I stay there at the window, sightless and alone.

Cruelly, the last one to go is that of hearing, so that I hear the moment my end approaches. I hear the distant shouts, the shuffling of booted feet growing ever louder. I hear my cell door clanking open, voices louder now. Rough voices belonging to creatures with no regard for what’s left of me.

I hear my own rusted feet scraping across the stone floor, and I hear the disassembly as it happens. I hear the flicking of a switch, and then my hearing is fading too. Fading slowly away, as everything else has.

Prompt #42

So, it's my turn to prompt again.  Only, I'm behind.  Really, really behind.

Being behind makes me want to give ya'all an easy prompt this week, like this:

"You can have seconds, if you want."

Do you get where I'm going with this?  (Hint: seconds, think dinner).  I hope you do.

PROMPT NUMBER 41

Um, yeah. This prompt is late too. For shame!!!! I cower...and somethin' :P

Anyway...here it is.

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words (or prose, like those other times we said it) based on the following:

Hey... Do you remember

where I left my soul?

Calling All Beer Geeks

Ack.  So late.  Sorry.  This is a little different this time.  It's something of a roast present for my husband who had a birthday on Friday.

River of Fire Brewery in Salt Lake City, Utah would like to proudly present its newest creation, Price of Your Soul, a Barrel-Aged Imperial Farmhouse Quadruple Russian Imperial Sour Stout.  Price of Your Soul is probably the most important beer that will ever be brewed.  It is so important that it comes with its own chalice carved out of jewel-encrusted sparkling petrified brimstone.

No beer geek’s collection is complete without it!!!  Price of Your Soul is made with the finest two-row barely malt the great salt marsh has to offer, retaining a lot of the sulfury characteristics of hell itself as well as the night after a pot of chili gone wrong.  We hand smoke the malt in the chimney of a crematorium for that clean crisp taste and then blacken it in the exhaust pipes of whatever SUVs happen to be in the Walmart parking lot that day.  When we say that people have died for this beer, we mean it.

Our yeast is cultivated from the under scrapings of a million public school desks.  For the quickest possible fermentation, we feed our little beasties low quality dog food from China because it’s chock full of all the things that bacteria just seem to love.  Then we warm the room up to a hundred and twenty degrees and those precious little creatures just thrive in our open fermenters!

Price of Your Soul boasts three hundred and forty seven point fourteen hop additions during its hundred and twenty minute cycle.  As it cools, it is dry hopped, sock hopped, wet hopped, fresh hopped and hip hopped.  This beer contains so many hops, after just one sip, you’ll swear that you just stepped into a funeral parlor on a day when the air conditioning is on the fritz.

Oh, but what a sip it’ll be.

Here’s what a bunch of random beer geeks are saying about Price of Your Soul on BierSnobvocate.org:

“This stuff makes my pee smell like Wonder Bread.”  -iheartmiller893

“Viscosity is somewhere between motor oil and warm tapioca balls.” -passthecan

“There was a goat hoof in mine.” –g1vemep0rk

“Notes of wet dog, old diaper and a surprising twist of kumquat.” –checkcheckcheck1969

“It glows in the dark.  WTF?”  -no6packs

“Price of Your Soul put hair on my chest.  Literally.” –waxmycap09

We barrel age this mess in absinthe barrels and then we freeze distill it so that the final product is 62% ABV.  Then we bottle condition it with Pop Rocks for a really explosive taste.

There is only one way you can get this super exclusive brew.  Follow these instructions to the letter:

1. Fill out the application on our website.  But don’t bother in you have less than 5,784,574,385,739 points on BierSnobvocate.org
2. Email this announcement to eighty people on your BierSnobvocate.org trades list.  Tell them that there is a less than 5% chance you may get this beer and that you need to know in advance what they’ll trade you for it.  BCC us on those emails.
3. Write us a forty page glowing review before even trying our beer.  Post this review in its entirety to your website, your twitter, your Facebook, in the comments section of other people’s blogs and tattoo it on your dog’s tongue.  Extra points if you make a really cool fan boy tee shirt with some of your best talking points and wear it for a month straight.
4. Take the ninety question beer compatibility test on our website. 
5. Send us three black and white pictures of your girlfriend’s or wife’s bare feet.
6. Pass a drug test.  We don’t cater to hippies.
7. Record your basal heart rate, rectal temperature and fiber intake for a minimum of six months.  Also, let us know if you are taking any prescription drugs.
8. Solicit letters of recommendation from your lawyer, postal carrier, Avon lady, general practitioner, local voting booth operator, bichon frise, and high school Spanish teacher.  But don’t tell them that the letter is for us.  Lie and tell them that you are applying for NASA.  For help making this seem convincing, contact our sales department at 1-800-WeR-NASA.
9. Take the ninety question beer compatibility test on our website a second time for the sake of consistency.
10.  Forward copies of your driver’s license, passport, social security card and your high school SAT scores to our personnel department.  You must be legal to work in this country.  Be aware that if your last name sounds overly foreign, you will be required to submit recent TOFEL scores.  We also need proof that you’ve been vaccinated for rabies.
11. Tell us about your favorite midnight snack and how it represents patriotism.
12. If you could be a cardboard box, a sliding glass door or an ad on Craigslist, which one would you be and why?
13. Can you pat your head, rub your stomach and whistle Disney songs while tap dancing?  If not, how do you think this has shaped you as a person?
14. Take the compatibility test on our website for a third time.  After you are done, triangulate your scores with the month, day, year and exact time of your birth.  Multiply the result with the numerical value of your name according to Tibetan numerology, raise that number to the power of your mother’s maiden name.  Take the square root of the result and rip it into eight pieces.  Close your eyes and randomly draw one of the pieces.  Then tell us if the last number on that piece of paper is odd or even.  If it’s even, you can forget about getting this beer.
15. If chosen, drive to our distributor in Frozenwasteland, North Dakota the day before our release day.  Spend at least sixteen hours camping out in our parking lot.  Numbers will be passed out at two o’clock the next day when our employees have finally sobered up.  And don’t forget to bring something for the potluck!!!!

PROMPT NUMBER FORTY

Jeez, that's a lot of prompts! Can't believe it's been a whole year - I've really got to get back on top of things.

Of course, that means I have to finish these darn college applications first. -___-

And, in the spirit of that:

Write a short story (1-10k prose; .333-3.333k verse) based on the following:

"The last time I checked, you didn't have to apply to become a demon from hell."

Good luck! Hope that's not too specific for your tastes.

-Winter

It's Not Over Yet

And by 'it's not over yet', I really mean that this isn't necessarily finished and that I don't know what I'm doing anymore and that ARRRRGH! hehe.

OK, shutting up now!

It's Not Over Yet

"I was never meant to be a soldier.

I should have been a housewife, a mother, something like that. I guess if everybody hadn't started dying around me, I might've gone that way.

As a little girl I wore pretty dresses with flowers on them, I played with plastic figurines of ladies—Barbies, they were called—and I daydreamed of the day I'd wear white and totter down an aisle in sparkling white heels. I was a bit of a weirdo by that point—most of the other little girls liked what I liked, or wanted what I wanted. But I stuck to my guns—god, that's a terrible pun, and I didn't even intend it to be one—and clung to my girliness.

Everything changed, of course.

It's a well-known fact that civil war changes a woman. It bends her, twists her up a little inside. My mind isn't the same as it once was. Nor is my heart, or any part of me for that matter. I've got scars on the outside, remnants of battle wounds, but the ones inside are what never leave me, even when I dream. Did I mention I turned all emo? Yeah, I resent that in a big way, but I've accepted it. I've accepted a lot of things I never thought I would, especially in the last few days. Because there's a point in every rebel soldier's life when she just can't deny any of it anymore—she realises once and for all that she lives in hell and she's going to die there too.

The really good soldiers decide that they might as well do what they can, while they're still standing.

I'm still standing, hard as that is to believe. I'm still standing, but the machines are my last chance, the only chance I have to get the message out, beyond these walls. I don't trust machines, but they're all I've got. They're all the outside world has got."

Red light ticks to green and I open my mouth to start talking.

I've planned it all out in my head, but now that I'm really here, now that the machine is on and I've got the chance to speak, my voice conks out on me. On the very first word it catches, and I choke, cough, splutter. It's one of those coughs that doubles me over—working the abs, you know?

As if I need more of a workout than I've had lately.

Somewhere in the middle of the hacking fit I start to laugh. Things get worse, like my face turning red—I can't see it but I can feel it burning…pretty soon it's got to turn purple; that's a sight I know well. Am I really going to die here, squeezed of all air and of the strength to keep my feet? Because that would be really ironic.

That's when it happens: I stop, gasping for air—filling my lungs with the desperation of a woman who knows her days are far more numbered than her hours. Anger flashes through me at the thought of how much time I've wasted already. I grip the console and steady myself, taking a few long, deep breaths to regain my equilibrium. Then I begin to hum, testing my voice.

It holds.

"I'm reporting from Sector Fourteen, it's…" I tap my watch to bring up the date and time. "February thirteenth, time is eighteen-twenty-two. I estimate I have an hour before the machines die here as well. I'm not sure who this message will reach, if anyone, but I can only hope it goes somewhere. The truth has to be known because you're not going to hear it from anyone in red or gold, I can assure you of that…"

My voice is trembling, just like my hands. I grip my knees to stop the latter, but there's nothing much I can do about my voice. This has to be done, but I'm still not happy about being the one to do it.

How did I end up here?

I talk for thirty-seven minutes before the machinery gives out. There is so much to document but it doesn't much matter if I fail to relate it all. I start with the best examples, and they are good ones indeed. The rest can be construed—I make it clear with every word I utter that we're only scratching the surface here. To really understand what has happened, a person would have to live through what I did. There are always going to be facts that are lost to history.

But I can give them something, at least.

Some idea of how our nation has been betrayed.

It happens so quietly that at first I don't really believe it. Green light flickers, and my voice falters. Green light flickers and begins to fade. My voice gives out entirely. I stare at the dull shiny orb that used to be lit, just stand there and stare. Then I brace myself against the console, bowing my head. I close my eyes and let myself be. Just for one moment.

The time has come for me to leave this place. I fought hard to get here and now I'm leaving. But I can't execute my plan from here.

They won't feel me if I strike from this far back.

I need to go and meet them.

The further I walk, the more my thoughts tangle in my head. My veins rush with energy and vengeance fuels my motion. Still, I can't help thinking.

For me, thinking has never been a comfort.

I pass countless graffitied walls, and on one I see long-dried drips of paint that form the words, taller than my head but similarly messy:

HELL

My thoughts take a turn in that direction, and I start to contemplate the meaning of hell as I know it. I used to be religious. I used to fear hell.

I'm not so scared now, though, because I know you can find hell on earth.

You only have to know where to look.

Hell is realising that the people you trusted, the ones you wanted nothing more than to please, are the same ones who got you into this mess to begin with. Hell is learning that, contrary to popular opinion, you and your comrades just don't matter. You're utterly expendable, and quite frankly, the sooner you go down the better.

The more of you that die, the less resistance there will be in the end—resistance to the Revolution.

And god, I hate that word—Revolution. It's got all these connotations, like it's something amazing. Something wonderful.

It's not wonderful. It's not amazing.

It's hell.

"They turned on us at the worst possible moment. I guess that was the idea, right? Cut us off at the knees. Go for the jugular. Sever the spine.

So many clichés, so little time to make them all come true. But they did a good job.

I lay in a pile of bodies. Some of them twitched for hours, others were still in an instant. They grew cold around me but I stayed warm. They made a great windshield.

My comrades and my enemies all around me, friend and foe alike dead as last week's rancid meat. But there was an upside to lying there pinned by the weight of human flesh—it gave me time to think, really think. It gave me time to formulate a plan."

Prompt THIRTY NINE

Almost forgot that it was my turn to prompt again. 

Well, it's almost October, which means that a lot of us are either thinking about NaNoWriMo or avoiding thinking about NaNoWriMo.  In the spirit of doing the first rather than the second of these two things, I thought it would be fun to give you this prompt:

(1K-10k prose/333-3,333 verse)

"This is the short version of my story, the simplest way I can possibly tell it."

Good luck and sign up for Nano early before the site gets bogged down.

PROMPT NUMBER 38

I've got a confession to make, people - I still haven't finished last week's story! But I will. Just got to...slap myself around a little. Suffice it to say the story already got weird - a girl's liver is talking to her. Or rather, it's telling her off, practically screaming at her. Not quite sure how it's going to end yet... Maybe I'll wind up with a novel about a talking liver??

Anyway...this week's prompt is...this:

Write 1,000-10,000 words of prose (or, ya know, 333-3,333 words of that verse stuff) based on the following:

"That sweltering calm I'd never known

Blue skies and home"

All Because of Swan Poop

Not really finished . . .

It is their shadows that make me look to the sky, black wings so wide that they block out the sun.  I stop in midstroke, the cold lake water lapping around me, my lips part in awe until my jaw hangs slack.

As they land, the swans swoop so low that I could have reached up to stroke their downy bellies.  The whirl of their powerful wing steal the breath from my lungs.  I have never been this close to them.

Then a streak of white flashes through the air.

A sour taste in my mouth. 

My throat seals around it.  I flail in the deep water, no longer treading.  There is no one there, except for me and the seven black swans.  Without oxygen, the world goes purple-blue.

****

I remember a hand just under my ribs, fingers groping in my throat, pushing and pulling something free.  My mouth is forced open wide, jaw practically dislodged.  There is no noise, no voice of panic trying to call me back.

The hand withdraws, pulling out of me in one slow, steady movement.  Just as I wonder it it has given up, my body is rolled over so that I am on my side.  A sharp fist thwacks me between the shoulder blades.

Reflex rattles a cough out of me.  Hot, vile liquid spews out of my mouth.  There is so much of it.  It tears me from the inside.  Someone wipes me clean with their bare, calloused hand.

A sound like a dozen anxious rusty hinges worries at my ears.  Warm, feathery bodies press to mine.  My eyes flutter slightly, but I can’t keep them open.  For a second, I see two large brown eyes scouring my face, but I can’t hang on to them.

I take a breath and I suddenly feel the cold.

****

The sound of thunder makes me open my eyes.   I open my eyes and this time I can hold on to the big brown eyes.

The boy is long and wiry, with gold-streaked hair falling down to his shoulders.  He smiles when he sees that I am awake, but he doesn’t say anything.  I guess that maybe he is fourteen or fifteen.  The cave we are in is dark and cramped, but warm and sheltered from the storm that seems so violent that we are pitched around as if we were on a tiny boat rather than a rock in the middle of the lake.  My head is balanced on his lap, my legs pressed shoved against a rocky wall.  One of those candles in a jar with a holy card shines down on us.  I do not know who the saint is, but he holds up two fingers.  A sign of peace.  By it’s flickering light, the boy appears to be knitting.

“Hello,”  I try to say, try to thank the boy for saving my life, try to ask him how he did it, but my throat is bruised beyond functioning.  The word is barely a sound.

The boy lifts a hand from his knitting and places a hand over my mouth, shaking his head from side to side.  His hand feels feverish on my face, cracked with dryness and uncomfortably warm.  Then, he slowly shifts his hand to my eyes.

Don’t speak.  Try to get some sleep.

But the thunder roars again and I jump under his touch.

The movement frees a cloud of black feathers.  And I realize that this is why I am so warm—why the boy’s touch seems like fire on my skin:  we are covered with black downy feathers.  I grope around beneath them to make sure that I am still wearing my swimsuit, that this stranger didn’t undress me thinking to get me out of wet clothes or something crazy like that.

Then I feel it.  My torso is covered in warm slimey wetness.

In the light of the single candle, I don’t know what it is immediately, but I put it to my nose and send a million more feathers flying through the air.

Bird poop.

*****

Between the storm, the cramped cave, being covered in swan poop and the boy, I do not sleep all night.  I toss and turn, wanting nothing more than a hot shower and my own bed.

The boy doesn’t help.  He is ominously silent, except when he takes a raspy rattling breath.  I don’t know if he can’t talk or if he won’t.  He does not say anything to me at all.  I imagine that he is some kind of hermit who has taken a vow of silence.  I want to ask him what he is knitting and who the saint on the candle is. 

But I do understand this about him:  he is ill, very ill.  Pressed up against his body, I can hear every labored breath he takes.  His eyes are glassy and he knits almost as if he were in a daze.  Although his body feels like fire on my skin, his skin prickles with chills that I don’t feel.

The little hole where we hide is too small for me to move anywhere else.  Unless I close my eyes, I have no choice but to stare up into his face.  When I do this, I can’t help but notice the peculiar details of his face and compare them to the other guys I know.  This makes me even more uncomfortable.

As the night passes, I obsess over how miserable the little cave is.  Not only is it small and diseased and uncomfortable and full of feathers, but when lightening illuminates the walls, I swear that dried bird poop is dripping down the walls.  I begin to believe that I am breathing it in, suffocating on it.  The thought makes me vomit once, but I swallow it, because the thought of lying in it and smelling it all night seems worse than all the bird poop in the world.

When the night finally passes, the storm goes with it, leaving a dense fog on the silent glassy lake.  I crawl out of the cave and realize that it is nothing but an old buoy, covered in rushes, black feathers and bird poop.  A strangled noise escapes from my bruised throat and I dive down into the freezing water to distract myself from thoughts of vomiting again.  The boy’s head emerges from the cave and he reaches a hand out to grab me.  Shivering, I duck out of his grasp.  It doesn’t matter that I am convulsing with cold, I run my hands all over my body, scrubbing every bit of poop off of me.

The boy makes wild gestures at the mouth of his poop-covered home.  It seems that he wants me back inside.  I shake my head.  Nothing will ever make me go back inside the little hut.  It does not matter that I can not see the shore through the fog, I have spent every summer on the shores of this lake.  I know that it is not that large.  Two summers ago, I swam all the way across.  The boy makes his wild gestures again, holding his hands out as if to tell me that there is something big and terrible in the water.  I try to mime back to him that I am going to swim to shore, but he dives in after me.

Only, he can not swim.  His thin limbs flail around wildly, but he sinks like a stone.  I do not realize what is happening until the water until several seconds after the water has closed over his head.

The fingernails driving into my skin are a good thing and a bad thing; a good thing because it means that he has not yet lost consciousness and a bad thing because he is pulling us both deeper under the water.  In the end, I have to yank him up by his long golden hair and physically place both of this trembling hands firmly on his poop covered buoy.  Coughing without sound and shaking so hard that he can barely hang on, he clambers on to the buoy and reaches out to me once more. 

In the morning light, he is so pale that his skin appears to have a strange blue tinge.  His cheeks are flushed a deep red.  As he trembles from the water’s chill, I can see nothing but bones sticking out from his nearly transparent skin.  What I took for boyishness the night before looks something closer to starvation now.  He might be seventeen or eighteen for all I can tell.

Against my better judgment, I take his hand and let him pull me back into the unsanitary confines of his home.  I cover him with the soft black feathers, holding him in my lap silently and chafing his bare arms.  His brown eyes grow dim as if he can no longer see this world and the chill of water on his skin transforms back into a raging fever.  But he takes the knitting in his hands and loops the rough yarn until he passes out cold.  Even then a stitch or two continues blindly.

I hold his handiwork so that the light from the shack’s narrow opening might give me some hint as to what is going through the hermit’s mind.

A dress.

The boy is knitting a dress? The fabric is rough as if it were knitted out of burlap and the dress is short like a kind of tunic and very, very wide.  It looks like it would only fit a girl with a 40DDDD.

It is the most horrendous thing I have ever seen.

The strange thing is, when I looked into the boy’s eyes the night before, he didn’t seem crazy.  He probably wasn’t crazy when he saved my live.  But he’d obviously been knitting this—um—tent for days, maybe even weeks.

I am claustrophobic again.  There is no food here, no medicine, no clean water.  Nothing but horrendous knitting for a girl with a bra size gone rogue, feathers and poop.  The idea of leaving him, makes me feel guilty, but I know that if I do not find help, he will die.

As the fog burns away, the fever escalates—the boy’s eyes roll back into his head and his limbs nd torso spasm out of control.  The little shelter threatens to collapse around us.  I hold his narrow limbs tight with my arms and try to remember the symptoms of bird flu.

Squinting at the horizon, I can just make out the shore.  With the water so still, it will be easy to swim.  I disentangle my body from his limbs, blow out the saint’s candle to save the wick, squeeze his limp dry hand—a promise to return.