This is a “short-short” that I wrote for my General Literature class. It’s a story that I did not plan, plot, or otherwise put significant thought into before I began to write. Maybe it shows and maybe it doesn’t, but I post it here as the introductory post to my Writing category.

Have fun folks. The story begins beneath this line…

Some evenings she lay in bed and breathed in the night. There was a certain stillness that crept into the bones, like the Earth itself was relaxed. Sounds of the night came to her, the same all too familiar sounds that she had stopped noticing long ago, but now were present and strangely subdued.

Or was it just her imagination? She couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. There was something oddly comforting about it all.

Again she breathed deeply, her chest slowly rising, then falling, and she let her imagination wander.

She was back on the mat again, or in the gym. No, definitely the gym. Weights lifted beside her face as her muscles strained against the machine. Sweat beaded down her neck, played through her long dark hair, and ran with little fingers down her spine.

This brought her thoughts back to the mat, and once again she was standing before those tall uneven bars. She slapped her hands together out of habit and ignored the white puff that rose in front of her face. She ignored everything: The tight suit that she wore, the sound of the crowd, the digital display that showed her number for all to see. Her eyes were too busy burning an image of those bars into her mind to notice anything else.

Then she moved. Her mind cleared, and there was nothing except for what her body knew to do.

She ran forward, hopped up, and her hands gripped a horizontal bar. Her legs swung up, then back, and then she was swinging around and around. The world spun like something out of a movie, but still she didn’t think about anything. Muscles flexed across her body and suddenly the wind rushed around her. Her stomach fluttered as she seemed to hang in the air for but a heartbeat, then her hands gripped a second, higher bar.

Back and forth she went between them, twirling and twisting and spinning.

Then it was the end, and she spun through the air for her great moment of triumph on that mat far below. Everything had gone so well; everything except the end.

The impact came first to her head, then to her shoulders, then finally to her back. It didn’t hurt – the pain came later that evening – but she remembered how her body had shifted inside. How the bones had moved wrong. How other things had moved out of the way of those bones. She remembered, now almost comically, how she had thought to herself, oh crap, that ain’t natural.

She turned her head to the side and sighed, wincing at the memory. A moment later she opened her eyes and focused on the wheelchair that sat next to her bed. Her lungs pulled in a deep breath at the sight and her jaw set with determination. Then her head turned back toward the ceiling, and she closed her eyes again.

She would get better. She would. Then there would be many more nights at the gym.

She let the night soak into her, one distant honk, one heartbeat at a time.

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