A new experience

This was a quite and interesting prompt from a creative writing class I took back in 2004. The following after the prompt is what I written.

*Write a short story with the following conditions: It is exactly twenty-six sentences in length. each sentence begins with a word which starts with one of the letters of the alphabet -- in order. Also you must have one sentence fragment. Oh and one sentence should be exactly one hundred words long and grammatically sound.*

Antarctica was most certainly at the bottom of the word. Brr! Christina Cortes rubbed her arms trying to warm up. Dummie, she told herself. Elizabeth Thomas just shook her head at her. Friends or not, they were both stuck traveling to the bottom of the world. Great big icebergs loomed over the deck of the ship. Huge icebergs that took away their breath, as they looked up at them. Icy, white icebergs that were clearly too cold to touch, although she wanted too.

"Joyous view!" Killer whales, predatory black-and-white toothed whale with large dorsal fins, burst through the ice in front of their ship. Long, black bodies cutting across the ice. Many of the crew and passengers halted their actions to watch the beautiful dark shapes cut and glide through the cold Antarctic sea of rolling broken ice with their slick black bodies. Never before had Christina seen anything like that. Only, perhaps in her dreams when she laid awake at night fearing her trip.

People pointed beyond the whales toward McMurdo Station. Quite a contrast, for it was a dark blemish on the white surface; a pile of metals buildings, dust and debris. Really drab as far as Christina was concerned. Surely they weren't going to stay there that long? Troublesome thoughts crossed her mind if she had to stay there longer than one or two days. Unless she just decided to go out on her own to Vostok; no it wasn't worth worrying over or risking freezing to death out on the vast white frozen desert. Vostok Station was her real destination, after all McMurdo was overrated in her opinion.

Welcoming waves from people could be seen from shore near McMurdo. "Xenophiles," said Elizabeth Thomas, Antarctic scientist; a word used to describe people attracted to that which is foreign, especially to foreign people, manners, or cultures; which the continent Antarctica was most certainly a mixture of with bases belonging to several different countries and a vast amount of people of all walks of life that work and visit its endless land of white and blue icebergs, islands, fossils, plants, rocks, minerals, gold dust, volcanoes, valleys, mountains, solar displays, stations, wildlife - penguins, whales, and many many legends of explorers, death, lies, truths, lost dreams, proven ambitions; a wide vast amount of history.

"Yet, this is new day," she told herself swallowing the reborn fear of a new place.

"Zealous actions can get you killed here but I know despite your fears you'll be fine."


*short url: http://bit.ly/mEyb59