Kyra pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders as if the gesture would keep her teeth from chattering. Her face, like Von’s and Em’s was pale, drawn, grim. Together they had agreed. To have the power to make one transmission, one hundred and twenty seconds, it would cost them twenty degrees of heat over the next six days, at which time all power would be exhausted and heat and cold would no longer matter. So, they sat huddled in the numbing cold and looked blankly at the transmission screen as sailors stranded on the open ocean look at their last flare.
The switch stood, firehouse red, stark in the haunting blueness of breath frozen in mock witness to hope tumbling in a freefall of inevitability. Kyra’s trembling hand reached halfway, and then, as if the invisible hand of fate itself held court, she stopped. Looking with listless eyes, incapable of conveying the gravity of failure, Von, and then Em, nodded their heads. Her gloved hand continued its journey. Contact. 120, 119, 118, yet words were stuck and panic knocked on walls thin with fatigue and hunger.
“John, this is Kyra. Do you read?”
Categories: Story, Kyra, Von, Emy
12 comments:
Smoothe and perfect.
Ya know, after seeing these couple of fractals, if you ever decide to get a sideline, you could be a jewellery designer!
:)
Ooh, these last few chapters are sooo exciting. I just see it playing out. Great stuff here!
...and the fractals, perfect.
Thanks Sweetest. :-)
Saffy, you do flatter me and I love you for it. :-)
Deb, I could so see the last two chapters being acted out on the big screen. The images of these scenes is just so clear in my mind. And guess what? It gets better. :-D
short and sweet~
"Deb, I could so see the last two chapters being acted out on the big screen"..
..Make a movie out of it..~!
:)
Must just say, one of the reasons, why I'm personally happy that you publish images at Trebuchet is that very much more often than not, I forget to comment on the images that accompany the chapters. However, this does not mean that they are dwarfed in any great way by the writing, or rather that they somehow are forgotten within the whole (post). Evidence for this would be the few, like when you posted below, times that I have read a chapter without an image to accompany it and it just isn't the same. The image lends not only atmosphere but meaning and demands interpretation within the scope of the words, visually too it completes, expands, and so, although I am remiss so often in commenting upon them, they are always a great part of the general impressions of the post.
This one is a perfect example of that, where the red ties back to not only the switch but the flares too, and it adds to that contrast between the tense and very serious situation at hand as described by you with words such as pale, grim, bland, blue.
As I have repeated many a time, you have this wonderful ability to cut straight to the chase. Short as this chapter is, you still managed more than aptly to express (at a guess) everything you wanted to, certainly the gravity of their situation is apparent as is the same behind this decision that they have taken together where they have weighed up their miniscule chances of being rescued against the clock ticking even faster and their plummeting towards an even bleaker, harder existance - in the mean time or until the end, they know not.
What you do with this chapter is open up a whole process of thought that cannot reach conclusion other than in the imagination, and even then, imagination could never stretch far enough. How do we know anything until we have lived it, but that said, we really have no say when prompted as we are here to try and conceive what that must be like. One can travel a little ways only.
With no control over their situation - their lives - and nothing that can be done to restore control all they can do is hope for luck, a miracule, that somehow, someway someone will come to their rescue. Each thought connected with where they find themselves at seems so huge to me, unimaginable. Of course, some might say we never control anything, but this, this floating, this knowing the elements so to speak are against them, that they will run out of basic essentials needed to survive and soon, like heat, food, but most importantly air, what must that prospect do to a person - how long would the individual be able to maintain hope. To the end, or would those last hours and days be spent without that very last saving grace in this most dire predicament.
One thing I am glad of is that neither are alone facing this, that would be too much to bear.
Another thing is the decision that they make to send this transmission and the gamble of it so to speak and from that where exactly the point is, in any such great gamble, when the risks are just to great, or the potential price too high. Here three agree, three already cold and struggling and one has to imagine that just as a person freezing to death would want to lay down and sleep, so too the three of them would feel the need to preserve whatever heat they could, and likewise general fear could have made them head in the other direction, even towards hopelessness, or rather pointlessness. Had more to say, something quite different, will come back, if I remember. (Love my days off!)
The third thing that hit me full-force was the great hope that they would have been consumed with making that transmission, the reaching out towards (the) living, towards someone who could hear them, know where they are at, what is happening to them and offer some, even if it were false (makes me think of Cait and the assurances she received that John was safe and sound although she had not heard from him), hope that all will be well. Hope, once again. What I see here is that so long as there is hope, there is ability to cope and to battle through. Ending on that question mark is once again being treated to one of your famed cliffhangars, the question of will they be heard, will there be communication, will that hope be offered and since it isn't revealed and we are left waiting at that question mark, it leaves the field wide open anew for thoughts that are hard, unpleasant and specifically impossible as the thought occurs, what would it do to their morale if they aren't heard, if they hear nothing.
So short, and so weighty. Different, similar, short, long, a moment in time, or days within the same chapter, a conversation, a battle, soft, harsh, seemingly unimportant (an opening) or full of action, each chapter proves anew and builds upon what went before why I love this story so. In short, and though you may smile at the gush it is completely deserved and much more, there is a continual thread of brilliance that runs through these chapters, and each one is the story, whatever form it takes.
And that makes me sit back and think 'wow'.
Oh Meg, I do love the compliment and the urging. My challenge with this "blog story" is that although individual chapters could easily be a scene in a movie, the "story" as a whole does not conform to a beginning, a middle and an end as much as an ongoing series of adventures. I still scratch my head over how I would translate what I've written to a book or even a movie, although in pieces it is clear as day. Thanks again for reading and leaving me such a nice thought to wake up to. :-)
awww..:)
hehe. true true.
this is best left as words on a page.
have a nice week~ :)
had a bumpy day today. wasn't that bad, though.
i have many questions, but i will never question, and thus i get no answers. so the mini-frustration flows like a neverending river.
gah. the future seems so bleak. ah well. just pray for a good ending..
:)
such was my day. yours? :)
Meg hope after the rain there is a beautiful rainbow in your life. I'll be thinking of you and wishing and sending positive karma your way. :-)
I'm in Louisiana this week. My mother had open heart surgery yesterday. The good news is two-fold. First, that they were able to catch the blockage before she had a fatal heart attack; second, the operation, so far, seems to have been a great success. Yesterday, mom didn't look too good in ICU; this morning, however, she looked much, much better. Heading back to the hospital in just a bit. Thanks for asking.
Take care my friend and look for those rainbows. :-)
Ohhh... John better have given Rog the ship! I have come to enjoy these short chapters; full of descriptors for visualization, get me wrapped up then, bam, you end it when my emotions are high.
Thank you Karen. Always so nice to have you stopping by. :-)
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