The end

As I attempt to start this up again, hopefully not to slowly sink back into the very tempting and beautiful quagmire of writing-laziness that is so very serene and simply divine wow forget my original train of thought and all of English punctuation writing-laziness sounds pretty awesome.

---2 years later---

Let's try again. I have not been idle in the writing arena for the time I have been gone from here but I have not been able to finish writing a single thing either. So I will post here the beginning of a 'short story' I had begun some time ago, to which I have not penned (typed) the end yet. Each week, I will release another part of the story and hopefully this will keep me motivated to keep writing more. Or I will have to pretend to die, and that will be very costly. Well, without further a dew.

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I was walking down the road, as you would often find me doing, alone. The moisture that I breathed out condensed instantly on the dust in the air, obscuring my vision. I came upon a crossing and glanced behind me reflexively. For a moment through the fog I saw a pair of dull yellow lights, lanterns suspended in the white air, growing ever larger like the ravenous eyes of a fiend. Then I remembered that that was a scene from the past. Funny.

It was dark. Without the streetlights, the cars, the coffee shops, the blinking lights of airplanes overhead, it was always dark. There was only the moon but that too was often hid behind a blanket of dark clouds. It was not safe to be out in the dark anymore. I quickened my pace, but this was always a difficult task with my leg.

The gravel made a crunching sound under my feet as I walked. I liked that sound. It reminded me of the past. I pulled my sweatshirt tighter around me to ward off the cold. It could get really cold now that the huge emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had come to a sudden stop. I guess global warming was not a hoax. It turns out that the world was better off with it though. But of course that was not the only reason it was always cold.

As I looked up at the bright spot between the thick clouds, the moon’s light diffused and spread over its surface, I thought about the world that was. It was fast. And bright. Like your childhood. Nothing like this. There were girls. Girls with bright red lipsticks. Girls on the billboards, on your television screens, on magazines, girls everywhere. Then there were cars, and buildings, and people, lots of them. People walking around on roads like this, getting in their shiny cars, getting out of their shiny cars, girls with bright red lipsticks on their arms, laughing and joking, flicking ash from their cigarettes wherever they went. It was a different world. Especially on nights like this, it seemed so alien. I sometimes thought I had imagined it all.

Something startled me. A dark shape fled by a few meters ahead of me. Something even darker than the black of the night around it. It darted behind an electric pole, an obsolete reminder of a world that perhaps never existed. Was I imagining this? I fumbled with my belt, trying to pry open the cover of my knife. I had to be quick, predators were common now, even in cities. But something told me it was not a predator. Not something I had ever seen at least. It was too big, and too fast. I couldn’t get the button of the leather cover to open. My fingers were numb with the cold. I limped behind another pole for cover. As I struggled with my knife cover, I peeked back out. There. Again. The shadow fled across the road. My breathing quickened.

“Shit,” I breathed out white smoke. Suddenly the yellow lights reappeared. In front of me this time. The button came loose but the knife fell out of my hands. I stood there, rooted, couldn’t take my eyes off those dull yellow lights, like the eyes of a fiend. They came closer. I started hearing the sound as well. The sound of a car engine. The dull whooshing sound of the wheels on the road. How alien that sound is. Like from another world. Like I was imagining it all. I took a step back. My leg gave way and I fell on the loose gravel. Crunch.

I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the light. It was very close now.