These picture prompts have inspired a number of ideas which will hopefully become WIPs. I like that I’m writing in different genres instead of limiting myself, which is something I used to do.

Happy reading!

Jacob found the complete darkness and eerie silence unnerving. Adjusting his night vision goggles, he shifted uncomfortably, feeling the cool, damp grass soak through his shirt and the front of his khaki pants. He didn’t know what lurked in the grass and the thought of a mouse skittering across his arm made him cringe. He just wasn’t made for this rural life.

Surveillance sucked.

Especially out here in the middle of a Wisconsin field that bordered a farmer’s alfalfa crop. Securing permission to be here was one thing, avoiding the barbed-wire fence quite another entirely. He had just missed ripping his forearm across one of those nasty spikes and the thought of dripping blood and exposing a wound to infection wasn’t a comforting one. And while he didn’t think a deer would go into a frenzy after smelling blood, he wasn’t too sure about bears or even wildcats. Not that he’d seen any…

Chicago was looking really good right now. Nothing like concrete and steel to make an FBI agent feel like a part of civilization. Jacob missed the scream of sirens, the ubiquitous gridlock and the rush that came from living in a large metropolis.

But out here, he felt isolated and bored. Mostly bored. He knew surveillance was a tedious job but at least in the city there was something happening. Here, all he’d seen was a bird land on the fence post, an ant crawl along the dirt, or a fly alight on a grass blade.

Suddenly, a chill gripped him and Jacob stiffened. He knew this feeling and never ignored it. Immediately, the trained agent part of him took over. Lifting his night vision goggles to his eyes, he watched as a tall, lanky young man ambled across his field of vision. The man wore a baseball cap pulled over his head and he seemed to be searching for something on the ground. Jacob remembered from the file that this suspect had a shaved head with a distinct spider web tattoo. Not a smart move, but Jacob figured that the tattoo had been inked before the suspect had decided on this new, lethal vocation.

What was he looking for, Jacob wondered. He raised his upper body, balancing himself on his elbows as he stared through the goggles into an alien world of various greens. It was an absurd feeling, like watching a silent movie.

I’ve posted mine on my blog
http://robinsbluenest.typepad.com/robins_nest_blue/2009/09/for-them.html

Hope everyone has a beautiful day

Clouds

wondering through clouds
without love is just
another kind of higher silence.
and in this silence we just
seem to reach, it doesn’t matter
that we’re there in the clouds,
heaven is only heaven if love
is gone and one feels like
a small boy, in the rain,
laughed at by his own
small friends, left to find his own
way home, and where is home?
where is that place that
one finds his own self
better, than in love.

Donald Rhodes