This is one of the shortest ones I've had for a while, but eh. I need to keep in mind that they don't all NEED to average about 2,000 words per prompt, since they come in a slew and that's a whole heckin' lot of material for you readers to page through.
June 27th, 2021
Rena sighed contentedly to herself, nestling back into the yielding give of the canvas hammock and looking up at the sky, streaked with a thousand shades subtly darkening into indigo at the eastern horizon, where the first few faint stars glimmered. Fireflies swirled in slow, lazy orbits above the grass and retrieved junk in her backyard, their greenish-yellow light mimicking the spangled tapestry soon to fill the heavens as they buzzed like tiny, mobile sparks across her yard. The humid heat of Hinamizawa had drawn back a little with the setting sun, leaving a pleasant, tepid warmth that ghosted over her skin with a featherlike caress, leaving her perfectly comfortable, perfectly content, for this to go on forever.
Paper rustled as Keiichi-kun turned a page in his book and continued reading. He had a good voice, actually, which should come as no surprise when Rena remembered his club nickname. Keiichi-kun knew on an instinctive level all the cues and dips that would make his spectators lean in, gasp, exalt. He could work a crowd like no one else Rena had ever seen, and even if she was a crowd of one, she was still an enraptured audience.
And this tale was certainly enthralling. Witches and magic, an island mystery-murder involving an entire extended wealthy family…betrayal and so many deductive twists and turns that only a dedicated mystery novel enthusiast could keep track of them all, never mind name them. Keiichi-kun, who had grown up with his mother's mystery novels scattered about the house, was perfectly happy to explain the logical mind-games and torturous puzzles to her in between his reading, although Rena's sleepy guesses often came up correct. She may not know these patterns of logic, but she knew the patterns of people, and her intuition was almost as keen as telepathy, sometimes.
This was the twilight chapter of the story, the last arc, the setting sun on the horizon. Despite the building excitement in Keiichi-kun's words and the mounting tension in the story, Rena still found herself sleepy, gently swaying and rocking in her hammock. Twilight might be when the curtain of the story was starting to draw closed, but that implied rest, finality, as much as it did an ominous looming of darkness on the horizon.
Rest in peace, indeed.
Rena had heard those words before, those words of Western reverence. They were said over the dead by Christians, put on their tombstone tablets. Rest in peace, because they buried rather than burned their bodies with the belief that the soul would eventually rejoin them, and a soul could not rejoin that which was burned to ash. As they piled dirt onto their solid coffins, they wished that the dead would sleep in peace until that time, remaining undisturbed by curiosity or desecration until their body and soul became one once more.
But something of that peaceful rest crept over her here, now, swinging gently in her hammock as her eyelids fluttered against the fiery sky and Keiichi-kun's voice rose and fell beside her, the warmth of summer rolling over her like a thick, downy duvet blanket. The world seemed to stop whirling around her and just was, with every drowsy second taking an eternity to slide into the next and yet not a moment of time passing at all. Despite the drifting sparks of the fireflies, everything around her seemed like a still pool, and the slightest breath, the slightest movement, would send ripples eddying out into the world.
Rena didn't want that. Insensibly, she didn't want it, felt that disturbing this deep and sleepy dark-tinted pool would ruin something in her, in the air, in the quiet contemplation of her spirit. Not terribly, not painfully, just…ruinous. If she stirred, the magic of this moment would slip right through her fingers, leaving her grasping after its memory with vague and groping thoughts, unable to even articulate what she sought.
She breathed in the green, rich scent of the world around her, and closed her eyes, letting Keiichi-kun's voice and the magic it wove for her wash over her mind like the slow, steady waves of the ocean.
8.17 AM, USA Central Time
If you like my work(s), please consider supporting my book! The Business of Creation is a fluffy and wholesome collection of short stories in which the gods' process of creating their fantasy world is examined from the very moment of its beginning, and you can support it by moseying on over to my profile page and the link there to buy an electronic copy from one of several sites, or by just searching "Business of Creation by Anna Marcotte" on the web. You can leave a five-star review to boost the book's prominence in its category, if you don't want to spend money, but the more profits this book brings in, the more time (and less stress) I have to work on fanfiction!
