Archive for July 21st, 2010

I follow various writing blogs and writers on Twitter, and I happened upon a link to Jodi Cleghorn’s post on Monday of a ten-line writing prompt. She posted it using AudioBoo, and encouraged others to post what they wrote for the exercise using a Boo as well. This sounded pretty fun, and I listened to her piece for this exercise as well as a few others, and decided that I needed to do it, too.

I had some issues with AudioBoo’s recording directly from the browser, and Garage Band made everything sound odd, so there are a couple of skips in this recording. Below the player, you’ll find the typed version of this piece. Enjoy!

Low, gauzy clouds stretched across the sky, stained orange and red and pink by the sun’s paintbrush rays as it slowly pulled the blanket of the horizon about its middle.

The crunch as boots broke through the icy crust of day-old snow was deafening in the silence of twilight.

His bare fingers brushed against the worn edges of the faded photograph, creased and smudged and stained with age, tucked safely in the inside pocket of his jacket.

The chill wind shrieked across the snow and cut through fabric to shivering skin.

His threadbare, hand-me-down jacket did little to stop the cold.

The sound of the ice giving way beneath his feet brought pictures to his mind of two boys, a matched pair, laughing and stumbling down an endless gravel road.

He closed his eyes, and as his fingers ran over the edges of the photo again, he could see it clearly in the darkness behind his eyelids: one boy, alone, face grim.

A shiver ran up his spine with another gust of wind, and he pulled his jacket tighter around him.

He was not the boy in the photo, but they shared the same face; the same dark, unhappy eyes; the same joyless expression; the same feeling of being overwhelmingly alone.

“Will you ever forgive me?”