100 Words

One hundred words. One hundred ways to catch a day and frame it.

I grab a moment, bruise its wings and pin it, still struggling, to the page. If I do my job well, an observer in one hundred years will still hear the echo of the moment, still see the smudge of colour; breathe in and imagine she can smell the — taste the — moment I describe.

If I am clumsy, it will lie there, faded and flat, looking sad and pitiful and regrettable, something no-one ever cared about; something that should have been left to fly forever free.