Sleeping

Matthew propped himself up on one elbow, making sure to move quietly so as not to wake his wife. She had fallen asleep some twenty minutes earlier, but Matthew had not been so lucky. However, when she was sleeping and he was not, there were some things that he could enjoy that he could not when she was awake.

He closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the soft, relaxed sounds of her breathing. She was an active person, and so spent much of her time breathing rough and hard from all the energy that she put out. Not that he didn't enjoy that, and especially at some times more than others, but there was just something nice about the slow and steady breaths of her sleeping. She was more relaxed then she ever was when she was awake, and that relaxed him as well.

He opened his eyes so that he could look over her, and watch the way her chest gently raised and lowered with each breath. When she slept, she had a softness too her that was not present at other times. She was strong minded and strong willed, and everything about her showed it, from the way she carried herself to the way she spoke. There was something about that that attracted him. But in her sleep, she looked innocent and docile. Such a drastic change from who she was in her waking hours, and it put a smile on his face.

He gently laid a hand on her skin and caressed it slowly. Somehow over the years, she had managed to keep her skin smooth, almost to a point where it felt like silk, and he loved it. She sighed happily in her sleep at his touch, and wiggled her way closer to him, which only made him smile even more. As he felt her skin, he slowly leaned down to kiss her forehead, which pulled forth another happy sigh and more wiggling.

He laid back down, one arm curled tightly around her waist, and buried his face in her hair. There was something entrancing about the way she smelled to him, and especially so in the case of her hair. It made him feel comforted and warm, like he was wrapped up in something that he could only accurately describe as 'home.'

A brief temptation passed through his mind to reach up and tickle the back of her neck. He knew she was highly ticklish there. It made her squeal and flail wildly and generally do everything she could to try and make him stop. He found it adorable. She did not agree. He decided against it, however, because as fun as it might be for a moment, he knew that he would quickly come to regret it. And it would probably make him take much longer to fall asleep.

Sleep was finally coming to him, though, with her smell overcoming him. He closed his eyes and felt her warmth against him. He felt the way her skin felt against his own. He felt her breathing push against him, and felt his own begin to match it.

As his vision faded and the world went with it, all that was on his mind was her.

Martial arts

I've mentioned before that I spent a lot of time in my life learning martial arts, and while I do not actively practice it at the moment, it still enthralls me. There are a number of different martial arts that I would love to learn, especially Iaido (which I'll get to in a moment), but unfortunately these aren't things that you can just look up a youtube tutorial for and figure it out. You might be able to get some of the ideas down, but unless you have someone watching over you who knows what they're doing, you're probably going to be making some mistakes that may seem minimal, but could ruin the entire point of what you're trying to do.

A good example of that is punching. That sounds like a really straightforward, basic thing to do, but there are a lot of ways you can mess that up. The most obvious example I can give is where you put your thumb. Most people who have never thrown a punch before will instinctively wrap their fingers around their thumb, holding it on the inside of their fist. If you throw a solid punch like this, you will break your thumb. Instead, you want your thumb on the outside, resting over the middle section of your fingers.

This is a really basic thing that, if not directly pointed out to you, you can easily miss and pay the price for later. And as you get into more complex and, in my opinion, more interesting martial arts, these kinds of basic building blocks can be very easily missed without a live instructor.

That brings me to Iaido, which is one of if not the most interesting martial art that I know of. If you have ever seen an anime, a movie, or a comic with a lot of ninjas or samurais or some other kind of swordfighters, chances are you have seen that one incredibly fast swordsman. That one guy who always carries his sword around in its sheath in his hand, even as he enters combat, and strikes faster than the eye can see. Usually there's a big deal made out of him putting the sword back in its sheath, and just as he does whatever it was he was attacking just falls to pieces.

That is Iaido.

Iaido is sword fighting martial art where the idea is to strike quickly and accurately from a sheathed position, and end in a sheathed position. In the time that your sword was out, you struck at the most vulnerable area, so that by the time your sword is back in its sheath, your opponent is effectively defeated.In a branch off art called Iaijutso, that specifically means that your opponent is dead.

That is the coolest damn thing I have ever heard of.

But can you imagine how precise you have to be for that? And not only precise, but incredibly fast. Every single movement has to be dialed in, unwavering, and flawless. Your muscles have to be so attuned to the action that you could do it in your sleep. Even something so simple as how you put the sword back in its sheath. That is a vital step to the entire process, but it you get it wrong, not only is your entire attack going to be thrown off, you'll probably cut a finger or two off, if not your entire hand.

That is years and years of dedication and practice. Probably even just to the process of sheathing and unsheathing. Much less actually striking. Not only do you have to be precise as all hell, but you have to know exactly what you're aiming for. You have to know every weak point, every soft spot, and then you have to be able to see the very instant that an opportunity arises and have the reflexes to act on it before it is gone.

And that's only one of the arts that interests me.

Re: The wall

Leonidas walked among the battlements, letting his hands drift across the rough stones that made up the walls, feeling their texture and shape under his fingertips as he gazed over the edge. From his position on the inner walls, he could see the commander with his knights-to-be in shining armor, running drills in their heavy suits so as to be better accustomed to them. Though he was familiar with the sounds of their training - the shuffling of sliding steel parts, the heavy breathing, the shouted orders coming one after the other - he could not actually hear them due to the height of the wall.

Looking out past the outer walls, he could see the peasants running their daily lives of bargaining in the marketplace, and working the fields to supply the kingdom with its food. Farm animals grazed, and small caravans made their ways in and out of the more populated city around the castle, trading what could not be easily collected and maintained in the immediate area. Following the outward caravans, his eyes were drawn to the thick forests at the base of the mountain range, which encircled the kingdom to provide protection, and shone in the sunlight thanks to the snow covered peaks high in the sky.

It was a particularly clear day, with not a cloud in sight, which was what had drawn the prince out of the confining space of the inner halls, as well as what allowed him to see so far into the distance.

As his hand came to rest upon one of the lowered portions of the battlements that had been designed to allow for the guards to rain heavy bombardments on any potential invaders, Leonidas smiled to himself. He had another use for the crenellation. With a heave, he lifted himself up and over the wall, dropping down to sit with his legs dangling over the edge. Sitting atop the wall, rather than standing behind it, gave him a less cluttered view, and allowed him to feel the breeze in the air blowing past the entirety of his person.

Leonidas took a deep breath, letting the freshness of the cold air fill his lungs. Inside the castle, the air was consistently muggy and warm. He wasn't permitted outside of its walls very often, so days like this where he could sneak out to the battlements were the closest he got to being away. It gave him a sense of freedom, even if it was only a brief and half-imagined one. Though guards did patrol the area even up this high, he had done this so frequently over the years that they had given up trying to advise him against his actions. He knew that he had nothing to fear. He closed his eyes as he breathed the fresh air, and dreamed of sprouting wings, letting the wind lift him up and carry him away over the lands and seas, able to experience the world and all its wonders. The wind came up from the valley, carrying the smell of the trees from the forest mixed with the smoke coming from the bakery, a mixture itself of crackling fire and rising dough.

"Good morrow, Leonidas," came a soft voice from behind. Leonidas opened his eyes and turned back to see the source of the voice - a slender girl whom he had never seen before. "You looked like you might be needing of some company."

Leonidas took a moment to take her in before he responded. She wore a simple dress of soft green, with an azure pendant hanging from her neck, and her amber hair resting gently just below her shoulders. Her face was thin, but well composed, and her hair was draped around it in an almost picturesque way, and her matching brown eyes practically smiled up at him. "I did not feel particularly lonely," he informed her, "but if you are willing to sit as I do, you are more than welcome to join me."

The girl smiled and stepped towards the wall, much to Leonidas' surprise. He had expected her to leave immediately at such a proposition. She held a hand out to him, and he took it, helping to lift her up onto the wall so that she could take a seat beside him, her legs carefully draped over the edge beside his own. He looked at her once more, now not sure quite what to think of her. "Who are you?" he asked.

The girl looked at him and smiled gently. "Just a friend, your majesty," she responded. He looked into her eyes for a moment, pausing to read her face, then smiled. Together, they turned to look out over the countryside in solemn quietude.

Trunkaphobia

My mom and my dad had a lot of problems with one another, and for a large portion of my childhood this was the key proponent of my life. Today, I remember arguments they had better than even they do. Petty arguments and disagreements that hardly even make sense to me, like why he would kiss her, or whether or not I should go to summer camps. Those like the latter especially confused me even at the time, because I simply didn't understand why that argument was happening, and I wasn't allowed to have a part in it.

Even before I remember anything of my life, these kinds of arguments lead to my parents living in two different houses. Of course, I grew up like that, so for a long time I didn't even realize that that was something out of the ordinary. Regardless, for nearly my entire life, and certainly for all that I can possibly remember, my parents have lived separately from one another.

Eventually, my mother had to move out of the condo that she was living in, due to a series of health problems she was struck with. She got an apartment in a different part of town, closer to my dad's house so that she would be closer to someone who could help her if something happened, and we spent a weekend moving her in.

More than all of the arguments and separation problems, this single weekend was the worst part for me about the problems between my parents.

While we were moving things between houses, we were using multiple cars. My dad's car, which was a standard, small car, and my grandpa's truck. It took us a few trips, and after the second trip, I had an idea to prank my dad. You see, in his car, you could pull down the back seats and open up a hole into the trunk, so that you could store longer items. I had the idea to slip back into the trunk, and when dad came out to put stuff back there, I would pop out and surprise him. The backseat could only be opened from inside of the car, but I wasn't too worried about it. I would only be in there for a minute or two, and leaving the seat open would give away where I was, so I closed it behind me.

Unfortunately, no one told me we weren't using that car on the third trip. 

After a few minutes went by and the trunk didn't open, it began to occur to me that perhaps I had made a bad decision. I kept waiting, and I heard them loading things into the truck, but no one came. It was the middle of summer, and the longer I waited, the hotter it got.

I started screaming. Screaming for dad to come get me, I'm in the trunk, please come get me. Please dad, it's me, I'm in the trunk and it's hot and I feel like I'm dying, please please please. 

But no one came. 

I don't know how long I was actually in there. It felt like hours. It was probably only half of one. By the time my dad realized that no one knew where I was, I had given up screaming. I'm not sure what gave them the idea to check the trunk of dad's car, but they finally opened it up to find me curled up into a ball and crying.

It turns out that my screaming had been muffled by the car, and so my words were unintelligible and distant sounding. They thought the neighbors were beating their kid. I didn't help anymore that day with moving. I just stayed in the house and tried not to cry anymore. 

It was a long time before I got over that. Just the sight of an open trunk sent shivers through my spine, made my eyes water, and made my stomach churn.

This was when I was in first grade. It took until roughly high school for me to get over that fear.

Character development

Despite this being a key aspect of my personality and thought process for the vast majority of my life, I only realized in the last few years just how important character development is to me. Most of my favorite movies, books, and video games all have heavy amounts of character development in them, with a main character who is practically a different person entirely by the end than they were at the beginning. Even after having realized this, it took me a good deal of time to realize just how far that love of development spread, and where it had come from in the first place.

If you've never seen it before, I recommend that next Groundhog's Day you watch the movie by the same name. This is a movie that I legitimately watch every single year on the titular holiday. It's hilarious, but it also has a surprisingly well told story, and an immense amount of character development that takes place over a single day (technically). I've watched this practically since I was born, and only in the past couple years did it occur to me that it was probably a huge influence on me in that regard.

I suppose I can't accurately explain why it is that I enjoy character development so much, however. It's been instilled in me, but when you ask me to explain, it's hard to contain in words. There's just something so interesting about seeing a person grow. Especially when they so frequently go from being an absolutely terrible, despicable person, and in the end they are endearing and worth emulating.

A game that I feel really embodies this principle is Tales of the Abyss. The main character is a childish, spiteful, irritating little shit in every single regard. He has absolutely nothing going for him. But, having been thrown into a series of conflicts, treachery, and death, he finds a reason to actually be alive and to think and to feel, and - despite discovering he is not even the person he thought he was - becomes one of the most relatable and human characters that I think I have ever seen.

I feel like a lot of my favorite characters are ones that undergo these kinds of changes. They are also characters that I find many other people do not enjoy. I think people get stuck on how a character acts at the beginning of the story, and fail to recognize the changes that they go through throughout the story, thus missing out on the way they evolved and changed. I know I've done this before with some characters. Something about who they are at the beginning is just too irritating to let go of, and I refuse, whether consciously or not, to accept that they could be any better than how they started.

That's just an unfair treatment of a character, even if it is a common thing to do. Development isn't something that just happens over night, and it's not something that comes easily. It's a slow process. If a character is completely different at the end than the beginning, and you don't know how it happened, perhaps you should give that character a second try.

Of course, sometimes the writing is just bad and there really wasn't any development. But that's another issue entirely.

Missed chance

I was standing in line for lunch, talking with a friend of mine. It was Senior year of High School, and to celebrate that it was our last year, the school had taken us out to a water park. Walking around in swimsuits, and specifically seeing girls walking around in swimsuits, was an enjoyable experience, especially given how hot out it was. We had already paid for lunch when we had signed up for the field trip, so there was little to worry about. My friend and I had, for really the first time, gotten down to talking about girls and what we were in to when it came to them, when one girl in particular caught my eye.

She was off in a separate lunch line, talking with a group of her friends, and by coincidence we managed to glance at each other, and our eyes made contact. Her face struck a chord with me, and I could not for the life of me think of way. I must have looked like some kind of creepy, perverted asshole, staring at her in her bikini, trying to think of why I knew her.

Just when I thought of it - she was a student with the same guitar teacher as I - my friend grabbed my attention, wanting to know what I was looking at. I tried to explain that I had seen someone I recognized, only to realize that I had absolutely no idea what her name was. It's not like that was an uncommon occurrence for me, but having thought of who she was, it began to irritate me that I couldn't bring her name to mind.

I turned back to where I had seen her to point her out, but she was abruptly gone. She had likely disappeared into the lunch room, which I was still awaiting entry for, and being as poor at descriptions as I was, I couldn't enlist my friend to help me find her.

Throughout the entirety of lunch, I kept looking around the area, trying to find that girl all over again. My friend and I talked about a variety of things, but I was only half invested.

Afterwards, having still failed to find or identify the girl, and seeing as we had already gone on all of the water slides before lunch, we decided that we would take advantage of the situation. We made our way to the middle of the park, where there were collections of beach chairs, and took our seats to relax. We watched people walk by, and we pointed out all of the hot girls to each other. We made a game out of it, keeping tally of who was the first to notice a hot girl walking by. The whole time, I was watching for that one girl and trying to remember her name.

By the end of the day, I had failed two-fold. Not only had I failed to re-find or identify the girl, but my friend had found more hot, bikini clad girls first then I had.

Love at second sight

As usual, I was early to the party. The house was quiet, the soft sounds of preparation coming from the next room over, as the party host - my guitar teacher - was still getting food together and the kitchen table set. She glanced through a window between rooms as I walked in, having heard the screen door sliding open and shut, and excitedly waved and called out my name. I smiled and waved back before setting my guitar down near the couch. Her parties had a flow to them - people would show up, usually late, we'd get together, and one after the other we would get up in front of everyone and preform a couple of songs that we had been working on. There were singers, other guitarists, and occasionally a violinist or two. She taught more than that, but most of the others generally didn't come to the parties.

As I walked into the kitchen where my teacher was, I was surprised to find that I had not been the first to arrive. At the counter, half helping prepare and half eating, stood a girl who looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn't quite think of why at that moment. I glanced her up and down, taking her in, and I thought at the time that she was pretty, but I didn't think much else of her. She was another student, of that much I was certain. Blonde with her hair held back by a dark blue bandana, and a nice figure. She didn't notice me for a moment, so at the time she was busy stuffing her face. The fact that she was so unguarded in that moment was really funny to me, especially when she noticed I was there and abruptly stopped, and it put a smile on my normally flat face.

As the night moved on, however, and people arrived and we all started setting up to preform, that quickly became little more than a funny memory. I wasn't much of a talker, so I stood off to the side and listened and observed as I did a lot of the bulk work for my teacher to set stuff up. Just before we began to preform, it was decided by another student that we should film everyone, but the camera that we had to do so was faulty, and so it ended up falling on me to record off of my phone.

The girl who had been the first to arrive was fittingly set to be the first to preform, much to her chagrin. She picked up her acoustic guitar, sat down, adjusted the mic, and I hit record.

When it comes to music, despite the fact that I played electric guitar, I was all about that acoustic. I loved the way it sounded. And as she started playing, maybe that started mixing into my head with the way she looked, and the single good memory I had of her. Something about her as she played made pull my eyes away from my phone as I made sure I was filming it right so that I was focused entirely on her. And then she started singing. Her voice... I couldn't pull my eyes away from her after that.

Somehow I managed to record her properly. She sat down after that, clearly embarrassed at her own skills and the fact that she had had to go first. As others played, I couldn't help but glance at her from time to time. Eventually it was my turn to preform, and while I knew I should have been looking toward my phone which I had handed off, I couldn't stop looking at her. It was a completely subconscious action, and I hardly even noticed I was doing it.

After everyone had done their part, we all headed into the kitchen to eat and chat. I ended up across the table from her, and it seemed like every conversation one of us had, the other got heavily dragged into. We spent a lot of the night talking.

She had to leave early, although she didn't really want to. We said our goodbyes, and although I had made other friends that night, I felt a little lonelier after she left. Eventually it ended up being me, another female student, and our teacher. We were all chatting, having a good time, when the other student decided that we should prank call the girl who had left so much earlier. She had the girl's number, but somehow it still ended up being me who called her.

Sometime after that, I agreed to drive the other student home, and we parted ways. As I drove home, very tired by that point, I still couldn't help but think back to that girl. The memories were few, but they were happy. At the time I thought I had made a good friend.

It didn't take long after that for me to realize that something a great deal larger had taken hold of my heart.

Lost

When I was a kid, my dad and I would go places all the time. We'd just set out on weekends and travel who knows where. We'd go to parks, shows, we'd fly to other states and see what was out there. I remember a lot of people being jealous about stuff like that, because they'd just sit at home and do homework or watch tv. I didn't really get it at the time, and I suppose to say that I do get it now wouldn't really be truthful, but at the time I didn't understand why they didn't just do it too. But that's another story.

There was one day in particular I remember a lot better than the rest of them. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the theme park we were in that day, but it was heavily themed around children and letting them learn. For the earlier part of the day, we had mostly been riding the rides, experiencing what was there. Eating the food. That kind of stuff.

It was some time in the afternoon when we decided to check out the maze that they had. Like most things in the park, it was designed more for children than adults. Periodically in the walls of the maze, there would be small tunnels that kids could crawl through but parents could not. They were entirely unnecessary to solving the maze, and weren't always easy to track. We didn't know that at the time.

Perhaps you can see the problem with this. Clearly the park operators did not. I did not. My father did not.

But it quickly became very apparent.

The first two tunnels I traversed were unproblematic. It was maybe a minute after I had entered that my father and I would find each other, and then we would continue to search for the exit. The third tunnel, however, did not go as smoothly.

A minute passed, and I was still alone. Then another minute. Five. Ten. I began to panic. I was probably around ten years old, and while I did not have any problems being at home alone, this was most definitely not my home. I began to blindly walk the maze, not knowing where I was going or where I had already been. I passed a number of tunnels, but I did not enter a single one of them. The last tunnel I had entered was bringing me a great deal of misery, and I was not about to risk making it worse. What if one of them took me somewhere I couldn't get back from? The last one seemed to have.

It was perhaps a half hour before I managed to find my way back to the entrance of the maze. I had been crying for a long time by that point, and my throat was raw from all the screaming I had done trying to tell my dad where I was. The maze was a lot bigger than we had anticipated. The attendant outside the entrance asked me where my parents were, and I told him that I had gotten lost. He suggested I go up on the bridge that spanned over the entirety of the maze and see if I could see him inside. With a sniff and a wipe of my face, I nodded and was on my way.

As it turned out, my dad had already done the same some time ago. The whole time I had been screaming, he couldn't hear me because he was too high up and the maze was too large. I was too small. He never had a chance of spotting me. When I saw him, I ran head first into him. I had been so scared that I would never see him again.

Together we looked out over the maze and saw the path to the end. Not a single tunnel was necessary. After I had calmed down, we went back down the bridge and re-entered the maze. It didn't take us very long to finish it. I didn't leave his side once the entire time.

It was a long time before I was willing to go into a maze again, much less let my dad leave my sight while we were in one.

Campfire

Ronald glared at the sad excuse for a campfire, infuriated with its lack of warmth. He had been trying for nearly an hour to get the fire going, with nothing but a hundred some odd burnt out or broken matches to show for it. He had tried every way he could think of to stack the logs, arrange the kindling, drop the matches. It wasn't even a problem of wind. He just couldn't get the wood to light.

Katrine had been taking a nap, and picked that moment to wake up and crawl out of her tent. She came out with a yawn and, much to Ronald's chagrin, gave a half laugh when she caught sight of him trying once more to start the fire.

"I thought they were supposed to teach you stuff like that when you were a scout?" she asked, mockingly.

Ronald grunted out a response as another match snapped in his fingers as he was trying to light it. "Just because they were supposed to," he shot back angrily, "doesn't mean that they did. All of the people who actually knew how were too busy building the fires to ever teach any of the rest of us how to build them ourselves."

Katrine chuckled and shook her head, taking a seat at the picnic table situated not too far from the fire pit. "Were you not paying attention to them as they were building the fires, then?"

Ronald snapped upright, his frustration at the fire exploding in to full on anger thanks to her comments. "No, usually I wasn't," he spat at her, "because usually I was busy doing cooking or cleaning, or some other such activity that was just as important to what we were doing but considerably less manly, so no one else wanted to do any of it."

Katrine's smug look dropped when she saw how pissed Ronald was. She had always seen him joke about things like this when they talked about camping, but it had never occurred to her that it might have been anything more than that - a joke. But now, actually being out and doing these kinds of things, she saw that there were real emotions behind his words.

And she couldn't deny that he knew what he was doing in other areas while they were camping. He had taken out to the path like it was an old friend, and when they had returned to camp he had been quite capable of making dinner (though she had considered it to be fairly early to eat.) Even now, as she glanced to where they had eaten before she had taken her nap, she could see that all the silverware was clean and set aside. He had done nearly all of it without her help, as she was unfamiliar with the equipment and how precarious and small everything was as compared to how it was back home.

But he was fuming with trying to build a fire, which she had always assumed would be easy. She got up and went to him, gently taking the box of matches from him.

"I can do it," he began to argue, but she cut him off.

"You've been doing everything," she retorted. "Let me help with this."

She leaned down into the pit and started fiddling with the wood, making small adjustments to it here and there. Then she went to the paper bag that had been carrying some of their food supplies and began tearing and crumpling it, before pushing it inside of the logs. Then she set the paper aflame, and carefully guided it all to burn.

Ronald watched in silent frustration as Katrine took care of the fire. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate the help. He certainly didn't think she would do worse than he would at building it. He knew better than that. It was just... He felt like the opportunity was being taken away from him, just like it had been so many times before. How was he ever supposed to learn if no one would let him?

Katrine had the fire going in no time. The two sat around it as the sun set, taking its warmth and its light in comfortable silence. But Ronald still couldn't help but feel like he had lost another chance, and he didn't know when the next one would come.

How to fight

Miranda grunted in pain as, even through the padding, she was pelted with another blow to the ribs. Her older brother had been training as a kickboxer for some time, and after years of pestering, she had finally convinced him to teach her how to fight.

It wasn't going well.

Her brother was faster and stronger than her in nearly every regard. He knew how to get inside her defenses, which were poor to begin with, and he knew how to exploit her every opening. He had told her explicitly that he wanted her to know first what it was like to get her ass handed to her. She had always wanted to learn how to fight, but he disagreed. He wanted her to learn how to defend herself. And he had decided that this was the way to do that.

It was working better than she had hoped. With every blow that he landed on her, she wished more and more that she could simply keep him from hurting her. At first she had tried to fight back, completely unsuccessfully, but as she had begun to tire herself out, her brother had started pushing her. His fists came from every angle, snaking around her arms to wear away at her. The fight finally ended when he threw a kick at her, after knocking out her defenses with his punches, and knocked her completely onto her ass.

She was breathing hard as he stood over her and extended a hand out to help her up. She glared at it, considering for a moment trying to take advantage of his opening, but knowing that she didn't stand a chance. She weakly reached up and grabbed onto his hand, and he pulled her back onto her feet.

"Did you learn anything?" he asked. She was irritated at how not out of breath he sounded.

"That my defense sucks," she conceded angrily.

He smiled and nodded. That was the answer he was going for. "That's right," he said. "You have to learn what parts of you are weakest. Anyone who knows what they're doing is going to aim for those spots first. So it starts with your arms."

He grabbed her hands and pulled them up in front of her face, stopping them roughly just under cheek level. He closed her fists, putting her thumbs on the outside of her fingers. "Stiff," he said. She blinked, not entirely sure what he meant, but nodded. He let go of her hands, and she instinctively left them where they were, at least understanding enough that that was what he wanted of her. He flicked a hand out, slapping the inside of her arm, and knocking it away. A second later his other hand was out, lightly slapping the side of her head.

She was stunned for a moment by the abruptness of it. "Stiff," he repeated, grabbing her arms. She realized what he was saying, and nodded. He let go and flicked out at her arm again, but this time she was ready. She held her arm stiff, like he said, and it wasn't knocked out of the way. Then the second hand came for her head, but because her arm hadn't been moved aside, it was there to block the second blow.

They repeated motions like that for over an hour. The outsides of Miranda's hands were sore by the end of it, but she had grown exponentially better at blocking his attacks.

"This isn't it, right?" Miranda asked as they walked inside. "There's still more you're going to teach me?"

Her brother smiled. "Of course," he said. "It will take a long time and a lot of lessons before you're really ready for a fight."

Miranda smiled back at her. "Good."

Night train

Rena watched out the train window. It was hard to see much outside. There were lights on in the distance, giving small bright spots revealing the shapes of buildings in the distance. There wasn't much she could hear, either, other than the sounds of each connected rail bumping the wheels, sending a shock through the steel carriage. A few hours ago there had been the sounds of people conversing and moving about for whatever reasons. That had died out some time ago, as the passengers had drifted away to sleep.

Rena couldn't sleep, though. She had always had trouble sleeping while in some form of transit. Planes, buses, boats, cars. She had tried to sleep on them all, and she simply couldn't. Something about the motions kept her awake. Come morning, while the others might not be well rested, they were certainly better off then she was. But it had happened enough times throughout her life that she had gotten used to it. When she knew she would be traveling, she would stay up late the night before, so as to delay her sleeping as long as possible. That way she could last longer while traveling before she would start to shut down. 

Unfortunately, the train she was riding was an older one, and didn't have the conveniences of more modern trains. Like outlets. The electronics that she usually used to keep herself entertained throughout the night had all died a while ago, and she had expected not to need anything else, so she had only packed one book, which she was halfway through when she got on board, but was now done with. There wasn't much left for her to do. She had considered going and striking up a conversation with the conductor, but somehow she had the feeling that they wouldn't appreciate a random passenger coming in to the cockpit, or whatever it was called on a train. 

She wasn't sure how long she had been staring out the window before she noticed someone had sat down next to her. She wasn't sure how long they had been sitting beside her when she noticed them. She turned to look, and saw a young boy, perhaps ten, watching her and smiling. 

"Trouble sleeping?" he asked, seemingly full of energy. Rena blinked, as if making sure she wasn't somehow dreaming him, and slowly nodded. The boy nodded in return. "Me too," he proclaimed matter of factly. "My mom used to tell me the best way to pass the time until your eyes shut for the night was a good conversation."

Something the boy said caught her attention. "Used to say?" she asked. 

The boy nodded again. "It's been a long time since I've talked to my mom."

Rena felt pity hit her heart like a brick. "I'm sorry," she said. 

The boy shook his head, still smiling. "What are you apologizing for?" he asked. "Everyone dies eventually."

"How did she die?" The moment the words escaped her mouth, Rena realized what a rude thing she was asking. She must have been more tired then she thought. How late was it already? The boy, however, seemed unfazed. 

"Old age," he explained. Rena was taken aback. How could that be possible? He looked so young... "Dad too," he continued. "Not too long after mom. When they died, they told me only to cry as long as I needed to, because they would be together in the next life, and that some day I would join them."

Rena was starting to feel uncomfortable. There was something very wrong about this boy. He sensed the disconfort, it seemed, seeing as he frowned and put his hand on hers. His skin was cold.

"It's ok," he said gently. She was beginning to realize that his voice was much older than his face. How had she missed that before? "I'm just here to help. You don't have to be afraid of me."

"Why should I be afraid of you?" she asked quietly, her voice weak. 

The boy smiled. "Right."

Rena woke with a start as the sun shone in her eyes, and train's whistle blew to mark its arrival. This was her stop. A burst of adrenaline shot through her, and she gathered her stuff to rush for the exit. 

It wasn't until she got off that she realized at some point she had fallen asleep. 

Gauntlet

"I wanted you to have this."

I watched as the small girl lifted a heavy iron box out from under her bed. She could barely lift the damn thing, much less actually get it on top of her bed, and I genuinely wondered how the hell she had managed to bring it home and hide it under her bed. Her arms were shaking as she set it down. With a breath of relief at that job being done, she reached into her cloak and pulled a key from between her breasts. She slipped it into the lock on the box and turned it, and the box unlocked with a soft click. She stepped away, gesturing for me to open it.

With one eyebrow raised, I stepped forward and lifted the lid of the box, which given that it was made of thick iron, was lighter than I expected. Inside rested a large, golden gauntlet, with dull looking gems imbedded in each of the knuckles. Taking hold of it, I lifted it from the box, and was immediately made aware of the fact that this was the cause of the great weight, and not the box. While it still wasn't much trouble for me, there was no question in my mind why she had had so much trouble with it.

I looked at her, confusion splayed clearly across my face. She just smiled gently and nodded, as if telling me to put it on. I looked it over for a moment, determining that it was meant for the right hand, and slipped my own inside. The power was abrupt and overwhelming. It felt like a whitewater river was rushing around my hand, pushing and pulling violently in every direction. One moment it was scorching hot, the next it was a frigid cold that made my hand numb. It felt like my breath was being pulled from my lungs out through the pores in my hand, ripped into the gauntlet to be a part of its violent flow.

I pulled the gauntlet off hard, tossing it to the ground in the process. It dented the stone of the floor rather than the other way around. The skin on the back of my hand was standing on end.

"What the hell was that?" I demanded angrily. I wanted to swing a fist at her, but I was having trouble controlling my hand, and I needed the other to hold on to it and keep it steady.

She just smiled at me, almost apologetically. "I want you to keep it," she said.

"Why the hell would I do that?" I interjected loudly before she could say anything else. "I felt like it was going to kill me! And just from my hand! What the hell is this thing, and why are you giving it to me?"

She shook her head and just kept smiling. "I promise you it will be important someday. Can you put it back on?"

"What is wrong with you?"

She knew she couldn't lift the gauntlet well enough to get it onto my hand, much less force me to wear it. So she just waited patiently. I waited a long time before I finally knelt down and picked it back up. Hesitantly, I slipped it back on, and the torrent of energy rushed around my hand once more like it had never stopped.

I watched in agony as she reached out and put her hands on the gauntlet. I clenched my fist and was surprised to see the gauntlet actually accommodate the action. But then the pain doubled as the energy rocketed directly into my skin, like the rapids had suddenly frozen into icicles that all were piercing me. I cried out in pain, but couldn't pull my eyes away, and watched the gems on the knuckles begin to glow and come to life. Each was a different color - red, white, blue, yellow, and green.

She pulled her hands away. It had only been a moment, but it had felt like an eternity. Abruptly, the pain vanished. The current of energy was gone from the gauntlet. I dropped to my knees, panting hard. It wasn't in the gauntlet anymore, but it wasn't gone. It was in me. Rushing through my entire body now, making my head numb.

Gently she reached down and pulled the gauntlet off of my arm. Everything slipped away with it. I gasped for air as I could feel my brain come free again.

"It will take some getting used to," she said, letting the gauntlet drop to the ground once more, as she watched my heaving body as I panted heavily. "But you'll get the hang of it."

I looked up at her, hoping my seething anger would show through the exhaustion. "I am never putting that on again," I said between breaths.

"Oh, you will. You'll need to. Hopefully later rather than sooner."

Flowers

Lucy sat down under a tree and looked out at the field of flowers. A great mixture of many colors, dancing in the gentle breeze that drifted by. She wanted to run out among it, to be a part of that mass of color, but she didn't want to disturb it, or trample the flowers into the ground beneath her feet. So she sat from a distance away and watched them silently.

She thought about what made a flower a flower. When she was younger, she had seen her father bring her mother flowers, and she had seen the way they made her smile. She was always so happy to receive them. So Lucy had once gone out into the yard and tried to pick flowers, and while her mother smiled when she gave them to her, the smile hadn't been the same as it was when they were from her father. Her mother had explained to her that she had picked weeds from the gardens, not flowers, and that they weren't the same thing. She hadn't really understood at the time.

As she grew older, she learned to appreciate flowers more. The house was always full of them, but it wasn't until she began spending time away from home that she really started to notice them. Other people's houses didn't smell like hers did. They all smelled different, but none of them had quite the same freshness to them, regardless of how well kept they were, unless they also had flowers in them. They also made houses look more colorful. Less drab. They felt more alive to her.

In high school, the reason that her father always brought flowers to her mother began to make sense. She saw boys doing the same to girls they liked, and that's when they would "go steady." She still wasn't entirely sure what that meant. No boy's had ever come to her to ask that. But there was definitely something about it. She had a better idea of it when she read her mother's books. That was where she had learned a little bit about romance. So she supposed there was something romantic about giving flowers. But that seemed to her much more like a thing in the books than in reality.

As she looked out over the field, she wondered if there were more things about flowers that she still hadn't realized. Things that had perhaps played a role in her life that she wouldn't appreciate until she was older. Maybe one day they would give her strength in moments of weakness, or help guide her along her path to find her future.

She got up from where she had been sitting for quite some time, not fully noticing the passage of time while she looked at the flowers. She walked to its edge, and picked a few of the flowers, pulling out her hair tie to tie them together. She didn't notice the boy who watched the way her hair flowed out and blew in the wind as she did so, or the way his eyes watched her as she walked away from the field.

Sense of time

This is perhaps more of a personal problem than one that I see frequently in stories. Perhaps at times, but less frequently than some other topics that I have written about in the past. I find that my stories have a problem with the passage of time. It is difficult to accurately convey how much time has passed, or addressing the way that things develop. Making things happen in a reasonable amount of time. Two people don't fall in love over night. A person doesn't die over the course of a week after being stabbed in the heart.

There are exceptions to these statements, of course. Instances of incredible miracles, exceptional people doing exceptional things that no one can explain or ever dream of. People who fall in love in the blink of an eye. People who should have died twenty times over, but keep standing back up until the job is done and there is nothing left to kill them.

Every author wants their character to be exceptional. Monologues on the death bed, love in a period of hours or days, never losing a fight, so many things that no one could ever reasonably do. A lot of people consider this to be oversaturated. I don't necessarily agree, but I can see where they're coming from. What is exceptional about it if every protagonist is like that?

This is something that could easily be lessened by simply having a better sense of time. But while that in theory is simple, in practice it is not quite so easy. A book can only be so long, after all, and while the contents of it may take place over a specific amount of time, the length of time that one takes reading it affects their perception of that. Taking a break from a book and coming back to it several months later makes the story seem significantly longer than if you were just to read the whole thing straight.

There are some books that find ways to guide the flow of time as the story progresses. Two examples that I can think of are the Gone series by Michael Grant, and New Moon by Stephenie Meyer. In the former, rather than chapter titles, each chapter is headed by a timer. From the very first page, you know how much time is left until the ultimate scene of the book. You may not know what is going to happen at that time, but you know how far away it is from occurring, and as the chapters fly by, you are always expressly aware of how quickly or slowly time is passing. In the latter, there is a point in the book where a huge time skip is made. This is notified to the reader by a series of pages with nothing more than the name of the month that is passing without event.

Say what you will about either of these books, these are excellent ways of expressing the passage of time. They let the reader know exactly how quickly things are progressing, while still staying in tune with the way that the author wants the story to flow. Gone's method is brief and fleeting, keeping it just at the edge of your mind, and making you ever fearful of just how much time is left. New Moon's method is intentionally shocking and abrupt, following a traumatic experience with an emptiness that reflects how the character feels. And yes, I realize that expressing that shows too much about the things that I have read. We all make our mistakes.

I often feel like my characters are progressing either too slowly or too quickly. Its hard to judge while writing, however, because time seems to last so much longer while writing than it does while reading. Its just the perception of how long you stay in that world. I have had stories where development happens over the course of a week, but that week is so packed full of action and adventure that it feels like an eternity has passed. In contrast, I have had stories that span over the course of multiple years, but events are small and wide spread so they pass quickly.

I don't know how best to accommodate these things. Partially because it depends on the context of the story. In fact, perhaps the best, and possibly only, way is to simply have someone else read it and see what they think. Perhaps multiple people. Have different kinds of people read at different paces, and see what they think.

Of course, having to go through that kind of process would make finishing a story exponentially longer. But for the purpose of learning, perhaps it is a worthwhile investment.

The hero's blade

Hishio carried a large, thick sword on his back, further weighed down by the heavy and powerful lock placed on its sheath, sealing the sword inside. Many had asked why he carried such a heavy and unwieldy weapon, and especially when he couldn't even remove it from its sheath. He always tolf them the same thing. 

"It's fate is mine, and mine it's. And our fate has not yet come to us."

He had carried this sword his entire life, since he had entered adulthood. He was an old man now, and he watched his grandchildren grow before him. They would regularly beg him for tales of the glories of his days of youth, when he had traveled the lans and fought so called evils and become known as a great hero. Sometimes he would try to fight these requests, claiming fatigue in his old age, but he would concede to their wishes without fail. 

He would tell them of how he had traveled, looking for those in need. With his sheathed sword, he would bludgeon those who stood in his way, and clear a path for a future. When he had settled down and found a wife, he would occassionally return to the world and fight, for he wanted a safe life for his children. Even when those children married, he would fight when the need arised.

The grandkids would often asked how he was so strong. Nearly everyone in his family had tried to lift the sword. Even the ones who trained to become heroes in his footsteps could hardly move the hilt from the ground. Yet Hishio lifted it with one hand and placed it on his back easily every time, even as his hair turned all too white.

"It's fate is mine," he would tell the children. "And mine it's." They were never satisfied with that answer.

But finally a day came when his family was threatened directly. Another hero, a young man with a blade at his hip, demanded to challenge Hishio. He refused, and so the young man attacked his home. The moment his daughter was struck, Hishio lifted the blade from his back. 

"Now you'll fight me, old man?" the young man demanded. "I didn't even have to kill her!"

With his free hand, Hishio shattered the lock on his blade, and the sheath slid off with a loud and heavy clattering. The sheath itself had weighed nearly two dozen pounds. The sword itself, despite its age and lack of use, was razor sharp. The face of it was flat, and inscribed with a dozen ancient runes in a language long since lost. Hishio lifted the monstrous blade and pointed it at the man, a direct challenge. 

"You think just because your sword is bigger it's more threatening?" the young man mocked. "We both know what happens next. You're not walking away from this."

"No one threatens my family, boy," Hishio boomed. "My blade thirsts for your blood for this act. And it will have it."

The young man lunged forward, pulling his sheathed blade out quickly to attack. But he couldn't get around the massive size of Hishio's own blade. As he tried to maneuver around it, he felt his chest collapse as Hishio landed a solid kick, and then the feeling of his lower body was no longer there. The last thing he saw were his own legs on the ground several feet away as he hit the floor.

Hishio planted his sword in the groun, one edge stained a deep red. His family rushed toward him, surrounding him to ask if he was alright. He asked them all calmly to quiet down. 

"My time as a hero has come to an end," he told them. Tears welled in their eyes. "But this is no cause for sadness. I have lived a long life. Much longer than other heroes. I have fought as nobly as I can, and in my final battle I have been able to grant the most important gift of all - safety for the ones I love. I shall see you all in the next life. I promise."

They gathered around him and embraced him tightly. His sword was already gone, faded away into dust and blown away by the wind. As they hugged, their grips slipped as he too passed on, a final swirl of dust encircling them before he disappeared for good. 

Lonely eyes

Chris was drunk out of his mind. He couldn't remember how long he had been in the bar, or how many drinks he had had. He had probably spent significantly more on drinks than he could afford. If he had any clarity in his mind, that thought would have terrified him. Maybe so much that he would have ordered another drink. Which wasn't very different from what he ended up doing anyway.

He barely even noticed the roaring flames that were his throat as the liquid fire poured down into his gut. A sudden rush of a need to urinate washed over him, and he pushed himself away from the bar to head to the bathroom, and found himself face first with the floor. There was a strange feeling coming from his nose that he couldn't quite name, and a different kind of liquid leaked down onto the top of his lip. Unsure of what it was, he reached towards it with his tongue, and the taste repulsed him. As he pushed himself up onto his knees, subsequently falling over on to his side, he wiped at his nose, and was surprised at how red and thick the liquid was.

"Alright, buddy, get off my floor," came a pounding voice from above him. It made his ears ring, it was so loud. He looked up to see a big man, swaying from side to side like he was on a ship at sea. The man did not look happy.

"You should find some solid ground," Chris slurred to the big man. "Might make you feel better."

The next thing he knew, Chris was being dragged by the collar out of the bar. He tried to protest, trying to explain that he really needed to go to the bathroom, but the big man wasn't listening. He violently tossed Chris out the front doors, calling out something about getting another drink. Chris wasn't too sure what it was he had said. His ears were ringing too much.

Chris staggered back on to his feet, having to lean heavily against the wall to keep himself upright, and felt a lurch in his stomach. Just then, a woman was walking to the bar. She looked at him glaringly, disgusted with his appearance, and brushed by.

But needing something to focus on, Chris had seen her eyes. Though it had lasted only a moment, that look into her eyes had felt like an eternity. He had seen a story. Seen the truth behind her life. Her eyes had been the loneliest eyes he had ever seen. She had been looking for something, but... He wasn't sure what it was. He wanted to be what those lonely eyes were looking for. He wanted to reach out to her, call to her, let her know that those lonely eyes didn't have to be alone anymore.

He reached for her. With the wrong hand. No longer having the wall to support him, he fell once more to the floor, where he puked up the liquid fire sitting in his stomach.

Surfer

Michael sat on his surfboard, watching the wells of the ocean. It was a good day to be out on the water. He was just at the edge, letting the ends of the waves wash over his feet. He was dressed in a black bodysuit with blue highlights running up the sides, and his long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Back home, people made fun of him a lot for his appearance. But out on the beach, no one said anything. It was only one reason he spent so much time there.

As the waves started to get bigger, he got up and lifted his surfboard, placing it on his shoulder. he waded out into the water, maybe a half dozen other surfers up and down the beachside matching suit. As the water got up to his knees, waves pushing him back, he threw the surfboard out on top of the surf and hopped on. He clipped a strap connected to it to his ankle, so that he wouldn't lose the board, and started paddling out.

It took a while to get out to the point where the waves rose and fell in such a way that he could actually surf them. He had to paddle his way over some large swells to get into the right position. The anticipation of what was coming filled him with a sense of excitement. Despite the chill of the water, his chest started warming, and a smile spread across his face.

He saw a large crest rising up in the distance, and he scrambled to his feet on the board as it caught up to him. He rose up, the rush of water filling his ears, and the wind blowing in his face. He aimed his board down the wave, maintaining his position on the wall of water, and up ahead of him he saw the top beginning to curve forward and crashing down ahead in a round enclave, leaving space in the middle for him to enter.

He angled down harder, gaining speed to dive into the crash of the wave. He was surrounded by water, yet he was given a space where he could breath, still feel the wind, and move freely. He slipped his hand into the wall of water to his side, feeling it rush over his fingers, and washing the blue face explode into a cloud of white.

He let the wave swallow him as it collapsed fully. He fell down on his board, wrapping his arms around it, and the two were hurled down into the water, spinning hard and fast until they exploded back out to the surface, where he gasped for air. It took him a moment to orient himself, partially because his ponytail had whipped around and covered his eye.

When he had gathered his surroundings, he smiled to himself. Most surfers would never dare let a wave crash on them. But he enjoyed the thrill and shock of it. That moment of uncertainty. He loved every part of surfing, but that part - which all others considered a mistake - he loved more than the rest.

He turned back out to the open water, and began paddling back to do it again.

Casino

Aces High, or so they called him, sat at the poker table, gently lifting the corners of his cards to check the suits and numbers. He had a crazy win streak. It wasn't perfect. He lost nearly every time he came in. But not so much that he couldn't turn a profit.

He was well dressed, a sign of his winnings. A sharp, well cared for suit with a pair of red and black A's as cufflinks. Not exactly subtle, but they weren't a pair of cards like some of the other big winners wore, and he liked the way they looked. He kept his hair trimmed and his face clean shaven, and he frequently had to shake off the ladies. They played up his looks, but he knew the real reason they flirted.

He was also one of the few patrons who neither drank nor smoked. When asked, he would ask in return if said person drank or smoked themselves. They would invariably answer yes - they wouldn't ask otherwise. He would then ask if they won very often. They would pause, and look at themselves, and then at him. They wouldn't have any further questions.

He watched his opponent's gauging their emotions and reactions. Everyone had their poker face. Some were better than others. Some broke under certain circumstances. Playing the game was as much about knowing your opponents as it was about knowing your cards. Being able to predict what they might have, counting the cards in the deck to know what would be available and would not be, and playing mind games on those with weaker perception and memory to make them give up what might have been far superior cards.

That was why he didn't drink. He needed his mind to be sharp. That was also why he played the cards, and not the slots. You couldn't trip out the slots.

Besides. Beating the table meant taking other people's money. Beating the slots meant taking the casino's money. And if he took the casino's money, where would he go to play cards?

Aces was getting towards his last game of the night. He'd made a nice profit, but he wasn't tired of playing yet, and he had a safety net to fall back on. He could relax. Stop counting quite as heavily. Stop reading quite as hard. A lot of people tried to take advantage of him during this time, and he did usually lose a few rounds, but he never let anyone goad him into playing too far. He played out the part of the game that made it so exciting. The luck.

Another player tried to push his own luck, and went all in. Aces chuckled to himself, shaking his head, and folded. The player's face fell. He had wanted that nice pile of coins Aces was holding on to and thought he could get his paws on it. He knew Aces had a good hand. Possibly the best one on the board. He was willing to take the chance at losing for all of that money by calling him out directly. But Aces called him right back. He watched from the comfort of his place as the man lost, and forfeited the small wealth he had managed to accumulate.

After that, Aces called. He backed out and cashed in, taking home a nice paycheck. He stopped in with the owner to pay his respects before he left. They had become good friends. They helped each other stay in business. People came to face off with Aces. They'd end up playing the slots, even if Aces didn't, and so everyone benefitted.

Well. Everyone on the casino's side.

Hole

Amelia sat on a tree stump by the cliff and stared at the anomaly in front of her. A hole in thin air. Just a massive hole, large enough for her to climb through, and she had no idea how it had gotten there or what was inside it. From the side, you could hardly notice it was there, but from the front it was incredulously apparent. Out of curiosity, she had tossed a rock into it, and it had simply disappeared. Passed through the hole, and she hadn't seen it come out the other side.

She had no explanation for it. She had never heard of or seen anything like it in her life. It was as though someone had come along and simply torn a hole in the fabric of reality. The other side could be a different world entirely, or it could be a void, and anything that entered it would be lost forever. She had no way of knowing, but Amelia could not help but feel attracted to it. She wanted to know what it was, and how it got there, and where it led.

She also knew that she couldn't go back to the village and try and tell anyone about it. No one in their right mind would believe her. They wouldn't even try to go and see what she was talking about. A hole in mid air? That was crazy. They'd probably throw her out before they ever tried to see the hole. And even if they did, how did she know it would still be there by the time she returned? Every moment that went by was a moment she was losing towards learning what was happening.

Her mind was decided. She had to know more about it. But she also knew she should be safe about it. She drew her bow off of her back and two arrows, sinking one firmly into the tree stump she had been sitting on. To its end she tied a long rope she used for climbing trees and cliffs, and tied the other end of the rope to her second arrow. She knocked it on her bowstring and pulled back hard, aiming into the hole. She could only pray that it would strike something on the other side as she loosed the air and let it fly, disappearing into the hole.

She waited for a long moment, waiting for some kind of sign that her arrow had struck true. Becoming impatient, she tugged gently on the rope, and was surprised to find that it held. She must have hit something, then. Now she would have a way back out of the hole. Hopefully.

She slung the bow back over her shoulders and took a deep breath, then leaped into the hole.

Graffiti

Officer Fredrick shook his head in disgust at the blatant disrespect for authority that was the graffiti stained walls of the Police Office. He knew that they were supposed to be the names of whatever "crew" the people who had done the graffiti were supposed to belong to, but he couldn't make out any of the bloody words. They're attempts to seem "cool" and "hip" looked like little more than a babe's attempt at copying written words he had seen, with no grasp of their meaning or purpose.

The "art" covered nearly every wall of the building. There had been a power outage the night before - no doubt caused by the thugs who had painted such crude markings for specifically that reason - and so the security cameras had been useless. There was no way of knowing who had defaced the office, and no way of proving it, either. Fredrick sighed to himself, muttering about what he would do if he ever caught them.

As he entered the building, he missed that one of the crude looking faces of a barely recognizable man, dressed in a sick perversion of the police uniform, opened its eyes and looked quickly back and forth. It was checking to make sure that Fredrick had left. Seeing the coast was clear, the thin layer of paint began to peel itself off, headfirst. It pulled and tugged itself away from the wall, leaving a clean and smooth surface behind it, until it came off completely and fell to the floor.

It picked itself up, trying to move quickly, but held back by its lack of dimension. It could barely stand its ground when a soft breeze blew by, knocking it around. It shook its legs first, and after a few attempts they popped out, filling the third dimension as a normal man's legs. Next the arms, shaking harder and more flexibly, until they too popped out. The body, now a two dimensional torso and head with three dimensional limbs, was able to hold its place, but if anyone were to come by and see it, it would be dragged away for sure, either to be killed or experimented on. It could only pray to find a new hiding space before it was caught.

It made a mad dash away from the Police Office, shaking its head wildly back and forth as it went until it, too, popped back into the third dimension, revealing a young man's face covered in paint. He slipped into a back alleyway a short distance from the office and, under cover of darkness, began scrubbing away at the paint on his face with one hand, and attempting to shake his torso back to proportion with the other. The paint came off much easier than his midsection came back to normal.

"I really have to get it a better hang of this shit," he muttered to himself as his chest decompressed. He looked back around the corner of the alleyway to see that the Officer had still not returned, and ran quickly away, praying that he was safe.

Officer Fredrick came out a minute later, a bucket of water in one hand and a new recruit following close behind. "Alright, son, time to start cleaning," he said. "And I want every inch of this wall spick and span, or I swear..." That was when the no barren spot on the wall, a silhouette of a person, caught his attention. "What in the world...? I could have sworn there was nothing left unpainted..."

Out of ideas

Generally speaking, I try to write something different everyday. I've done a couple rewrites, and I've touched on a single universe or story multiple times, but for the most part, I try to write new things as much as I can. I do this because I want to say that I'm experimenting with my writing. That I'm trying to explore my writing style and and genres, to learn about how to write. And also because some of the things that I would want to retouch on, and even stuff that I have gone back to, are things that I would want to make full novels out of. I don't want to put all of that novel out in the open. It kinda defeats the point. Especially when all those pieces aren't necessarily in order.

But that also makes writing for the blog quite difficult. More often than not, I struggle with trying to think of what I want to write about on a specific day. Occasionally, the things that I think about writing are things that I decide that I don't necessarily want to have out in the open. Not because I'm ashamed of them, but because they are more adult type of content, and I don't intend on making this blog marked not safe for work for a couple of posts that are more adult oriented. Not to mention I'm not particularly good at writing those. But I'm supposed to be writing things that I'm not as good at to get more experience with them. But still. You get the idea.

A lot of my real talk posts in particular are more or less about this subject. I probably talk about it too much, but it really is something that I'm thinking about on a near daily basis. What I should write is always somewhere in my brain, and it is far harder to consistently come up with an answer to that question than I would care to admit.

Days like that can be pretty disheartening. Those are the days that make me question what it is that I'm doing. If making this blog is really the best thing for me to be doing, and if I'll ever actually go anywhere with my writing. Running out of words for an author is like running out of paint for a painter, and I find myself on the short end of that stick fairly often. Only I don't get the luxury of running down to the store and buying some more words.

Sometimes that leads to me finding writing prompts online. And that works sometimes. I've found some pretty great prompts, and sometimes the way my brain works translates a prompt into a different subject entirely, and I can get an idea that way. But the problem with prompts is that, more often than not, a prompt is fishing for an answer, rather than laying the groundworks. It's like a person has an idea for a story, but doesn't want to have to write it, so they try to get someone else to write it for them. I'm not big on that. I wouldn't mind having someone give me a request for a story, and trying to write that. But only if it doesn't already have the end in sight. And far too frequently, the writing prompts that I see do exactly that.

So sometimes I just find myself unable to come up with something I want to write about, or something that is in my head for long enough to get it down. Days like that generally end up with posts like these. Posts that I can almost guarantee I won't be coming back to look over like I do with some of my fictional pieces, because they're just not very interesting. But I can at least say that I wrote, and I do try to think about how I'm saying what it is I'm saying. Sometimes I have trouble getting a point across. You've probably gathered. But I'm working on it.

Meeting at work

Raine felt nervous as she walked into the smithery. It was in a different part of town then she was accustomed to, so it had taken her a bit longer than she had expected to arrive. The heat washed over her the moment she stepped in the door, though she could see that Leo was right: all of the actual forging equipment was kept in back, away from the customers. Still, the warmth from the flames she could hear roaring in the background could hardly be contained behind the walls. 

"Greetings, lass," the man behind the counter said. He was large, far more muscular than Leo was, but his hand was clearly a prosthetic, and the burn wounds on his wrist left heavy scarring. His voice only held a hint of the Scottish accent of his family, but his vocabulary reflected it. "Is there something I can be of service to?"

Raine pht on a smile and walked up to the desk. He was intimidating, but Leo had said he was a good man. "I'm here to see Leo," she explained. 

The man gave her a large, toothy grin. "Ah, so you're the lass he'd been telling me about. Boy'll be out in a minute, he's working on a project of mine. Can't just walk away from our line of work. Make yourself at home. Can't offer much to keep you cool, but a wee bit of heat'll do the body good."

Raine smiled and nodded, stepping away from the counter and taking a seat on a bench. The big man, Rex, disappeared into the back.

Raine took some time to look around the shop. A great many metal objects adorned the walls. Historic recreations, modern farm tools, home decoration pieces, and even a small section of jewelry. After a minute or two of waiting, Raine decided she might as well take the time to have a closer look at that last collection. 

It was clear that, while not a particularly large part of the shop, they did not skimp on the attention to detail when it came to these works. While some were quite plain and simple, others were surprisingly elaborate, and they were all beautiful. A great number of them were custom orders that they had been permitted to leave up for display, so as to potentially attract further customers. Raine wondered just how heavy a role Leo played in this silversmithing side of things.

Raine hardly noticed as the sound of hammering came to a stop from the back room, with Leo coming to the front shortly afterwards. She lifted her eyes from the jewelry to see him coming through the back door, still in the process of removing his lightly burnt and ash covered leather apron and gloves. He smiled at her briefly before hanging the items, and swinging himself up and over the counter on to her side.

"You said you wanted to see my place of work," he said. His voice was once more rough and low, dried out as it had been the first time they had met. Raine had to admit, there was something oddly pleasing about the way he sounded. And the way he looked. He was nowhere near as big as Rex, but he was solidly built, now more visible than ever thanks to the sweat from the hard work. "What do you think so far?" he asked. 

"It's really something," she responded. "You make all of these."

Leo gave a hoarsy chuckle. "I work in all the areas," he said. "But everything you see here isn't necessarily my work. But I have helped in some way on most."

Raine nodded, taking another look around, trying not to eyeball anything too hard, and especially not Leo. "What are the chances I can take a look in the back?"

"Well, most customers aren't allowed in back," Leo said, leaning against the counter. His finger began to tap away on the wood, and had Raine been paying enough attention, she might have noticed it was to the same rhythym to which he had been hammering away only moments prior in back. Raine frowned and nodded, but the smile did not falter from Leo's face. "You, however, are a friend of the workman, and thus get special privledges, already agreed upon by the big man. As long as you promise to be careful and follow all instructions exactly, of course. Sound fair?"

Raine beamed and nodded. "Of course!" she exclaimed, perhaps a bit more enthusiastically then she had intended. 

Leo chuckled and nodded. "Very well then. Let's get you some protective gear, and let the tour begin."

Dragon rider

Sam looked up at the dragon seated before him, its deep purple scales encasing its bright red eyes as it stared down at him. He could feel his knees wanting to pop out of place from how hard his legs were shaking. "A-are you s-sure this is a g-good idea?" he asked shakily.

Aran chuckled and patter the dragon's hide. It was outfitted with a harness meant for a rider. It was Sam's fifteenth birthday, which meant it was time for him to learn to fly. "Yes, Sam, I'm sure," Aran assured him. "It's tradition. Besides, Eragoth here is my old faithful. He won't let you down."

Eragoth snorted in agreement. Sam had watched the two riding tofether ever since he was a child, so it wasn't as if he didn't trust Eragoth. He was just scared. The thought of being suspended so high in the air was as terrifying as it was exciting, and Sam had never been one with a sense of grace. He was about as unlucky as they came, and frequently tripped over his own feet. 

He tugged nervously at the collar of his leather riding suit. It made him itch in places he didn't want to talk about. With a deep breath, and a helping hand from Aran, he mounted the dragon. 

Eragoth's scales were warm under Sam's body, smooth and tough. He was glad he would be sitting in a harness, rather than directly on the scales as some riders did. He didn't think he would even get through take off before he slid right off. He got himself into place and latched his feet into their stirrups, gripping the reigns as though his life depended on it.

Before he knew it, Eragoth's wings were unfolding and slamming down against the air hard, generating a massive wind force that launched them from the ground and into the air. Sam's breath rushed from his lungs as they ascended, quicker than he had ever moved before, until they broke through the clouds. They hung for a moment there, Eragoth's wings fully extended lazily gliding through the air, just long enough for Sam to regain his breath before the wings folded in once more and they were diving down. 

Sam watched the water approaching at an alarming rate, and visions of the frigid cold envelopping his body filled his mind. An instant before they would have made contact, Eragoth's wings exploded out, catching the wind and curling them back up and away from the water.

As they curved through the sky, Eragoth rolled inwhat was for him a lazy manner. For Sam, however, the grip he held on his reigns was a matter of life and death. As they turned upside down, he felt as though his brain was pushing against the inside of his skull, ready to fall out at any moment.

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, they were landed. In the blink of an eye Aran was there, unstrapping Sam from the harness and helping him to the ground. Sam could only let Aran take control, his entire body feeling limp. 

"Well, Sam?" Aran asked. "As bad as you feared?"

And Sam vomitted on Aran's shoes. 

Understanding your audience

After a recent encounter where the intended audience of an event was not in correlation with how said event seemed to be advertised, I feel compelled to touch on the subject. They tell you in every writing class you will ever take that understanding one's audience is of utmost importance, and leads to an enhanced piece. I suppose I didn't fully understand this until seeing such a sharp contrast between intended and actual.

I can understand if you're not quite sure of who your audience is. That comes with time and practice and a great deal of thought. If you're still learning who your audience is, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I would encourage you to continue exploring boundaries and what you enjoy and what gets the best reception and where. That's certainly a space I find myself in frequently. However, once you know who your audience is, make sure that your audience doesn't get confused on who they are. 

Advertisements are an important piece of getting your work out there. The most important part, for all intents and purposes. I concede to not knowing much about the topic, but I do know that you should be advertising to your audience. If your audience is children, don't be trying to advertise to college students, and vice versa. Different groups respond to different things, and there are plenty of sources you can find about what attracts who. You should use those sources. It may seem pandering or steretypical, but the fact is that it will work ninety percent or so of the time. Some people may be pushed away by that, and they may even be people who would have enjoyed your work otherwise, but there are other ways to reach them, some of which may not even be under your control. That's just how it's going to go sometimes. 

At other times, you may want to move away from an established audience. This is also something that is understandable and acceptable. However, when doing so, try to make that transition clear to your old audience. Let them know in no uncertain terms that you are going to attempt something different, and may or may not be continuing on with what you did in the past. Make it clear that your new product is for someone else. And for all that is holy, don't continue to advertise your new product in the same way you advertised your old one. Your product is different - so should your advertisement. 

I don't know a whole lot about advertising. I spend too much time trying to understand the creation part. But I do know that your advertisement should at least be somehow related to your product. It's too bad a lot of advertisers don't seem to get that part. 

Creator's anvil

Gychwyn arrived at the gates of God with nothing. Nothing from his life could he bring with him. Not even the body or face that he had carried with him for so long. Only the memory of who he had been, what he had done, and the things the he had believed. He didn't even know if it was accurate to call himself a "he" anymore, but with no other obvious choices to make, he decided to continue doing so.

He waited for a long time at the gates, expecting an angel to come and greet him and welcome him in, but no such person came. He couldn't say how long it was before he reached forward and pushed the gates open on his own. The other side was surprisingly barren. There were no choirs of angels to sing the Lord's grace. No millions of righteous and chosen souls to celebrate together for eternity.

But it was difficult not to call what he saw beautiful.

Inside of heaven was an expanse of beautiful creations of a countless varieties, made of materials Gychwyn had never seen before, or had ever imagined could exist. Buildings, gardens, statues, all created as though they themselves held a soul inside of them, giving them an inexplicable aura of vibrant colors and lights.

"Greetings, Gychwyn," came a voice. Gychwyn turned quickly to see a massive figure towering behind him. He didn't know where this person had come from. "It appears you have reached my home." The man was dirty and sweaty, as though he had spent longs hours working on some sort of project. His clothes were those of a workman, old and raggedy, and his hair and beard were unkempt. "Many pass through here. Few choose to stay. They are often... disappointed."

"Disappointed?" Gychwyn asked. It was the first time he had spoken since he had died. It felt strange. He wasn't sure where his voice was even coming from. "But... You're God."

The man shook his head, and dirt crackled and fell from his beard. "I am who you think is God," he said, "but I am not God as you think of him. It would be more accurate to describe me as Creator."

"But is not God the Creator?"

"Aye, this is true. At least, as you think. But I did not breath life into the universe. I did not create everything from nothing. I am merely a craftsman, taking what is there and using it to create something new."

Gychwyn looked once more at the landscape of heaven, covered in creations of a beauty that his living mind could have never fathomed.

"That's right, Gychwyn," the Creator said. "These are my creations. My creations which, having been given new life, formed a new world all of its own that you called home."

As Gychwyn watched, the lights and colors of the various creations seemed to dance, and trails of them mixed together and floated up into the air before falling gently down, and passing through the ground to an Earth far below.

"It is hard for me to describe why this happens," the Creator explained. "But it does. And so with time I have come to treasure this second world as much as I treasure my creations themselves, and so I continue to make them and care for them, so that their world may continue to thrive. In this way, I am your God. But I do not think to call me that would be accurate."

There was a long moment of silence between them as Gychwyn thought, letting these learnings sink in. "What am I?" he finally asked.

The Creator smiled. "It would be easier to show you," he said, and walked away.

Gychwyn followed him, lead away from the beautiful expanses of architecture and art, to an area of heaven that was characterized by large structures of barren walls, broken supplies, and work benches. Upon closer inspection, he realized that for the Creator, these were small structures, ones he had just enough room to work in.

The Creator knelt down and lifted a broken sword from the ground and presented it to Gychwyn. The sword had once been beautiful, masterfully crafted and well kept. But it had shattered into a dozen pieces, which had begun to rust. "This was you, Gychwyn. Strong and graceful. A sharp edge to cut your enemies down, with gentle curves to embrace your family. Like many souls, yours spoke to me long ago, and asked me to forge you this way."

Gychwyn wasn't sure what to say. He could only look down on the remains of his life. They lacked the aura of life that so many other things he had seen shined brightly with.

"When you died, this sword shattered, because you were separated from it. I can not rebuild it without you."

Gychwyn looked up at the Creator. He opened his mouth to speak, but a thought came to him. He became concerned and confused for a moment before speaking. "Did I not have a sheath?" he asked.

For the first time since Gychwyn's arrival, the Creator smiled. "You were forged on my anvil together. You were the sword. And she was the sheath."

Though he had no face, Gychwyn could feel a smile spread across him, a warmth that he had not felt since his life, long ago.

The Creator chuckled. "You always said you were created for each other, eh? You didn't know how right you were."

Fighting nature

Christopher stood on a cloud over a deep and long canyon, covered in greenery. He stood across from Stephen on the other end of the cloud as they drifted over the quiet and peaceful valley. "You see, Stephen?" He called out, sinking his blade into the cloud where it rested, as thiugh it had been stuck into the dirt. "These sites that we pass over? These are what I fight for."

Stephen scoffed and pointed his own sword in Christopher's direction. "Empty and barren canyons are what you fight for?" he mocked. "You are more pathetic than I thought."

"You see so much, yet you understand so little," Christopher replied. "I fight for the peace. Can you not feel it? Drifting up on a cool summer's breeze to us? It speaks to and accepts all people, caring not what their intents are. Yet your intention is to remove it."

"I'm afraid I hear none of this tranquility which you so long for me to grasp. I swear, you are but a child speaking nonsense at such times. It is hard to believe I have had such trouble ending your miserable excuse for an existence."

Christopher growled and ripped his sword from the cloud, wielding it with two hands from the shoulder. Stephen's sword was slimmer, longer - able to be wielded with only one hand, sacrificing power for mobility. Christopher had to keep a close eye on his opponent's movements. If he could not predict them, he would stand no chance at stopping them.

Stephen rushed forward, his cloud evaporating in his wake. Christopher pulled hard to one side, anticipating the sidewards blow that Stephen would throw, pushing his own blade in the way. The clash of steel was powerful, knocking Christopher back, and tumbling off of his cloud. 

A moment later, Stephen came barreling after him, using the tip of his blade to split the air below him, making him more aerodynamic. Christopher used all of his strength to fling his sword straight up and towards his foe. Stephen was fast, but he couldn't redirect himself well, and the sword cut straight through his leg, the hilt catching on muscle and lodging itself in place. The impact sent Stephen spiraling out of control, up and away from Christopher. 

With no weapon or means to control his descent, Christopher turned quickly towards the ground. His only hope was to lighten his weight to the point where the impact might not break him. He could feel the weight shedding off of him like layers, thrown into the air behind him. Then he hit the ground. 

He crumpled, mashing like a paper plane running into a wall. Pain filled his body, but as the weight slowly returned to him, he could feel that fewer bones had broken then might have. A few moments later, he heard Stephen crashing down. He had clearly not been so lucky. 

Christopher forced himself onto his feet and dragged his legs forward toward Stephen, who did not move. The man's own blade lay discarded a dozen feet away, Christopher's still lodged into his thigh. Christopher removed it, having to place a foot on Stephen's knee and crushing it to get the leverage he needed. 

"I tried to warn you, Stephen," he said, words slightly slurred by a weakening in Christopher's jaw. "You mess with nature, you ain't gonna win."

Pride

I think a lot of writers, and especially younger and less experienced ones, take a lot of pride in their work. I know I've been like that for a long time. It's hard not to be, after all, when the stories you write are quite literally an extension and presentation of yourself. It makes it difficult to be told that something about your writing isn't good, or could be better, or shouldn't necessarily be a part of what you are presenting. I've talked a decent amount about the things that I would like to happen with this blog, particularly receiving feedback on my writing, but I'm not going to pretend that receiving that feedback would be particularly interesting. No one intends to, but being told that your writing isn't very good feels like an attack on your person.

I'd like to think that I've grown past that feeling, that I can take that criticism and work on improving my writing, but truth be told, I'm probably not. Not entirely, at least. I think I've gotten better, but it's also been a while since someone's given me some full on criticism. And I know that I have a tendency to try and defend myself and my actions. I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing, but even if I had reasons behind what I was doing, that doesn't mean that the criticism isn't coming from somewhere. If a person reads my writing and it doesn't sit well with them, there has to be a reason for that. And even if that reason is small and insignificant, that is a potential change that I could be considering.

I think, for me, these blog posts are a good spot for me to try and set my pride aside. These are incredibly rough drafts. Things I sit down and pound out so that I can get an idea down before it escapes me. There are posts that I hate, and posts that I love. Having them out in tandem has helped me to see that I am not infallible. It's not that I necessarily or consciously thought that in the past, but it's a reminder that I am what I am, and not more, or at least not yet.

It's hard to face that. Admitting that you are prideful and should not be is a daunting task. I can say that all I want, but internalizing it is hard to accomplish. To admit that the way I write is not the best way, even for me, and that I still have a lot to learn. I can say it again and again, but until I start thinking it every single time I sit down, I haven't gotten past the pride.

And there is a certain kind of pride that I should not be holding on to. I am proud of the fact that I am an author. I am proud of this blog, and the fact that I have managed to sit myself down and write nearly every day. I am proud of the fact that I am trying to be a better writer. And I am proud that I have written things that exist.

I should not, however, be proud of the thought of being an author. I should not be proud that I have a goal of writing a book. Because these are not quantifiable. These are not things that I can point to and people can see. But those are the things that are easy to be prideful of. They can't be pointed at and shown as being bad. You can't tell me that the book I am going to write is going to be bad, because you don't know anything about it yet. And I can't either, so I can't be ashamed of it.

But I can, and should, be ashamed of the fact that it does not yet exist. I should be ashamed that I can't yet show the fruits of my labor.

These are things that I have been thinking more and more about. And I should be. Because these are the things that are really going to push me forward, to make me try and do new things, and find new grounds upon which I can stand. And these things may not work for anyone else, and they may not even work for me, but the more I think about them, the closer I'm going to get to the truth on the matter. Just like the more I work on a book, the closer I get to finishing it.

Dancer

Alex sat on the classroom roof, having finished his lunch, watching the other students down below walking around and talking with their friends. He had a good view of the school from here, should he stand up and walk around, but he refrained from moving down to the south edge. He knew what he would see there, and he wasn't sure if he was ready to see that at the moment.

His friends would be over there, without a doubt, more than happy to watch the events that were taking place. They wouldn't even question that he wasn't there. He came and went as he pleased, and they knew him well enough not to question it. He did as he pleased. Always had. He didn't care much about what other people wanted from him, which was part of why some referred to him as Ice. He always thought that nickname was ill advised to be associated with him, but let people think what they will. He was more hot headed than cold, but he didn't talk to many people long enough for them to realize that.

He heard someone coming up behind him. He expected it to be Amelia or Janice. Those girls were the ones who were usually sent to find Alex if anything came up that he should know about. When he turned to look, however, he was surprised to find Pete approaching.

Pete was a smaller kid, one of the new guys their group had picked up in the last year. He was awkward and pretty shy, but every once in a while he'd show some spine and really blow everyone away. Amelia was the one who had found him in the first place, and he had a tendency to cling a little bit more to her than anyone else, just because he was the most familiar with her. At least, that was the explanation that everyone gave. Who knew what was really going through the kid's head. He had trouble getting any words out if something important came up.

"Hey kid," Alex called out. Pete used to get mad about being called a kid, but he'd long gotten over it. "What's up? Shouldn't you be clinging to Ame's leg?"

"The fact that you weren't around today seemed a little strange," Pete replied, sitting down beside him. "I know you don't always hang with us, but I didn't think you'd miss out on Suz's dance."

Alex shrugged. He didn't want to talk about it. "Ame said you'd probably be up here. Said you tended to be when you were off on your own. Also that I should keep that info to myself."

"Yeah, kid, you really should."

"I know, I know. I won't bug you too much. Just seemed... I dunno. Like something was up maybe."

Alex leaned back against the ac unit and looked up at the sky. "Just not feeling being friendly today."

"You're not that friendly to begin with."

"No, I'm not."

They sat in silence for a while. Alex liked the quiet. He could still hear people talking down below, of course. It was lunch after all. But up here, it was harder to hear the voices, or make out what they were saying. He could think about the things he would do when he got home. Things that he didn't want to do where people could see him. That he was afraid of doing with people around.

"I don't think you're all that bad, you know."

Alex looked at Pete. The kid was looking up at the clouds, too. His words seemed to just come out of nowhere. "What makes you think that?" he asked.

"You're always there when we need you," Pete explained. "Like you got some kind of... Like a spidey-sense, like in the comics, but for us. You just show up when we need some advice or when we're in trouble. You've even hurt yourself making sure we were okay. Doesn't seem like something a guy called Ice would do, huh?"

Alex sighed and leaned back. He just acted on instinct. There weren't many people he felt comfortable around, and the few that he did he wanted to keep around. He liked being alone, but not that alone. "What's your point?"

"Suz was kinda sad you weren't there. Said when she was dancing was one of the few times she saw you smile. She likes it when you smile."

Alex looked at the kid again, one eyebrow raised. "She told you that?"

Pete finally turned to look at him and smiled. "Being the awkward kid means that people aren't afraid of you hearing stuff."

Alex sat up and turned himself fully towards Pete. "You're more than you make yourself out to be, kid."

Pete chuckled and nodded. "Kinda like you."

Alex thought about that for a long moment. "Yeah," he said. "I guess you're right."

"You wanna tell me why you didn't watch the dance?"

Alex grinned a coy, cocky grin. "I ain't trusting you after what I just learned."

Pete laughed and nodded. "Fair enough," he said. "But I can keep my mouth shut when it matters. I don't think Suz would mind all too much that I told you that. But you probably shouldn't mention it all the same."

Alex nodded in return and sat back again, thinking. "That dancer..." he muttered under his breath, not fully realizing the words had been spoken.

"She's really something," Pete replied. "Hard to believe she's still single sometimes, you know?"

Alex looked at Pete out of the corner of his eye. The kid was looking up at the clouds again.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."