rivers_bend

I was given an assignment to write "a paragraph of description, as good as [I] can make it." I'm not sure how good it is, but it lent itself to becoming a flash-fic and so I share it. 300 words, general rated.

and yeah, the cut text is shamelessly missappropriated

The sea is like slate, and makes a mockery of the notion that one might surf, or frolic in the waves, or even swim. It looks instead as though you could walk right out to the horizon, arriving at the junction of pale grey and dark with your feet sore from trudging so far on such a hard surface. It's only where the water meets the land that any sense of liquid is revealed, and then only because the receding tide has left a strip of pebbles shiny and darker than their dry flint cousins farther up the beach. There's no sunshine, not a hint of breeze, it's like being on a seaside film-set except when I take a deep breath, the air smells of salt and damp, rather than paint and bodies heated by Kleig-lights.

Then the illusion's shattered further by a pair of squawking seagulls, fighting over a discarded scrap of food. They land in the sea with a splash-splash, making ripples that lap at the pebbles on the shore. In the ripples' edges, slate-grey gives way to green-grey shadows and I get a sense of the water's depth. Then I notice a fishing boat, and further out, a tanker, and I hear a child screaming in delight and a dog barking, rocks clacking as he runs. I remember there's a bustling city at my back, that the low rumbling is people in their cars going about their business, that if the curve of the earth were a little less acute, I could see France.

The beach stones are hard under my thin-soled work shoes and I've lost that feeling of being the only person left in a post-apocalyptic world without weather so I turn west and leave, hoping I'm not late to work again.