Writing Prompt: Write a story (at least 900 words) about a $5 bill that is handed off between at least three people. Focus on character development and scene.

Naphtali Archeron’s apartment could at best be described as spartan. It was spacious, taking up the entire third floor of a three-story building close to the edge of West Nazca and Center City. She had occupied the place for the better part of a half-decade since her return from Zarephath, but in all that time had added little to the wood floor and faded white plaster walls of the apartment’s natural state.

Presently, Naphtali sat in her kitchen at the end of a small, rectangular table, Wyatt Learyn seated opposite her. Naphtali leaned into a plain wooden chair, her right arm resting across the top of the chair and her legs crossed, the chair chipped and scraped, worn from time. Like most of her few possessions, she had salvaged it from wherever it had been discarded in the city, valuing function over form. Naphtali was at the head of the table, the end closest to the door. Unlike Naphtali, Wyatt sat hunched over, his hair—recently cropped short on the sides but left long on the top like a horse’s mane—spilled forward, obscuring his face while he furiously attacked his sketchbook with his pencil. Every now and then he’d look up and steal a glance at Naphtali, then return to drawing. The rhythmic scratching of his pencil was the only sound in the otherwise silent apartment.

As he sketched away quietly, stopping occasionally to push up his cobbled together eyeglasses every time they slid down his nose, it occurred to Wyatt that, in a way, the emptiness of her apartment was reminiscent of Naphtali herself, who had become rather reticent after the end of their tour at the warfront. At first, he attributed her sparsely decorated apartment as a byproduct of her upbringing, one of constant travel and relocation that forced her to never accumulate many material possessions since her family was always on the move. But since returning to Nazca, Naphtali had remained withdrawn, and Wyatt now saw in her apartment a reflection of that. A general detachment forged in the fires of Zarephath.

Besides the table and three chairs, the kitchen was little more than a hallway, with slender windows to Wyatt’s right and chestnut cabinets to his left. A hazy gray light poured in from the windows, dark skies announcing a coming storm. He could smell its imminent arrival, the air pushed down by the buildup of rain, filling the city with that distinct pre-rain scent. That scent mingled with the smoky residue of Naphtali’s last and cumulative smokes, giving her apartment its own unique odor. Behind Wyatt was a pantry cut into the far back wall, mostly devoid of food. Instead, it housed an assortment of liquors—whiskey, Black Blood Whiskey primarily, along with a few bottles of rum and tonic water. Naphtali currently cradled a half-empty tumbler of Black Blood in her left hand.

Time inched forward, kept only by the scratchy progress of whatever Wyatt scrawled in his sketchbook. The next hour seemed to squeeze into long minutes and even longer seconds before there finally came a knock on the door. Naphtali raised the tumbler to her lips, threw her head back, and poured the remainder of its contents straight down her throat, the searing sensation that followed causing her to lick her gums. The warmth that flowed back up was an old, welcome friend. Satisfied, she stood up slowly, smoothed out her long duster, pushed back her bushy tangle of curly black hair, then made her way to the door and opened it wide. Continue Reading…

Writing Prompt: This was a self-imposed writing prompt. Something about this particular edition’s cover of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse compelled me to write a story based off the cover image. I also decided to set it in the same world as the larger story project I’m currently working on. My (self-)instructions: Write a story about this picture (below). Who are the people at the beach? What are they doing? What is the structure in the background? Tell it in under 1000 words.

“What do you think it is?” Raine asked his father, looking up at the older man.

It was a hot day. A bright day. The Sun’s rays fell mercilessly on the beach, baking the sand and turning the normally relaxing, muted blue water of the bay into a sparkling mass that rose and fell like the deep breaths of some massive creature, waves tumbling slowly towards the shoreline as it exhaled deeply. The steady sound of waves coming and going echoed this sense of the bay/creature’s deep, rhythmic breathing.

It was at the intersection where the waves met the sand that Raine and his father, Asher, stood. Where the water rushed forward and slipped between the toes of their bare feet, then receded as if feeling their presence frightened it—only to return again and again in the ceaseless curiosity of a dumb animal. The two stood a few feet apart, Raine and his knotted mop of dirty blonde hair to his father’s left. Further to their left, two men struggled to get a canoe in the water while a third waded in the bay a few feet out, waiting to hold the boat steady once it was afloat. Behind the father and son, two boys roughly Raine’s age chased each other across the beach, kicking up sand behind them. Farther back still, where the beach began to fade and rise gently into grassy hillside, three older townsfolk sat on the hill’s slope, hiding from the heat and Sun, one under a parasol, the other two soaking in a periodic breeze that carried with it the heavy salty scent intermingled with seaweed so distinctive to beaches. By the look of their dapper attire, they must have been fresh out of church, which was only a short walking distance away.

Raine mostly stared at his feet, wriggling his toes in the wet sand, watching the stuck together clumps of sand grains squeeze out between his toes, then wash away when the next wave rushed over his feet. Occasionally, he looked up and stared at the dark round monolith lunging towards the heavens from the tip of a thin strip of land farther out in the bay. From where he stood, the tower was tiny. He closed his right eye as if holding a wink and raised his thumb in front of his left eye, blocking the tower out of existence. This made him smirk. But Raine was old enough to understand perspective, and knew that if he and his father were on the island, not the beach, the ancient tower would loom over them ominously.

After a while, Raine looked up at his father. The older man was looking towards the tower with a hard gaze, hands in his short pants’ pockets. Asher’s dirty blonde hair, the same shade as his son’s, was cut closer to his skull, and did not flutter in the wind like Raine’s whenever a breeze passed by. The silence crept between them at a slow pace, and just as impatience was about to get the better of Raine and cause him to repeat his question, his father spoke.

“Honestly? I don’t know. The Ancients, wherever they went, left behind an awful lot of their belongings. As if they packed up in a hurry. Though, I guess it’d be kind of hard to take something as big as that,” he motioned towards the tower with his chin. “But. We’ve found some pretty amazing things of theirs, so who knows.”

“Yes but what do you think it is?” Raine asked, a slight whine of insistence laced in his tone.

Asher smiled. He looked down at his son, who fell just of short Asher’s chest, and ruffled the boy’s tangle of hair. This caused Raine to squirm away in embarrassment while failing to suppress a grin he couldn’t help. It made Asher realize just how old Raine was getting. Time. In Asher’s experience, you could fix almost anything in this world, make right by just about any mistake if you try hard enough, but there were two things you couldn’t get back: time and life. Asher shuddered, trying to shake the grim thoughts from his mind, and focused instead on towering black obelisk turned gray by the haze of heat and distance.

“I’m no Restorian, Raine. If you want a good answer, you should go ask old man Khris back in town. He’s the resident expert on the Ancients and magitech and all their machines.” Asher looked down at his son and saw the boy about to protest, but quickly continued. “But, if I had to guess, I’d say it was a marker of some sort. Like. A lighthouse. You know how they say the Ancients used to have boats that sailed not only the skies, but also the heavens? Well, maybe that’s what this thing is. The Ancients’ version of a lighthouse, like the ones with lights we use.”

“What about that big dish on top?”

Asher chuckled. It was like the why? phase all over again, and just like then, Asher had none of the answers. He considered himself a simple man. He just laid down track for the trains, or worked with the Restorians when they discovered any pre-existing tracks that once belonged to the Ancients, and tried to do as best by his wife and son as he could. They were, after all, his world.

“I dunno. Maybe some of the Ancients were huge. I mean like, giants, and they ate their breakfast out of those things. They were their bowls.”

“Daaaaaad!”

Asher laughed. “C’mon, let’s get back home to your mother. You know how she hates to be without us for too long. When you get home you can go pester Professor Khris and see if he can’t give you a better answer than my silly ones.”

Raine took his father’s hand and the two started across the beach back towards town. Both wore smiles the whole way.

~Dedicated to my father, William J. Holzworth, for Father’s Day–6.19.11