365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

153. Shaping Up

153. Shaping Up: Write something that makes a shape on the page...ie: a circle, a heart, a square, etc.

The ink dripped onto the page. It slid down her slender fingertips, welled up at each digit, and finally released into the chill air. Each ball of black, syrupy liquid splattered onto the page and seeped outward, making irregular and sometimes spiky shapes, the edges of which faded into the thick paper.

She was bleeding and her blood was ink.

Her eyes were closed, but she was not without seeing. She saw things inside of her: swirling images and half-thought ideas and things she could barely comprehend but that she channeled. Her skin had been rubbed raw by some unknown feeling. It was the same that caused the ink to seep from her fingertips, sometimes in flowing slowly, and sometimes bursting with vitality of some fancy.

She was an authoress.

Beneath the thin skin of her eyelids, her eyeballs moved frantically, as if to capture everything that moved behind her mind. The spatters of ink began to take shape, to wiggle and slide across the grain of the paper. They were forming different shapes: curves and straight lines.

She was writing a story.

As more ink gathered, she grew fainter. The emotions drained out of her in the effort, until she was connected irrevocably to the shapes on the paper, for the contained her life force. They controlled her, sustained her, tortured her... She had to continue, for she was now linked.

The ink formed words.

So many words! Words of different meanings that, when sliding next to other words, formed different meanings. Each stroke of every letter cost infinite pain; they took something she would never gain again, unless by the same method.

Her hand fluttered, the ink ceased, and the book was closed.

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed." -Ernest Hemingway