[Fic] "Prayers to Broken Stone" -- Chronicles of Narnia

I am not satisfied with the ending of this fic -- it doesn't have the punch I'm looking for -- but I am not sure how to fix it. *sigh* Anyway, "Prayers to Broken Stone" is a (remarkably non-descriptive) descriptive vignette about what happens to Charn once Jadis, Digory, and Polly leave. Very gloomy, as befits the aftermath of an apocalypse. 400 words exactly, which I suppose makes it a quadruple drabble.

The title is a random T. S. Eliot quote, because gloomy apocalypses always make me think of The Hollow Men.

[ETA: The revised final version is now up here on AO3 and here on ff.net. Mostly, I fiddled with the ending -- the new conclusion alters the message and mood of the vignette somewhat, though it still fails to nail the effect I was aiming for.)

( Prayers to Broken Stone )

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On another topic, apparently I will be posting "Undertow" unbeta'd Monday night. *sigh* Oh well, if it sucks, it sucks.

...Seriously, though, is nobody willing to do a quick beta for me? I swear it won't take that long. You don't even have to have canon knowledge of Naruto -- the story is designed to work as fanfic and original fiction simultaneously.

wherein Liz breaks her glasses

Today was a decent day until 9:30pm.

I was walking home (in the dark) after closing the smoke shop. As I passed a tree just on the north side of Cascadilla Creek, I felt a spiderweb on my face. I reached up to brush it off, touched my glasses, and felt/heard something small and solid fly forward and land on the sidewalk.

Good, I thought, figuring it had been something caught in the web, which I would not have wanted to actually touch me.

About ten seconds later I noticed my glasses suddenly felt funny. The plastic tab that sits on the right side of my nose seemed oddly cold and metallic, and the positioning of the right lens was drifting slightly downward.

I pulled the frames off to check and sure enough, I hadn't just knocked away a tendril of spidersilk. I'd knocked off a piece of my glasses.

I backtracked and found it on the sidewalk, using my handy-dandy keychain LED mini-flashlight, but when I got home and examined it under full light, it became obvious that it wasn't repairable. See, the plastic thingy is held onto the metal prong by a screw that passes through a little plastic loop. If the screw had come loose, I could have fixed that. (I have a lot of spare glasses screws.) But the plastic loop itself is broken, and there's nothing I can do about that.

Tomorrow morning I am calling my local optometrists/glasses shop and making an appointment ASAP. Because while I can get away with using the broken pair for reading (I am doing so now, in fact), and I do have my previous pair of glasses as emergency replacements for daily use, that combination is not going to cut the mustard for very long.

...

Damn it all. There goes more money down the drain.

ETA: Nevermind! rurounitriv suggested that I buy a cheap pair of sunglasses and use them for replacement parts, which reminded me that I had some old prescription glasses lying around, so I cannibalized those instead, and hey presto, my glasses are back in working order! *sparkles at the world*