The Vessel

Today's prompts are a little trickier to work with than last week's though perhaps not in the way you would think. The theme is "sand," and the subject is "the vessel." These evoke the image of a ship at sea, or a ship beached in a sandy cove. But that's too easy. My challenge with this one is to create a snippet with more surprise and pop than the image that comes to everyone's mind (assuming none of my readers here have aphantasia, which is statistically unlikely).
If you come up with something completely different than I do, I would love to hear about it!
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The rumble of the engine shook the whole ship, vibrating through every nut, bolt, and panel. At times, things came loose and rattled horrendously until the Engineer could sprint to the site and tighten everything down again. Luckily for everyone, that only happened with the inside panels, and never with the bulkhead. If it ever did move to the outer layers, they would all be frozen space debris.

"This haul is the one that will get us the funds to buy a new ship." That's what the Captain promised. There were some doubts, but no one really had the energy to argue anymore. It was a constant fight to keep the old rustbucket from falling apart every time they passed a minor asteroid or moon.

Book 2

Last month, I worked on writing the first book of a series that I've been playing with for some time. This month, I started writing the second book in the series. Here's how it starts:

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The tolling of the old temple bell was low and sonorous in the dim morning. Clouds obscured most of the pale dawn light, leaving the world below grey and dark as folk got out of bed and readied themselves for the day. Karia paused by a deep window, a narrow slit in the stone wall that let in the warm breeze from the distant forest. It smelled of growing things and damp earth. She breathed deeply, but knew that the morning routine wouldn't wait. With a sigh, she kept on along the corridor, past deep-set windows like narrow eyes in the stone.

As she entered the auditorium, the singing of the choir in the loft fell down upon her ears like snow, high and soft, echoing from one wall to another until it seemed that the music came from all around. She had never particularly liked the higher songs, but this was part of the rotation, and soon enough they would be back to the lower, quieter songs that Karia liked better.

The Trunk

I've discovered recently (as have you, I bet) that my writing style tends toward the dark and discordant and emotional. In an effort to correct this course and lighten my writing, I have made a new reading list for myself that doesn't include quite so much dystopian fiction. This is my first attempt at something a little closer to the Young Adult Adventure stories that I want to write. 

Let me know what you think.

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She was probably right about it being a bad idea. She usually was. But bad idea or not, he really wanted to know, and this was the only way to find out. And that was the reason Pan found himself squashed into a corner, behind a dusty old couch and pretending he didn’t need to breathe at all - because if he started sneezing now, everything would be ruined.

The loveseat was practically an antique, and Pan suspected it hadn’t been moved from that spot since it had first been brought into existence by whatever colorblind personage had decided it was a good idea to make such a terrible thing. The rug under the loveseat was half scratchy wool and half dust, and it was hard to tell which was which.