Since I’m having such trouble with productivity lately, I figured I could use this webpage to motivate myself. I wrote this the other night, riffing on the book that lives beneath my fingertips, but this passage is unlikely to make it into my novel. It asked me to write it in this particular tense, with this particular focus. Two paragraphs, about a girl who just accidentally killed the boy she’s had the hots for. That’s my world right now. What follows below may not make much sense now, but that’s a good thing. I can’t always answer for my subconscious.

Excerpt, from Throwaways:

Lightning strikes as she closes her eyes. The bulging white light singes them, a musty smoke invading her mouth. We don’t stand close–she is suspect, dangerous. A being we cannot and will not know. Around her, rain drops freeze and shatter against the ground. The brick wall caves in and reveals bones–old bones–the lives left behind so that this world could plunder on. She unburies them. Unburies everything so that the cycle becomes clear. After a moment, with her closed eyes alight and still burning, the vision appears.

He is not dead, cannot be dead–his heart stopped, he floats in the ethers, between what is and what will not be. All her flames, lashing light that stopped his life from growing into the coming minutes, act as surrogates–the boundary between this world and that. But she does not embody death. It is only life her fingers twist and turn and touch into existence. On the other side, the realm of the in-between, he waits for permission to come back. And what he brings with him calls on the future, asks it to caress their bodies with some truth of what she is and cannot know.