Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

River

The trees swayed poignantly in submission to the beckoning wind. All around, the air was abhorrent with warmth, thickness and nauseating humidity. To either side of the riverbank, a scene not unlike prehistoric Earth could be seen: the big trees were seemingly forced, extruded, from the ground, only to serve as kings to the conspicuously flamboyant undergrowth which was below.

There was a sickeningly alluring silence all around. Everything was still – the silvery water, the rampant vegetation – even the floating specks of sunlight in the air seemed to be frozen in time. The long stretches of still water ran on endlessly, forming a lattice of waterways which would prove imposing to even the greatest of sailors. Trees swayed, water crept, forming a corrugated skin; even the grass beneath a stone would jiggle in its anxious ways, yet not a sound was to be heard.

The lack of noise was, however, not a befalling of peace; no, it was nothing less than a tawdry replacement of sound, a mask of calm concealing a brewing grasp of unstoppable intention and hidden motives. This was an unnatural silence, one which was to be shunned from rather than allured to. Only authentic fear would be felt if one ever was to even contemplate ensconcing here; fear was perhaps the only true ephemera which existed in this twisted, silent river.

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