Hole

[aesmael]

On an island floating in a vast nothing the colours were slightly wrong, the ground stuttering in places and the wind static. But the island had not yet began to list and, anyway, despite that slight nagging sense of there being something outside, there was nowhere for it to crash into, and so the girl who called herself Jayde tried to focus her attention on other matters.

Amid a recently declared forest she stood in a pit just barely higher than the floppy brim of her hat. Heaps of solid were piled round it like dirt, insofar as each was generally brown and granular. At her feet, the tool which 'til recently resembled a shovel now rests, a many-pronged assemblage of cogwheels and joints.

She was looking up at a figure immersed in solid particulate up to its furry knees. Some had settled on his shoulders and head, the folds of his clothes, anywhere there was purchase. She was quite proud of that, but rather disappointed to discover she had been flinging dirt – her mind wished desperately to think of it as dirt – all over her creation.

He did not move, of course. He could not move (though he could be moved, if she wished). He simply stood there, tall, horned, and apparently geared for war. His cloak with its bleeding eye design did not move, even when the wind stuttered into action for a moment.

The figure did not speak. She heard his voice in her head anyway.

-That's a deep hole you're digging. You'll have to dig faster if you want it done on time.

Time did not seem to matter so much in this place. If it still passed at all, it was flexible. A deadline of her own making could be reassigned at whim.

-And the point of deadlines is what?

Jayde tilted her head as if to say 'touché'. She reached for her tool and poked aimlessly at the base of the pit. The pit was not simply a hole in the surface of her island. Its walls were decorated with a spiral pattern, like a holographed series of film stills with crude hints of implication branching off at odd intervals. Something was supposed to go here, in the space where she had temporarily halted work on her pattern, but she had never known what it was. It had been her hope that the next step in the pattern would reveal itself by the time she reached it, but now she was at the hole and she still did not know. She stared at it, beginning to panic.

-Skip it. Come back later. Patterns are often clearer when the whole picture is available for examination.

But...

-This is not my pattern. I cannot fill it in for you.

I thought you were less formal than this!

-Teasing.

Oh. There it is.

Comments

[coniferous_you]

I still enjoy the concept behind this. It is tremendously difficult to write highly conceptual fiction like this without sounding horribly pendantic, but I think you are doing a good job so far. The fact that your world is subject to what I would call "dream physics" (ie. an ever-changing set of laws for reality that have their own internal consistency, but still allow you to do pretty much anything at any time and make it seem believeable).
That being said, in future revisions, pay attention to the consistency of your identification of "foreign" objects. For instance, when you mark something as solid and note that your character does not want to describe it as such (as understood it as her inability to do so, initially) - perhaps such a person would have difficulty identifying the cloak of the horned figure so precisely? Just a thought.
The dialogue between the two was good. You handled the difficulty with having a character who is unable to *actually* speak fairly well, I think.

Keep on writing,
~El.

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

:O

*helps dig*

>.>

<.<

*hugs*

I like it :D