Snippet: Carapace
I am standing in a spotlight, but invisible. You are the star. The prize. Ripped out of history and laid out for display. A perfect sphere of light surrounds your tiny space, singles you out. Darkness beyond as my focus narrows on your chipped surfaces, your restrung design. The heavy centerpiece that should be resting over the heart of a queen. Singled out, but in a clutch of hundreds. Preserving a culture, at the expense of one eternal soul. Your lapis scarab should have guided its queen. Forth by day, to Yinepu and his righteous scales. Where is her soul now? That I see her treasure, evidence of her existence, name sounded phonetically on a paper label - is that enough? Or has she been consumed by time, stripped to nothing, dust and memory and linen-wrapped bones? The Nile cannot feed her roots. The floods will not nourish her. The sand will not polish her monuments. Instead her legacy is locked behind glass, scattered across the marble halls where strange languages echo and murmur. Where a hundred other queens wait in the dark and silence for their guides to lead them forth by day. Author's note: These snippets are unedited free-writing exercises that I use as a way to shift my brain into a creative state. I use Lynda Barry's What It Is YouTube timed exercises (usually 9 minutes worth of writing) for these. They are handwritten in a composition notebook, and then typed up here. As I transcribe them, I do tiny grammar and spelling checks, but the overall "clarity" (if you can call it that) of the exercise is left as-is.