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Writing > Users > Elizabeth L > 2012

Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction


The following is a piece of writing submitted by Elizabeth L on October 8, 2012

Remembering

Breathe in, breathe out.

For over four thousand years, it's the same old tune. My breath is the clock that measures the ages, and I know that when the time comes to stop its ticking, something will be lost. Maybe something, maybe nothing, but it will be lost.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I remember the little mud-chinked hut by the maple tree creek. I wonder if it's still standing or if it has been scavenged for the fires of the wanderers who followed me across the wild grass plains.

Breathe in, breathe out.

What of the leopards? They were many and mean when I found them, and then they were few and mean when the rest of the two-legs found the glittering rocks in my caves.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Edison was on to something, with his glowing glass. I told him so, and he laughed at me and said, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." I just stared at my overalls and remembered the hundreds of places they'd been since Strauss and Davis found their own opportunity in denim.

Breathe in, breathe out.

It wasn't much, but it was beautiful. The rugged rises in the land, the jagged peaks lined like the open mouth of a saber-tooth tiger. The Yellow River never has been truly yellow, any more than the Yangtze is brown except after a storm. The Samurai knew. But they've been gone a long time now too.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I knew there wasn't cheese on the moon long before they built their space bottles to make sure. But I still told her, my darling midget with the crystal eyes - I still told her well into her seven hundred years that it was cheese. Warm, golden, fragrant. I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the cold rock that circles our Earth.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Maybe the Google-Apple war seems like something new, something clean and bloodless. But it is driven by the same thirst that drove Ashoka the Great and Kalinga to each others' throats, back before India was just India. They say it was the bloodiest battle in the empire's history - I say that is a kind statement.

Breathe in, breathe out.

My daughter stares at my scribbles and asks me why, why I am I remembering? I tell her someday the world will lose something, or maybe nothing, and someday there will be none like us who remember it all.

Breathe in...

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