Monday, April 18, 2011

Excerpt

The last time I posted an excerpt, it was of a paragraph I cut, as it was a little too over the top.

This one I'm keeping.

When he got the call in the middle of the night he packed the barely-awake kids into the back seat and drove to his mother’s home, expecting to be greeted by ambulances and the flashing lights of fire trucks, but of course they had all left by the time he had completed the three hour drive. Pools of fog lay in the pre-dawn fields and shallow valleys between his house and hers; months later now and he still thinks of grief in this way, laying low to the ground, indistinct, inert. He remembers how during the drive he wanted to gently pull the car to the side of the road so as not to wake the kids, get out and lie down in it, cool grass against his back, damp air against the skin of his face. How he wanted to be blanketed by fog, asleep in its arms, the rest of the world disappeared into the wide hazy distance forever.

3 comments:

Eric said...

Oh, man. Very good.

Anonymous said...

I'm thinking you might have wanted to go with, "When he got the call in the CENTER of the night..." Little more poetic and mysterious. Just a thought.

Kidding. Good stuff, Jeff.

Clowncar said...

Thanks E. I haven't been writing much. And it's only four sentences. But they are four sentences I'm happy with, and that's not always easy.

Anon, I've decided, after consulting my thesaurus, to replace "middle of the night" with "the hellish, gaping maw of blackness just after the void of midnight." Might add some more adjectives later. They're like sprinkles on ice cream. No such thing as too many!