Last week, I gave you one way to start a story as my students and I progress through National Novel Writing Month. This week, a very different way to begin. Enjoy!
Elfheim Studtgard stood on the hillside, looking down at the pastures below. Sheep and goats and cattle dotted the landscape, munching away at the green grass surrounding them. Elfheim turned his gaze upward as the sun shone brightly with nary a cloud in the sky. A smile creased his face; he was enraptured by the simplicity of nature.
Elfheim flipped his long, flaxen hair out of his eyes and headed back down to the farm, walking stick in hand. His tan tunic had a brown vest over it, covered in pockets filled with small tools and supplies he might need throughout the day. His brown pants and laced walking boots were practical even if they wouldn’t win any fashion awards.
Huh, fashion, he thought morosely. Who cares? He knew who cared, but he brushed aside thoughts of her for now. He needed to get that gate fixed so the cattle wouldn’t get out again overnight. It had taken him most of the morning to get them into the correct fenced area.
As he plodded down the hill, he was startled by a whooshing sound from above. He grunted in dismay as a flying car soared through the air, clearly headed for Denver. Elfheim followed its path as it quickly disappeared into the horizon. Elfheim glanced back at the livestock, but it was something they had grown accustomed to, and they rarely reacted when the technological marvels flew over the farm. Elfheim wished he could ignore them, too.
Now he was really in dour spirits. His life was a simple one, a life in the country, away from the monstrous metropolis that was fifty miles away. Denver had been a city that grew consistently from the time it was founded in November 1858. Now, 200 years later, it was so huge that the skyscrapers seemed to do just what they were named to do. Elfheim spit on the ground in disgust.
He gazed toward the seemingly distant Pike’s Peak. It wasn’t as much of a tourist attraction as it had been decades earlier; the ability to fly around in personal vehicles took away from the exhilaration of driving to the top of the highest peak that humans could climb easily. Now, if you had the highest quality flying car, you could reach those heights without driving up a long, winding road.
Elfheim wasn’t opposed to vehicles; he had a tractor and an old pickup truck. But there were fewer and fewer people who had driving machines like his. Luckily, he knew how to fix problems on his vehicles since the nearest shop that would work on them was on the other side of Denver.
He had been in a flying car one time, when he visited his mother in Denver a year ago. She had moved there after his father died unexpectedly from a heart attack while working in the field. She said she needed to move to a more modern style of living, eschewing the simple life his father had built on their acreage. When Elfheim visited his mother for the first time, she had insisted that they take a flying cab to a restaurant. The experience was not a pleasant one.
“Why are you so opposed to this?” Moderna had asked her son. “This is the world today. You can’t just let it pass you by.”
Elfheim had shaken his head and put another mouthful of food to his lips. He didn’t really want to have this argument again. They ate most of the rest of the meal in silence. Since then, he had kept in touch mainly through the video phone she had installed in the farmhouse before she had left for Denver. Moderna had visited him on his birthday, and he had stopped in one other time when he needed some parts for the tractor that he could only find in Denver.
Elfheim put his hand in his pocket and felt the well-worn coin in there; he had gotten it from his grandmother and kept it on him as a good luck charm. Grandma Alfie had been eccentric at the best of times, and now she sat lonesome in an assisted care facility in Colorado Springs. He really needed to go visit her again; his grandmother was a woman of similar views to his own.
Suddenly, the sight of Pike’s Peak went fuzzy. Elfheim shook his head, closed his eyes tight, and reopened them. The fuzziness was gone. He shook his head again and squinted at the snow-capped mountain. He had joined a bus tour to the top with his parents one time and enjoyed breathing in the thin air at the peak. Despite the cold, Elfheim had spent most of the time outside, walking around, viewing the surrounding landscape with awe. He had not been back up there since that visit but started thinking that maybe a trip there was just what he needed to reset his head. He could do that after visiting his grandmother since Colorado Springs was on the way.
A low rumble started in the ground. It wasn’t much, barely shifted Elfheim from his center of gravity. He looked around curiously, but the rumble didn’t last long. But he saw Pike’s Peak through a haze once again. That’s really odd, he thought. We don’t have earthquakes here. Maybe I’m having a spell of some kind and just imagined it. He headed back to his house for a long drink of water, figuring that would clear his head and his thoughts. After all, there was still work to be done.
Completely different, right? Next week, I’ll wrap up this mini-course on writing by explaining different ways to approach writing and trying to nail the beginning.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is morosely, which means being gloomy, as in, “The teenager sulked around the halls at school morosely after their latest break-up.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!