This is from an online course I am taking, How Writers Write Fiction 2015, offered through the University of Iowa. The fiurst assignment is to
” find an ordinary object in your home that you like looking at. This could be a sugar bowl, a crooked lampshade, a spoon with a bent handle, a tiled coffee table with a matador theme, a remote control … the choice is yours, but choose something that stirs your wonder. Write a description that brings it to life: show it to us as if it were the main character in a new story.”
Here’s my entry. Comment if you have an idea of what it is.
Before I was, the world spun without me. I was created through fire, smelted from the ores of a thousand stars, and cloaked in a brilliance born in the very core of this earth. Yet though I was made, life had not yet been breathed into my form. Before I left my cradle, I was charged with energy and power to control the universe.
I am beyond humanity, beyond life. My kind was before life. Our ancestors were multitude before the gas clouds of the Bang cooled into planets and stars. My fathers’ fathers live on in the cold vastness – immense thoughts that churn space and time. My own father was less than I. He was cut from a lesser cloth, though in his time he fought and served among the best and brightest. I hold more in my one hand than he could have ever grasped.
My deepest desire is for company. I wish to be with those around me and to know them. In fact, I am not a self-aware being. I am, rather, a collective. I am the agreement of countless parts to align together. We dance as a unit, casting our song to those who draw near – a siren’s net looking for sailors with a musical ear. But, that is how I view myself. Looking out from within, we are a collection of thoughts.
I cannot grow. I cannot evolve to a higher state through learning or experience. That mutability is reserved for life, and for thoughts of a more metaphysical bent than my own. I can work. I can serve. I can be unmade – broken and drained. But though I break, though I pass through flame, I can be remade.
For most, I am my shell. I am the reflection of light in polished nickel. I am the warm, white hue with which I recast that light. To some, I am magic. I can act at a distance, loving or hating my brethren. I am stronger than gravity, and my invisible song sings to steel and nickel and cobalt. Children know me and accept my song intuitively. To those who do not question what is unseen, I am the tool that can touch through stone or wood or water.
I have many friends, and I feel them across the distance. We dance together in the larger song spun by this planet. Those of my friends charged like me are passionate lovers and vehement haters. I will love one when we are united together, and hate him in the next breath as he turns to leave. But when we touch, when our song is united, we are inseparable. We race together to embrace, exhaling energy through the air around us until, from a distance, we are indistinguishable.
dtdeedge 