#this Cori definitely has shades of 1998 Cori sprinkled in there

[naturepointstheway]

Little sneaky-peeky into the first draft of my 3rd chapter for "The Mute and the Maine" (featuring our beloved Coricopat)

“The skull is a chamber.” 

Tugger blinked over at Coricopat, who was staring right at him, face carefully neutral in expression. 

“Uh, I guess?” Was Tugger’s confused response. 

“You know what happens to sound in a chamber?” 

Tugger made a little offhand noise. “It echoes?” 

“You ever been in a small, echoey chamber?” 

“Depends. Empty room? Cave?” 

“Either of those count.” 

“What happens to sound in an empty room?” 

Tugger laughed, rolling over on his back again, arms behind his head, regarding the scuttling clouds above.

“Echoes.” 

“And what happens to those echoes?” 

“Why are you asking me?” 

“Answer me.” 

“Do you want a stupid answer or a serious one?” 

Coricopat sighed again. “Serious. if you can muster it, Tugger.”

A serious one, huh. 

He thought of empty rooms, of little dens, of small hidden spaces, of a little “cave” they found near a beach once. The loud “HELLO!” that would echo back when he yelled inside a suitably cavernous space. And the hellos that came back again, and again, and again, louder and quieter and louder again. 

“The echoes return,” Tugger said, “They come back to you louder.” 

“That’s correct. What if you yelled angrily in that cave?” 

Tugger narrowed his eyes in thought, imagining a cave where the voices returned with great cacophony and fury. 

“They’d sound downright pissed.” 

“Even if you were just a little mad, when you shouted in that cave?”

“Honestly? Yeah. I’d run away quick.” 

“Now think of all those echoes, that voice, amplified, but it’s inside a skull.”

He tried to imagine it, then, those echoes, those bouncing words off dark walls and empty floors and ceilings, and constrained it into a space no bigger than his own skull.