I have made my goal for sponsorship, so I am writing the fabulous story that I will be sending out to all of my donors when the writeathon is over! You can still get in on that action by sponsoring me now–there’s still time!
Work: I Look At My Lover and Only See Bones
Wordcount: 2517 words
Accomplished: Lady drama in a culture based on ancient Greece!
Excerpt:
Kaleeh slumps and bumps along the road, between sere thornbushes and past shrines. Road winds between hills, landscape mounded as a young girl’s dugs, rolling down to the sea as wet as something else belonging to young girls. She sees a crow in the distance, but it doesn’t approach. Cicadas sing.
Noon rest is under the scant shade of an olive tree. A locust alights next to Kaleeh, and she darts her hand out and catches it without thought. In her mouth, it’s crunchy and bitter, but good. She sucks the carapace dry and tosses it to the ground.
Life teaches her this: never pass up food when it happens by.
After a time, a small village hoves itself into view. Whitewashed walls are brown and grey with summer dust, complaining goats are driven by a small boy with a stick. She sits herself down by the well, in the shade of a flag-flowered vine. The foot of her walking stick smacks the ground.
A girl approaches. She’s perhaps twelve, on the trembling edge of womanhood, hair covered by a dull scarf. She brings a bowl of brined olives, a plate of bread and crumbling cheese. The cheese smells sharply of goat.
It is an offering, and Kaleeh eats of it, then drinks a cup of well water, cool and mineral in her mouth.
