Fiction "Bones" | Looking for Artist
This is an excerpt from a fiction piece written for the project. It has not been edited for proof reading yet. If possible, Chemicalwordsmith would like an artist to draw a cover picture for this story. If you're interested then please send an ask or contact Chemicalwordsmith directly! It will not count towards your page count. There will be various characters featured in this piece.
Hello! this is what I've written so far for the short story for the book.
The girl lay back on her neatly made up bed and stared at the ceiling. It was already 8 AM and she’d miss the bus to college, but she didn’t really care. There was too much noise and too many people in the bustling London college that she attended, and she enjoyed an occasional day off to unwind and relax. ‘I guess being able to skip is a perk of having parents who don’t really give a shit,’ she thought as she stared at the intricately painted autumn leaves that she had painstakingly concealed every inch of her ceiling with.
The small room was painted in shades of brown and green and contained a single bed and a small desk for her computer. A great big cabinet took up most of the northern wall of the bedroom, and was filled with various items relating to the girl’s myriad interests. One shelf was lined with various Pokémon merchandise that she had accumulated over the years with money stolen from her father’s wallet during one of his drunken stupors. Another shelf contained a selection of small robots she had designed and built herself. There was one shelf of items though that she valued most.
Her bone collection.
She loved the bones; she had been collecting them for years, searching parks and wooded areas across the city, as well as travelling by train in to the countryside to explore the bountiful and untouched fields and forests and heathlands, all of which were ripe for the pickings of the skeletal remains of their mammalian, reptilian and avian inhabitants. She found a strange, morose beauty in the pale smoothness of the skull, the angular flexibility of the spine, the complexity of the arrangement of the tiny bones in the limbs.
The girl shook out her green-dyed hair and sat up on her bed. She found her hat, patterned with the face of a catfish, and pulled it down over her ears. She then pulled on her hoodie, three sizes too big for her. It made her feel less nervous about leaving the house to have some form of protection against others touching her bare skin. She loathed physical contact. The very thought of it made her stomach turn and her face turn pale. The girl didn’t think that she would ever be able to maintain a stable romantic relationship, not when touch was such an issue for her.
She picked up her mp3 player, a small, cheap thing that had been the only present she had received for her seventeenth birthday, and plugged in her earphones. She could hear screaming and shouting coming from downstairs and resolved to climb out of the window rather than face her drunken, neglectful parents, both of whom were locked in a heated argument about something or another. At the sound of smashing glass she picked up her backpack and made a hasty retreat.
She climbed down the mass of crawling plants that covered the side of her house a hopped down on to the front lawn. It was overgrown and weed-ridden, never once cared for during their residence at their house in South London. The girl kicked at a mound of dirt in the corner of the lawn and examined the contents of the hole. As she had suspected, the body of her cat had decayed sufficiently for her to collect his bones. Tigger, he had been called. He was one of the few living things that she’d ever touched with her bare hands. She had been heartbroken when he had died two years previously. She could now display him in pride of place in her cabinet. Her parents never went in her room so they wouldn’t care.
She carefully lifted the skeleton in to a plastic bag and put it in her rucksack, being careful to pile the mound up again, moving the displaced weeds back on top of it before moving on out of the garden. Her destination as she walked along the gravel pavement past the houses with their clandestinely pulled curtains behind their grimy windows, with just enough of a gap at the side of many of them for an inquisitive eye to keep watch on the street beyond, was a small wooded area nestled amongst the built-up residential area. Here she hoped to make a few more discoveries for her collection, and to escape in to nature, just for a little while. She felt much more at home within the trees than she did surrounded by concrete and prying eyes. Her footsteps echoed as she walked down the sullen, silent street towards her place of solace.
To be continued when i actually write the rest.