15 Minute Writing Exercise: Stone Oasis

My friend, JP, at criminalenglish has set up another fifteen minute writing challenge. The pic he supplied, which I will supply again below, caught my interest, so I gave the exercise a go. The following scene is what I was able to get done in fifteen minutes. Let me know what you think.


Stone Oasis

As the storm pounded rain against the slanted stone roof, Simon and Ralph poured over the contents of their pillowcase.

“I can’t see nothing.”

“What?”

“I can’t see nothing!” yelled Ralph against the echoing of the rain. His hand jutted about inside of the pillowcase. “You sure you brought it with!?”

“Of course I did! Move!” Simon yelled back from the darkness and bullied his hand through their packing supplies until his fingers found the desired shape.

“I told you!” Simon said and clicked the button. The flashlight jetted light out against the opposite gray wall. Panting, the boys looked at each other’s muddy appearance and wet, unkept hair. “I told you,” Simon mouthed again as their breathing finally slowed. Ralph thought it quite lucky of them to find this abandoned shed in the middle of the forest. Simon wasn’t convinced that anything was ever truly forgotten.

They stood up as Simon, who held the flashlight, started casting light around the room, slowly searching the interior of their oasis from the rain. Ralph, without thinking, was still clasping the pillowcase that held their canned corn and jars of peanuts. Honey Roasted. Simon had finally convinced Ralph that it was wiser to keep their pocket knives in their namesake.

As the beam of light moved left from the right corner of the wall opposite of them, they saw a door on its side length-wise. The hinges, which twisted out in a metal mess, looked so rusted that they would crumble under a callous touch. The white paint with green trimming that once covered the wood door was curling up in small patches like curdled milk. Along the bottom half of the door, the paint was missing entirely.

“What is this place?” Asked Ralph. Simon didn’t supply a response; instead, he shook his head at a pace slow enough to match that of the grazing flashlight.

“Holy Shit!” Simon shouted.

“Fu-“ Ralph yelped, scrabbling back a few steps.

In the left corner of the room, opposite of the doorway in which they had entered, the flashlight had caught a small round table with three large rotting dolls positioned around it in chairs. Their eyes, made of bright blue marbles, leered without expression at the Simon and Ralph. At any moment, Simon thought, one of them is going to blink. I just know it.

But they didn’t blink. Instead, they continued to sit in their frozen, molded states.

“Do you think Tom is going to find us in here? I mean,” Ralph continued while not taking his eyes off the dolls, “you don’t think he would keep coming after us in this rain, do ya?”

“I don’t know. He was pretty mad. We should get out of here.”