My senior year of high school our English teacher asked our class to write a story based on three pictures he gave us. I cannot now remember what was depicted in these pictures, but those six years ago, this was the short story I came up with. Nagging and unpolished, it's not much to bark at, but I could cultivate it...
“Susan Baker” appears on the screen one letter at a time. The well manicured hands continue to clack away at the keyboard as the editorial on Cher’s wardrobe unfolds. She has always been responsible for the one or two actual articles in her brother’s magazine. She had formerly referred to fashion as the envy based, long-legged tramp displaying, money mongering industry, but her grandparents had founded the magazine and created it from the dust of the Depression for their future generations to inherit and run. So she had hopped on the family band wagon, and the job now consumed her life. It paid well, and she was part of the elite in Manhattan. One of the best apartments money could buy was hers, the most eligible bachelors craved to make her acquaintance, and if she could not purchase the most contemporary designer outfits and jewelry, they were hers to borrow from the company’s stocks. Yes, the world was at her fingertips, she thought, and with a little maneuvering it would be eating out of the palm of her hand.
She awoke to the buzzing of a black fly against the canvas of her hastily pitched tent. The night air had crept in while she slept, and a fine layer of dew now coated her sleeping bag. Rorek still slept soundlessly beside her, his ginger beard shining with little rainbows as the rising sun slipped between the flaps of the tent onto the beads of dew. A feeling of utter contentedness and ease washed over Susan, and she lay back down and watched the sun slowly dry the contents of their humble shelter. The black fly came to land upon her arm, and she looked on quietly as it took its breakfast. She felt the pinch of the bite, then the throbbing, itching sensation, but still she did not move. As a breeze blew in and opened the front of the tent, Susan peered out lazily at the breathtaking landscape, full of the dips of valleys and peaks of mountains. She and her husband had settled not far from the sheer face of a cliff that shadowed miles of the valley below at both sunset and sunrise. Husband. Husband? She blinked rapidly.
