Friday, January 30, 2015

Fog 2.0

I wasn't intending it to be this short, but here you go: 50 words in about 5 minutes. Haven't even finished my first cup of coffee...


The fog is claustrophobic.

An unsettling clash, a brawl of warm and cool.

Moisture in the air fills my lungs, displacing oxygen. A long, slow drowning death. Peaceful and heavy, like white sheets and plump down pillows. 

Suffocating.

Like his elbow on my chest, like his hand on my mouth.



4 comments:

  1. Ah! Very nice and short.... mine is not short, which is perhaps not a surprise :)

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  2. The fog is claustrophobic. It rolls between a handful of old graves, clings to the underbelly of a tree like a vast spider web filling the branches, looking as fragile as such a web and easily dispelled by the mere light of a cell phone. I walk toward it slowly, skirting gravestones that echo with the unmet needs of the dead.

    “Hello.”

    The fog shrinks in on itself, seeming to be little more than breath pluming in the air and slowly flows about me as gentle as a mist.

    “I am a magician; we can talk to most things when we want to. Mostly its emotions.” I smile and wait as the fog slowly forms again. “You’re scared of filling the cemetery?”

    The fog ripples as a shiver fills it.

    “Or of getting big at all?”

    This time it doesn’t move at all, answer enough.

    “You will die as a small fog as well as a large one might, burned away by the sun when daylight comes,” I say softly. “In time even the sun will die as the foggy vacuum of space engulfs it in turn. What else do you imagine keeps people going if not the knowing of their death? The same is true for fogs as for people, for suns and even magicians. Sometimes the best we can hope for is to be remembered, and a gentle wide fog that makes the world a shade more magical and can inspire beauty is far better than a roiling mass that kills drivers.

    The fog rolls a little thicker at that; it fears the lights of cars, desires to snuff them out.

    “I know. And you could. But then a magician – not me, but this city has one – might stop you, and it would hurt something of what the world knows about fog. You are concealment and beauty both, a touch of wonder humans can imagine they understand. You don’t need to hide, and you don’t need to be small.”

    The fog thins and rolls out into the city, a nimbus turned softly wondrous as lights dance through it and streets seem to be something other than they are. I count that a job well done and continue walking back to my motel room. The fog is long gone by morning, but it managed to make the newspapers, having filled most of the city before the sun burned it away come morning.

    I think about fogs and fear, and the words I spoke about the sun. I wonder if sometimes the sun is reluctant to burn, or the moon to reflect it, and I wonder if there are magicians who deal with such matters, but I have no idea who I’d even ask. And if I could bear to hear what they might say.

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  3. ARGH! With the first couple of lines, I thought this was going to be about your ghoul character which you have teased me about with small snippets of deliciously creepy writing. Yes, I went and used 'deliciously' there, 'cause, y'know...

    Wow, Alcar, beautiful descriptions, and I love that you made the fog 'claustrophobic' ;)

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    Replies
    1. That was the first thing that occured to me for it :) "What if it is the fog itself that is ... perfect!" I haven't been doing much with the magician stories per se lately, due to being sick, so that was a nice challenge.

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