Folks, I’m trying to write again. I have a spectacularly disastrous, illustrious in the worst way possible career when it comes to writing fiction, but dammit, I can’t stop trying. If I can just get something, anything produced that is halfway decent, be it a short story, novella, full blown novel, hell, even a Chinese parable, I’ll probably feel satisfied and move on. But, until then, here we are.
What follows is the very beginning of my attempt to once again write something that is not akin to a five-year-old’s homework assignment “write a story. use complete sentences.” Wish me luck.
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Donnie was almost asleep when felt it. He had drifted into that hazy state of semi-consciousness that was as precarious as standing on the edge of the cliff, not quite snoozing but not quite aware of his surroundings either. The state wherein an intrusive pseudo-nightmare could jolt you back to reality: an imagined fall, a charging animal, a gunshot even. But this was none of those things. What Donnie felt was even realer than those terrors.
As was always the case, his left arm had fallen off the side of the bed when he started to drift off. No matter where he started, he’d always travel to the left side of the bed, roll onto his stomach, and the arm would slide right off. He often woke up unable to move the thing for a few minutes because all the circulation had been sealed off. It felt like a lead weight, and several times had made him think he was having a heart attack, or had gotten the thing amputated and not realized it.
At this point in his slumber, though, he had not yet lost feeling. Which is why he felt it. At the tip of his fingers, a soft rush of air, no more than a whisper of a breeze, but concentrated enough to have only come from a mouth. Someone was blowing on his fingers. That, or the can of air he kept in his study and used to blow the dust out of his keyboard had wandered down the hallway, into his room, and begun to operate itself.
The breath he barely registered. When you fall into that state of semi-consciousness, it takes more than a soft tickle of air to bring you back to the real world. But when a hand emerged from the same place as the breath, grabbed Donnie by the wrist and yanked, that was certainly enough to wake him up.
