A Scene
Here’s a riveting subject! Anyway, I’m taking a fiction writing class this semester, and this is the submission for our first, very simple and short assignment. The assignment was to write a scene describing a place. The place could not be a familiar place, but rather an invented place. There can be no characters. Here’s what I wrote.
The late afternoon sun sighed through the opaque and irregular panes of the north wall’s center window. Curtains on the wall’s other two windows were drawn, dusty and thick. From the south the light was equally defeated, resigned only to reach for the borders of its northern twin, but never to touch. The weakness of that exhausted daylight did almost nothing to dispel the shadows from the large room.
Three long and well-worn benches stood facing east near the center of the room, precisely spaced to be just three of many that had once filled this space. Now they stood alone, the three remaining ribs unplucked from a body empty and long dead. Looming darkly over those empty benches, the east wall was bare, with only the slightest trace that anything had hung upon it; a light discoloration crossing the center of the wall.
A single entrance was on the west wall; a double doorway closed but damaged, it’s wood gray and soft and torn with a couple of large, ragged holes. It was through those holes that the room’s brightest light would enter, touching the almost invisible sign of the god that died there, as the sun set on the backs of the ghosts of his people.