Greetings fellow Steemians! Here is my seventh 5 minute freewrite. The prompt is "solitude".

This piece is a continuation of yesterday's freewrite, and the third installment in an ongoing story. Let's see how long I can keep this up, using the prompts provided!

Part I: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/freewrite-129-fingernail

Part II: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-ii-freewrite-130-wasps

Part III: https://steemit.com/freewrite/@bennettitalia/the-strangeling-part-iii-freewrite-131-solitude

Unlike yesterday's freewrite post, this one was actually written in 5 minutes, although I did go back in and do a bit of editing once the 5 minutes were up ;)

Freewriting is a daily practice for most poets and fiction writers, designed to loosen up and get things flowing, like stretching before exercise. Visual artists, especially those who draw or paint from life (figures, landscapes, still lives, etc) do something similar in "gesture drawings". After reading several of @poetrybyjeremy's freewrite posts, I got excited to try these again. Many thanks to @mariannewest for hosting this daily freewrite! https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-132-5-minute-freewrite-wednesday-prompt-gardening

https://pixabay.com/en/medium-psychic-female-fantasy-woman-goth-1726601/

The Strangeling (Part IV)

"Follow me", I said, turning on my heel and striding off through the labyrinthine corridors. The wasps followed wordlessly, walking in a tight little group, like kids in a high school clique.

I knew where to find the strangeling. The only place she felt even a little bit comfortable was the Botanical Garden directly across from the four story apartment house in which she lived. Specifically, The Wildflower Meadow on the east side of it, close to the center. She spent nearly all of her waking hours there. It was where I had made first contact with her, introducing the idea that I was an antique book collector (the only books left to collect at this point were antiques anyway, so it was a believable cover) and amateur botanist, a quiet, philosophical, square-peg-in-a-round-hole type. The fact that she couldn't read me at all had surprised her at first, and also seemed to frightened her. But by the third or fourth time we'd "accidentally" bumped into each other she was, by her own admission, starting to like it. It was a relief to her to interact with someone from whom she was unable to pick up anything but the usual human nuances - body language, facial expressions, tones of voice, and so on - just as The Handler had predicted it would be.

Of course I'd already known that the Chameleon experiments had been successful (multiple tests with resident strangelings had shown this to be the case), but it was still reassuring to see that quizzical look on her face whenever my inner life refused to reveal itself. Sometimes it pays to be a human guinea pig.

©2018 Bennett Italia