to and fro

[fahye]

This is the coolest writing meme I've seen in ages. Borrowed from daegaer:

Give me one of my own stories, and a timestamp sometime in the future after the end of the story, or sometime in the past before the story started, and I'll write you at least a hundred words of what happened then, whether it's five minutes before the story started or ten years in the future.

The good thing about it is that I'm not forced to come up with entirely new scenarios, just slip myself into an already-created universe and extrapolate in one direction. Sounds fun!

Everything's at mercurial_wit, though if you are really mad keen on a drabble I wrote in your LJ years ago...then by all means ask me for that :D

ETA: I'm going to work for a few hours, but all requests will be filled when I get home. That's a promise!

Comments

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Twice in my life, only twice, did I see the braiding of my mother’s hair interrupted by one who was not an Eater. The first interruption was by a girl not many years younger than I, a girl with unsteady legs who sucked on the fingers of one hand and kept herself steady on the doorframe with the other. My mother’s braid had reached the nape of her neck, but the fast flicking of her fingers ceased as I pulled in my breath.

“Mama,” I said, uncertain. But my mother just looked at the child for a count of five, and then her fingers began to move again – flick, flick, the dark strands leaping and falling into place.

“It is nothing, my own Rose. It is fine.”

The child stood there – not making a sound beyond the moist noise of her fingers in her mouth – and blinked at my mother, following the movement of her hands. Not once did she glance at me, and by the time the braid was complete she had given a small cough and waddled away again. I was five. I did not think too deeply about the incident; the taboo had been broken, and my mother had sustained the break, and that was all.

The second time – three years later, or maybe four or five; my timeline is not as sturdy as it once was – it was a man who stumbled into the room, just I was refilling the red salt-pouch and my mother was dividing her loose hair into sections. I do not think he recognised us as those who walk, because he nodded at us with no fear or hatred or respect or any sign of the otherness that I was becoming accustomed to.

“I heard...” he said, and looked for a moment at the woman’s corpse.

“You will get out of this place,” my mother said. Her hands dropped from her hair, which fell over itself and untangled as she stood up. This time when the man looked us he must have seen the pouch, because his face paled. And there. The fear.

“I apologise,” he said, “I did not realise,” but my mother showed no signs of letting this pass as she had with the girl.

“Out,” she said again, her quiet voice all the more frightening for the expression on her face. It would have matched a yell. My mother’s slap drove the man backwards by two steps, but I think it was this eerie contrast in her face that pushed him the rest of the way out of the room.

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

It's so formal, but so appropriate . . . a very good world.

*does not touch, carefully*

[fahye.livejournal.com]

It is such a strange world. I think it came ready-made, like the story itself. Finding new details is just a matter of stepping - very carefully - into the unexplored corners. With a candle.