This was the half of my NaNoWriMo experience that failed miserably, word-count wise, but recently I've decided to whip it into shape. It's rather short, actually--any comments are welcome, but ones about characters or plot are reciprocated with cookies.
WILLIAM
William was eating lunch when he died.
It was a summer’s day, bright and hot. No one dared speak, but instead sat, heads drooped, round little plates of tin and listened to the horses swish their tails at flies that almost certainly didn’t exist. He had been sitting there, fork speared into the meat on his mess kit, and something had hit the back of his head.
Death was a simple thing- not at all painful, or sad, or lonely as he had expected. It was something sharp and fast, something like a rock. And then, he had fallen asleep--or what one could call sleep.
He couldn’t possibly comprehend that that something like a rock had actually been a bullet traveling over two hundred miles an hour from a Union officer on horseback. A lucky shot. A little bit of metal lodged in his brain that had hit just the right spot.
But unlike most deaths, he woke up.
He woke up standing in a marsh with the scum to his knees, all a-tangle in the droopy branches of a willow tree. It smelled faintly of rotting wood. Mosquitoes were buzzing rather loudly, but--almost a blessing--he couldn’t feel a thing.
His hands grasped for bank, but found none. He pulled on the tree and lifted himself out of the bog, sinking slightly into the earth where he landed, the roots of the tree sticking out like ancient limbs.
It was here that he realized that he had no feet.
He had not yet realized he was dead.
[ANEZKA]
There were exactly four hundred and sixty three little purple flowers painted onto the woodwork above Anezka’s head. She had counted them, being careful not to lose track when her mother yanked her head with the brush or told her to move this way or that. And when she could no longer see the flowers, she started once more--counting by twos, threes.
The stool she was sitting upon was crooked and rocked back and forth when her mother tugged at her hair. “I will make you beautiful,” she was saying. “I will make you so beautiful that they will pay six hogs for you.”
There was another little purple flower that she had missed somewhere to the left. Four hundred sixty four.
“I will make you so beautiful that they will give me a silk purse filled with silver.”
And yet another. Four hundred sixty five.
“I will make you so beautiful that they will throw themselves on the ground, weeping and saying, ‘Come! Have all we have! What we have is yours…’”
It was at this point, usually, that her mother ceased to make sense.
“I will make you so beautiful.”
And this was exactly the problem--Anezka didn’t think she was beautiful. She was a skinny little rag-clothes girl, with dirty yarn for hair and faded dresses and bare feet with rings of brown in the nails. She was not Six Hog beautiful or Silk Purse beautiful or Idol Worship beautiful. She was simply Anezka.
Her mother took the brush from her hair and set it on the floor at her feet, bristles pointing to the little purple flowers. Her bony fingers began to run against Anezka’s scalp, cold and sharp. Her hands twisted this way and that, making waves, making braids, lumping together to make one mass of who-knew-what at the nape of her neck.
She left Anezka sitting on the crooked stool, leaning to the left and went out to the garden, humming something. She got progressively louder, so that Anezka could still hear her through the window when she bent down to pluck a rose from its thorns.
She brought it back into the room- all red and round, except for a single wilted petal. This was plucked away. It swirled in the air six times before resting on the ground, dinner for rats or the broom.
The rose was held indecisively above Anezka’s head for a few moments before her mother placed it, finally, in a little knot above her ear. Anezka took the hand mirror from the loop in her apron. She thought it looked strange, alien.
Her mother brought from her trunks a little brush and powder, inhuman pink at the ends. She dabbed it against her daughter’s cheeks and stood back, proud.
Anezka looked in the mirror once more. She looked beetroot.
“You will make me proud, Anezka.”
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