My100: One-Paragraph Story Hooks Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three

Moving on up from Harappan and ancient Chinese pulp noir, today we have Mesopotamian and Egyptian.

Twenty-Two:
Daru shoved the basket of tunics under the water and dropped a rock on it to keep in in place. The water was muddy here, but a lot less than down closer to Uruk, where everyone else was. It flowed past in a deep, dusty, turgid stream redolent of animal, like washing his clothes in an ox's water trough. Fortunately, the oxen didn't care that he smelled just like they did. His arms ached, trembling as he bent. He dunked them in the water only slightly cooler than the blazing air, but it helped to reduce the fatigue. His hands brushed the riverbottom, sinking into the mud. Something hard lay there, under his palm, and he closed his fist on it and pulled it up. There was good news here--it was a ring, gold, by the look of it. There was bad news, too. The ring was still attached to a finger. Which was attached to a hand. And a wrist, it looked like. Daru spent a long time deciding whether he wanted to know how much more body was there along with it.

Twenty-Three:
A fiery wind began to blow through Menkhaf's house around the fifth hour of the evening. Blasted sand from the great desert tore blankets from the windows and drove the goats into their huts. The house gods must be angry. Maybe he shouldn't have let the cat drink their milk this morning. But the rubbing and purring of Bast was far better than anything the house gods had brought him lately, so they could do their worst, and see if he cared. Sarenpet cried out at the gale, without waking. Menkhaf drew the young boy's woven door closed and sat himself on a chair outside as a guard. Sometime in the night Menkhaf fell asleep, and was gifted a dream, in which he was himself a house god, and his milk was stolen by a cat the size of a cow. He woke to the grey of morning to find that the dream had come true.

Seventy-seven left to go, assuming these count. I'm less than happy with them. Maybe I've made the task too difficult.

~Cristof

P.S. The original impetus for this challenge comes from The New Creatives, a BYUtv show about creativity and drive, which challenged us two weeks ago to create 100 of something as a step toward mastery. This is my attempt. #TNCmy100