blank He sat dead still, afraid to move. How long had he been sitting like this ? The pale creature was lying motionless in front of him. Its skin was almost featureless, a flat expanse of pristine whiteness. Even though he couldn't see its eyes he knew that it was watching him intently. He'd crossed paths with its kin before, many times and it always terrified him. He could sense a slow breathing; a slight fluttering along its extremities, first one side, then the other. He felt the sweat forming around his collar. "Do I make you nervous?" The voice pierced straight into the recesses of his mind without any disturbance to the air between them. His right hand tightened its grip on the implement he was going to use to silence it. He slowly, apprehensively, reached out his left hand and gently placed his spread fingers on the thing. "Don't touch me!" His hand shot back as if stung. The creature chuckled softly inside his head, condescendingly. "You're pathetic." He took a deep breath and reached out again, more aggressively, pinning the creature. He looked up and closed his eyes for a moment, silently mouthing something. A smile drew across his face, and he raised his right hand to strike. "Go on then," it sneered, "write something. I know it'll be rubbish." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - (around 222 words - my software doesn't count words so I asked it to count the spaces and then split the paragraphs) (inspiration - have you ever sat in front of a blank white sheet of paper? I was going to have him writing a sentence, crossing it out, and then have a detailed description of all the doodling, ending with the famous author writing the first line of his most famous novel. But I got bored. An alternative ending after all the doodling was to have the 'artist' signing his name and thinking "That'll make it worth $10,000,000") (the 2 hours spent is an estimate of the sum of all the individual minutes spent writing down phrases on scraps of paper as they came to mind, assembling all those scraps into some sort of coherent order on a larger sheet of paper, annotating that (i.e. ldrawing lots of arrows and crossing a lot out), repeating a couple of times, until I got to the point at which I decided that I'm getting bored. Et viola! (I know - they were out of cellos)) (Notepad++ for the words, GIMP for the picture) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Personally hand written on scraps of paper for the mid 2023 writers contest here at Renderosity