Be the Voice that Echoes
The young boy knew he had lost but that didn’t stop him from running. From a distance, he could hear the sounds of fake and obnoxiously high-pitched gunshots gaining upon him. He made the careless mistake of looking back while sprinting, causing his legs to trip over one another and send him flat onto the muddy ground.
At the stroke of midnight, his watch started to beep. With a mild exasperation, David Arthur decided to abandon his task to cross over to the desk where his belongings lay.
The laboratory was dark – well, except his workspace. Under the fluorescent lights, he looked into a microscope to examine the tiny viral organism he had been researching for the past several months. It was an odd little thing. Both airborne and waterborne, it was contagious to both humans and animals. The virus had an acidic quality to it – after numbing your whole body, it would proceed to corrode all your internal organs. Though the incubation period was insidiously unpredictable, symptoms may include black blood oozing from every pore and bodily cavity. If not, there would be a show of nausea and fever that could potentially kill you.
I never knew why she insisted on sunflowers.
I used to think that it was because of Vincent van Gogh; the whole yellow paint and happiness spiel that she was so enthralled with. I knew that she used to paint because she loved his paintings. When I was younger, I watched her in the alcove of our living room, using the windowsill as an easel. She never used a palette, instead she mixed acrylic paints on the back of her hands and on her arms. The tubes of blue, yellow, and white paints ran out the quickest. She would put white paint on top of everything she drew, when the first coat of paint was still wet.
A single beam of sunlight streamed in through the rectangular slit of the window and illuminated my hands as I smoothed the large blueprint over the collapsible table, quietly savouring the lack of crinkles.
In today’s day and age, nothing really happens unless you post about it on social media. The feeling when likes and comments start flooding in after you’ve posted a picture you’ve spent ages editing and even longer contemplating to post, is an addictive sensation. It’s impossible to deny you’ve not been a victim to this vicious cycle. The habit of paying an outrageous amount of money to get into aesthetic places and posing for hours just for the sake of capturing a single perfect shot is an embedded culture in our current society. A few amongst us who are lucky enough, have actually successfully made stable and profitable careers out of these habits.
He threw his violin bow with such force that it narrowly missed her feet. Her tense muscles only moved to flinch before freezing up once more.
Prompt: What is a trend that you have noticed recently?
I’ve felt fear; while listening to scary stories or watching horror movies and replaying certain scenes over and over again in my mind when I can’t fall asleep easily. But what I felt at that moment was beyond fear.
The term “NaNoWriMo” might confuse you if you’re not too deep into the writing scene. For starters, this abbreviation stands for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place annually in the month of November. Participants are required to write a manuscript of 50,000 words from the 1st of November up until the 30th. Since its launch on the 1st of July a decade ago, NaNoWriMo has fostered a thriving community of active writers. NaNoWriMo has also established itself as a non-profit organisation with many esteemed donors such as Wattpad and Scribd (yes, the money you use to buy their adorable merchandise goes to charity!).
Being a student is a tough feat for many of us and that includes me. Personally, I’ve had about three breakdowns in the last week as deadlines kept flowing in. Sometimes it feels like I’m thrashing in harsh waters, trying not to drown. It’s during these phases when I look at the above average students whom I know and wonder to myself: how do they do it? How do they handle so many different commitments so flawlessly?