March Campaigner Challenge - Light and Dark

Here is my second campaigner challenge from Rach Writes.  The instructions are long, so if you are interested in the various writing prompts and pictures, click here.  I tried to use them all.  Then I wrote a flash fiction (200 words or less), a pitch line (under 100 words) for a book (based on the flash fiction) and added a poem, (also based on the flash fiction).  Oh yea, and I'm supposed to write in a genre I am an unfamiliar with.  Well, folks,  this is my first thriller.  Let me know what you think.  If you like it, please vote for me.  I am number 30.

Light and Dark

“Are you crazy?” Paul rubbed his leg where it had scraped against the barnacle-covered rock.  It’s 33 degrees out here.”  I tossed my wet hair, shivering. Fat dollops of water dropped off my brow.

“Didn’t you see him? The kid with the ball?  He was chasing it.  I saw him from down below.” 

“What kid?”

Ever since I got out of the hospital, he’s been waiting for me to start hallucinating again—an excuse to divorce me so he can take up with Elena.  He doesn’t believe any of it happened before; the undulating strings of light that appeared when he was away, blinding me until I hid in a closet.  

 “Jill, I asked you. What kid?”

 “He was there.  Then a trawler motored by and he was gone.  All I saw was the ball floating in the water.  So I jumped in.”

Paul handed me his coat.  “I’m going up to the club for dry clothes.” I stared at the water, digging for my reality like an impoverished child picking trash at a landfill. 

 

When I turned, Paul stood in the distance passing something to a man.  A boy in a red jacket bounced at his side.  

Light and Dark

Thirty-year-old Jill Garrison delights in her photography career, until frightening things occur in her darkroom.  Lights fail, the door locks, and strange smells make her choke.  When she claims the live-action-stills she develops have come to life, her husband Paul, a sound and light engineer, forces her to seek psychiatric help.  Jill wonders if she’s lost her mind until the day a boy with a ball mysteriously disappears and she witnesses her husband paying off a stranger.  Then she begins to suspect she’s not crazy, at all. 

Light and Dark is a 100,000 word psychological thriller.

Light and Dark

Time frozen,

a moment imprinted,

first glass,

then film,

a smiling

bride and groom.

A darkroom

safe haven

develops to ash.

Dream images

implode sanity,

until

all that is frozen

becomes real,

and all that is real

becomes hell.

If, you enjoyed these pieces, click here and like #30.