Week in Seven Words #479

bared
It's a bleak, grand landscape of bare earth and massive rocks.

dulled
The bookstore is underwhelming, basically a shrunken Barnes & Noble with a selection watered down to what's most trendy. One of the things I like about bookstores is coming across a book I wouldn't have known about otherwise; that isn't likely to happen here.

intoxicant
A teenaged boy plucks a bud from a magnolia tree. "Is this opium?" he asks his friend. An old lady, walking past them, snorts with laughter. She tells them to come back in a couple of weeks, when the beautiful opium will be in bloom. ("But is it really opium?" he asks. She shakes her head and explains that no, it really isn't.)

sunshine
They've turned a part of the park into a meadow with mulch paths. The long grass is soaked in sunshine.

surface
Around the rock clusters, the stream looks like a ripply diamond-paned window.

trifle
A blister is ballooning on my pinky toe, but I don't mind so much, because it's good to be hiking.

uses
She complains how he's glommed onto her, and how he won't stop talking, but she has no problem using him to carry her coat, camera, or backpack as the need arises.

Extracts: a cold hollow

The sun was not setting, nor was it seen. It hid behind the western slopes so only a hint of sun rose upward, firing the ridges with a green fire, and leaving everything in the hollow a clean, cold shadow.

-- from "Fox Hunters", by Breece D'J Pancake

Words like those give me a cold shivery feeling even in summer. Like in most of Pancake's stories, set in West Virginia, there's a cold ache running through the landscape and the characters. They can try to warm up with drink, with sex, with hunting or fighting, or with some dreams of a different life or a different place, but they still remain in those cold hollows.