the lake
and now for something completely different that a couple of people have requested. okay, not so much requested, but i was called out by a friend a while back and other people have asked why i haven’t posted things i wrote it that creative writing class like he has done.
so, here you go. this is something i confess i am moderately proud of (which is pretty much the highest compliment i’ll give myself, in public anyway). i have not re-edited it since our class discussions, so it’s still sort of raw and comma-filled. like me ;)
our assignment was fairly simple: write a description of a lake from the perspective of a young man who (spoiler) without mentioning (the spoiler). feel free to compare my story to his. as you can see, while i thought the challenge was to “taint” a standard description with the spoiler (and not necessarily have the reader deduce said spoiler while reading), jim took a very different approach. if anything, it’s an interesting contrast of how two people with very different styles approach the same request. if you can’t determine the spoiler from my writing, then his should do the trick.
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so, without further ado: Something Creative I Made
It was different than he’d expected. He supposed it was because he was older and it was the wrong season, but the lake cabin where he’d spent so many summers when he was young was not what he remembered. Inside the cabin had been dusty, with that odd odor that comes when all the mold and mildew has died away. He sought solace outside and hoped that the setting sun would trigger something familiar, something comforting.
The porch door slammed shut behind him and the sound, so much like a gunshot, startled him. As a few far-off birds protested the intrusion, he pulled his coat tighter and hurried down the steps towards the dock. The wooden railroad ties that his father and grandfather had repaired countless times hadn’t been touched in over a decade. He was forced to slow his progress to prevent himself from slipping on the damp, rotting wood.
Trees, with piles of leaves at their feet, littered his descent. As a boy, he’d climbed almost all of them with his cousins, but now even the lowest limbs were out of his reach. He looked up, and the stark contrast of the empty limbs against the grey sky made him claustrophobic. With another icy chill down his back, he shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.
He’d planned on walking out to the edge of the dock to watch the sunset, but as he cleared the trees, he could see that would not be the case. Water and time had done to the dock what they had done to everything else. Although the main dock was still anchored to the lake by the steel pipes he’d helped his father plant, the smaller sections leading to it were impassable. Uneven and half-submerged, they promised nothing but the opportunity for a dip in the bitterly cold water.
“I never should have come here,” he told the sun.
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