For instance, it is nearly dawn. You walk along the wet cracked concrete path, past picket fences, moving between pockets of safety carved from the rural black by soft yellow lamplight. You are humming, and freezing. You open your eyes wide to let the chill needle you into wakefulness. You love the cold. You love the walk home in the cold. That’s what you said. You said you preferred walking home here in the safe embrace of a small town. The city is dangerous, violence is always there, footsteps echoing only a few paces behind.
But that was a lie. You miss the city, the night life, night’s life. Here the night is dead and cold as a moon. Here, even at night, the sky feels like a pit to you, an inverted chasm ridged with rolling hills and hostile mountains. Perhaps that is the onset of post-party anxiety talking. The ecstasy is leaving your bloodstream while the alcohol continues to swarm your liver enzymes and drown them. The growing weight of each footstep and quickening intensity of each shiver tells you that tomorrow will be a write-off, another write-off in a long line of write-offs flagged by your internal insurance adjuster as inflationary to your cost of living and held against your future claims.
Claims, for instance, it’s only now and again. Claims, for instance, you have it under control. Claims, for instance, it is nearly dawn. But the sun has wrapped an arm around your shoulders, and you begin to sweat.
Not far, you tell yourself. Nearly there.
(260 words)
ChatGPT
For instance, it is nearly dawn. Jasper could tell you it’s nearly dawn, or he could say that it’s mid-morning. In the wilderness, time bends; sometimes, all that matters is whether you’re moving or still, searching or resting. In this moment, Jasper chooses “nearly dawn,” though he’s not sure how long he’s been sitting by the cold ashes of last night’s fire.
He hadn’t planned on coming this far. But when his friend joked about strange tracks by the ridge, Jasper felt something stir – a call he hadn’t answered in years. Now he’s three days deep, drawn by whispers in the underbrush and hints of something just out of reach. The clock in town would say it’s 5:12am, maybe 5:13, but in the wild, dawn is just a possibility. It’s a suggestion, a sign that the world is tilting toward light.
Jasper shifts, his eyes scanning the shapes around him. “Nearly dawn,” he reminds himself, almost like he’s testing the words. That phrase alone keeps him grounded, enough to let him move forward, barely knowing what he’s after.
A flicker in the shadows catches his eye, a shape – too quick, too silent. He watches, senses heightening as a pair of eyes glint in the fading dark. It’s a creature, massive and elusive, watching him as if it, too, knows time can be whatever you make of it out here.
And then, just like dawn, it’s gone, leaving Jasper wondering if it was ever there.
(244 words)
Julian Gorham
For instance, it is nearly dawn, the epic zeptosecond before early dawn. (A trillionth of a billionth of a second, they reckon.) ... Read more.