The box and the beach.

At my writers' group this week we were iven a really interesting task to complete- There was a box on the table and it contained two objects. We didn't know what was in the box and weren't allowed to open it. We could lift it, shake it and pass it round, but never open it. We were then told to decide what was inside and write a descriptive passage about our relationship to it. It was actually very hard, but here's what I came up with-

A timely timepiece, it sits in cardboard dark, slithered with halogen lamplit roomlight sneaking in and through and dissipating. It fades. The light bends; it skews in sharp and gentle spirals and razor sheer lines. It settles or slips or doesn't exist at all. For inside that box - is there an inside? Pandora is nothing without the grand unveiling, the letting loose. The box is merely box. The inside is self-contained; a wormhole, a chink in dark and space and time. A vacuum. Empty as a whaling warehouse, a Svalbard glacial chamber- watery, lightless, darkless, shimmering, fastidious deep-down cavern. A lounge; sofas packed in crushed ice. The carpet is a pool of water, the walls clad in cold cold cardboard. The box is sealed and closed and there is something solid in its Tardis belly. A grand piano. An island. Two vases; Ming but chipped and bruised. The outside is nothing; inside is deep and vast and claustrophobic and cramped and overwhelmingly tepid. Not the ice chamber. Not the family lounge. Just a box, and, inside- who knows? I say a clock.

We then all shut our eyes. The box was opened and the items passed around though we never got to see them. They were then sealed back in the box and we wrote another piece, this time knowing vaguely what they were. Here's the second one-

The seaside is sandy at this time of year. Dry sand-blasting sand. Hot, parched by a dry-wood sun. Combustible, carbon, splintering, varnished, beaming, blooming sun. Eight-pointed. A compass. A sunflower. An angular spiderous dark white orb. Summer is unforgiving. In sunbleaches lemon-juiced fair skinned Northern European I-can't-tan-I'm-ginger boys and girls. Men play French cricket and stumble lumpishly through furrows. Anonymous women flip flop flip flop down the shoreline where the water is beige, silt whipped into clouds of micro-fossils and shards of mighty headlands, buffeted and battered to become merely the family two week holiday. They are but shades of ancient seahorses, the bones of plesiosaur, mammoth and man; an earlier man. And on grey November days (always grey, always dawn) the fishermen lost at far far sea juggle onto the rocks and pestle grind to match ancestors and cousins and the deepest furthest bedrock. The sea, voluble, liquidic, seamless- it smashes the pre-fragmenting, crumbling won't-be-long-now land. The planet is hot. The water rises. Tides are higher. We cool down the planet with freeze-pops and a Calipo or two. We save it, sunny side down.

In case you're wondering, inside the box was a conch shell and a candle-holder in the shape of a sun.

Imprisoned

This is just a short piece of descriptive writing about a woman trapped in a room in a deserted old mansion on a Scottish Island. I was plotting for a while to write a Stephen King-esque horror novel, whch may eventually come into fruition, but here's the very first bit I wrote:

Behind the thick black curtains pulled tightly across the grime-smeared glass were shutters bolted from the outside. The electric light, pulsating in low surges as it always had, hummed through the empty stillness and lit only the centre of the room. The dust-spores from the divan had settled now on the threadbare and musty rugs that slid across the misfitting boards. The fire had long since died out and the ashes in the grate skipped lightly as the wind whistled across the chimney some three floors above. A grandfather clock was silent against the wall, its face frozen with rust. The wallpaper warped with damp.

Esther’s eye was pressed to the keyhole. The door, carved from solid oak and made to withstand attempts to force its lock, had served its purpose and stood firm against her vain attempts to free herself. And beyond the door, far into the depths of the shadowy corridors, Esther saw nothing but stagnant shapes and solid furniture. She felt no air seep through the keyhole; it was outside as it was in here, cold, damp and still.

Her throat was hoarse from shouting, but she had been answered only by the same deathly hush as had blanketed the house since the door had closed several hours before. There had been no footsteps, no doors closing. The house had groaned in the Atlantic winds and shuddered as the walls were sandblasted from the beach, but there was no flesh and blood in the house beside her.

The light persistently flickered as the hours rolled by, and the roar of the sea swelled and pitched until, as the sun rose, the wind moved on, and the sea, pacified and content, slid into a placid sleep. And the light in the corridor revealed nothing more than textures and colours of the unmoving and sagging objects that delved through the carpets and fused with the floor. And Esther, her face clammy against the wrought iron lock, had slept only a few moments as she battled to watch and wait for the feet she knew would come. She knew she wasn’t alone.

A velvet chord hung from the ceiling near the fireplace and once again, as she had countless times that night, she fought with the rope, pulling heavily as the distant bell clattered in the pantry below. But there was no response. Through the hallways and drawing rooms, bedrooms and stairwells, the bell echoed, to be greeted only by a fetid hush.

She sank onto the carpet, her waterproofs clinging to her limbs and her hair matted with sweat and blood. And she lay back, her vertebrae sinking one by one onto the mildewed floor. Her lungs caught the close air around the legs of the furniture, and she finally let out the howl that had been building since she left the boat. And only now did she understand.