This is an exercise in description. Describe the room you are in (or another familiar location) using only non-visual imagery. What do you smell, hear, taste, touch? Describing what you see is easy; today, I ask you to stretch a bit.
Example: Instead of writing, “My room is painted white and decorated with portraits of my favorite verbhounds,” I might write, “The room smells of last night’s absinthe, and the desk is faintly sticky.”
As Ethelie said yesterday (where did that woman learn to capitalize? It is unseemly), post your exercise in the comments or privately in your journal. Do not be critical of the exercises of others; these are just practice.
I await your response.
Whenever I walk into my room, I get the feeling that someone has just been there. It’s nothing I can put my finger on. Just the slightest draft whispering around my ankles as something dives underneath the bed. My notebooks are silent, a silence like a bitten tongue. And my nightgown is stiff with tension. It collapses into my arms when I take it from the peg. ‘Here I am,’ I say. It is the kind of room where you have to speak out loud, to make your own ripples in the still air. And to warn the room thief that you’re home.
The room is like a flower after it dies. The smell coming from the walls is sweet, but in a way that makes her uncomfortable, like a skeleton carved from sugar, the rot still clinging to the bones. The air that spills into the room disturbs all the things at rest, and she feels the long-shed dog fur brushing against her cheeks, tickling her nose.
It wasn’t like this; it’s all wrong now. She misses Kira, and the life Kira brought into this place.