Searing Rain

Prompt: "Help I'm Alive" and "Sick Muse" by Metric
Time: 9 minutes
Result: 387 words

The rain was falling. Hard. More like hail. Except it burned. Hot, scalding rain. She looked up, and the searing rain fell into her eyes. She would have screamed, had she any voice left. So she ducked her head back down, pulled her hood over her head, and ran down the street to the park at the end. The gate was locked, but she climbed the chain-link fence. She lept down, and groaned as she heard her jeans rip. The fence had grabbed her pants and ripped a giant hole in one leg. Her left leg burned as the rain hit her now bare flesh. She swore under her breath, knotted the ripped fabric together to block some of the rain, and continued on. Past the swing sets, past the baseball field, past the once green grass. This was dystopia; no such things had any use now. No one swung. No one played. No one lay in the grass underneath the sun. What sun? All there was was an endless torrent of searing rain. She refused to accept it though. She remembered life before dystopia. Life had been better once, and she knew. There had been light, had been sun. This she knew, no matter how much she had been fed the lies that it was only a dream. It wasn't a dream. She didn't only dream of blue skies, sunburns, children laughing, couples in love; she remembered them. Maybe others only dreamt, as if such things had never existed and never could exist, but she knew better. She knew it had to be more than a dream.

But what if she was wrong? She was fighting for a memory which might have been only a dream. But she was so sure. They had to be lying. They had to have done it. But she couldn't see why. Not even the filthy government workers, the spineless gits who ran everything, liked this. Everyone dreamed of the same sky, the sam parks, the same light. It had to be real. And so she wouldn't stop running in the searing rain. She couldn't. She had to find out what had gone wrong, what had happened to destroy the light, to eliminate things like swing sets and baseball fields and green grass, to find a way to bring it back.

The Woman in the Chartreuse Dress

Prompt: Chartreuse
Time: 10 minutes
Result: 369 words

Her dress was chartreuse. A strange, greenish sort of colour, right in the middle of the spectrum. The sort of colour you look at, and no one can seem to find the right way to describe it. Some say it's green. Some say it's teal. No, it's a much yellower colour than that. Teal's a more deep sort of colour. But look at the saturation! On and on, it goes, and no one can agree.

Of course her dress was chartreuse. She was chartreuse. Not literally, but she might as well have been; perhaps it'd be the one thing everyone might agree on about her. But no. She was impossible to describe. From the moment she walked into the room, wearing that indescribably chartreuse dress of hers, all eyes were on her. All minds were on her. Every tongue, ever pair of chapped and chewed and over-glossed lips, every chiseled and unchiseled jaw, every high voice and every low voice could make no sound but the sound of whispering about her.

Who was she? Where was she from? What was she doing here? No one knew. Everyone was confused, perplexed, puzzled by her. It was her way. And she was completely unfazed. The woman in the chartreuse dress was apparently either oblivious, dumb, or wholly accustomed to this treatment. It would be unsurprising to any who stood there that she had always been this way, so indescribable, so addictive.

Yes, additive. No one could look away. Some tried to carry on new conversations, but their every thought still clung to the woman like her tight, form-fitting chartreuse dress did her bosom. Every mind hungered madly for her, to know her, to solve her. Like a Rubik's cube, but worse. Even the brightest minds could never twist and turn her into any form that made sense, that followed logic.

She was illogical. How could she exist? This was the thought on every mind. It was as if she was from another world entirely. She deified all laws of logic an reason known to this world.

And yet she made perfect sense. She was mere a woman. Just another human being. Perhaps it was this simplicity that made her so incredible.

There is just over a week left until NaNoWriMo begins, so for the rest of the month, instead of the usual posts, you'll be getting the results of "word wars" I'll be doing to re-sharpen my speed-writing abilities. Word wars, sometimes called sprints, are high intensity writing "races" in which one writes for a pre-determined amount of time, and at the end of the time frame, a word count is taken to determine how many words were written during the "war". The goal is to write as many as possible, which means that deleting, over-thinking, and hesitating all lower your score. The real point is to shut off the infamous "Inner Editor" which prevents writers from ever getting anything written for fear it might be wrong. The beauty of art is that you are never wrong. Art is just opinion. No matter how many people disagree, it's always yours.

So for the next little-over-a-week, I'll be posting the results of various writing prompts and free writes. Come November, I'll either write about NaNo or post up excerpts from the day's writing, varying as I see fit. Today begins pre-NaNo blogging!

Prompt: "I hope your chair falls apart and someone throws an apple at your head."
Time: 15 minutes
Result: 438
"I hope your chair falls apart and someone throws an apple at your head!" she shrieked, slamming the door in my face. Literally. I stumbled over and landed with a smack on my back. I just sort of laid there for a few minutes. Maybe I hit my head when I fell over too. I don't really remember exactly. All I knew was my best friend had just slammed a door right into my face, my nose was probably broken, and I wasn't even going to consider what kind of pain my back might be in from landing on it. And for what? It wasn't like I had done anything to her. I didn't ask for this! I was tired of it. If I could have given it to her, I would have. After all, she was the one who actually wanted.

But nothing ever works that way, does it? Stupid me wanted nothing more than to just be a normal, average, high school and fit in, so of course I'm the one who gets these stupid powers and can't even function in normal life anymore because I keep electrocuting things. Stupid me. I should have know trying to fit in would only make me stand out. And now my best friend's all mad at me just because I don't want to wear the stupid costume she made me. I mean, seriously? It's spandex. I don't even know where she got spandex, let alone managed to make the whole thing.

I'm going to go to school tomorrow and act like nothing happened. No one else knows besides her anyway, and no one would actually believe her if she started telling people I had superpowers. Because everyone knows superpowers don't really exist. I'm sure it's all just in my head. There's some kind of logical explanation for all of this. A scientific reason. Some sort of electron issue or coicidence or something.

I'm not going to go walking around in some bright yellow spandex tights with a stupid lighting bolt across my chest and a stupid low-cut V-neck thing. What is up with that? That's what I don't get the most. I've never understood so-called "superhero" women who all wore these crazy-tight outfits with their boobs popping out and everything. And high heels! How are you supposed to stop crime in heels? That's ridiculous. I'm not wearing the heels either.

I don't know why I'm even bothering to think about this. It's totally irrelevant. I'm not a hero, I don't have powers, and, actually, I'm going to wake up from this weird dream right about . . . NOW!