15 minute Challenge, Word 104
Apr. 25th, 2005 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolevalanAnother one. Blame Joe Lauinger.
Title: Fall of a Sparrow
Fandom: Hamlet
Rating: G, I imagine.
A wager. A bet. A simple challenge. But it wasn’t that at all was it? Not really. He knew it. I knew it. It was something I tried to say, but he wouldn’t let me.
The snow is falling outside my window, and I want to write. To critique the students’ papers. But instead, now, even now, I am more haunted than even my dear friend was. His ghost drove him to the edge of madness. He would not show me the same courtesy. But then, that’s like him. He wouldn’t see that his simple instruction would chain the rest of my life to a set course. That I would not be able to break away.
He left me. He went and forbade me to follow. I stare into the candle flame, and I fancy I can see the way he looked at me just before they all arrived. All of them, drunk with power, fury, or simple curiosity. To see the mad prince. To manipulate him. To kill him.
I thought I would recover, eventually. He said it would be painful, though God knows if he could understand just how painful. Then again, maybe he did. I do not flatter myself that I am the only one who has felt a deep, cutting loss. But standing there, in the mass of blood, staring almost helplessly at the invaders arriving to claim the vacant throne, the waste of it all threatened to drown me.
So I ran. I holed myself up in the university, turning from a student to a professor like a leaf, changing color. But try as I may, I cannot fall. I wait, telling his story more and more seldom, but unable to forget. To depart. And though it has been a good twenty years since I set foot in Denmark, I close my eyes and I see Elsinore.
My heart cracked long ago. Surprisingly, it does not seem to be such a necessity, as I once believed.
The challenge didn’t matter. Emotions were running too high. And the readiness, which he spoke of so calmly. The readiness…that he had.
Title: Fall of a Sparrow
Fandom: Hamlet
Rating: G, I imagine.
A wager. A bet. A simple challenge. But it wasn’t that at all was it? Not really. He knew it. I knew it. It was something I tried to say, but he wouldn’t let me.
The snow is falling outside my window, and I want to write. To critique the students’ papers. But instead, now, even now, I am more haunted than even my dear friend was. His ghost drove him to the edge of madness. He would not show me the same courtesy. But then, that’s like him. He wouldn’t see that his simple instruction would chain the rest of my life to a set course. That I would not be able to break away.
He left me. He went and forbade me to follow. I stare into the candle flame, and I fancy I can see the way he looked at me just before they all arrived. All of them, drunk with power, fury, or simple curiosity. To see the mad prince. To manipulate him. To kill him.
I thought I would recover, eventually. He said it would be painful, though God knows if he could understand just how painful. Then again, maybe he did. I do not flatter myself that I am the only one who has felt a deep, cutting loss. But standing there, in the mass of blood, staring almost helplessly at the invaders arriving to claim the vacant throne, the waste of it all threatened to drown me.
So I ran. I holed myself up in the university, turning from a student to a professor like a leaf, changing color. But try as I may, I cannot fall. I wait, telling his story more and more seldom, but unable to forget. To depart. And though it has been a good twenty years since I set foot in Denmark, I close my eyes and I see Elsinore.
My heart cracked long ago. Surprisingly, it does not seem to be such a necessity, as I once believed.
The challenge didn’t matter. Emotions were running too high. And the readiness, which he spoke of so calmly. The readiness…that he had.
