Coffee Beans & Writer/Runner Dreams
Writing Fiction and Running Miles! That goes together, right?
Cindy shrugged. “I like them both. What do you think?”
“I’ll go with whichever’s cheaper.”
Cindy rolled her eyes before cutting him a look. “Men,” she mumbled as they neared the painting she was leaning toward. A red barn set beneath a blue sky on a field of green. It conjured memories she thought lost to her, causing tears to well in her eyes. “This one.”
Josh flipped the paper slip up to check the price. He thought he may cry also.
WC: 100
“How miserable is this weather,” Raul moaned.
“Oh no,” April said. “This is the perfect day to stay in and… I don’t know, write some poems.”
“Poems? No thanks. Never been able to figure them out.”
“That’s because you never really tried.”
Raul slumped down in the couch cushions. “Did too. The words just don’t fit together.”
“You’re overthinking. How’s this:
"The rain today, Is here to stay, Time to write, Since I can"t go play...
“Ugh! Maybe you’re right. That’s no good”
“No, I liked it.” Raul sat up and stared into the rain. “Lemme try… Okay, here goes…”
WC: 100
The down side didn’t work. I wondered why but kept silent.
There were men with guns. Hard looking men. They didn’t seem the talking type.
Surely there would be someone on the upper level to explain. We were citizens and as such, deserved an explanation.
The escalator carried us up to where we slotted into lines. More hard-eyed, gun carrying men lined the walls.
Haz-mat suited figures scanned those at the head of the lines. They parted the subjects left and right.
A man screamed and ran. A dozen rifles appeared before him. He wept and parted to the left.
WC: 100
The snow had quit. The wind had not. It howled, driving temperatures below zero. Martin followed the tracks, wondering if his thick gloved finger would fit inside the trigger guard of his Glock.
The body lay just outside the halo of light from the park lamp. What was left was half buried in snow dyed red with its own blood.
“Oh dear God,” Martin gasped.
Flashlight beams trembled over the red covered white, tracing the line of tracks to the edge of the forest.
A howl rose on the wind.
Martin shivered. It had nothing to do with the cold.
WC: 100
Sammy knew what he had to do. It wouldn’t be easy, but if he could mange, it would be worth it. He hoped it would anyway.
He pulled in a deep, steadying breath and went for it, peeling the plastic from the tray and attacking the contents. All the nutrition he needed and no taste. It all went down with hardly a chew. Hardly a taste.
“Very good,” his mom said smiling. “Slow down for dessert. You don’t want brain-freeze.”
She needn’t have worried. He would savor this. His favorite with none of the nutrients and all of the taste.
The airlock clanged jarring Sarey from her thoughts. It was a months long trip of stars and blackness, and she was both happy that it was over and apprehensive at what awaited her. She already missed the color of Earth.
Heavy doors hissed open. The Captain greeted her in the gray tube that ran from docking to Control. They walked gray corridors, wore gray uniforms, and lived on a gray, lifeless world.
She would change that.
Her workstation was gray and barren. She stuck a photo to her monitor.
“Okay Mars, let’s get you growing.”
WC: 100
The moment the wheels stopped rolling, the RV door flew open and kids poured out like sands through an hourglass. They screamed and jumped, reveling in the freedom of open spaces and sunny skies.
Exhausted, Jan propped herself in the doorway. “You kids go play.”
They yipped and ran, playground bound, kicking up deep sandy footprints.
“Be back for dinner,” she called at their backs. “Don’t make me send your dad after you.”
Jan closed the door and collapsed on the couch. Dan turned from the instrument panel to look at her. “Dinner?”
“Yeah,” said Jan, “we’re ordering pizza tonight.”
WC: 100
“No. Please,” Fin begged. Shivering in nothing but his tighty-whities, he wished for his gazebo bound clothes.
Bob laughed. “Please? That all you got?”
Large hands grasped Fin by the shoulders, held tight against his struggles, and pressed him onto the dock stretching over the icy water.
Pressed to the edge, Fin saw everything with perfect clarity. Snow covered beaches, epic mountains filling the horizon, and all that ice cold water.
Then he was flying, swimming, gasping, and being pulled out of the icy depths.
“We do this every year! Welcome to the family!”
Fin wondered what he married into.
WC: 100
Slim hit the floor with a thud that was concealed by the explosion of what they called a Carnage bomb. The resulting wall of flame sent plaster dust, mortar and masonry shrapnel speeding in every direction.
He crawled, bleeding, ears ringing, and covered in white dust, to where the explosion had hurled Bobbi. She lay in a heap of wrong angles. Tears cut trenches in Slim’s grime covered face as reality set in. She was gone.
They would come for him, just as they had come for everyone else.
Let them come, he thought. I’ll show them some real carnage.
WC: 100
Cyrus walked easy, a pretty young girl by his side. He talked, and she giggled.
Things were so different now. He could remember when there was nothing here save a small village and wilderness. Those were simpler times, but things change over hundreds of years. There was no stopping it.
His kind had worried at the beginning of this age, that The Hunt would be hampered with all the light, but the prey was attracted to light, like moths.
Slipping into an alley, he went for her neck. She moaned her ecstasy and pressed against him.
Cyrus drained her life.
WC: 100
Coffee Beans & Writer/Runner Dreams 