Flash fiction
Nov. 17th, 2007 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
changelingPrompt: The Graveyard Book
No relation to Neil Gaiman's upcoming book of the same name, other than deciding to use the title as a prompt.
The Graveyard Book
She had taken to haunting graveyards. Not literally (at first). She was a Goth. She dressed in black. She wrote poetry. Some of it was excellent, some of it was awful. The awful was the most heartfelt, and sometimes had streaks of blood across it from when she cut herself. (She was mad. It was in the blood. Her mother had been institutionalised when she was twelve, and her aunt brought her up.) The graveyards were peaceful, and she could breathe easily without the ever-present car smoke that made her lungs choke.
One Sunday morning she went for a walk in her tracky-daks, breath frosting in the air. Her cheeks were pink with cold, and her fingers were starting to turn numb. The tops of her runners were starting to let in the water from the dew-faced grass. She found the book on the edge of the graveyard, under a tree. It was resting open, spine cracked, as though someone had just put it down and would be back any moment.
Nothing stirred. No-one came.
She waited. Finally, dropping herself on the mouldy leaves, she picked the book up - it was a book of poems, handwritten - and began to read.
"It was only a matter of time," her aunt said afterwards.
If she had been able to defend herself, explain what had happened, she would have said, "I think the book was alive. It was warm, even on such a cold day. It was like picking up a lizard that was basking in the sun. No, perhaps like a dove. It trembled in my hands. Then I looked at the page, began to read, and as I read the words they burned into my head, burned long and hard and bright, so that when I closed my eyes the words were still there and they wouldn't go away and they set fire to the rest of my brain and I wanted to scream but I couldn't because my brain my brain my brain ..."
Her aunt looked after her. She mashed up her food and fed it to her, slowly and carefully, on a little spoon. She scraped up the soft food that escaped the girl's mouth, and gently, insistently, put it back in, and made sure she swallowed. When six months had gone past and the days were warmer, and her aunt was not-crying in her room, so tired and emptied from having lost both her sister and her niece so that she had no-one left, the girl walked into the graveyard again.
She haunts graveyards still. Well, just the one now.
No relation to Neil Gaiman's upcoming book of the same name, other than deciding to use the title as a prompt.
The Graveyard Book
She had taken to haunting graveyards. Not literally (at first). She was a Goth. She dressed in black. She wrote poetry. Some of it was excellent, some of it was awful. The awful was the most heartfelt, and sometimes had streaks of blood across it from when she cut herself. (She was mad. It was in the blood. Her mother had been institutionalised when she was twelve, and her aunt brought her up.) The graveyards were peaceful, and she could breathe easily without the ever-present car smoke that made her lungs choke.
One Sunday morning she went for a walk in her tracky-daks, breath frosting in the air. Her cheeks were pink with cold, and her fingers were starting to turn numb. The tops of her runners were starting to let in the water from the dew-faced grass. She found the book on the edge of the graveyard, under a tree. It was resting open, spine cracked, as though someone had just put it down and would be back any moment.
Nothing stirred. No-one came.
She waited. Finally, dropping herself on the mouldy leaves, she picked the book up - it was a book of poems, handwritten - and began to read.
"It was only a matter of time," her aunt said afterwards.
If she had been able to defend herself, explain what had happened, she would have said, "I think the book was alive. It was warm, even on such a cold day. It was like picking up a lizard that was basking in the sun. No, perhaps like a dove. It trembled in my hands. Then I looked at the page, began to read, and as I read the words they burned into my head, burned long and hard and bright, so that when I closed my eyes the words were still there and they wouldn't go away and they set fire to the rest of my brain and I wanted to scream but I couldn't because my brain my brain my brain ..."
Her aunt looked after her. She mashed up her food and fed it to her, slowly and carefully, on a little spoon. She scraped up the soft food that escaped the girl's mouth, and gently, insistently, put it back in, and made sure she swallowed. When six months had gone past and the days were warmer, and her aunt was not-crying in her room, so tired and emptied from having lost both her sister and her niece so that she had no-one left, the girl walked into the graveyard again.
She haunts graveyards still. Well, just the one now.
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Date: 2007-11-16 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
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