Writing Prompt
Write a passage describing a building, object or landscape. Imagine that you are writing from the point of a view of a parent whose child has just died. See if you can evoke the feeling of loss and grief in the reader without mentioning either.
Henrietta turned from the driver’s seat and put one foot down on the black pavement, and then the other. She kept her eyes on her feet as she traversed the yellow striped parking lot at a speed on par with glacial movement, only looking up to avoid the too many tourists chiding their full-of-life children.
Had that been me? Upset at mere boisterous?
The troops—Henrietta a lone soldier within—funneled to and onto the trail’s dirt packed entrance. Rocks ranging in size and appearance from glossy skipping stones to dull dusty boulders jutted like leopard spots.
The single file line weaved through the forest and over a footbridge, as would be the case, she thought, when confined by metal chains and bars leading up to an amusement park ride. She actually wanted to get off the roller coaster that she was riding — not get on another.
The entrance path finally opened up into a clearing. Henrietta felt like she had broken from a swarm of bees. She gasped for a breath of mountain air; only to swallow a bug.
Of course.
Like the livestock on her otherwise empty farm in Iowa, everyone followed whomever had initially decided on the day’s direction, and started to trod clockwise around the lake. Breanna’s delicate hand would have tugged her against the grain, always forging her own path, but the thought of having to make eye contact with another soul made Henrietta fall-in with the now spaced out sunwise nature goers.
The beauty of Sprague Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park was once embedded in her psyche, but on this day, she couldn’t find it. The lake looked more like a murky marsh with unknown, but surely, lurking creatures just beneath the surface, than the mirror that had once beamed her daughter’s innocence right back at them.
Henrietta spotted a moose in the distance—far enough away to be safe from tourists turned stupid. As she, and her imaginary weighted vest, plopped down on a bench to keep tabs on the moose, a placard spoke louder to her than the hundreds of feet around her trampling the pine straw laden forest floor.
Terrence Whitley got to live a long life. And left his children behind. Lucky bast…
Henrietta caught herself. And then chastised herself for the surfaced anger. Apparently the mental work, in which she’d been meaning to thank her expensive therapist for, was for naught.
A second gaze through the towering trees to locate the moose again unearthed a calf. Her instant tears were fluid in counterbalance to the otherwise static lake. And the falling pine straw became a funnel cloud with she as the tornado’s eye.
If I sit here long enough, will it drown out my sorrows? And if not that—me?
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