Short & Long
A microfiction exercise from "Steering the Craft" by Ursula K. Le Guin concerning narratives made of short and long sentences.
Short
A creature waits in the dark beyond. The windows are still and shuttered. A curling wind whips in the quiet. Lightning peals in the distance. Something shuffles and creeps across the grass. The windows shiver, anticipating its approach. Whatever lives flees from it in fear. Out comes its hand, long dead, drowned. The porch light turns on. The bloated, purple thing doesn’t recoil. With certainty, it grasps the doorknob. The brass handle turns. The creature presses and the doorframe splinters. Somewhere inside, an alarm begins to scream. The frame gives way, the door falling in. Feet thunder on the stairs. An enrobed man arrives with his shotgun. The bloated thing takes three blasts. The third sends it to the ground. The man stands in the room alone. The alarm screams all around him.
Long
The night approached, as it always did, all too rapidly, with a scarlet sunset and car horns howling on the boulevard—cabs driven by nasty men, all impatient, all with somewhere more important to be than the other guy, and with it came the dawning dread of the end of festivities and fun, a signal to prepare for the humdrum of “the week”, where disillusioned men and exhausted women break their spines for a few more pennies each year, a few extra percent tacked on for good work; but those howling horns, those bleary little yellow lights, all blinking and flashing at the other guy to hurry the hell up, wouldn’t flash or blink if the one behind the wheel remembered that time moves at a marked-time pace, and that no steaming leadfoot on the boulevard—no matter how high his rush-hour cab fee, no matter what important businessman sits in his back seat—no leadfoot can outrace time, which, unbothered by the comings and goings of lesser creatures, knows that it is on its own side, that in terms of playing the long term game, someday the streets will be cleared and the lights will not flash, the horns will not howl and the cabbies will not swear; and so it seemed so precious, so valuable, as the last few sunbeams stretched over Sunday’s horizon, to remember the fun of the day, to recall the promise of a future, and to see the hidden reminder that each moment must be seized while it lasts, seized and held close like a precious pearl, and to love, to listen, to whisper in a lover’s ear as each precious hour dwindles away in the dark.
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