Worth 50,000: Day Fourteen - Short Skirt, Long Jacket

[momebie]

Some photographs tell your story better than you can tell it with words. This particular image slots in with the Big Damn Existential Scifi Novel so well it's eerie. Ever since I decided to set the thing in Florida a lot of the blanks have filled themselves in. It's a long walk between military bases in Florida, but sometimes the slow way is the only way to get there. Just like in writing. One foot in front of the other. I haven't written more than a thousand words all weekend, since I was in Fernandina visiting Boy, and right now I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by the distance I need to traverse. But feeling overwhelmed isn't going to fix it, so I must put it aside and simply march. (Though, what I wouldn't give for my march to be done in that sunlight. The light here is a character all its own.)

Two men diverge in a yellow wood, which one takes the path less travelled by?



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Comments

[ecosopher.livejournal.com]

How are you finding the perfect pictures for me to write with? Damn, I love this picture.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

Isn't it wonderful? The movement in it just makes me want to join them.

[yachiru]

The boy was dead and buried. Evan hoped he was buried deep enough. Things had a habit of crawling back to you if they weren't buried deep enough.


You feeling allright Harry?

Fine.

We did just murder a small boy and bury him. No trepidation? Do you perhaps need a hug?

No.

You're such a snoz. A great big snoz. Here I am offering physical comfort to you and you won't even look at me. This is the last time I attempt a kidnapping for profit with you!

Fine.

We're gonna get caught and go to prison and I bet you'll be begging for a hug then.

...

[momebie.livejournal.com]

Prison hugs are probably less preferable to 'we just killed a kid' hugs.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

It had been a long night, huddled in the light drift of snowflakes near the base of a scrub pine. Rajin had forbidden him from lighting a cigarette, lest he give away their position, so at 07:00 Caleb chased the daybreak with his first smoke of the day. His lungs ached with the humid cold. At least the winters back west would have killed him quick. This lingering, melting, freezing purgatory was slowly becoming torturous.

He stood and slowly stretched his stiff arms and legs. Rajin, who had been gone when Caleb woke, stomped his way back through the crunch of blanketed pine needles with all the stealth of a Panzer. “I thought we were supposed to be slipping under the radar.” Caleb watched the way the steam from his breath and the smoke from the cigarette mingled in the air in front of him. Why did it seem like the parts of himself always disappeared faster than the fabricated things?

“If they knew where we were we would have opened our eyes to the barrels of guns. As it is, I think we’ve finally actually lost them.”

“It’s not the guns I’m worried about, it’s the arrows.”

Rajin grimaced. There were droplets of water clinging to his black dreads. No matter how many times Caleb told him he was going to freeze to death, he never stopped dunking his head in any body of water he could find. Refreshed, he called it. Pneumonia, Caleb would clarify.

“You’re running from a ghost,” Rajin said. “She’s been dead for a year now. I’d know if she’d survived. I--”

“You think she’d contact you, don’t you?” Caleb dropped the butt of his cigarette and the burning tip sizzled slightly against the sodden needles and brown grass at their feet. “She didn’t care about anyone but herself.”

“She cared about all of us. It’s why she was doing what she did.”

“Romantic,” Caleb spit.

“Pessimist,” Rajin replied. It was an argument they’d had many times.

“Welp, this pessimist is fucking hungry. How far to the next town?”

Rajin pulled out his GPS unit. “Twenty miles, but there should be farm land in another five. We can beg, borrow, or steal something there. It’d draw less attention to us. I doubt they’d think to question individuals between city centers. After all, they know what we’re after.”

“Do we?”

“Yeah, a real bed. Let’s go.” Rajin led as they started down the cracked and pock marked pavement.

Caleb should still be working behind a desk in Colorado, pulling together algorithms and extrapolating alien data. He shouldn’t be shivering in a too large trench coat on a back road in the south. He missed lukewarm coffee and dry socks and co-workers that were too polite to mention certain things in his company. He took a deep breath, which settled in the base of his lungs and made him cough roughly. He stopped and leaned over, hands on his knees, while the spasms wracked him. Rajin doubled back to him and placed a large hand on his shoulder to hold him steady. Caleb looked up the road ahead of them to where it curved out of sight. He should be anywhere but there, and all he could think about was the unknown up around the bend.