Context-free sampling at its best, folks. For some reason, I felt that I should throw this on up here. It's a fragment from something that I've been working on for quite a while now, yet seem to actually work on quite rarely—something that I seek to rectify.
Like the last post: New, first draft, unprompted, unedited, unseen before by human eyes that aren't my own. Also, brief. Unlike the last post: Part of an overarching narrative, based on an existing idea, third person, past tense.
He could remember every detail of the room, but what most struck him was the scent. Not the dark, greasy smears that adorned the walls and ceiling in every sort of splatter, nor the forms crumpled and splayed about on the floor like broken dolls, but that one sensation as he first passed the threshold into that small house would not leave him.
Aseptic, yet not alcoholic in nature. Soft, somewhat sweet and somewhat bitter, tinged with dried fungus and rusted iron. Blood, stone, lichen, fallow earth, death without rot, like a frozen body grown warm and moving without breath or beating heart. No spoiled smell of decay or ripened wounds. A lifeless, hollow scent.
It filled the house. It coiled in the room, in the walls, in the furniture, in the bodies like twisted puppets on the floor.
After standing for a while in the second doorway, he had attempted not to faint. He failed.
All feedback is appreciated. Thank you and have a pleasant whatever.
P.S. If you're wondering why "novel" is in quotes in the title, my best answer is this: I'm not sure whether this will be a novel or something different from that. Only time will tell. In the meantime, it's prose, it's a narrative, it's long; ergo, it's a novel, and that's that.
Friday, October 12, 2012
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