Deleted Parts and Random Ideas

Random Idea

I think this used to be related to a plot somehow, but I've forgotten what exactly. It's very short, shouldn't take more than a few minutes of your time.

-Enjoy! Julia

The ditch out back was narrow, like a river valley deep in the Rocky Mountains. When you lay at the bottom and looked up, the sky was just a slit of blue, the dirt walls making it feel like you were lying in a tomb.

Sometimes I pretended that it was a tomb. That a mighty warrior had been buried here back before Columbus discovered America. I would pretend that the warrior had been in a restless slumber, and had finally risen from the dead. Of course he scared the previous owners of Whispering Well when he broke free of his burial mound, the dirt busting up over his head in a wave of black ash like a volcano erupting.

That's why the house was deserted for two years, maybe. It probably isn't the real reason, I guess. The house was breaking anyway. Who would've wanted to live here?

But my mind never chose the logical reason. Not after everything I'd been through before I came to Whispering Well. I used to live where nothing made sense, and so now nothing will ever make sense.

When I wasn't pretending the ditch was a tomb, though, I would just sit there, lost in a book. I read Ivanhoe in there last summer, and the ditch became my camp as I waged a siege on Whispering Well.

Sometimes I would dream of being buried in this ditch when I died. They wouldn't even need to dig a hole for my coffin, just hurl me here and shower me with a cascade of soil.

I never wanted to lose my right to sit in that ditch, so I didn't tell them it reminded me of death. Nobody ever knew what exactly that ditch meant to me. I'll probably never be buried there, but they said never to give up hope, so I'm still hoping, even now.