Is this a darling, I see before me?

[khiemtran]

I woke alone in the forest. My head ached and my body felt strangely cold. I was lying on my back and the sun was shining through the treetops and into my eyes. There was a low-hanging branch above me, with an indentation at roughly the height of my forehead.

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, it took me too long to figure out even what the point was supposed to be. Even then, the details don't add up very well. -- Or are the oddities clues to magic or something?

Level of forehead? I visualized this as the level of his forehead now that he's lying down. Maybe you meant the level of his forehead if he were standing up.

Indentation? How does a branch get an indentation from being bumped into by a forehead? A branch might split or break or something -- but not if it's a low-hanging branch. Low-hanging means, well, hanging, dangling, swaying in the wind. If you bump into it, it just moves; you might get scratched or tangled or something.

It made sense for Prince Caspian, riding a galloping horse through a dark forest, to get knocked unconscious by a branch. But that would take horse-power. :-) I can't imagine someone running fast enough to do that much damage to himself just by running into a branch -- tho I suppose I might be wrong. But if the branch were soft enough to take an 'indentation'....

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

In context, in wasn't quite as bad as that. The narrator was already established as a non-human, of unusual strength and composition, and prone to clumsiness, and he spends much of the earlier part of the story either running after things or running away from them (which he was doing just before the above passage). But the mildly ironic tone of the narration didn't quite fit the rest of the story, which called for a more solemn moment right at that point.