So a little bit of background, I was doing an essay, not sure which one but I remember outside the rain was howling something fierce. I, in my infinite wisdom and a desire to procrastinate decided to write something quite outside of the remit of the task. With the rain that’s hitting the UK at the moment and an auspicious rediscovery of this word document I figured there couldn’t be a better time.

A Slightly Short Story

The young child stared out at the storm, his memory stretched back to the last time he’d seen rain and found he couldn’t remember exactly when, before yesterday but not much longer than that. In his mind they stretched into an eternal storm, all the instances bled together and thoughts of sunshine appeared as if only brief respites in an otherwise endless struggle.

Twenty years later and the child is now a man, still trapped in that house. The barriers in his mind have grown with him, where before they seemed like wooden bars, time has made them steel. Books encircle him, brought in by outsiders whose compassion had been met with strange indifference. Scrabbling around on the floor he grasps a pencil, a short stubby thing that presses to the off-yellow paper on his desk. What he scratches is unknown; an observer would say it was nonsense, if you gave it to the best linguists in the world they would tell you, that all those piles of paper, mean nothing. No character or marking is repeated, no resemblance to any other language living or dead. They would not be wrong, what the child turned man has discovered is something primal, before language. Expression of feelings pure and unchained, when he looks over his writings he knows, more than simple words can describe, what he felt when the paper was inscribed.

In another life, an alternative road, he could have been a great writer, one whose work persists long after their body has turned to ash. In this world he has never left the confines of the four walls, never walked on grass or seen the outside of his ramshackle house. In this place and this time, the everlasting storm rages on and the scribbles continue into the night.