One of the other students in my creative writing class is a romance author. She wrote a scene in which the two main characters, who knew each other as children, meet again as adults. The scene involved the woman recalling how the man had repeatedly teased her and hurt her feelings years ago, and finally that resentment showed itself in the present, to the surprise of the man.
It was very well written, and so our teacher gave an assignment to the other students in the class to write a scene in which two characters who knew each other when they were children meet as adults, and to show the internal dialogue as one of them recalls childhood hurt feelings, until the character makes some physical manifestation in the present of that past pain.
A rather complicated assignment, and made all the more difficult by having already read such a scene, which made it hard to think of a different situation.
This was written a few days ago, and I just haven’t gotten around to posting it until now.
One-Eye-That-Sees-Prey-From-Afar-and-Falls-Upon-It-as-Death-From-the-Blue could smell the man that had entered his cave. There was something troubling about the scent, though, something that tugged at his memory.
There was only the one scent. A foolish man, to come alone into One-Eye’s cave. Foolish or not, they tasted the same.
And foolish or not, they could sometimes still be dangerous with their pointy sticks. So One-Eye worked his way deeper into the shadows cast by the fire that warmed his lair.
The man called out something in the man-tongue. This, too, tugged at One-Eye’s memory, and coupled with the scent it was enough: the sound was what the little people had called him, the two little people that had befriended him twenty-five or thirty winters ago.
One-Eye made a grunt of greeting, and the little person stepped out into the firelight, except that he was no longer a little person. He was a man now, but he carried no pointed sticks.
The man repeated the name-sound.
Yes, though the voice was different and lower, and the scent was altered, this was definitely one of the little people. At the time, One-Eye had not realized that the little people were merely the young of the people. He thought of them as being merely a smaller species, like the drakes were to his kind.
One-Eye slid his head out from the shadows slowly, so as to not startle the man. He smiled, baring the teeth that had frightened many a man over the years, but this man made happy sounds and began to approach.
The man’s hands were empty, One-Eye could see. There were no rocks in them.
Rocks. The last time he had seen the little people, they had thrown rocks at him to make him go away. The rocks had bounced off his scales harmlessly, but he’d thought they were his friends until they attacked him without warning. They had betrayed him.
He would not be betrayed again. Opening his mouth wide, he let out a roar that shook flakes of rock from the cave ceiling. The man fell down, and scrambled to get back on his feet, all the while calling out the name-sound. But there was fear in his voice now, and fear in his scent.