My husband and I set up a story challenge (he wants to start writing again).
The challenge is one written page, short story. He had to give me two words and I had to give him two. You must write a one page story using the two words in some way, be it meaning of the word, expression of the emotion of the word or just the word itself.
My words were Myriad and Anathema. Here is my story.
Story Challenge. One Page. Title is “Red Blue”.
He could have stood quietly allowing the waves of indifference to pass over him. Yet he held her, still breathing, taking life into her lungs. The blood had sprayed like twinkling stars upon his arm, a universe of blood, all moments, all pumped from the source that would never know its maker.
Tight wired hair complicated all movements, why had she not cut the damn mane? Small red tokens adorned the nest of sand washed hair. This was the movement, the moment.
He twisted his arm, she was losing breath. He could hold her tighter but she would not feel it.
He had been held by her, so many nights, awakened by a flash of this wired sand hair and her breathless movements. All that would pass now, all that would be was the end of these movements.
She held fast and then, with a silent touch, reached with her eyes to him. All forgiveness pleaded, all mistakes begging for understanding. He held the knife. His hand was shaking; he should not have pulled it out. He had seen the movies. The knife may have held the blood in, may have held it in the body, like stars before the black hole.
She stopped. He could feel her leave as though the knife had left him. She was gone.
Red became blue and blue became red. Loud were the sounds that crashed like so many drums, like the war his grandfather had told him about, the old stories. It was calm now, she was gone. He lay her head down on the cold driveway were once all tires had past, all of the comings and goings of this God forsaken family. It was over for her but not for him. Not for the other.
The man lay in the grass like bag of trash forgotten, left behind by the garbage truck. The breath he pushed was soft and tired and smelled of gasoline. The drops of blood-let stars covered his shrunken, drunken chest. He still breathed, unknowing of what he had done.
Blue became red and red became blue as the drums grew louder. He walked up to the trash. Something was crashing and screaming, something was close and he could make out words. He wanted to talk to the lights and the words but the trash was there. He had to remove this trash from the lawn.
He stumbled upon empty batteries of courage, anger and fear. He tripped upon bottles of hope and desolation. He fell into a pool of sick and rested beside the trash. He could do this thing, he could. He held the knife as surely as he had been taught with his own eyes. He needed no batteries. He had wires, wires of tangled hair. He had her, her thoughts, her pain, her passion, her breast, her devotion, her tolerance, her forgiveness and now her death.
He looked the trash in its eyes; black and small. So many bits of loathing that rested in ambivalence. He could hear the red, see the blue. Too many sounds around him, asking him, pleading with him. The knife found its home, covered in the bloody stars that were his mother’s universe. The knife found its home pushed into the beat of his father’s heart. A shot fired. Another drum.
He lie there, quiet now. They were both gone. He would be gone soon. His father had taken his mother, he had taken his father and now, he had taken himself.