1. Nightmare.

This is the first in a series of short writing exercises based around my OC warboys during the First World War. I’m using this list and this list for prompts. It’s not much, but I’m just easing back into writing. If you like it, stay tuned - there will be more, including more info on my actual characters.

Prompts: breathing in the dark; unable to breathe.

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When Nat wakes tangled in soft cotton sheets, he fights them. It doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel real. In his dream, he sat at the bottom of a deep, flooded shellhole, soaked and shivering. Clutching his rifle tight and ready to spring into action, he stared upward at a sky that glowed green. He was waiting for something, muscles taut, teeth gritted, but he can’t remember what. It doesn’t matter. The sodden, clammy weight of his soaked uniform felt more real than the bedding he drags with him as he tumbles to the floor now. His nails scrape against wooden boards sanded smooth, carefully polished, not slick and rough, half-rotted. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel real.

Nat kicks the last of the sheets away as they cling to his ankles, try to wrap around his calves, and he gets to his feet. The room tilts, unfamiliar shadows looming at the edges of his vision. He knows where he is. He’s not mad, he knows where he is: Nat knows that he is at home, in Aberffraw, that this is bedroom, that these looming shadows are the books and toys and collected treasures of his childhood, but it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel real.

Breathing short and sharp against the barbed wire wrapped unseen around his ribcage, Nat clings to the bannister as he lurches down the stairs. The house is silent all around him, sleeping or dead. His feet creak on the stairs, his breath saws through the tepid night air. The gloom changes colours and warps shapes and — this could be the dream, if it didn’t hurt so much. If his head wasn’t pounding and his lungs weren’t collapsing, this could be the dream, the nightmare.

Reaching the door, Nat stumbles outside, his arms wrapped tight around his chest to stop it ripping apart, bare feet numb to the small stones underfoot, the dewy grass. It’s quiet. The lazy summer breeze whispers through the dark trees, rustles gently in the bushes. A cricket sings. The earliest birds flit silent and black across the lesser dark of the deep blue sky. In the distance, the river gurgles. No artillery, no gunfire, no hissing flares, no whispers in the dark. The ground is lifeless, limp beneath his feet without the ravenous growl of war humming deep in the belly of the earth.

It doesn’t feel right.

It doesn’t feel real.

Nat shuts his eyes and screams.