Creative Writing - an update

Okay, so Creative Writing Assignment One is back. The idea was to use your skills in err...creativity, to put together a piece from one of a few prompts:

- The house opposite
- Driving alone
- The smells of home
- A beach in winter
- Things that make the heart beat faster

Naturally i chose the latter, and considered the idea of a man trapped in routine and regulation, who is obsessed with time and lives by the ticking of his watch. Then he meets a woman and the pace and rhythm of his life suddenly is taken beyond his control. Here's the main piece:

Running Out of Time

There are fifty minutes until its nine o’clock. That means there are fifteen hours and fifty minutes left in the day. In forty-one days, fifteen hours and fifty minutes I will be thirty-five years old. After that I will probably have another forty years left to live. The clock is ticking. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

The tube train is late. A platform sighs and the temperature rises. It is late on average five times a month. How much time is that a year?

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

Its ten o’clock now, which means there are three hours left until lunch. My stomach gurgles in complaint, and I can taste the acid as the last calories are digested. I let it build and then force the feeling elsewhere. Hunger. That’s all it is.

Around me a choir of conversations sing and keyboards steadily patter out a rhythm. I like the sound. It’s structured and organised. There is a system:

‘Ring. Answer. Yes? How long? Okay. I’ll note that down. Speak to you soon. Regards. Goodbye. Tap, tap, tap, tap.’

Eleven o’clock. I can eat now. I need a hundred calories for every hour that I am awake. Saliva dances on my tongue.

It’s her. Of course, it’s always her on a Friday. My heart begins to beat faster. She has yellow and white eyes that beam from beneath her black fringe, and I cannot look at them. Once you look you cannot see anything else. It’s like staring at the sun for too long.

As I pay for my sandwich a cough leaps out of my mouth. She smiles. Oh God.

‘Hey Martin,’ she says. ‘Hey. This might sound strange, but would you like to go out after work?’

My heart rate increases and a stream of sweat pours down my shirt.

‘It would be nice to get to know you better.’

Escape. Run away.

‘I think I’m going for a run tonight,’ I tell her. ‘Sorry.’

‘Oh, I love running’ she says, brushing back her fringe. ‘Mind if I join you?’

Six forty five. She is waiting for me at the traffic island. The lights are flashing red.

‘Are you ready to go?’ she asks

My heart thunders like the wake of a thousand waterfalls. She is a goddess – an ivory visage of skin and curves under a dark, silk canopy.

‘I always start now,’ I tell her. ‘So we better get going.’

As soon as we begin to run I feel strange. My breaths come short and my stride is awkward. When she turns and smiles my legs buckle and I almost fall over. What is happening?

‘You run past me every evening Martin,’ she tells me. ‘I used to wave but you never saw me.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘No I didn’t.’

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

We run for half an hour and I feel better. There is a rhythm to our pace, our strides match and we breathe together. I don’t have to look in her eyes. I can look at the sign to Hammersmith that points the wrong way instead, or the dog that’s always tied to the same lamppost.

‘Time’s up,’ I say, as we return to the office. ‘Thirty-eight minutes. That’s worked off all the calories we need.’

‘Yeah?’ she says. ‘Well how about we work off a bit more?’

Her hand clasps mine.

‘Race me,’ she says. ‘Two minutes, to the end of the road.’

She runs off and I run after her. I don’t think. This isn’t part of the plan, but I do it anyway. I run and run and run.

The thing is, is that she won’t stop. She keeps on running and I keep following. The dark road changes into a river of blackness, houses melt into syrupy blancmange and an ivory light blazes ahead of me. I look at my watch and start to panic. It’s late. My heart is pummelling, but I cannot stop running.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Soon we don’t even have to run. Her body floats off the road and up into the air and then mine does as well. It is movement, but not in the physical world – momentum, friction or gravity do not apply. Her light has lifted us somewhere else.

As we float higher she turns and looks at me, yellow orbs shining out of the blackness. We kiss long and ecstatically. The world turns white, then yellow, then gold. Light. Lightness all around.

‘What time is it?’ she says, looking at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.