#wpdl: excerpt

[writingbyricochet]

I can see you waitin' down the hall from me And I could see you up against the wall with me And what would you do, baby, if you only knew? That I can see you

Taylor Swift, "I Can See You"

transcript + tag list under the cut

He was nowhere to be seen when she stepped out of the elevator. It was not until she rounded a corner that she observed him at the end of the corridor, leaning casually against the wall and just about to light a cigarette. The flame flickered for a second before he cupped his hand protectively around it, only to then reveal the wafting smoke that crowned his head in curls that matched his hair. The gesture was so quotidian, so ordinary, it should have been impossible for Sophie to find anything fascinating about it. Yet from her vantage point standing down the hall, she admired him the same way Michelangelo must have admired David. 

A/N: If it wasn't obvious, this is the "I Can See You"-inspired paragraph!

Tag list (ask for +/-): @canofpeaches @wayoftheghost @jacquesfindswritingandadvice @writeblrsupport @wip-nook @macabremoons @original-writing

[writingbyricochet]

transcript + tag list under the cut

She turned away from him and walked to the end of the porch, pressing her hands onto the railing to try to stop herself from feeling, but it was a hopeless effort. Her throat seized up as her vision blurred—she was furious now. What was he thinking? Didn’t he realize how she would react? Sophie blinked hard, expelling the tears from her eyes, but before they even splashed onto the wooden rail, she wrenched herself away from the railing and flew down the stairs to the sidewalk, hiding her face. She could only think of the gardens, her sacred grounds of retreat, where everything seemed to make sense and all was well. At first she walked, but when she heard Eddie following her and calling her name, she broke into a run. Running like she always did, like she always had, from her father dying, from Sam dying, and now from the thought of the last man she had loved dying too.

Tag list (ask for +/-): @canofpeaches @wayoftheghost @jacquesfindswritingandadvice @wip-nook @original-writing @writeblrsupport

[writingbyricochet]

Find the Word Tag

I was tagged by @worldofthraeia, thanks for the tag!

breath, between heaven and earth

From her bedchamber, Laesia observed the thick blanket of white that had settled on the western garden over night. It had landed light and fluffy like the puffs of her chilly breath when she exhaled into the biting air. Laesia smiled with a shiver when a breeze wafted through the window and she hastened to close it, retreating to the warmth of her bed.

concern, where paradise died and lived

“I wanted him to understand why you’re acting the way you are,” Lillian argued. “He’s infatuated with you, can’t you tell? And all you did at dinner was mope and chastise and act like a shrew—” “No—no, that’s what you think. Because you always do this, you’re always needling and poking your nose in places that don’t concern you, saying things to provoke me and get a rise out of others—”

blue, between heaven and earth

She pulled out her necklace. "This should be proof enough for you. The House of Durecane's royal emblem, made of pure mirellette." She held it out for the men to inspect. In the characteristic blue-silver light that it flickered onto the sentries’ faces when they held their torches closer to it, Laesia saw some of the doubt slip from their expressions. Every Velitovan knew genuine mirellette when they saw it—and that only very select members of society could afford such a jewel.

dust, between heaven and earth

Laesia shrugged off her traveling cloak (no—her only cloak, now) and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. She inspected her skirt, which she had been wearing the entire journey. The hem was browned with dirt and dust, and the whole garment clung to her rather disgustingly. She knew she looked filthy, for she felt the same.

Open tag to anyone who wants to play! Your words are fear, polish, panic, and tremble.

[writingbyricochet]

Find the Word Tag

Thanks for the tag, @lexiklecksi!

petrified

not found

moonlit

not found

kingdom; in the light

"I've told you; Nestoron is much better. He’s taught scores of young healers and is the very best in this kingdom, far more capable than I. Don't you want to learn from the best?" she asked. 

sauce; where paradise died and lived

Sophie did mean it, at least a little, but trust Anne to at least make her feel a bit ashamed about it. The moment was quickly forgotten when they passed through the kitchen—though Mrs. Yamaguchi had departed the house already, she had left on the still-warm stove a full pan of rice tossed with soy beans, carrots, and green onions. The mound was topped with fried eggs and slices of Spam cooked in soy sauce. As a child, Sophie had found the cuisine of Anne’s family peculiar, but her mouth watered now at the smell of it. Years of eating Mrs. Yamaguchi’s food had elevated her palate, to the point that she almost never came by without an empty stomach. The Yamaguchis were perpetual feeders.

forgotten; between heaven and earth

Honestly earned? Had he forgotten she was right there when Varden paid him that first day she arrived?

Tagging @rudeneles @sugar-phoenix @orphicpoieses @moonscribbler with the words ache, crimson, glass, adore, and whistle xx

[writingbyricochet]

transcript + complete excerpt + taglist under the cut

“What was so important that we had to rush out of there?” Sophie asked, glancing backward at the white house where Eddie’s family remained. 

“You heard me,” Eddie said. “I’m a Marine. We’ve got a schedule to keep. You’ll see.”

“So you’re not going to tell me where we’re going, I understand how it is.”

“You’ll like it,” Eddie promised. “Don’t worry.”

He had never disappointed her before, so Sophie chose to believe him—she had trusted him with his life not a half a year ago and he had delivered then. If he didn’t now, it would be rather ridiculous, she reasoned.  

So they continued up the street. Whatever Eddie had in mind, Sophie was glad for where she was, at this time. 

Golden hour was beginning.

In Honolulu, it signaled the time when swimmers got out of the surf and parties lit bonfires. During the war, golden hour had come to be the most precious part of Sophie’s day, because it was the last light the island would see until morning. Golden hour meant the blackout period would begin not long after, and she’d always thought it was then that the entire island might as well have not existed. If extraterrestrials ever visited earth after curfew, Hawaii would have missed them; aliens would have never known the islands were even there for how dark they became. Sophie was sure there was nothing quite as unsettling as that darkness, that sensation of invisibility. It only made her feel small and inconsequential. 

Every so often, a rickety car would come down the road. It announced itself first with its blinding headlights, and then with its shaky carriage and laboring engine. Sophie and Eddie would stop to let it pass, the driver would wave at them, and they would begin walking again. Once the noise of the car faded, the only sound around would be that of their footsteps scuffing along, and the constant droning of the night critters, mainly crickets. 

Eventually, Eddie turned them off the main road and down a dirt path into a forested area next to the fields that dominated the landscape. Sophie stopped short at the side of the road skeptically. Only a few yards down the path and it dissolved into an unknowable wood, the kind that hid foul and nefarious creatures in fairy tales. 

“Are you sure about this?” There wasn’t much that Sophie could see before her that seemed inviting.

“I’ve been down here a million times,” Eddie said. “I’ll go first, just follow me.”

Sophie did so, matching Eddie’s confident stride with her hesitant walk. The trail wound through the trees in tight curves. If she hadn’t been put off so much by the fading light, Sophie would have admired the way the path was dotted with wildflowers and the height of the trees. It was a nature altogether new to her. Everything she knew in Honolulu was so picture-perfect and manicured; even the few hiking trails she was familiar with were carefully marked and cleared for easy walking. This forest was all unbridled wilderness, seemingly untouched by man and left to its own devices to proliferate how it wished—in fallen logs covered in springy moss, slinging branches replete with late summer leaves, creeping emerald ivy, and grass so overgrown it hunched over, rather than stood tall, over a moist earth Sophie could smell. Before she had come here, she had only ever imagined such a habitat.

The silence was not as noticeable as they made their way through the undergrowth. Twigs and leaves dried out by the August sun carpeted the ground underfoot, so their steps were alternately punctuated by snaps and crisps, the sounds of the nature succumbing to the path they trod. Sophie wished she and Eddie were back on the main road. They made more noise here, but it only seemed like it would make them easy prey for some maligner in the gloom. To relax her nerves, she posed the question she had been pondering for several minutes now.

“How do you know this place, Eddie?”

An unruly part of the trail distracted him and a beat passed before he could respond. “My neighbor Sam showed it to me when I was a kid. We used to come here—watch out—we used to come here every Saturday after all of our chores were done so we wouldn’t be given anything else to do. It was his idea,” Eddie said, at Sophie’s amused, reproachful expression to hearing about his boyhood antics. “He was always the one to think of how to make trouble, not me.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she teased. An eye-level branch, the one he had just warned her about, stuck out in the middle of the walkway; Sophie swept it aside impatiently. Eddie had paused a pace ahead of her, waiting. “Where is he now?” she asked. 

His brow pinched slightly as his eyes dropped to the ground and Sophie knew the answer at once. That awful pain filled her with regret; she wished she had not spoken at all. Without a word, Eddie pushed forward, Sophie burning and shriveling inside at her blunder. By the time she made herself catch up to him, there was nothing else to do but take her thoughtlessness back.

“You don’t have to—“ she began. 

“He was killed in ’44,” Eddie interrupted shortly, turning around to face her. She stopped abruptly and stared at him, helpless and surprised. He raised the toe of his foot, then tapped it down once on the ground. “France.”

The crickets chirped, taunting her. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Eddie looked down at his shoe. He had pressed it down to make an imprint in the dirt; now he shrugged. “He was a good man,” he said simply. Then he smiled ruefully. “I don’t know if I would have introduced you two, though.”

“Why not?”

“You’d like him too much,” Eddie said, grinning and moving on.

Relieved the awkwardness had passed, Sophie followed him. The undergrowth was relentless here. There wasn’t a moment that that Sophie could take her eyes off the trail, lest a wayward branch or root get in her way. Eddie tramped through it all seemingly without a care in the world. Sometimes they talked, but mostly they concentrated on the path. Once the ruggedness had lessened somewhat, Sophie could again think of the complete unknowable quality of the trail she followed, and where they were. Now there was not even the trail’s roughness to distract her.

“It’s awfully quiet, Eddie,” Sophie murmured, slightly too spooked by the silence to speak louder than a hushed tone. 

“I know,” he said. In contrast to the jitters wracking Sophie, he seemed completely unbothered. No, it was more than that—he was at ease. Calm. 

The sun had fully set now, dousing everything in blue. They pulled out their flashlights but the circles of illumination somehow only made Sophie feel more on edge. The brightness was even more of reminder of the relative darkness around them. Everything was a shadow; no detail of their surroundings could be seen now. Sophie glanced aside at Eddie, then looked away quickly when he returned her look. 

“You doin’ okay?”

“I’m okay,” Sophie lied. It was childish to be scared of the dark. Sensing her anxiety, Eddie found her hand and held it in his. 

Finally, Eddie stopped. Click went his flashlight, and he almost disappeared in the shadows that instantly cloaked him. His profile was just a black outline with a deep indigo behind him, but when he spoke, Sophie could hear his smile. “Turn off your flashlight, and it’ll be just around this corner here,” he said, nodding at a bend about ten yards in front of them. Sophie shined her light in the direction he indicated and couldn’t see anything that could be of interest in the direction, only a continuation of the grass and more trees. She sucked in her breath with no small amount of apprehension. 

“You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you? Did you get one of your brothers to hide behind there to jump me?”

“I said you would like it, didn’t I?” Eddie reminded her. “How ‘bout we go together. Come on.”

This was an acceptable proposal. Sophie turned her light off, plunging the trail into the semidarkness. That didn’t seem to bother Eddie, who led the way without any sign of hesitation, an impressive feat, Sophie thought. All along the way, she felt the long grass and stems swiping at her shins and feet, threatening to trip an unfamiliar traveler such as herself. They took small steps as a result, but they came upon the bend soon enough as Sophie’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. She could still see nothing that indicated what could be so special about what lay around the curve. It was an assumption Sophie was never more glad to be proven wrong.

The path opened up to a wide pasture. It would have been identical to all the other fields Sophie had seen in the past few days—a vast canvas of wild grass bracketed with towering trees that infused the air with that fresh scent of pine Sophie had come to love—except this field was alive. Scattered across the grass was a series of yellow twinkling Sophie had never seen before. They melted in and out of the dark expanse like sparks of a candle dissolving into smoke, flitting back and forth as they rose higher and faded into nothingness. There were dozens of them, disappearing as quickly as they reappeared somewhere else. Fireflies, Sophie thought somewhere in the back of her mind. She had read about them in books before, but there were none of them in Hawaii. Now that they were in front of her, she didn’t want to look away even for a moment. How strange that something so small could create a sight so mesmerizing. 

Sophie had only ever known one other comparable sight, and that was when she had driven out to Hanauma Bay with her father to observe the Milky Way in her second year of high school. She remembered that night well; it was difficult to forget the acute sense of insignificance one felt when standing under what seemed like all of the cosmos. Now in a strange manner, Sophie felt the opposite. The universe was not an unreachable, incomprehensible infinity here. It was right before her then, surrounding her so she could have touched its marvels with her hand, if she had been quick enough to catch one. Not at all removed from its awesomeness, she was actually within it—part of it. The sky had fallen to the earth, and far from it being the end of the world, Sophie could only think of how lucky she was to be in a place so wondrous. If the place had been filled with fairies, she would have felt the same sense of magic. 

“You’ve never seen them in real life, have you?” Eddie interrupted her reverie with a grin. 

She shook her head. “You knew they were going to be here?”

“Always are,” Eddie said. “In the summer. I used to come here with my dad to catch them in a jar. Then before I joined up with the Civilian Conservation Corps and left home, I took the kids.”

“But you didn’t today,” Sophie pointed out. 

“I will,” he said. “I wanted to show it to you just on our own.”

Warmth flooded to Sophie’s face. “I brought you to my park, you bring me to your field, is that it?” she said. The reciprocation was not lost on her.

“That’s it,” he agreed. “What do you think about it?”

What could she say? Nothing that would be adequate, that Sophie knew. She thought of how many memories he must have had here, with Sam, with his father, with his younger siblings when they had been even younger—those fleeting, special moments that she knew were even more precious for having happened before the war, before everything had changed. That was such a long time ago; everyone she knew guarded that part of their life liked it was the greatest treasure in the world, and he had opened his up to her without the slightest indication of doubt. It was a gesture of such great intimacy for which she had not the ability to express her own gratitude. But she must answer him, and only the simplest of declarations would come to her as she looked out at the twinkling lights. 

“It’s beautiful.”

Next to Sophie, Eddie was not following her and taking in the scene in front of them. Instead he only looked at her. “Sure is,” he said after a long moment. 

Notes: I've teased this extract a few times and here it is! It took a long time to get right but I'm finally satisfied with it so I thought I would finally share it as a little Christmas/holiday gift. Hope everyone enjoys and happy holidays!

Tag list: @canofpeaches @wayoftheghost @jacquesfindswritingandadvice @writeblrsupport @wip-nook

[writingbyricochet]

Last Line Tag

Tagged by the lovely @wayoftheghost <3

Sharing a snippet directly inspired by an evil conversation I had with @canofpeaches a few days ago about Where Paradise Died and Lived.

October 11, 1944

Dear Sophie,

I know you’ll be surprised to be receiving this from me. I won’t beat around the bush and pretend to have a better reason why I’m writing––Hillbilly was wounded yesterday. He told me not to say anything so you wouldn’t be worried, but I thought it would only be fair if you knew. (Anyway, we both know he can be an idiot when it comes to these kinds of matters.) He’s been taken to one of the hospital ships for now. I didn’t get a good look at him before they took him off the line, but the men said he was hit three times: once in the hand, side, and below his shoulder. Unfortunately, that’s all I know at the moment. The most important thing is that he's alive. I’ll write again as soon as I have more information.

We’re all just about at the end of our rope, so please pray for us, and that this campaign will be over soon. 

Your friend, 

A. Haldane

Tagging @withlovelunette @mxxnlightwriting @juls-writes

[writingbyricochet]

FIND THE WORD TAG

Thanks for the tag, @sunset-a-story! It's been a while since I've done one of these.

please. between heaven and earth

Reluctantly, Laesia stepped up to the door. She put her hands on the sides of the carriage, and then turned around to her father. "Please, tell me what you're doing—"

drink. where paradise died and lived

Their evenings typically began with making dinner and rehashing the work week, but eventually it devolved into mixing drinks and painting each other’s nails with Cutex while one of them read from that week’s edition of Life and showed them the photographs. Sometimes it felt like they were just playing house as grown women, but Sophie savored the time she spent at Ethel’s place. It was impossible to forget about the war, but at least Sophie could forget about her mother for more than a few hours while she was there. 

stall. between heaven and earth

Despite its small size, Market Street was a well-kept stretch of town, the type Fareisians would describe as "charming." The storefronts were swept and tidy, some of them boasting small flower boxes or other decorations like a chalk board with a short message of welcome scrawled on it. Every door, and many windows, stood open to invite potential customers into its depths. Sephris pointed out some of them: the cobbler, the inn, the school. There were no alternatives here. The only exception seemed to be the grocers. They passed one market at the beginning of the street, there was another at the end of town, and otherwise specialty sellers set up shop with carts and stalls on any part of the road that wasn't already occupied. A handful of shoppers frequented the road with unbothered leisure. It was a far cry from the heart of Fareis, where people always bustled about and there was never a still moment.

eyebrow. between heaven and earth

The jab cut Laesia like a knife. She glared at Sephris. “You’re wrong."

Sephris raised his eyebrows. “Of course you say that, you’re his daughter. But that doesn’t meant he’s beyond criticism.”

“I didn’t say he was.”

“You clearly think it. But on this issue, he didn’t do this area any good. Take it from someone who knows.”

fire. where paradised died and lived

So she was an odd child, compared to the other keiki she grew up with who capitalized on their tropical upbringing. She left luaus before the fire twirlers began so she would not be in the audience if one of them lost their grip, didn’t drink from the raw coconuts that fell on the beach in case they were contaminated with a strange germ, and did not explore the tide pools among the slippery rocks, convinced that either a rogue wave or the uneven footing would trip her and leave her a concussed vegetable.

Tagging @darkgazer @harinawa @athemarina @chishiio! Your words are orange, cut, music, tedious, and lament.

[writingbyricochet]

Last Line Tag

Tagged by @chishiio!

Returning to Where Paradise Died and Lived for this one because I've been plagued with scenarios and concepts.

“I’d like to hear you play,” Sophie said then. “Will you, for me? One day?”

Tag list: @canofpeaches @wayoftheghost

Tagging: @wayoftheghost @moonlitinks @moonscribbler