start of a short story: the tinker's second pack

the story that turned up in my head was about an itinerant optician in a post-apocalyptic Britain. & then I realised it would need subplots as well as just scenery, so I thought I'd just do a short story that felt like an extract from a real story.

so I marked up a page with 25 lines in 2 columns and figured I could describe what happens in each 100 words to get 5000 words. I wrote the first and fiftieth down first, and then filled in the one-third and two-thirds points as pauses. and then i filled in the 'action'.

it isn't action. i am action-averse.

here's the first four blocks of 100 words each.

The kind of walking that takes no mind, no navigation, just letting her legs swing, eyes glancing down just enough to avoid rabbit holes and stray rocks without even thinking the word 'rabbit' or 'rock', passing the information to her legs without her. The kind of walking that doesn't even tire, at the time, because she isn't really there. She isn't, in any meaningful sense, doing the walking. She's carried above the walking legs: a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, a set of teeth, some hair, and an unseen thing called a mind that registers holes and rocks.

The mind, not being needed for the walking, is already in the next town along. It won't be the next stop. At the next town, she is aware there should be nails, there should be some better screws, there might be more sandpaper. There will almost certainly be tape, or at least glue to make her own tape. If her glue brush weren't wrecked from the day she worked too long into night and fell asleep before washing anything. If she can use the workbench that has a vice, she can dismantle and re-hair her glue brush. Yes, of course.

She tries to avoid 'should' these days but something old still says that she should have mended her glue brush at the last town. Of course they had a vice. How can a set of five hundred houses, even if half of them are standing empty, not have a workbench with a vice? But they didn't have a school, or a nurse. They didn't have bandages. People in rags. So she didn't ask them for anything, in case they began to wonder if the few things in her pack would be more use divided among them. People in reused rags.

The walking brings her to a turn in the road around an oak tree, which is older than the road. Outlived the land registry, of course. The tree is alive, so the road turns round it carefully. The house coming into view is her next stop. Bringing her mind back from up ahead, with effort, back into her walking body, where it notices that her pack has slipped and needs shrugging. Where it prepares the face (a pair of eyes, a set of teeth) for the old man who lives in the old house you see from the oak turning.

the completed story is at The Tinker's Second Pack. I had no idea I was going to finish it.