Looking for a little inspiration tonight. Liking the new location, but still struggling to become comfortable with new surroundings and this is very important for us writer-types. We need to be able to find our writing voice anywhere, and I want to make sure mine is still there alive and kicking.
Got this prompt off creativewritingprompts.com because the book I usually use is packed away somewhere and I haven’t opened all of my office boxes yet…whoops. Not sure if its supposed to be a short story? A poem? Where it goes, nobody knows…
(Oh, and it totally isn’t # 147 on the website, I lost the number when I clicked away from the page. Oh well, it’s somewhere!)
Sorrow croons for love lost
tomorrow is another day
today is an opportunity
The young woman closed the book in her lap with a snap. “What a bunch of hooey,” she muttered.
Love wasn’t an opportunity for her…far from it. She grabbed her black shoulder bag where it was squashed against her legs on the concrete. She stood up and brushed the dirt off her clothes. Like it would matter. Her skin crawled and her head ached. Her dirty-colored blond hair fell in tangled waves around her pale face.
She walked on. The streetlights cast the street in a strange green type of glow. The road looked like it was full of molten lava, all cracked and glowing as cars rumbled over the potholes.
The librarian she’d met while she was rummaging through the library’s trash bins didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Here, honey,” she’d said. “I was going to take this home and shelve it…but you have it. You look like you could use a little love in this life.”
She’d taken it with numb fingers. She’d never been one of those people to remember gloves. And the old woman had looked so clean and smelled of lotion. The kind that her mother used to wear before she’d had thrown herself out of the window after Daddy shot himself.
She wasn’t sure if she had even said, ‘thank you.’
The woman had given her a weak smile and then had shuffled off. Like she knew already that Sarah didn’t have the words to say what she should have.
Sarah found a more comfortable place amongst the moss and the concrete, and the trickles of water underneath the red bridge which cut across the only dirty water-way in her not-so-small town.
She opened the crinkly pages, ran her fingers over words that were clean and very old but brand new to her. She pondered that for a brief moment, how words were never the proper age to anyone. They were always becoming something new, meaning something different to anyone. Somewhat…timeless.
A frog jumped and she with it, and the croak he left with a splash gurgled across the empty spaces, the cool night, the sound of concrete rumbling, cars and artificial light.
“Words are timeless,” she read.
age is but a number
crawls across space
and time, and I with it
“Don’t be just another number,” she continued, eyes glued to the page.
be the delicate words
you are reading so much about.
A. J. Morse 