Chaos Intrepid: In Her Shoes

Prompt the Second: Memories, All Alone in the Moonlight

You Should Write A Book

Dust eddies keep swirling as dusk falls. Ribbons of sand fold and weave, slack against the sky. They float in lazy zephyrs, blown in from every compass point, dropping as the air rapidly cools. But the earth still scorches. There is just enough light that the air blurs in the heat like warped glass, perhaps a gateway to another world. Everything sifts, a world beyond time, slowed to the second.

A convoy crawls through the heat, a quiver of golden, greenish hues moving through the desert. There are four, maybe five, that blend in and out of each other’s twilit shadows. The air, seeming to slow them as they scrawl a path across the desert sand, sticks in the throats of gun-wielding men who have decided it is marginally better outside than inside. They are only twenty minutes from their destination, ipods are being passed around, radio news playing on digitals, two dark skinned soldiers from Bolton laugh about the ration packs they can put back into storage. Doran Bingham grins at his photographer, who ignores him in order to take a snap of the one man whose weariness has caught up with him.

“How long now?”

“Did you see the results? Spurs bloody won!”

“Another five months, four three days. Thank god for skype or my missus would never have me.”

Everyone is in high spirits.

“Everyone pull out your pens and paper.”

With the next blink, Doran falls back into an English classroom on a blistering hot summer’s day. He remembers the scene: His teacher was an old lady, though perhaps all women over forty were old through his eight year old eyes. She handed out assignments, creative writing, based around alliteration and Oh no, oh no, oh nomatopoeia.

Ringing, rumbling, roaring, the rush and surge of noise in his ears.

“Bingham, are you quiet alright?”

“Yes, Mrs Buckland.”

The assignment: he wrote about a boy and his sister, Kristi. He wrote his first simile because Kristi was white as a leaf. And as his eyes blink open again he thinks that she could never have been as white in his imagination as the photographer, whose face is now caked in dust and ash, white clouds that drift from nowhere.

Doran closes his eyes again, drifting backwards, into that classroom.

She gave them thirty minutes, right until the end of class. He scribbled a TBC in the bottom right corner because his wasn’t finished before the bell went and Buckland shunted them off to the playground. The heat was unbearable; as sand blurred in and out of focus. There was nothing to grip onto, only the smell of burning ozone, burning skin.

The next day, Mrs Buckland had promised they would receive their work back. 

One scream. One that throbs. It pulses straight through him, causes the photographers body to lurch on the group. He wants to speak to her but his mouth refused to cooperating. Then comes the noise. A squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal on grit and gravel. The rush of blood and ring of metal as a fourth explosion hits. Pain richochets from his knee. His body is trapped. His brain swam, thick and dry as the air he breathed.

His paper sat on the top of the pile, top of the class. Mrs Buckland smiled at him and tapped the comment she’d left on the page.

“You should write a book, Doran.”

Would he write this? One day? He chases the idea, what it would mean...Everything is burning now. He cannot remember the alliteration and the ringing rings like it’s been left on free dial. He tries not to grin as his teachers comments rise again. A book. He had yet to write one of those.

The wheels of the truck spin uselessly in the air. Dusty men, begin to crawl out from the wreckage, faces blackened, blistered red. Doran Bingham tries to move but pain races through him. A hundred burning needles. Someone might be talking but there is only the echo.

Word Count: 684.