Friday! Filler! An Excerpt!

Is everyone working on their story for our contest? I am! To prove it, I offer the following snippet, which will give you a feel for the prose style, but not much else. Which is fine, I think. Anyway, all the usual caveats about this being a rough draft:

The air at M-- was soothing, clean and soft like washed linen. Antosha imagined the pure, clear atmosphere circulating through his chest, bathing his bronchial passages. He could smell the white blossoms of the chestnut trees along the stream over to his left. He could almost taste the powdery purple lilac scent and the tang of graygreen catkins that swayed beneath the twisting black limbs of an old willow at the crest of the hill behind him. Antosha visualized these perfect fragrances as medicinal compounds, cleaning any imperfections from his lungs. A mile or so ahead of him, Antosha knew, was a field of knee-high grass mixed with chamomile, the ubiquitous chamomile that grows everywhere in Russia. If he kept on in the same direction he'd push through a wall of silver birches and there he'd see an acre of dark yellow cones above thin white petals, like ten thousand boiled egg yolks perched atop porcelain saucers, trembling in the breeze. Chamomile had been used in folk remedies for centuries. Doctor Chekhonte often prescribed tea with chamomile to his own patients, in cases of insomnia or nervous blood.

I'm having fun with this story, and I think it will be something worth reading when I'm done. Even if it's not a great story, I got to use the word "catkins," which you have to agree is a cool word.