My Writing Group starts each week with a writing prompt. (We just started meeting two weeks ago and I got the time zones mixed up last week so I missed the prompt...) I decided to post my responses to the writing prompts - just because!
This week we were to write from the perspective of a character whose vision was obscured by some thing (whatever you decide) and let the reader know where they are/their surroundings. Make sense? Someone wrote from a character whose eyes were gouged out, one wrote from a character with one eye... and this was mine...
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The old man inhaled deeply and coughed, the dangerous aromas from the street that had crept in through the window made his eyes water. Sulfur and rotten cabbage mingled with stagnant pool of water left by the rain the night before. All the freshness from the rain had been baked away by the heat of the afternoon. Swallowing the lump the scents had brought to his throat, he made his way to his favorite chair. It wasn’t a pretty chair, but that made no difference to him, it was comfortable and it was familiar. The most familiar thing in his small, two room world.
Running his hands along the arms, he lowered himself into the crevice years of sitting had created. It molded to his back side perfectly. His rough fingers snagged on the rougher fabric as he brushed them down to the smooth wooden handles at the ends of each arm of the chair. He sat, and waited in silence just as he did every day. Waiting for … he no longer recalled what he was waiting for, but he had waited so long it wouldn’t make sense to stop now. And so he waited, in the familiar, stinking silence.
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After writing this I had a snapshot of my old man with cataracts in his ratty comfortable chair and in his silence and it sort of drifted away from me and yellowed. I wondered where this idea was going to go and if I was going to leave it alone and let it stay where it was. Which led to the thought "Where is it? Where do my unused ideas go?" I pictured a many-roomed building (house? prison?) where they were all sitting, standing, pacing, screaming, growling and crying. And then that idea began to drift away and occupy a room in this building as well.
I really need to crack the whip and finish one/some/them all!
