Impressions, sensations.

[DoS Archive]

From: kaenetheblack@aol.com (Kaene the Black)
Date: 19 May 2002 03:40:47 EDT

A bead of sweat lurched from a pore.

It ran down his cheek.

It fell, shattered against the cobblestone road.


~


The wooden door jarred on its hinges as it recoiled from the blow. A dark figure sprinted through the threshold and onto the empty alley street, pausing in agitated confusion before resolving to head Westward. It wasn't so much that he was going somewhere; no. It was more that he was escaping something. But why?

A bored housewife caught a brief glimpse of a shiny object swaddled in rags as the dark figure ran past her window.

A posse of alleycats scattered as the figure crashed their midnight rendezvous, blithely unaware of the magnitude of the situation. They closed together again like an old wound even before the figure's footsteps had faded into the darkness.

The thief's ash-grey hood pocketed a gust of wind and retracted.

The figure ran past an old man reposing against the side of a corrugated metal shanty.

A rat. Olaf thought of a rat. The sharp nose; the twitchy lips; the mean, beady eyes. Definitely looks like a rat, thought Olaf, his toothless mouth suckling on a fresh milkweed stem.

The figure slid on the wet stones as he took a corner too hard. Unusually clumsy. "Damnit!" He cursed. "Mother ____!" The stones had decided to keep, rather rudely, a few layers of skin from his elbow. The wound was fresh and pink beneath the tunic and wept a clear, oily fluid that would eventually scab. He patted down the bundle to check for damage. None--that is to say, of course, none he could detect. He exhaled.

The sensation of pain suddenly appeared in his back. Rather, he recognized the sensation. That he brought the sensation into his concious thought had given it substance. How long had it been there?

...

He suddenly winced. It was a sharp, deep pain. And it spread, rooting itself through his veins like some malevolent tree. His jaw slackened; a heaviness tugged at his eyelids. He wrestled to keep them open as he twisted and lurched, his hands frantically groping for the source of that pain.

A shaft?

An arrow?

Better to not remove it, he advised himself dully, fighting the invisible blanket that smothered reason. [his vision detects someting--a collection of vague impressions that he can't arrange into any semblance of association--charcoal grey skin, razor eyes, roman nose, matted silver hair]COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"> Better to just lie down.. and sleep.. [the ground rises to greet his face--the quintissential greyness of the stones--blinding whiteness of indeterminate length that dissolves to
reveal... a pair of boots]

It was hard to tell in the dark autumn night which had dropped first, the man or the object he guarded. But both shattered against the ground; both became fragments of their former selves, beyond repair.

[darkness]