==================================================== This story and image is in response to a challenge by Wolfenshire. ===================================================== The following is his challenge: Special Notes: I picked up a book on writing prompts, it gave me the idea to write some of my own. They are all original. I challenge you to take any one prompt and complete at least one paragraph. Post it here in Writer’s Gallery. (If writing is absolutely not your thing, then take one prompt and create a visual scene of the prompt.) Enjoy. ======================================================= Here is my story using Wolfenshires first prompt (bracketed) ======================================================= Sun! {I have lived two-hundred years, and in all that time I have never seen the sun. I know the sun is there, just beyond the doors that were sealed just before my birth. There are no magical seals holding the doors closed, I could open the door if I so desired. I've placed my head against the doors and felt the warmth of the sun beyond the wooden barrier.} That warmth feels soft and comforting but I am still not sure I am brave enough! I would be very lonely, except for them. They are my sincerest friends! What they say they keep to. They never tell me one thing one day and something else the day or week or year after! I count on the books being honest that way! Many are happy books, some are sad, others are very meticulous. Like a drill sergeant they must be followed in precise order to learn the secrets of numbers, lenghts, widths, time and other such nuisances. A necessity I was told! Time it seems is one thing I have plenty of. But I need more courage to do what I know I must do! I turn to my friends to find that strength. Many speak of daring people that are good and others that are bad and a few that are pure evil! I do not really understand the evil ones! I can only understand the good and happy people. Like Mother, the bravest person, well to be honest the only "living" person I have known. Some of the books are very very old, and wise as Mother. She taught me everything, a bit more each day, before her hand slipped from mine as she closed her eyes and left me! Actually she only taught me what the marks and scratches in the books meant and how to listen to them. How to put them together to hear them march and sing and play, and sometimes weep! I miss her. I was not interested in the books at first, all dusty and some of them smelled strange like plant roots, being a selfish child only wanting to play. I began to notice that sometimes she watched and would look unhappy. 'Are you sad, Mother?' I would ask. 'You play with the same things, every day, each at the same time, it worries me' she replied 'Is'nt playing good? I'll stop if it makes you unhappy?' I said. 'Oh no, playing makes your body strong as she cupped my cheeks in her warm patient hands, but reading is needed too! You live in this one book of "myself"! The book of the boy that likes to play! But these others on the shelves, all hold their own magic.' she cooed 'Oh, I love magic!' I cried! Of course I didn't know what magic was then but I hoped saying it would make Mother more cheerful. 'Your Father made sure we had as many books as would fit before he sealed the barrier! Enough for 500 years he had said. They each hold a new world to play in, as often as you want!' she smiled. 'Why did that man seal the doors and abandon us here!' I wanted to know and shuddered at his apparent cruelty. 'Later, when you are stronger!!' she frowned. 'Now go check on the hydroflora, change that burnt out sunlamp, and bring some of your favorite veggies for our supper!' I heard that many many times over that 178 years I knew her. Of course there were no new sunlamps so all I could do was switch a good one with the burnt one so the plants in each area would still get enough light to live. Mother was not aware there were no new bulbs, and I prayed no other bulbs would burn out. The boxes they had came in said "Lasts a lifetime!". However, I often wondered whose lifetime that meant, theirs or mine. That is when I started imagining what the real sun looked and felt like and how soon I might need it! All I understood was that if I listened to the books and let them make me stronger she would answer my question. That I should not break the protective seal and go beyond the doors was the only times she spoke harshly to me with deep pain on her face! I promised I never would. There was one perplexing oddity however which I started to dwell on. Why was I so old? Why were only a few of the people my friends told of only able to live a bit past 100 years. When we celebrated my 164th birthday I could not help turning to M (as I now called her) hoping she would not be upset and explained my concerns, again! 'Because you are special, silly boy.' M tried to sidestep as she had often done before! 'MOTHER! you are AVOIDING my question!!' I over-emphasized. 'You have'nt called me "Mother" for 20 years, this is seriously bothering you.' she replied. 'Yes, why have I, well both of us, lived so long?' I pleaded. Turning pale and almost whispering through her clenched teeth, said 'It is time! Go to the very back shelf of the S's and on top there is a box hidden. It will be hard to see but it is there. Bring it - UNOPENED -and you must wear the solar gloves, sorted nearby with the books, before you touch it !!!!' It only took a few minutes to get to the end of the row. 'S' is one of my favorites, well really all the letters are in their own way, except 'W'. It seems pretentious to make two sounds when all the others only make one, and then have the nerve to make only one sound when dressed-up in a word, although I never had to say 'double U hy' or 'double U hen' or 'double U hat' and thank goodness least of all 'double U ildabeast'! Neither "double U" nor "Zee" nor "ph" which seem to be contrived inconvenient conveniences were on my mind at that moment. The gloves were a dissapointing solid undefined nothing of blackness, so unlike the pictures of anything "solar" my friends showed me. It took a few moments to find where my hands and fingers were to fit. They did however feel exactly like the warmth I feel when I put my head on the barrier, in the spot I have worn smooth, to partake of the suns life! I started looking on the top shelves for the box, it was not there. I shined a light everywhere, still nothing. M had said on top, so I got a ladder and climbed on top of the shelves. Still nothing. Only a flat burnt tile that could not be a box. Suddenly the toes on my right foot began to feel like they were on fire! Stepping back from the tile they instantly felt normal. Just like my forehead when I leave the barrier. As I inched my foot forward again and the warmth began in my toes I saw it, or a corner of it, a flickering of a shadows shadow atop the tile. The solar gloves had seemed to be the blackest nonexistant thing I had ever seen but the box was 10,000 times less "there". But it was "THERE", I could feel it, or at least its warmth! I tried several times to pick it up, the gloves passed through it or bounced off, I could not tell which! Finally I just put my hands out in a gesture of bewilderment and the box was in them instantly. I should have been afraid, you might think, but no! It gave me a feeling of such peace and kinship to be this close! M sat, not in her comfy chair, but on the floor near a square of what looked like a charred stone tile where she had removed the rug. Looking frail and worn she spoke, 'Place the solarbox here, tonight you can be mother and make our tea, sit down Sun this telling is going to take a while.' 'I know you both have time!' she began with an angelic yet somewhat impish grin! ==================================================================== (Note: I think you may see where this is headed so I will let you entertain your own thoughts on dark matter, dark energy, black holes and singularities in a parallel universe! This was fun and thanks for the challenge R.L. Gave me a chance to emulate what I have learned from you over the last two or three years, it can never measure up but made me feel good attempting to write, at least once.)