[Preface: Been thinking I should do some creative writing again, and I had an interesting idea the other day. I thought for the next few days I’d share some doodlings that I’d come up with.
The concept is that the complete “book” or whatever you want to call it will be a book of “beginnings and endings” — short stories/scenes/vignettes that mark either the beginning or the end of something. This could be a first meeting, the beginning of a new romance, the start of a new job… or the end of someone’s life, a successfully-completed mission, someone saying goodbye to a past life. I haven’t figured out quite how I want to structure the overall thing yet but I’m thinking all the stories will be set in the same “world” and “time”, whatever that might end up being, and that characters from some stories will show up in others. Some “endings” will match up with the “beginnings”, others will stand alone. They’ll all be jumbled, though, so the reader will have to do a bit of mental dot-connecting to figure out the full picture.
Anyway. It might all be a bit ambitious or it might work well. We’ll see. Here’s the first mini-story/scene/whatever I’ve written, which is a Beginning.]
“Who are you?” said the girl.
She’d come across the boy completely by chance. He looked about the same age as her, with mousy-brown unkempt hair and some tatty-looking clothing that she guessed was a hand-me-down from a sibling.
He turned to face her slowly.
“Who are you?” he echoed back at her, his face curious; hesitant.
She frowned and looked him up and down. His face was dirty, but his eyes sparkled with life. She had already arbitrarily decided that she was going to like him very much, but she knew better than to declare something like this up front. People had to work for her friendship.
“I’m Laura,” she said. “You still haven’t told me who you are. And I asked you first.”
He looked at her suspiciously and put down the stick he was holding.
“Sam,” he said. “I’m Sam.”
An awkward silence hung in the air for a few moments. Laura continued to gaze at Sam, sizing him up, analysing him. Sam, meanwhile, looked anywhere but at the pretty young girl in front of him, his gaze alighting by turns on a nearby log, an interesting-looking leaf on the floor or a pattern in the old oak tree’s bark that looked a bit like a person if you squinted.
“What are you doing here, Sam?” said Laura eventually, satisfied that she had learned all she could with her eyes alone.
“I, err,” said Sam, his cheeks flushing. He didn’t like to tell people about his secret place, but since she was already here… “I like to come here sometimes,” he said. “To be alone. Away from the grown-ups.”
“Why do you want to be away from the grown-ups?” said Laura.
“Because they’re mean,” he said. “I don’t like them.”
“You don’t like your parents?”
“No.”
Silence fell once again. Laura had never known someone who didn’t like their parents. There were times when she thought she didn’t like them — usually times when she had gotten into trouble for something or other — but she’d learned pretty quickly that fluttering her pretty eyelashes, saying “sorry” in a meek voice and, occasionally, crying usually got her back into their good books.
“Why?” she said after a moment, deciding that the best approach would be the direct one. Sam said nothing in response for a moment and turned away from her. He picked up his stick, brushed away some leaves and started scratching marks into the dirty ground of the woods.
“Sam?” she said, craning her neck to look over his shoulder at what he might be scratching on the floor, but hesitating to come any closer. Still he said nothing. She stood in quiet contemplation for a moment, waiting for him to make the next move.
Finally, he turned around, the stick still in his hand. His eyes sparkled as he looked right at her, making eye contact for the first time. He looked sad.
“What is it?” she said. He said nothing, but simply gestured in the direction of the crude picture he’d scrawled on the forest floor with his stick. Looking back at him with an unspoken question hanging in the air, he nodded. She took a step forward to better see the markings.
Her eyes filled with tears, and all she wanted to do was hug him. She walked right up to him, looked into his sparkling, sad eyes and put her arms around him. His body, stiff and tense until now, softened as he relaxed into her embrace. He rested his head on her shoulder and put his own arms around her.
The pair of them wept.
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