A/N: This is a bit of a project. Inspired by 2 things, the 500 word story competition (it's for kids but i wanted to see how difficult it is) and also more prominently 'Under Milk Wood' by Dylan Thomas. It's very different to most fanfics, but I wanted to write something in the same way as in the play.
For those that don't know Under Milk Wood is a play for voices, where the listener sees through the minds and interactions of the people in a small welsh fishing village. It lasts for 1 day, starting at night and ending at night. If you have no idea about the play watch the 2014 BBC version with Michael Sheen in and let yourself get lost in the words and feelings. It is simply beautiful.
If you like this then please review. (or equally if you don't). Not sure about whether to continue with it or leave it as the prologue alone.
To begin at the beginning.
The cold, brisk, damp-filled night of the autumn scene, where the moisture breathes through the rustling red leaves on the rough bark, is illuminated by few, hazy, stuttering lamps and the warm, basking glow from bedroom windows. It is midweek, quiet, where no footsteps tread except the echoes of ghosts of footsteps before, the treaded in, worn out, weathered routes through the courtyards of the majestic college halls. The gently-lapping calm as the branches of thorns and brambles and bushes drink at the edges of the starlit sleeping lake.
Most students are sleeping. The studious, the pompous, the quiet, the bolshy, the alternative and the ever neat even while in slumber, the couples, the lonely, the i won't see you after tomorrow and the I hope you'll still be here in the mornings. The scholars rest soundly as their prodigies doze is interrupted by their adolescent worries and stress.
Open your eyes as you alone see past their walls. Delve deep into their dreams and thoughts, their rights, their wrongs, their words they cannot utter and their words they utter but cannot mean.
See now. The velvet blanket sky, speckled with glinting starfall with smoky wisps of cloud pushing past from darkened horizon to darkened horizon. The stone masonry of the trying to seem old buildings betrayed by the lack of weathering. See now into the dorms of Baker Hall and the freshmen with fluttering of eyelids.
Listen to the humming of the glowing green blackness burning sign above the bar, quiet in the midweek night. The campus turns in it's sleep. The darkest moment is the hour before dawn. Even the alarms clocks are sleeping.
Wait here. Wait for the moment when breath is stirred into the life infront of you. Wait here as their voices fill your head.
Wait for the time to roll by.
Wait for the songs and the tap-tap-tapping of pens on desks. Wait for the sarcasm and the flicking of pages in the thick battered books. Wait for the thundering of feet, the notes flowing from souls.
Reach in and feel their thoughts.
Is it getting louder now?
Reach further. Go past their eyelids. Dodge through the white noise until the lines become unmuddled, unfuddled.
Is it getting louder now?
Iron out the creases and feel the grooves in the track of their mind. Don't let the needle slip off the record. Let it crackle into life.
Breathe in now.
Let the crystal clear thoughts fill your mind.
Choose between the neat blonde thread or the red swirling dye or the dark pencil thin straw. See the views of Barden University students through their own perception.
Listen now.