Back to School

Some of you may know that I recently started taking my first class in about six years.  It’s also my first online course ever.  Back when I was in college, there were no online courses.  Seriously.  I’m that old.  Like Rodney Dangerfield.  Except he’s dead now.

It’s accelerated course called Fundamentals of Fiction Writing.  The instructor is Gloria Kempton (who is the author of another book in my “to read” list - Write Great Fiction: Dialogue).  ”Accelerated” means that 12 weeks of instruction are crammed into 6 weeks of lectures and assignments.  I didn’t really need to try to fit this into my schedule right now… except, I did.  This is part of the plan.  I’m learning my craft.

I just finished writing my first assignment for the course: a 500 word scene in which setting is of primary importance.  My scene is 485 words and was inspired by this photo I found on Flickr.  Here it is for your enjoyment/dissection:

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Rico pressed flat against the floor of the decrepit rail car, willing himself to sink into its cracked and faded tiles, while he made prayers of silent desperation to every saint his dead mother had ever taught him.  A few feet to Rico’s right, Cornelio’s body stared sightlessly up at the once ornate ceiling, his blood soaking into the parched floor.  The men chasing them were out there in the desert night.  Somewhere.

They were certain to find him.  Rico hadn’t seen a single broken shack or abandoned farmstead for hours before he found the train car.  The hulk of the once-proud Pullman had been rotting in the desert heat for decades.  Its rusty sides and shattered windows beckoned him and to Rico it looked like a palace.  There were no train tracks leading to it and there was, as far as Rico could tell, nothing but hilly scrub for miles.

Out in the night, there was another sound like the one that had prompted Rico’s latest silent litany.  Rico clutched the floor like a climber clinging to the side of a mountain.  His nails dug through soft, rotted tiles.  Not far enough in the distance, a coyote cried shrilly and was answered by another and then one more.  They could probably smell Cornelio.

Rico wasn’t sure when Cornelio died.  He knew it was sometime after the sun had fallen below the western mountains, but not by much.  Rico was ashamed to think he’d been asleep when his brother died, but he knew it was the truth.  He’d been awake for almost four days.

Another sound in the night,  like a pebble skittering across gravel.  Not far away.  Rico’s nail cracked from digging into the rail car’s flooring and his left index finger started to bleed.

The men had come into their little pueblo just after dawn.  When they rode in with their bandanas over their faces, more than half of Escalera’s people were already dead.  The plague beat the riders by about three days.  They shot anyone they found, even the dead.  Then they started a fire.  When they arrived, Rico was out scavenging for water that didn’t have dead fish in it.  He hid in a culvert under the western road out of town while the burning flesh of everyone he’d ever loved stung his nostrils.  After they left, Rico picked through the town looking for survivors, but found only death.  Until he heard his brother call out from a ravine just south of town.  Cornelio, sick with the plague since the previous morning, had been shot.  Their mother threw stones and Spanish curses at the men to distract them while Cornelio crawled away.  They shot her where she stood.

Still another sound outside.  Rico knew they were close.  He glanced at Cornelio and saw that his eyes were open.  The irises were gone, just like everyone else who died from the plague.