Six Sentence Sunday

So apparently the idea is that on a Sunday, you post six sentences out of whatever book you please, and then link to it in a central place at http://www.sixsunday.com/

I’m not sure I’m doing it right. Partly because it’s only Saturday (but if I tried to do it on Sunday, I think I’d fail due to time zone differences,) and partly because I’m not sure I understand the instructions for putting your link on the SSS site. Still, we’ll see.

Here are six sentences from Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon, in which Flynn trades fifty years of his life for the chance to go home. This turns out to involve some very unpleasant surgery:

~

His eyes snapped open at the squirm about his wrist, the saw-edged slide of something hard and dirty into his flesh, and so he was in time to see her needle-pointed nails lengthen, slick out from her fingertips and drive through his skin, up the veins of his arm, parting the muscle, winding about the bone. Augh! No. No, no no! He screamed, tried to wrench himself away, but it held him fast, the barbed tips of the nails sinking into the joint of his elbow.

Exquisite pain—the kind of pain that shredded reason and left him howling, nothing behind his eyes but the enormity of agony. Then it eased and he found himself human again, collapsed onto his knees, one arm curled about his head, the other still held in that obscene grasp.


Bonus background factoid: the description of the pain is highly influenced by my experience of what it’s like incautiously jogging your arm when you are in the painful ‘freezing up’ stage of frozen shoulder. Fellow frozen shoulder sufferers? You do not get enough sympathy in this world, but you have mine.

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Sadey Quinn
11 years ago

Wow– wonderful description of pain. And so sorry it came from personal experience. 🙂 Great six!

Eleri Stone
11 years ago

I think “unpleasant” is an understatement but your description of the process is amazing. Gave me chills.

Frank Fisher
11 years ago

Good six Alex! I’m sensing his pain this and you describe it well. May I make one suggestion: perhaps add quotation marks to the part Augh! No. No, no no!

Other than that, it’s pretty good.

Jo-
Jo-
11 years ago

Powerful, and in only 6 sentences.
Cheers
Jo-Ann

Elin Gregory
11 years ago

😀 lovely stuff. Well not for poor Flynn.

As long as the post is up and strictly 6 sentences long when the mods check [how DO they find the time?] you’re good to go.

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