Fiction

Your body is asleep in the house you moved to when you were fourteen, but your brain is wide awake in your old school library.

My friend and I are sitting out back, the tiny backyard seeming to get smaller, and smaller, by the minute. It’s July, and it’s one of the hottest days of the year, so hot you can see the heat waves coming off the pavement.

Rain was sparkling, shimmering all around Grayson.  He’d left his earbuds, his phone, resting atop the worn cushions of his favorite writing loveseat, where he’d always curl up his legs and hug his leather-bound notebook to his ches

Characters:

JAMES: A wrestler, very calm and collected, except out on the mat in the spotlight. 

SHADOW: A strictly rule-following entity, always carrying a large book, gets flustered easily 

The snow fell in a layer thin enough for my footprints to reveal the concrete beneath each step. It lifted in waves when the wind skimmed the ground, like tall grass in an open field.

For years people worshiped Nature, she would help bring nutrients and food the the people.

I sighed as I set my car in park and opened the doors. I sat on the edge of my car seat for a while pondering what my life had become. But I had no other choice. Time for another day of work.

It is sunny outside. I feel the heat, I see the other birds chirping from their perch on a branch. I want to fly, the wind ruffling my feathers, two hundred feet above the ground.

The heavyweight champion of the world enters the ring.

“Boy, he looks solid, doesn’t he, Jim?”

“Sure does. Confident, like.”

My thumb slammed in the door, rapidly turning purple. At first I didn’t even realize, I had become that numb to reality, similar to how my thumb was about to be. My neighbor, Mr. Smithers, waved at me from across the way.

The icy Penobscot wind cut through me like a blade as I stared at the crow, now just a crumpled shadow in the snow. My dad’s shot had silenced its call, and it lay there, broken and defeated, a symbol of my own helplessness.