Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Example Sentences
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
Rascant
Another Sunday promenade in spite of the heat, and Lill’s collar rubbed rascant lines in the skin behind her ears.
Hopplag
By the frost-stained fountain, amid the clatter of the icicle chimes, she heard him before she saw him, and he was saying, “Nevermind what he charged, he tensioned up the hopplag and the gears haven’t slipped since.” He had a striped coat, green-tinted googles, and an asymmetrical grin.
Thurtle
She turned to see him astride a blue metal ornithoptopede, chatting with another rider. He tipped his hat as she passed and she resolved to find some pretext for conversation on her next circuit of the slippery tile-walk. But he and his friend were gone by the time she returned. That thurtling in the treetops might have been them.
Stoce
She got herself a cup of herb-flecked ice so she could loiter and watch. She chipped away with the tiny wooden spoon the vendor had given her. It was stoce. She hated stoce. She ate the whole thing, but he didn’t come back.
Ullivaria
She walked home the long way, and found grim amusement in the most neglected corner of the sculpture garden, where the statues of a quartet of primly-posed town fathers were draped with an exuberance of flowering ullivaria. She thought she saw cracks in the stone under the tendrils’ coils.
Fetzbalk
Back home, she cut silhouettes out of cheap fetzbalk, sigils that would represent the day’s events when she pasted them in her diary.
Widensh
When the light grew too dim for the fine cutting, she laid the book aside. Out the window, the sky above the courtyard was as widensh as she felt.
One Green Hill
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
A picture (a blue sky, a green hill) was found among her belongings.
She was the first of the first generation to die. The generation who knew Earth as home, not as story. The picture became the goal and they began to build the hill.
There was a poetic rightness to it, a commemoration, a remembering together. Their remains, turned to soil, building a patch of nature in the heart of the GreatShip’s endless metal and glass. For those who followed after, everything, always, was recycled.
The hill was their past and future, until they reached their destination, and then there was a planet with green hills by the million. There was talk of transporting the hill down to the surface, to a park in the middle of the first settlement. By now, however, the hill was its own ecosystem, a living thing that wouldn’t survive uprooting and transport.
So they went down without it, and it became a stop on the historical tours. Then history took a turn — disease, strife, struggle against a not-yet-domesticated alien world. A forgetting followed by a slow return. Societies re-formed, cities rebuilt, sciences reverse-engineered from artifacts.
When they were ready, they went up, into the sky, to the Star that Never Moves. They found an entire ship, larger than their largest city, empty and apparently devoted to sustaining a mound of soil covered in grass that didn’t look nearly blue enough.