Their Days Are Numbered is a new year-long project authored by the collective Entropy community. It is a collaborative online novel written by the Entropy community on a weekly basis. A different author will write the next “chapter” each week, to be posted every Tuesday, following the previous post from the previous week, and following a very limited set of guidelines (that each author has one week to write the next piece after the previous week’s installment goes up, that installments should range between 150-1500 words, and that pieces should somehow incorporate a real-life occurrence, current event, news item, or other happening from that week).
Follow the entire “novel” here: Their Days Are Numbered.
The third installment is presented this week by Janice Lee.
III.
In another valley, another alley behind audible morning trees, on this morning met with unmeasurable wings, the drowning, the vertigo that sometimes accompanies the simple act of waking up, she is seized with a sudden fear of resurrection. When the birds first seemed to flock to the cemeteries in great upheavals, her uneasiness was only followed by expectancy by wonder by pain by waiting. The rubbing of two faces like the universe of acorns or flames or flowers, she could remember the feeling of his stubble on her cheek when he kissed her deeply. What she remembered, too, was his intentional inclination to put himself into violent situations, as he couldn’t hesitate long enough to think about how it might affect her, too, yet eventually his luck ran out and her insanity was replaced with a different kind of tired continent to sever.
Even then, it felt like she was inhabiting a tiny universe that had birthed itself over the charred remains of a world.
Of course, that world had started burning before any flames had been visible to anyone.
Mornings are for blue, she thought. Mornings are for running from and towards the blue, everything above the horizon measured in gradations of blue.
Faces in waiting, rubbing against each other, against trees.
In the middle of the afternoon, later, there would be two horses who wouldn’t know to halt before the morning trees.
The trees were audible, but only to some.
On the reduced pages, paragraph after paragraph, she wrote the words she wanted to remember.
The words that were left out were always and very quickly forgotten.
