The Blank Page

This is a random post. In my last post,You Have Nice Character Traits, Boy, I made some sort of asinine statement claiming, ” I can (in writing) tell you exactly how you would react if you watched a four-year-old stick their little pinky in a spinning metal box fan…”. This prompted a comment from a friend of mine (who runs this wonderfully blog here: CarlyBeth’s Blog), who asked me how she would react in that situation. This gave me a perfect excuse for practice writing.

The following was my response.

Well, I haven’t seen you in a while, so I can only guess:

Carly sat back, tucked in the corner of the couch, laptop resting lazily on her knees. The wind from the fan resting on the window-sill blew lightly, flitting her tossed-up hair across her face, no matter what measures she took to stop it.

It was a quiet, lazy day — one she was grateful to have after the kind of week she just endured. As she brushed the hair off her forehead once again, she sighed and looked secretly over the top of her computer screen, smiling at the sight of Adam cooing softly to himself, playing with the old toys she had set out for him.

He was the neighbors boy, and at four years old, he was a surprisingly easy watch. Carly didn’t care either way. It just meant more money for her, which was never a bad thing.

She went back to reading the words on her screen, getting lost in whatever quiet revelations they brought her. Her hair fell again and snaked it’s way across her face. It felt like spiders and she crinkled her forehead in disgust.

“Dammit,” she said, brushing her hair back up again. She closed her laptop and pushed herself up to turn off the annoying, insolent fan. And then she stopped dead in her tracks.

Adam was there, his back to her, rigid, standing in awe as his voice through the fan was distorted into robot whispers. Carly’s heart skipped and pounded in her chest as she watched his curious tiny hand reach for the shining spinning blades that gave him his polyphonic tone.

“No!” she screamed, lurching off the couch so hard her laptop clattered and broke off the coffee table. Adam looked back with that sinister, ignorant, beautiful grin. “Don’t touch–”

Her last words were cut off with the wet buzz of the fan. The motor whirred and slowed for a minute and was drowned out by the scream. He turned, clutching his left hand, mouth opened in shocked disassociation, and for a moment, Carly couldn’t tell if that scream — that awful scream — was his or her own. She felt her face fill with warmth, and her head began to throb. The room spun violently, spinning, churning into oblivion, and as Adam rushed toward her flinging wet gobs of red across the white couch, Carly’s hands slowly climbed up her face, pulling at her skin.

“It’s not real,” she said as the room began to darken. Her vision faded, glaucomic irises penciling, now just tiny dots of indiscernible light. “It’s not…” Carly swayed, unable to focus; unable to breath. “…real.”

She fell backward then as her consciousness faded, landing softly in the crook of the splattered couch.