Blogadda has been doing a fun thing on twitter called #AddaTales. It’s gotten quite a bit of steam (the good kind) and the outcome is anything as far as imagination can go. It works like this
Blogadda puts a prompt out like so : Each person runs with a thread and others join in with their turns of a story that’s weaved and it is a free for all, and multiple stories develop. The thing here is there is no control for the most part for anyone. Which has its advantages though, coz it’s also about being versatile and allowing for what the story (pitch/line/twist/life) throws at you. If and when you find someone like a partner or a co-author, then well, you have a story that at least TWO people like 😉
We’ve done stiff like this before on twitter, but it was a close set of folks and their story writing ran parallel.
The timings doesn’t work for EST coz well, its morning hustle and trying to make sense and make a story coherently while juggling boiling pasta and deciding if the yogurt has past its expiry date and also yelling at the kid to dress warmly – doesn’t really work for the writer in us. Unfortunately.
But I wanted to shift the prompt’s medium and here I am. Typing furiously:
There lay a pink glove.
It was just another solitary pink glove, laying on teh bench, partically covered by the soft snow that was beginning to pick up pace all around us.
Normally, it would have been okay, but this one made him freeze in his steps, and not just because he was poorly undressed for the weather. He went closer to have a look. It was an ordinary glove. One that folks wear when the weather turns biting cold like it does more so often in this side of their world. He bent slowly and picked it up.
It was a small size. More a kid’s glove coz of the way it was made, than an adult’s.
Unless the adult was being a kid. he smiled at his own joke, coz well, he smiled again dryly, who else is around here to laugh with? His attention now on the glove that lay small on his large oversized and well worn leather gloves on his large oversized well worn palms below, he peered at the inside. No tag. That’s even strange. His brows furrowed, he debated on scratching that tiny itch forming at his temples, but that would involve removing the glove and feeling the cold to remove the sparse hat that covered his bald head.
He looked up.
His gaze swept all around the grounds. The place was flat. With a few firs that skirted the edge of the ground that was once filled with people, the place was barren. To his right stood a lone gym. The kind that kids would monkey all over during the summers that once were.
No one in sight.
Not a soul.
Not a color, except for the white that fell heavily on the brown below and the dark green that rose vertical at the edges.
His breath was now beginning to form little wisps of smoke in front and he knew it was only going to get heavy and cold. He shuffled just a bit as to not let the snow bury his shoes under. Those were the only pair he had and will ever have for a long while.
He looked at the pink glove in his hand and sighed.
Gingerly he placed it back on the bench.
He looked up and for a minute there it looked like he heard a gurgle in the wind. The kind that reminds one of a gurgling cheeky child playing peek-a-boo with an adult who was pretending to find the child.
He smiled at that memory.
Looking down, he realized the glove was skewed. He bent down again, and adjusted it so it lay in the exact same angle when he first saw it. It was important. The landscape demanded that things were returned to their original places.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
He murmured to himself. A line his mother had made them repeat every evening while they cleaned up. They lit the fireplace, and he and his brother and little sister hurried around the living room, picking up books, toys, scarves and little pieces of bread and cereal that somehow found a way under the couches.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
He remembered the last pick up before the whole town got buried under an avalanche. The avalanche that only he survived. Coz he was the only one who ran out in time to climb the fir tree in his yard.
He sat on that tree with his sister’s pink glove in his hand watching the snow cover everything he once knew.
The End.
