This is a rough sketch of a short story that I'm working on. This is the whole story but I may go back and add some more details. We'll see... It's somewhat abstract and I leave most of it up to the reader to decide what has happened. I wrote whatever the first thing that popped into my head was and it happened to be a water droplet. The idea was to begin with something and end up with something else :) Yes the grammer and sentence structure is bad... It's kind of like an ink blot story. It ended up having to do with guilt and repentance I think. Sometimes guilt starts as a small, maybe annoying, seed and it takes a while for the reality of our actions to come into full view. Anyways...
the Shorline...
She let the water droplets roll off of her fingertips and fall for what seemed like an eternity to the linoleum floor. The resounding plop of each drop seemed horribly exaggerated, like an off kilter heartbeat. The water had long since cooled, the steam, crept away to some forgotten place... like a dream. Creeping up from the depths of her mind came a blip of static and then another, this one being slightly louder than the first, though it still barely registered. The static blip sound and the slow-motion water plop sound orchestrated themselves into a sort of beautiful, lopsided symphony of purpose and unity... as if it was playing just for her. In that moment, for just a fraction of a second, it seemed as though she could see everything. It seemed as though the entire universe had been opened wide and she was allowed to catch a glimpse of what was real. In that fraction of a second, understanding came and as that fraction of a second passed, understanding was taken away, leaving not a trace to be found. The static blipping had become louder and it was starting to sound more like a voice.
A voice...
A word...
"Shea..."
A name...?
"Shea..."
Her name...?
She wasn't sure if that was her name.
"Shea...", it came again.
The water stopped dripping off her hand. One drop hung, suspended in mid-air several inches from the mildewed bathroom floor. The sound of the previous drop seemed to be stuck and it rang out, reverberating off of the walls until it sharpened into a wicked crescendo. It made her think of a tightly wound strand of white hot razor wire. As the sound whipped violently back and forth she heard the shattering of glass and even though she couldn't move her head to see, knew it was the bathroom mirror. The drop that was so beautifully held still suddenly plummeted faster than her eyes could follow and the impact of that tiny drop was profound. The cheap, moldy linoleum blistered and peeled back in slow motion. Rotten plywood was torn asunder at wicked angles to form a gaping maw that easily swallowed the meager light from the bathroom. Time once again seemed to stop. Her eyes, transfixed by the hideous vulgarity that was now beckoning her, could see nothing else. The previous symphony of random wonder had promised understanding and knowledge. That promise was now replaced by a different kind of promise. A promise of suffering. Of violence. Somewhere in the back of her mind she noticed that the razor wire sound had softened into rhythmic thumping once again, sounding more like a heartbeat.
Her eyes were dry and they burned but she could not close them. It seemed like an eternity, then suddenly, all of the sound in the room went completely silent. As if it too had been sucked into the gaping void.
"Shea!"
The name shrieked out of the void, long and terrible. Louder and louder it came until it felt like the sound was prying open her skull. She felt blood running down her forehead. She could see nothing but a blinding white light and at last she felt her mind collapse, unable to withstand the pain any longer...
