Wednesday's Words on a Friday

On Wednesdays, Elephant’s Child has been putting up a selection of six (or twelve) words which is called “Words for Wednesday”.

She had taken over this meme from Delores, who is gradually retiring from the blogging world.

This month the meme continues here, at Drifting Through Life

Essentially the aim is to encourage us to write.  

Each week we are given a choice of prompts: which can be words, phrases, music or an image.   What we do with those prompts is up to us:  a short story, prose, a song, a poem, or treating them with ignore...

Some of us put our creation in comments on the post, and others post on their own blog.  I would really like it if as many people as possible joined into this fun meme.   

If you are posting on your own blog - let me know so that I, and other participants, can come along and applaud.

 

I’m hopeless at poetry so I always do a story.

It’s a fun challenge…why not join in?

This week's words are:

1. battered             and/or:          1. thesis

2. assessing                                2. believed

3. widened                                   3. really

4. credit                                       4. finger

5. collection                                5. game

6. clarity                                      6. flash

Here is my story:

World Power (continued: part one was here last Friday)

After each outing, upon returning to our rooms, I inspected mine carefully, seeing nothing different, but sensing it wasn’t the same as when I’d left it. 

Every room in every building was exactly the same; a bed, hooks holding two spare sets of clothes, a table and chair by the window. Under the window was the food chute, a small spring-loaded door which opened twice a day to dispense a tiny container with two calorie pills each evening and the pills plus a tear-open protein pouch each morning. 

On the wall opposite the bed was a small tiled cubicle in the corner with a shower head, toilet and washbasin, to the right of that a large viewing screen which showed the daily movie choices at precisely 8pm. Two choices would appear on the finger-touch screen, we could select either by tapping the screen or ignore it altogether. When movie time was over, our lights would flash twice, indicating thirty minutes before all lights were turned off for the night. 

Today, when I returned to my room, I didn’t inspect each element immediately, choosing instead to let the scene ‘sink in’. It came to me in an unaccustomed moment of clarity. 

The clothes! 

I saw in my mind’s eye, the burly man brushing his hand down his clothes as he glanced my way. Now I saw two sets of clothes hanging on the wall to the right of the bed. Each morning we showered and the clothes we’d been wearing were dropped into a hamper for collection and we put on a fresh suit, then left the room. 

My eyes widened with the realisation I had been right to believe someone entered our rooms while they were empty. This was proof, to me at least, that we weren’t the only people living in this complex. There really were others somewhere out there. I gave the burly man a mental credit for pointing this out to me. 

At the next outing, I walked a little closer to the burly man and instead of the quick glance, he gave me a slightly longer, more assessing, look. I took this to mean “had I understood?” and gave the slightest of all possible nods. A tiny mouth twitch as he turned away to continue his walk indicated a pleased smile. We had successfully communicated.

He walked across the grass, away from me and I noticed that he wore a battered old hat as well as carrying a stick. No one else had these things. I concluded he must be the oldest of all the men; perhaps age brought certain privileges. 

I turned away and watched as some of the younger men made a game of their walk, each one stepping in exactly the same spot as the one before him as they walked single file around the single tree in the center of the yard.