The second Writing Salon from a week ago saw more writing sprints (which are freaking awesome), and since the genre focus of this salon was again different, there's a bit of a genre shift in the continuation of our story.
Part One (Horror) can be found here, and Part Two (Speculative/Fantasy) can be found here.
We did fifteen minute [15] sprints, and I'm not going to edit much as I type (no time, and I want to make this story bigger later, so yay, first draft)!
[15] means the break between sprints, and other comments in [these brackets] are my bracketed notes in the sprint. And yes, the writing sprints are long-hand. Have fun!
[Make the numbers cool]
Seventeen. That's how old Lisa-May was when her world changed forever. Twelve, the grade. 4921, The house number. May 7th, the date.
Specifics forever burned in her mind.
She'd been walking home from school, a month shy of graduation, a week away from eighteen, and a day away from the weekend.
The day had been warm with the clouds trapping the heat of a pale sun. Muggy and mosquito-ridden, and unseasonable. Lisa-May [this thought was Not written down--it's current, and I am seriously rethinking using a hyphenated name. In longhand I can scribble LM or L-M quite quickly, but typing out Lisa-May is starting to suck. Lisa May. Lisa-May. Yeah, I'm dropping the hyphen.] was feeling overdressed. Not for the neighbourhood because you could never be overdressed for this part of town. You could be wearing four layers of clothes, finished off with puce coveralls, a grey-haired wig, a hairy wart glued to your chin, and food splattered down the front of your body, ad the inhabitants of this part of town would still try.
[Later--input a why--inhabitants locked here except for the children. Prison? Camp?]
Lisa May thought of taking the wooded path home instead of the cracked sidewalk. Was the sidewalk the edge of the 'hood? Or was it the edge, the border, of the woods? Tales of monsters that ate children in the woods were told, but Lisa May didn't know of anyone who'd actually gone missing in the woods.
Was that because nobody actually went missing in the woods?
Or was it because no one went in the woods? Maybe it was like how kids went missing less in general because parents turned into Helicopters, hovering machines that made it impossible to disappear, even if you wanted to.
[15]
No, Lisa May was feeling overdressed regarding the weather, but naked in relation to the neighbourhood. She looked with longing at the woods. She'd take a bear over a man. It would be a quick death. Better than the alternative.
One of her classes in grade six had been on How to Avoid the Gaze of Men. It was a girls' only class, and she didn't know what the concurrent boys' only class was. She thought it's title was actually How to Protect Your Woman, but it should have been How to Treat Women with Respect. Or something like that.
Wasn't that a funny sentence to parse. How to Protect Your Woman, not ALL Women. And wasn't that the way of the world at the moment? [A backwards slide into an era that benefited Men at the expense of Women.] put this later
Men watching other men beat up their wives, girlfriends, sisters even, and not doing anything because those wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters didn't belong to them; they belonged to the men doing the beating. No right to interfere in that.
That was not a world that Lisa May wanted to live in.
She wanted to live in a world where ALL men protected ALL women.
Maybe if there were no men, women wouldn't even need protection? Well, not counting from the bears in the woods, she supposed.
Monsters. Not bears. That was the creature in all the stories. Monsters.
Monsters of no consistent description.
What, then, were the men of the 'Hood, if not monsters themselves, preying on Women?
Not children, though. Children were off limits. That was an unwritten rule, and it was also law.
Rules were broken, and laws were bent.
Not here. Here, the men of this neighbourhood were careful to stick to women. Not children, and not Underaged Women because those were still children in the eyes of the law. But children Lisa May's age could easily be mistaken for women. It's not like you were going to be carded before they touched you.
But there were stories of men in other neighbourhoods who bent the laws. Who invited girls for dinner.
[15]
End of salon, and Lisa May's childhood is getting dark. Not sure where I was going with that, exactly.
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