At midnight was the war

[pilfered_words]

Ugh, I don’t want to write anything. I’ve been skipping around, reading anything that happens to catch my eye, and not having thoughts about what I read.

 

Before that, I was reading LotR aloud to my sister. “Isn’t she a bit old for that?” you may ask. Why, yes, yes she is. She’s 12. The last time I read aloud to her was years ago. But she started LotR on her own once before, and got bored and quit, and that’s just not acceptable. We started at the beginning of Book 2 earlier this week, and we’re in the middle of the Council of Elrond now. That chapter is… really long. It doesn’t seem that long when you’re reading to yourself. Especially if you’re me, and use every line to go, “Oh! He means that dude from the thing! And this is the part that will be super important later! Oh, there’s the canon part of that one fic!” S. doesn’t really care about any of that, obviously, because she doesn’t know enough things to really make the connections. She also doesn’t quite approve of descriptive language, so it’s sort of slow going.

 

Eh. I’m just going to post the beginning of a perennial WIP. It’s a translation of one of my favorite Russian books, actually:

 

 

The only things I have left of my classmates now are the memories and a single photograph. It’s a group portrait, with our homeroom teacher in the center, the girls around her, and the boys at the edges. The photograph has faded, and since the photographer carefully focused the camera on the teacher, the edges, smudged even when the picture was taken, have now completely blurred; sometimes I wonder if they have blurred because the boys of our class long ago passed into nothingness, before they had a chance to finish growing up, and their features have been dissolved by time.