Monday, July 23, 2012

Collaborative Story Time?

Okay, I think we're doing story time this week?

I've spent a week trying to think about what I wanted to write and I still can't decide. Time to wing it. I'm leaving the ultimate genre and plot choice to the Katie and I'll just make a setting and one character. Don't want to decide the whole story and take out the option. Also I don't write very often so I'm sorry if this reads like bad fanfiction. I'm better at illustrating things.

The sun had just started to break the overcast of the past two days over a small town situated near the base of a rocky range of mountains. The flatter land before the base was mostly forested with occasional lakes. There were four main roads heading in and out of the town twisting along the lakes and cutting through the mountains.

Closer to the mountains on the outer most edges of the town where the houses of the neighborhoods had no need for fences as the trees gave them ample privacy, Claire, stepped out her back door to the wooded back yard and began pushing her way through bushes and off her property boundaries into the forest. She wore tennis shoes and worn jeans and a light long sleeve shirt, clothes she didn't mind tearing on branches and rocks. She also carried with her a brown satchel containing a book, a journal, a flashlight and a small folding knife her father had given her for her birthday as a child when they went on a camping trip together in the mountains, it was the most useful gift anyone had ever given her and thus she always kept it with her.

Claire was headed for a specific destination in the woods. She had only discovered it about two weeks ago when she was helping her neighbor look for a lost cat. But it had quickly become her favorite destination. The walk there was about half an hour through close-knit trees, uneven ground and a small ravine, Claire usually got a scrape or two going there and back, maybe she'd knock her knee into a vine covered boulder. Despite the bruise she may pay, having her private space in the woods seemed worth it.

It was only when the sky was nearly empty of the clouds that she finally arrived there.

It was a clearing, something not uncommon, but to Claire this one was different. The pillar-like trees toward over the clearing in a near perfect circle, not to big nor too small as speckled light of green and yellow filtered through the tall canopy above. There were three boulders sticking out of the ground in Claire's clearing. She chose the boulder closest to the edge of the clearing, it was slightly damp from the drizzle earlier in the morning, the clouds were gone now and the boulder was drying, not completely dry, but enough that she didn't worry about getting her jeans too wet.

Today what Claire wanted the most was just some peace and quiet to herself. There was a lot of stress lately with bills and work and just being able to live life. And for one day she just didn't want to think about it, Claire didn't want to think at all. And so as she sat on her boulder in the new found sunlight she pulled from her satchel her book. Mindless reading outside was the best way to get your mind off of things weren't they?

It was only when she was lulled into a light doze from reading that she heard a violent and shuddering crack from amid the trees outside her clearing.

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