Hope

Yay! I've won something writery! The UK Amazon Kindle forum on GoodReads had a competition: Write 200 words max on the given subject, and the entry with the most votes wins. So, we were give a piece of music to listen to, in this case the Meditation from Thais, and then we were asked to write up to 200 words of descriptive prose.

Here's the music:

And here's my entry:

Hope

The cannon were silent now. For days they had been pounding, pounding, without end. Even now their faint echoes, like sweet music, were ringing in my ears as I picked my way carefully through the mangled mess of barbed wire, craters, mud, and flesh. Once this had been pleasant fields and woodlands, green grass waving in the breeze, and tall, strong trees. That was until the war came through and turned it to blood and tears and mud.

Nothing moved. I peered into a crater, hoping for a cheery “hello”, but it was empty and so I moved on to the next. There were bodies, or parts of bodies. I couldn’t tell whether they were ours or theirs, it was all the same at the end, covered in the grey, gloopy mud. I said a silent prayer and kept moving on, hoping for signs of life, but finding none. I looked around, a pall of smoke hung over the ground, still and unmoving, grey smoke over grey mud, under a grey sky.

At last a ray of sunshine broke through the clouds illuminating a single poppy, brilliant red against the sea of grey. My ray of hope. 

You can read all the entries here. Why not have a go at the next competition yourself? You just need to think of a 150 word humorous anecdote about HMS Victory. The full details are here. Go on: You might win...