Creative Writing Prompt #7: Borders
Another of my group's creative writing flash fictions. This one managed to break through a nasty stint of writer's block, and I'm rather grateful to it.
Prompt reads: Write an impactful scene between two or more characters where words are not spoken. Optionally, also no described thoughts - i.e using only body language and cues. 300-500 words.
Barbed wire loomed high, grasping towards the sky like the hungry claws of a predator. The cold malice was almost mundane by this point; these serrated coils were omnipresent along roadsides, city buildings, traffic checkpoints. Borders of all kinds. Maybe the predator, having hunted the whole earth to extinction, was turning at last to the dreary gray clouds above their heads.
To one side of the fence, the armored soldier crouched against a twisted tree stump that crowded close to the metal wire. He forced a nonchalant wave of the tail- just a wolf on a smoke break, perhaps. Not that he was the one they were watching.
Behind him, his claws searched carefully around the hollow space inside the stump. Scrabbling in empty space until– there, the crisp feeling of paper in his paw. Carefully, the soldier pulled the paper crane free, and carefully, he hid it behind cupped fingers. Stained, perhaps, and a little droopy, but still beautiful. A ghost of a smile crept on to his muzzle.
Just a few meters away, the prisoners occupied themselves silently, lounging behind the fence in ragged gray jumpsuits, staring listlessly out at the patrolling guards. One of them, a doe no older than eight years, kept a careful and circumspect eye on the wolf while she hand-washed the laundry. Her smile, too, was hidden.
The guard tucked the folded paper into a pouch on his belt, concealed alongside several others. It was a risk, of course. There was nothing illegal about carrying small personal items in uniform, but it was unusual, and these days it didn’t pay to draw attention. But still. As the young girl watched from behind the fence, he pulled out something from his own pocket. Carefully, with a practiced motion behind his back, the object fell down in to the hollow space in the stump.
She waited an excruciating hundred seconds after the wolf had resumed his patrol, and then made her way close to the fence, throwing out the soapy water across the ground. This part was tricky. When all the guards were looking away, she reached one tiny, delicate hand through the metal wires, and for an instant, one inch of her was free. Then she pulled back, holding a slip of paper, and palmed it carefully as she made her way back to the low rows of bunkhouses.
Until she stopped, eyes, reading and rereading the hastily written words she found there. Her half-hidden smile vanished, and a look of horror dawned across her face.
The screams began then, the agonized shrieks of a child in fear. The barbed wire did nothing to mask the sound of those screams, of course; barbed wire never did. That wasn’t what it was for. But if the guards outside still had something in them that wanted to reach out to the crying child, or to offer some kind of comfort, they hid it well.