Morning all. I spent a chunk of my day yesterday writing something completely new and it was glorious! I don’t think I realized how disheartening it was to be spending the bulk of my time rewriting all of the things I lost when the computer crashed. But I do now. It still needs to be done, but I need to make time for the new. But before the day gets going, let’s jump into the morning prompt and see what shakes out. Timers ready? everyone in the writing pool!
I am not sure where this is going, but I kind of like Evan. I also kind of like Harrison. They could be a fun pair.
Wednesday, August 23rd: The trees looked burnt.
The trees looked burnt. All around them black trunks with bare black limbs rose up like skeletal fingers. The trunks looked flaky, almost scaly. Evan stretched a hand towards one of the nearest.
“Don’t,” a commanding voice said loudly from behind. Evan snatched his hand back like a naughty child and turned. Coming up the hill was an older man. Harrison was what Evan’s supervisor called him. He had white hair that was cut in a way that Evan was certain met 1950s military regulation. It stood up from a pink scalp as though the scalp hair always been covered by the hair but as age was starting to thin the hair it was newly coming to light. It looked like the pink of a newborn.
From his slightly higher vantage point, Evan could look down on the man’s scalp. As he was not a terribly tall man it wasn’t often he got to look down on anyone and Evan found himself wondering about the scalps of the others around him as well as his own. He found himself oddly grateful that he was wearing a hat.
“In fact, why don’t you come away from the line before you step on the infected areas and carry it down.” Harrison suggested. At the word infection, Evan started and jumped away from the trees. He looked down. The ground too look burnt in places but his boots hadn’t gotten near the areas where it was. He quickly stepped away and walked down towards Harrison.
The view was a little more familiar. Evan was, as he expected, slightly shorter than Harrison but not by a lot. The new positioning did take the baby pink scalp out of view and somehow that made him feel better.
“Is that why they were burned?” Evan asked. “To kill the infection?”
“They weren’t burnt,” Harrison said shaking his head. His eyes were scanning the tree line now that Evan was out of contamination distance. Evan too turned to look back at the trees.
“They weren’t?” From further away it looked even more like the remnants of a forest fire.
“Did you see the scales?”
“I did,” Evan said. I thought it looked like overly burnt bark, you know like when you burn chicken and the skin gets black and looks all wrinkled.”
Harrison looked at him and Evan tried not to squirm. In all fairness the chicken had been the one time he tried to cook something on his own that wasn’t a microwave burrito. It went so badly, he returned to the microwave and never ventured past it. He found he didn’t really want to admit the story to Harrison. The man seemed to radiate competence and while Evan doubted he was a master chef he expected that if Harrison decided to do something it would be done with efficiency and it would be done correctly.
“That’s the disease,” Harrison said. “Some sort of parasite.”
Ten til Midnight 