My WIP has a fight scene brewing, so I guess I have violence on the brain. Drabble:
Back straight. Weight centered. Shoulders relaxed. Knees bent, feet ready to move. Breathe. Remember to breathe. Eyes open, ears open. Keep the others in your peripheral, but don’t take your eyes off the prize. Here he comes. The swing is lazy, predictable. He’s trying to goad you. Don’t let him. Sidestep. His friend looks antsy, throw a feint to dissuade him. There’s the real attack. Parry, redirect. He’s off-line. Strike!
The blade hits home and his opponent crumples. He draws it free, a practiced flick of the wrist to remove the blood as he returns the weapon to ready.
Next.
The waiting is going to kill me and it hasn't even been a week yet.
Deep breaths, Allyson. Deep deep deep. They won't do anything about the waiting, but if you breath deep enough, you'll at least feel stoned.
Keys
Put your fingers to the piano keys
Let them linger, let them tease and bite
Skin to ivory, perfect calloused tips
Beat the rhythm, all in black and white.
Where I sit, languid and listening
All my world awash in liquid sound
Every wire takes its time to sing
Struck by hammers, notes both flat and round.
Ebony and rosewood are your base
Echoes from a box of rare delight
Treble laughing, bass and midrange full
Drape themselves across my dreams at night.
You strike the keys, and make those hammers fall
And I'll come dancing to that siren's call.
God, Deb, that's gorgeous.
Amy, 100 words on the first try, no editing.
Sometimes you get lucky...
You know what's funny? I wasn't even thinking drabble when I read it -- I was thinking lyrics.
I'm thinking maybe I'll see about setting them to music. That would be three song lyrics written in the space of as many months, when I hadn't written any in 25 years. But truth to tell, it was a drabble.
Damn.
What AmyLiz said. That is downright gawjus, Deb! As soon as I started saying it to myself, it felt like it needed music.
ETA: Not saying things clearly. It doesn't need music so much as it felt like there was already music there that I could almost hear and touch. It made me shiver. Better?
Seem to have a quorum, there. Music there should probably be.
drabble
I choose each word deliberately, weighing nuance and insinuation with the delicate precision of one for whom Roget's Thesaurus is bedside reading. There is an ego whose defenses must be circumvented so that certain truths may be told.
He has been very important to me, but I have finally reached a place where I know I don't accept certain ways he treats me. I craft sentences that tell how he's offended me. I ask if this is the note he wants to leave a five-year relationship on.
I pause, then strike the words out with a firm stroke of the pen. If it were not how he wanted to end things, then things would have ended differently. He has chosen. And now so do I. We have not exchanged one word in twenty years.
