For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 125: Despite not moving, she was standing in the center of the lake.
Despite not moving, she was standing in the center of the lake. The water crashed into her as though she was standing at the bottom of a bowl. It happened so fast she didn’t have time to react, to be scared. One minute she was standing on the side walk the next at the bottom of the lake. She didn’t have time to take a breath before the waters engulfed her. They covered her and she was suddenly looking up at the surface of the lake.
Penelope took a deep breath automatically. She felt water slide down her throat, but she didn’t feel like she was choking. She felt a calmness fill her. ‘I guess in a dream I can breathe under water.’
The thought made her feel a little better. She looked down and as she moved she felt her hair swish around her. It felt especially strange as the fluidity of her movements were the only things that made her feel like she was in water at all.
She could breathe and as she blinked she realized her eyes had been open. The water was clear as glass it simply replaced air. She looked down at her feet and found she was still standing on the pathway as before. In front of her was a field of flowers. The waved gently in the movements of the water. Behind her, when she looked it was the same. To her relief she didn’t see words now crawling up her skin.
‘So I’m in the lake,’ she thought. What do I do?’
The path led only to the lake so there was no point walking down the path since the lake got tired of waiting for her. She took a deep breath in and let it out. It bubbled around her face but that was it. Her lungs felt fine, her body wasn’t reacting to the lake water instead of air. Penelope watched the stream uf bubbles from her exhale rise to the surface. They broke the surface and as they did, the lake lefel dropped.
Frowning, Penelope took another deep breath and let it out. The same thing happened. The bubbles left her mouth, rose to the surface and the surface of the lake lowered. She repeated the deep breathing as though it was an exercise in calm and with each breath, the lake level dropped. Soon enough, she could feel the top of her hard above water. A few breaths later and her entire head was above the surface.
Once that happened she was no longer breathing in le lake water so the level remained the same. She bent her knees and took another deep breath underwater. The water lowered.
‘If I want the lake to lower I have to breathe under water,’ she realized.
Penelope sat down cross legged on the path and continued her deep breathing. When the level dropped again putting her head above the water, she lay down. Flat on the path she breathed in the lake until her head and part of her body were above the water. She then rolled onto her belly and continued breathing. She came close to kissing the concrete pathway as the last of the water drained into her and her exhale simply released into the air instead of blowing bubbles.
She pushed to a sitting position and saw small rivulets of the remaining water race towards her as though worried about being left behind.
Ten til Midnight 