Friday Freewrite

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Today's writing prompt: "She felt her strength begin to drain away"

"She felt her strength begin to drain away," as she lay on the darkening field. Rain started to drip on her face, her eylids, encouraging her to keep them closed. In time, she figured someone would come along. Or maybe not.

She sat up slowly, pushing with her hands. She felt wetness on the back of her neck, but she was afraid to to touch it. She didn't even look at her hands, or her jeans. Her weakness was becoming more like pain, weighing down on every inch of her skin, like tiny hands holding her down. She remembered the school nurse telling her once, after she gave blood and got dizzy, "Head up! Head up!" So she tried. She looked toward the sky and saw black clouds swirling before a gray haze, a muted sun losing its battle to shine through. The field where he brought her was large and mowed, surrounded by tall evergreens and blotched with spatterings of violets and dandelions. She didn't recognize the place, didn't know which way to go.

She strained to hear cars, a tractor, kids playing. But something seemed wrong -- she had muted, underwater hearing. Then she saw them, the tracks from his blazer. They traveled toward the bottom edge of the field, where she thought she could see a clearing.

She started crawling but it was too hard, and she kept getting glimpses of red stains and strange protrusions on her hands. So,she stood, slowly, pausing half way up, holding her arms out to her sides for balance, trying to breath slow and deep, trying to use her hypnosis training to quell the pain and regain her composure. She began taking steps and seemed to be moving at a good clip. She felt no pain now. Darkness closed in on her, and she recognized the sensation from after her car accident, the tunnel vision, the altered reality. She kept watching the dandelions on the ground before her, like streetlights, such a bright yellow that they made her squint.

She didn't use thoughts of her family, or of how much she wanted to live, to keep herself going. She just thought of the tire tracks meeting the small clearing, thought of walking to it, and making it to the other side, wherever that may be.