Tea...and Assassination!

So just for kicks today I decided to revist old Chrysals Experiment prompts, to, you know, get the juices flowing. Haven't written a short story in, oh, ages... Anyhow, as I started the Chrysalis Experiment late, I began this time at, oddly enough, the beginning. Their first prompt was "I hate polite people. Especially when they're murderers."

Hello, cloud. Hello, other former Chrysalis peoples. Hello, everyone!

Tea…and Assassination

When she opened the front door, the cold air was so staggering it turned all the cabin to winter for a moment, and the blow of it made her paint brushes shudder in their jars. Silhouetted against the night there was a man; there were no clouds and his edges were made clear by starlight. He was dressed warmly. But he was not from anywhere near her small mountain cabin where the wind and the mice sneaked under the door seal, that much was quite clear.

“Yes?” she asked. “Please, come in out of that cold.”

Without a word, the man obliged. “Uhm,” she began, “why don’t I make us some tea.” And she turned to the stove and sink area, glad to be busy.

“I hate polite people. Listen, we’ve got to go.”

“Tea,” she replied obstinately. “It’ll be just a few minutes.” Her hands shook as she turned the kettle on its burner.

WIP TCE 51--Opposite

Back to writing my Chrysalis stories! Hooray! Warning:  Contains heavy cursing and mild adult content.

This is going to be something completely different, yet again. Hope I can capture what it is I'm going for. Been doing a lot of people watching lately (don't worry, no one in particular!). Hmm...

Title still tentative.

Opposite

Shawn Mullins was a very nervous, shy young man. He chewed his fingernails, but when he did so he hid them furtively, so as to throw people off his track. When he went to bed at night, he set three alarms, because he feared he would not wake up in time, and when his friends came over he unplugged the extras. Crossing a road was a production; he spent so long twining his thick neck back and forth, all the while pretending to be fixing his hair under his hipster hat--so as to look some form of debonair--that a good five solid minutes would pass before he stepped off one curb and onto the pavement. That sort of thing; you understand. But what is really remarkable about Shawn Mullins is that he had no idea he himself was a nervous, shy young man. In his own mind, Shawn thought himself, as he would say, the fer-shizzle. The truth is that Shawn had spent so long convincing everyone in the world that he was outgoing, fun, hip, or whatever other descriptive word he liked to use, that he had finally succeeded in convincing himself. Jack of all trades; anaconda for the ladies; gift to the world in general.

It is men like these that give women the most trouble.

After spending a few years working in his hometown’s local hardware store, Shawn decided it was time to go be cool elsewhere. He had “outgrown” his town. Big fish; small pond. We all know what this means: he feared, deep down, that his peers were onto him. And nobody likes to have their self-perception broken down by rumours and rumblings. So he picked up and moved to Wyoming to work in a dude ranch, because he just knew it would fit his rugged, cool-guy personality better than working in a hardware store in Charlton, Tennessee. And when he arrived at the ranch, along with his eleven pieces of luggage (full of striped scarves and hipster hats—because he must be perceived as not only warm, but interesting), he saw her and he knew that he had to give her even more trouble than even the most troubled woman has ever endured, because she was the one for him.

TCE 44 WIP: The Effected

Well, this is all I got last week; ahh well. *sigh* At least I have a working title, right? Didn't get close to working the prompt into the blurb.

Yeah, erm...lol...

The Effected

I pounded, loud, on one of the heavy metal doors. Pounded hard enough that my fist made a sound like metal on metal. Behind me, I felt the children jump, long over pretending to be brave. Bravery equaled stupidity in days like these. There was no answer, but I knew someone had to be inside the warehouse or factory of whatever this building was. I’d been sure I’d seen steam, from the hill of the overpass, and standing outside its doors there was the smell of laundry drying. Laundry, of all things. I pounded again.


A face appeared in the narrow window pane. It was the face of a girl, still a teenager but probably only in number. The glass fogged up in front of her breath, but I saw her eyes dart behind me to Pilar and Michael, still in their school uniforms. When the face ducked down, the sound of grinding, metal on concrete, perhaps, came through the door, and then it opened.

“Do you have it?”

“No,” I said, pulling the children forward so she could check their jaws and mine, their eyes and mine. We hadn’t displayed any of the symptoms, even as far as we’d came. Not one.

“Get in.” And we did. The metal door banged shut.




The gilr-woman led us round about through a thick hallway, then offices, then into an open area, machines still present—looked like a plastics plant—but now littered also with makeshift cots and various items of the few living within its walls. Her head jerked at my shoulder, where my semi-automatic hung, making her long red hair jump with the force of her gesture.

“Not gonna happen,” I told her with my own head jerk. “You don’t get my gun. Like hell.” I sounded way more bitchy than I ever had before the drug bombs, but then, I hadn’t any reason to be bitchy back then. I’d stolen this gun fair and square, and it had helped us get all the way from Midtown to out here, where the suburbs turned back into the boondocks.

“Don’t be a bitch,” she said. “None of us are carrying. We can’t let you keep that on you. Just stash it some place; we won’t look.”

Pilar nudged me.

“I don’t want to go back out there, Auntie,” she said. “My nose hurts…and I’m tired. Real tired.”

“We both are,” mumbled Michael. I said nothing. The girl and the seven other people stared at me, inching behind the lumbering machines, as I stared at them.

“Let her keep the gun, for now,” a voice called. The man to whom it belonged stepped from a back left doorway I hadn’t yet noticed. He wore a gun too, I saw, but it was a handgun, snug against his waist. “John?” His voice was grim. Another man, presumably John, dislodged himself from behind a machine.

“Come on,” John said, a gray fringe around his head like a monk’s tonsure. “Let ol’ Doc take a look at you.”

TCE 44--Rudyard's Clara

Okay, so I was playing with verb tenses in this and it probably reads a little funky; hopefully I'll get that squared away soon. The TCE prompt was  "Fell down a well/ It should be pretty/ Like a little fairy tale."

Here you go!

Rudyard's Clara 

You’d think being dead would mean you don’t care about the living. But you’d think wrong. In fact, I’ve seen so much of humanity…well, suffice to say that on occasion it’s hard not to get attached. A beautiful soul really sticks out when you’re dead, it shines, almost. Like a beacon. A very hard to ignore beacon of everything you miss about life.

My beacon likes to hang wallpaper.

“Why do you live alone here?” I asked Clara. She’d bought the house from the bank because they lady before couldn’t pay her bills. I’d never liked that woman; she smelled like old cats, only she had none, and I haven’t had a real nose in 217 years, so my olfactory sense is a little dim; she smelled that bad. Clara was a different story. She smells like the honeysuckle blowing through the window she’d hung the lace curtain upon.

TCE 43--The Bone Song

Something completely different this week, and hopefully in keeping with holiday creepiness. The prompt was "She was like a sponge, he mused."

**oOOOooo-wEEEEeee-oooooo**

image courtesy of http://www.free-wallpapers-free.com/

The Bone Songs

The moon shined through the trees and onto our earth in cool shafts of almost-light. This time of year, the branches of even the oldest trees are nearly finished with their die-back. They wear their last leaves like old human women wear jewels, clutching them, rattling them, banging them against one another in a garish attempt to outshow one other. The sound of the rattling only served to cover our breaths, our steps, as we stole through the wood at night. Not that any who need fear us could hear us. We tend to be silent as our namesake.

Our namesake, you see, is Death. We are the Death Wights.

TCE-WIP. Aaaack, I'm so behind!

Okay, so I'm not done yet, but I want to get this one posted so I can guilt myself into finishing it. Still untitled, still not sure where I'm going with it yet. But a start is a start. The prompt was "You can have seconds, if you want."

UNTITLED

The non-sound of snow.

I rolled in the blanket, stretching against the car seat. Even it was cold where I hadn’t been sleeping. Freezing, in fact. Each time I blinked it got a little easier to see, even though my breath fogged up the interior of the car and the windows were opaque with ice. White and gray; white and gray. I rolled again, towards the driver seat. Saul was hunched over the console, face hidden.

“Saul.”

Nothing.

“Saul. Saul. Wake up.”

“Whaa? Where? Whaa?” The Browning's chamber aimed through his foggy breath. Saul always woke like that, glaring and brandishing a gun. Said if you didn’t wake up ready to kill, you’d wake up dead. Only his glare was visible from his gaiter.

“Easy, now. It got cold; we need some heat.” As soon as he unearthed the keys, I nabbed them and started the car so he could put down the gun. There was a rumble, then the glow of headlights against snow and the mountain face. We’d parked base of the drive, just behind a nice edge of trees that ran parallel to the main road. Out of sight, out of mind. At this elevation, the snow stole the nighttime and even with the headlights, it was all still white and gray, just splashed with two bright beams. Saul flicked the headlights off, curled over the steering wheel, then straightened.

“O-2-hundred,” he mumbled, jerking his muffled head at the clock. “Storm wasn’t supposed to be here until near breakfast.”

I nodded. It was cold. My brain felt heavy and sharp in my head.

TCE 39--Brat with a Soul

I still haven't finished the previous week's story, and this one (as per usual) isn't quite where I want it yet, but there you go. lol. The prompt was:  "This is the short version of my story, the simplest way I can possibly tell it."



And here's the story!

A Brat with a Soul

Donald’s littlest cousin was born into brathood. He supposed it was better than being born into hatred or something else serious, because a person could simply outgrow being a brat, eventually. Maybe by the time thirty hit. To go on, it made large family get-togethers tedious and daunting, having this young, thoroughly bratty child hanging about him. For some unfathomable reason, she liked him. Her name was Lizzie. Lizzie B, the family called her, because she talked so much she sounded like a bee, and a lot of times the words stung.

Once, just because she could, Lizzie B went without eating a thing but non-chocolate candy. It started at the Christmas dinner, this “once,” and it lasted for three straight years. Luckily, she’d passed that stage and was eating real food again (cookies, cake, cupcakes, cheesecakes, pastries, and so on and so forth). Another time she stole Loretta’s credit cards, because “Loretta wadn’t gonna buy good presents for Christmas anyway, because she didn’t know how, so of course she needed the credit cards,” and only returned them after buying the entire Dora sleep set off an internet site. She’d apologized after her mother and father convinced her to do so.

But she was still a brat.

Lizzie B sat at the dining room table of their great, great Aunt Loretta’s, right next to Donald. They were the only ones inside the house; it was a fine bright day outside, late summer. She swung her feet back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Donald pretended to continue checking his email.

“Whacha doing?”

“Checking my email.” Donald tried to keep his tone mild.

“No you’re not. You’re a liar. Probably a cheat, too. Liars always cheat.”

“You cheat, Lizzie B. You cheat all the time. That’s why nobody plays cards or Candyland with you anymore.”

“I don’t cheat, Donnie,” she said sweetly, blinking at his immobile inbox screen. “I only make sure I win. I always win. That’s what I do.”

TCE prompt 37--Fair Fraulein, Pt 4

...and the last bit is done! Errr, yeah. *smile*

Click the following to read part 1, part 2 or part 3

Fair Fraulein

part 4

The apples tumbled through the snow melt, rolling elegantly pale along the white slush. I opened the door, a woman stooped, not seeing me come out the door to help, or Donar’s watchful visage in the doorway, and began frantically pattering after them. Suddenly, we were face to face.

“Apple for your trouble, my lady,” she said demurely, dropping to a shallow curtsy.

“No thank you,” I said firmly. I’d had quite enough of strange women and their strange gifts. “I wished to but see you caught them all before they bruised.”

She rose.

“Are you sure?”

“Wherever did you get apples, this time of year?” I asked her.

“Oh, if you please, my lady, these are special apples. Apples of winter, which grow white and blush red…just like your pretty cheeks.” Smiling, an apple appeared at my right cheek. I could only just make out the crimson blush that graced one side.

Vampires Anonymous--TCE 36, I think

It's as comfortable today as it was in late April *happy sigh*. It went from 105-plus to 70 with light rain in one week. Cancel that light rain bit-- I think we're getting some of that tropical storm rain. It's kind of yellow outside, and the cars are going really fast (I imagine the yellow sky is the cause) but the rain is falling straight down and the curtains--they're white and sheer and very girly, lol, are billowing all pretty in the wind. What a beautiful Friday.

Okay, onto my story. I must warn you, this is really crass, maybe the crassest (is that even truly a word?) I've ever written. I.f you don't like cursing or, err, somewhat-funnies about peeing and whatnot, don't read it. Defer, instead, to one of my more grown-up-friendly short stories.

That being said, here was the TCE prompt: "I know all the best places to hide. But there are certain precautions you need to take if you don't want them to smell you."

Vampires Anonymous

High above the two of them, the slowly baring trees stretched the black sky. The trees, thick with Spanish moss, crept close to the cliff’s edge, but not close enough for the light of the bonfire to brighten their branches. Still though, it was a vivid night, the kind with plenty of stars and a halo around the moon, so that even though the stars were small and the moon, thin, the usual gray tones of night took on tints of green and brown.

“Will they see us?”

“Of course not. They’re only human, and these ones are tourists from the city anyway. Can’t see much of anything in the dark.”

Malice pulled the younger vampire deeper into the trees, just the same. Right on schedule, the group of drinkers laughed as a frizzing blonde climbed atop the cooler and began yodeling “Black Velvet,” using a whiskey bottle as a microphone. She was clumsy and inarticulate atop the orange plastic, but no amount of slurring could hide her voice as she sang. Try as he could , Malice couldn’t remember ever hearing anyone yodel in real life, let alone a song that wasn’t meant to be yodeled. Humans. You loved them or you ate them.

TCE-35 After

Well, shiznit. Every have one of those weekends you expect to be long and relaxing, with plenty of time for everything, and then WAH-BAM! all hell breaks loose and you're swamped but still in lazy-dazy mode?

Yeeeah.

So my TCE story remains at the same exact point it was on, like, Tuesday or Wednesday, I think, when I was sure I'd have plenty of time to finish. Phooey. I apologize for any typos and whatnot. *hangs head* And for the lateness... And for the whole being unfinished thing...

EDIT: I've finished, basically! Don't care for the title, but ahh well, I usually don't. This was my first foray into this genre, by the way. Happy to take crits!

Here was the prompt: "This could all be over in a matter of seconds... Should I or shouldn't I?"

After

I never had thought of myself as old, even through the last wars, when I lost my husband to the bombs. I didn’t even think myself old when, during the meteorite shower that killed half the western hemisphere and covered the rest with a winter of dustclouds, I noticed my skin was a wrinkled dead color that matched what little sky could be seen through the dirty window panes of "home."  So far, I’d sheltered myself inside some strangers' house, now little more than a hovel, just off the the 101 on the way up to Santa Barbara where my daughter and her children lived, now dead, probably. Been there since the meteors began to fall. 

As the first thundering sizzles of the meteors dropped into the ocean to my west, I wondered if maybe the kids were right and I shouldn’t be driving any more, since I couldn’t possibly be seeing clearly. But I was, and I got myself right out the car and wandered into the nearest house's unlocked front door. Who lives on the beach and doesn’t lock their doors, especially in this day and age, after the wars? There was no one home, and when the debris crushed the back half of the house and buried part of the front door, I stayed where I was.

The day I ate the last of the Cisneros’ canned goods—after it became clear I couldn’t leave, I tried to discover at least the name of the people who had lived in that house—was the day I decided to venture out of doors. When I finally managed to open the front door, the crack of light that fell through the opening wasn’t really light at all, it was merely air that wasn’t necessarily dark.

It was gray. Chilled, but acrid with the smell of salty burning, and thick. Who knew the sea could catch fire? I never; it had all been over in a matter of minutes, of seconds; the sea a roar of flames. There wasn’t much seeing to be done in it. I walked out into it, going slow, crawling over the burned bits of lawn furniture and metal car doors that had slammed into the thin yard. I moved even slower than I remembered as habit—I suppose all the months of moving so little had a greater impact on my body than I was willing to admit.

“Hello,” I called when I finally reached the other side of the 101 and stood on what should have been beach. No one answered. There wasn’t even the cry of seagulls.The air was thick, and gray, and utterly silent. The tides were wrong, and lapped near my feet. Should have been way out, unless I had my time all mixed up. Much of it is wrong; the muted tones, the acrid smell, the quietness of space between breaths. I paced up the shoreline, in search of someone alive, someone like me.

###

I am become a creature of the in-between. 

TCE 34--Enough

Alright. So right now I am multi-tasking like a sunnofagun, and only have a chance to post the opening of my Chrysalis story. I'll be taking a rather liberal view of the prompt, but I tried three different (indeed, completely different) stories, and they all fell flat on their, uh, faces. Not that they have any. Faces, I mean. Whatever. And here we are...

Anyway, I shall be posting several things today, including the next portions of this story, so if you happen across this, and it's all nice and titled and happy and shiny with completion, count yourself lucky. Everybody else, sorry! ~ 

LATER EDIT: Very unhappy with the end. MrAAaaaghHH!

TCE prompt: "The first time I walked into that classroom was also the last."

Enough

 Sometimes, there are situations that cannot be avoided. Conditions that ought to have been foreseeable, but weren’t. Waste that could have been restrained. Creatures to whom we never should have owed allegiance.


Existence is a tricky sort of situation.

I knew what the priest had done; heard the hushed suggestions to his master. Enough, he said. End them, he whispered. Forsake them all! With them, you shall never be at rest. Priest did not recall the echoes that abound in the vast halls and chambers of our Mother. His master heard him, yes. But so did others. So did I.

I did not necessarily think Priest was twisted or evil, but I did note the effect his sewn discord reaped. It was moments—or would that be years, or ages?—before we were assembled on the great battlefield, to make war against She-Who-Created-Us. But we had grown in power just as she. Our sons and daughters had wrought more havoc upon the inner plains of our Mother’s body than even she could have imagined; cyclones that were so destructive they formed a raucous music within their circling. And then we were born a king, strong, and goodly—when he could be—and true.

We are just the bastard children of her first consummation. Her first born, her first castaways, for we had killed her Consort, lest he destroy us all. She wielded vengeance as a tool for upheaval. Her minions, foul of face and limb, putrid to every sense and more, fed off her rage. They were called the Eleven Princes, by their side in truth, and by our side, in horror. For they were sent to destroy us.

This is the tale of the Battle, and of the time and that which was not time, which followed.


###

Mi Corazon! Mi Corazon! --TCE 30-something

Alright, so I went uber-childish with this one, just to have some fun with it. I've actually got a ton of ideas rolling through my head right now; can't wait for the next prompt! By the way, I can't remember if it should be "mi" or "me," so if you know, by all means, please remind me....lol.


This week's prompt was: "I closed my eyes and reached into the class treasure chest.  Uh oh.  THAT'S not a pencil."


Without further adieu....

Mi Corazon!

or

The Tale of Augustus the Formidable and Nina the Maiden Fair, and Her Brother

Kyler bent at the front of the classroom and yanked the sneaker from his sockless foot with a flourish. The classroom gasped when he propped the mottled thing upon a desk chair, wincing as he pulled off the giant Band-Aids. The foot had a small, sure hole clean through the middle of it, right where he’d stepped on the nail, and there was blood dried around its edges like some kind of fruity jam. The classroom oohed and ahhed appreciatively. Violet felt her stomach turn. How in the world could she be expected to follow a show-and-tell like that? There was no way! It was bad enough to forget what day it was and have to pick something from the classroom treasure chest, but to follow a show complete with real live blood? Definitely no way.

By the time Kyler’d put away his bloody foot, and Ms. Forman had called her to the front of the room, Violet couldn’t even bring herself to fake a smile. She stood there, right behind the desk chair that now had bits of dried blood on it, and looked to her classmates faces. Some smirked. Most looked wary, as if they knew she was going to have to show-and-tell something boring. Violet closed her eyes, and reached to the chest sitting on the floor beside the desk chair. No….no….no…ahh—there was something interesting. Definitely not something boring like, like a pencil. She wondered what it was. Her hand gripped the thing as she pulled it out.

And if she’d though the gasps Kyler got were great, they were nothing compared to these. Shyly, Violet unsqueezed one eye. Then she gasped herself.

Loyalty--TCE 32

Well damned if I didn't have a *moment* and forget to save early when I began writing this week's TCE story. As you can guess, that pretty much ensured my computer would lock up, which it did, and so I lost the original version of this story, and now that I've rewritten/finished it, it doesn't quite...match...what I was aiming for earlier, and the ending is off as well. Oh well; I'm sure you can see where I was heading.

 I didn't stick super close to the prompt on this one, but I tried! (The first version was better; too bad I don't have a photographic memory.)

Here was the prompt: "Any moment now, he's going to press the button. Are the cameras rolling?"

And now, the story:

Loyalty

The large manila envelope for that month’s school board meeting sat on the desk in front of Jim, no thicker or thinner than usual. He’d covered the meeting in person; now Mr. Ira Stravinsky sat before him on the other side of the metal desk. Jim liked metal desks. They were clean-lined, cool to the touch. Mr. Stravinsky looked like the kind of man who liked metal desks too. Functional. Stravinsky kept laying his hands in different places on his thighs. Jim leaned back in his chair, took a deep drag on his cigarette, thought better, and offered Stravinksy one.

The man nodded, took a cigarette, lit it. Inhaled deeply.

“So, Ira—can I call you Ira? Great. ” Jim said. “Any of it true?”

“Any of what true, Mr. Samson?”

“Please, call me Jim. What I meant was, are any of the allegations true?”

“What allegations, Mr.—Jim?”

Jim frowned around his smoke.

“Why, the allegations that led to your firing?”

“I…I don’t think I understand. There were no allegations” Now Mr. Stravinsky frowned.

66375--TCE Prompt 30

Okay, so it's really, really late but here's my TCE story for last week. The prompt was....

"I knew something was very, very wrong when I found the wall of cookbooks in his kitchen.  Not a single spine had been cracked."

Week 31 will be posted tomorrow some time.

READY?!

66375

The blue house spread itself along the edge of a wide, sloping lawn that slowly turned once again into forest, and past the forest, swap. Before the seventies, the area on which the house was built was a golf course, and so the turf was bright and springy. Perfect for barefoot walking during one of Todd’s famous barbeques. Perhaps famous was too strong of a word for Todd’s cook-outs, but the fact remained that he was a fantastic cook, and people came from all up and down the countryside to eat his food, squishing themselves onto Jenjira’s smooth deck when the light died and the frogs sang, and everybody stuffed their faces with cilantro-lime buttered crawdads and red beans and rice. For years he’d dreamed, living on his rickety old sail boat Jenjira, and those dreams centered around two things; food, and a home that didn’t require a mast.

Jenjira knew it. She knew it as she knew her own name was scrawled across that old boat on which they’d both once lived, for almost eleven years, knew it as she knew rain hung in the air. Jenjira sighed,  got out of her Imapala, and swung shut the door loud enough she might wake him, if he was still in bed.  He always had liked to sleep in late.

“Todd?” she called, hitching her purse better onto her shoulder. “Todd?” The driveway gravel was still a bright white, unpolluted by grease and oil or even little spots of grass, and she could see the screen door was closed, but the main door behind it was open.  Under the small porch roof—tufts of Spanish moss hung from the eaves--she hesitated… everything she'd discovered sounded crazy, insane even. He'd have to be insane too, to believe her. But she was here, finally, after all this time. No turning back now.“Hey Todd! You awake in there?” She rapped on the wooden doorframe, hard. No answer. “It’s Jenjira. You … you home?” She opened the screen door a bit, poked her head in the opening, leaning the screen on her neck as she peered into the living room. It was very … Todd. The floor was an awful ruddy brown shag no doubt left by the previous owners—he probably never looked at something like carpeting. One the walls were a few well-placed sketches of lighthouses with sail boats in the distance, probably done by his old art teacher Mr. Rudy, and the coasters on the coffee table in the middle of the room were made to look like portholes.  She stepped into the room. Her flip flops padded into the carpet and the door slapped shut.

The Cold--TCE prompt

I literally just finished typing this and frankly, I am done for, so this is getting posted as-is. I shall make my edits and second draft tomorrow, and fix this haphazard entry. Until then, toodles everybody. Goodnight!

Still Untitled

The night air was cold with ice when he opened the door. Soon it would snow again, and he’d be stuck, again, in this god forsaken sod house on the edge of a northern praire, miles from neighbors and even further from civilization.  The sky to the south and the west was clear, stars—innumerably stars—stretching all the way to the horizon and seemingly below; their shine made the winter wheat and further, the shorn rows of the corn fields, sparkle with a glaring, cold silver. The sky above and behind him though was low, a softer black, puffy, crowding the hill into which the house was cut. Snow, or snow and ice. Grant looked at the woman on the other side of his sunken doorsill.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in,” she said. She did the thing where she held her tongue against her teeth and jutted out her chin like she was trying to look snotty and sophisticated. It made him hate the sight of her, and want to tell her “No.” But she must have worked very hard to find him, house sitting out here in the middle of nowhere. Still, he couldn’t just say “Oh yes, please do come in,” as if she weren’t the biggest bitch he’d ever met, as if part of the reason he was here wasn’t to get away from her, as if she…

Grant cleared his throat.  Sassa swept into the house, thick wool trench taking up most of the floor space before the hearth. He shut the door behind her. The cold flowed from Sassa in waves.

“What do you want?”

“I tried your cell.  I tried Mike’s.  I even called your mother. At least she knew what state you were in. First time in her whole life she’s held any information of value.

“What do you want, Sassa?”

TCE Ninnies

First things first: I hate it!

It's so far from what I was planning I want to stomp my foot on it. Alas, that would mean either 1.) stomping my laptop or 2.) stomping my jump drive, neither of which do I want to do. Anyway, it wandered so far from its original intent that I pretty much just stoppped writing on it, rather than try and corral it back to having anything to remotely do with the prompt, my original plot, or my theme. Whatever. Frustrating.

The TCE prompt had to do with hangliding.

Ninnies

The light that spilled above the window sill to Susan’s room was calm, a gray and pink sort of light. Good enough for waking up, she supposed, if absolutely required.  She also supposed it was not truly her room; apparently it remained her husband’s room, though he never seemed to be at his house, his home. Not that she could actually seek divorce; her lawyer had warned against that. Instead, no, she was here. Atop a tangle of white bed sheets, looking through the white window sill of their white house in their white neighborhood where nobody had any problems at all. One of the babies screamed somewhere within the house.

Today was Susan’s week for the playgroup mothers. She swung her feet to the carpet. Despite it all, if she were pressed during an interview she had to admit always loving this old house; her home.  It was thoroughly Dutch colonial in its layout, materials, feel; thoroughly her grandmother’s river cottage, should her dead grandmother ever chose to be reborn and build a giant monstrosity of a house in the middle of a terrible stinking city. But it was lovely and white and quiet with dozens of wood-floored rooms and a gentle sloping ceiling hidden among the elm trees, and a good near half to the reason she married her husband. Though that was long enough ago now to cease to matter.

“Why don’t you just pretend it’s flying,” Greg had asked.  The sun had been in her eyes, so she’d closed them, standing at the edge of the rock cliff over the water, a quick so-called getaway three days before their wedding—really it was to tell him she was pregnant. She’d hoped to trap him by an “accidental” pregnancy to make sure he wouldn’t back out of the marriage, but then she read the prenup. “Nothing like it,” he’d said. “It’s just like hangliding, it won’t be that bad. Have you ever been? Of course you haven’t; I’ll take you this weekend. First day of our honeymoon.” She’d turned her face towards him then, but hadn’t opened her eyes so all she would feel was the sun, the July sun, baking her thin eyelids.  That was the morning she’d taken the test, but tests could lie. The sun didn’t lie. She was to marry Greg at the end of the summer, but they’d hurried things a month sooner so she could wed when “the church had an opening”; before she began to show. “I’ll take you tomorrow,” he said again, and then she grabbed his hand and yanked him horizontally in to the air, praying that if one of them were to dash their head upon the rocky cliff bottom, it would be him. The baby wouldn’t have had a head yet.

But the both surfaced, and she married, and she bore his child and many more, and before long he disappeared behind airplanes and androids and affected sighs. All by her own doing.

TCE Catch Up 2

Here's my really really really unfinished story for the TCE gasoline prompt. Haven't even gotten to the gasoline part yet...ho hum.

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It all began with a rock.

When Cyrus was four, he and his two best friends broke into their babysitter’s husband’s rifle cabinet with a rock wrapped in a hankie. Cyrus stood lookout while the other two faced off the cabinet the way people did when playing chicken out in the creek, and when all was clear, the rock sailed through the frosted glass window panes.  They’d done already stolen some ammunition to go with it. Twenty minutes later, Cyrus had blasted a whole right through the hallway and into the master bedroom with the shiny Winchester. Of course he got in loads of trouble; couldn’t sit right for weeks. But he learned something very important about himself.

Turns out, he was pretty good at destroying things.

By the time he was eleven, Cyrus, who was a sweet-faced boy with shiny hair, had built quite a reputation for himself. He smoked his uncle’s cigarettes during recess and after school, while his uncle worked graveyard at the factory, sneaked whiskeys from his neighbor’s. She drank so much she never noticed.  That year he was bit in the chest, right over the heart, by a brown recluse while he lay sleeping.

The spider died, and Cyrus lived.

Still, the three-week long fight for life had caused some to grow less craven towards him. Bully, they called him. Heartless freak, they called him. Of course, “they” were a very few, after he took the Wayland boy out back of the school with a leash and his heavy boots. Cyrus had knocked him down, strapped him to the bottom of the playground fence with his belt, then put one boot on the belt and the other to the boy until he was stomped senseless. 

TCE Catch Up 1

Well, hell. *sigh* Haven't finished the last two TCE stories, but I'm afraid if I don't post 'em I'll never get around to finishing either of them....so here's the beginning of my story for TCE prompt 26, which concerns the dangers of macadamia nut cookies. Only I haven't gotten that far along yet--perhaps you'll be able to see where I was going with it. More likely, not. LOL.

Here it is:

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This Sunday, Pastor Brim, now growing gaunt around the edges, woke earlier than usual. The lines in the space between his eyebrows had deepened during his sleep.  A soft-spoken man outside of preaching,  when the Holy Spirit came upon him during his sermons  his voice boomed and thundered around the sanctuary like something he’d heard as a boy listening to horse races on the radio. His real name was Peter Brown, but everybody had called him Brim for so long he sometimes forgot to think of himself as any other way. The name came from the fire of the Holy Spirit that flew into him whenever he got to preaching, and it was wonderful and a bit frightening, and full of the fire and brimstone his congregation had come to know and respect and love.

The church in which he spoke the word of God was a humble brick building and sensible, but the sanctuary had vaulted, arching ceilings made of good pine with a high ridge right down the center so that when his congregation looked up, the effect was of looking into the bottom of a vast ark tipped upside down on everybody as they sang and prayed. The decorations were few; flowers for special occasions and the alter candles. Two rows of twenty pews flanked the alter, also made of good local pine, and the carpet, though a low one, was soft and sturdy. 

He knew as he rose that morning that the spiritual lives of his congregation were at stake, for he could feel the Devil himself walking the earth, and had been stalking Pastor Brim for weeks. He could see his shade hanging outside the brightest window, following the noblest souls, even amongst them in their good and godly community. Every shadow under every tree, every ungrateful scoul on the faces of men and women, every horror and every sin--the Devil. So he scrapped the sermon he’d planned on doing and done wrote up another, woe-filled, terrifying new one and knew that today, more than any other day, he would have a chance to turn back the tide of sin and non-belief, and save his fellow brothers and sisters from the temptation of evil in its most purest form.

Nightingale--TCE 23&24 combo

In keeping with the twofer tradition, this combines two TCE prompts.  Prompt 23 was "You love him. You love him more than this. You love him, and you cannot, you can't resist," and 24,  "Look, that's really cute, but it doesn't exactly go with bite marks."

Warning: Contains foul language and mature subject matter.

Also, this was a weird one, lol. I couldn't decide for sure what I wanted to happen to Bobby at the end, so I left it ambiguous. You decide.

Nightingale

The attic room was dark. Black ceiling, black walls, black thick carpet, black smooth sheets.  One window black on the sill, air blowing through it heavy with the blackness of long summer night. The room, a coffin.  So he could screw a corpse. So…I could live my life. Such as it is. When the time is gone, there really isn’t much difference between screwing and living.  Everybody wants to do it, some are terrible at it, most of it is sweaty, a bit nasty even, depending on how you like it, and though it can all be fun, you’re really just there for the great big finale, and after that you probably want to go to sleep or something.

I rolled in the bed sheets until my arm slapped the top of the black nightstand.

“Smokes?”

The man — I understand why some like women, and why others like wolves, but a man is such a beautiful creature—came back into my room. Boudoir, I would have called it once.

“Here.” He tossed me the pack, wearing nothing but a pair of slacks. Black. His arms sliced through the darkness. My pale limbs are long, fatigued from overuse, and thought sill shapely, very thin. Tired. They get tangled in everything. But his? Lithe, fit, agile at catching moonlight I didn’t even know was in the room. I have a habit of not seeing light unless he's near.

“Shut the door,” I told him. So he did. I untangled myself, hung off the bed, smoked my smoke. He sat down beside me. What was his name? Closed my eyes for a moment. Bobby. That was it. The man, his name was Bobby. The smoke swirled in my mouth, I could feel it in my lungs, almost in space between the marrow of my bones, if there was still marrow after all this time. Bobby smiled at me, his teeth a line of white in the blackness around me. He leaned.

“No. Get off me.” I pushed at him, but did it gently.

“Alright, alright,” he told me, swinging his hands in front of me as he leaned back. “I can take a hint.”

I laughed at that.

“Like hell.”

We both laughed.

Answering For--TCE 21 (or so)

Still adjusting, but here's the prompt and the story: 

"I remember.

I wish I didn't remember.

Maybe if I wish hard enough, the memories will just fall away. Like the smell of old perfume dissipating. Like the innocence of white chalk darkening under the rain. Like the dying color of that crimson blood as he washed it from my hands."

Answering For

I wish I didn’t remember.

The cup tree was a dead one, some ancient and half-rotten lightning stump of a live oak about one roof high. It was long since stripped bare of any bark, and the chipped ceramic coffee mugs and tea cups of the years shined against the pale wood. Time was, it had been a bottle tree; the glass had long dangled in the winds to capture roaming spirits; to keep people from harm.  One by one the bottles with their translucent blues and greens and browns were replaced by more practical cups and mugs and mason jars, so that if anybody ever needed a cup to break their sup, it wasn’t hard to find one.  I remember the details like these, the waking up in the heavy fogs and going out to water the taters beside the house, the smell of almost mildewed water gathered in the coffee mugs and antique tea cups from the heavy rain the night before, or the way the honeysuckle made the air so sweet at night while it crept into the clapboards of the house. It’d be nice to remember these things and only these things, but I don’t.  Life ain’t nice.

Neither is death.  

Cup Tree stood smack in the intersection of two gravel roads which met where the top of one little hill joined a great big one. At the time, I lived alone in the peach-colored clapboard house just a bit down the hills’ intersection, and figured I would every day of my life, for a time expanding as far as the eye could see, disappearing somewhere beyond, somewhere into a distance hazed with clouds and humidity and the green glow of leaves and bugs in the sun. Yes, that was what I figured.  But this is the story of how I figured wrong.

“You get any reception out here?” Allie squinted into the sun beside the house where we both stood, arm raised, waving a cell through the air with her chicken-leg arm. It was summer, an early one, and I’d been working all morning long on keeping the weeds out of the tater row.

“S’it look like I get any reception out here?”  I’d wiped the sweat from my forehead, leaned against the house. How she kept on all those layers and layers of makeup I’d never know; if she’d ever smile it’d crack like the clay dirt. “Who you tryin’ t’call anyways?”

“Jim. He’s got a new batch cooked.”

“You need to keep out’a that business.”

“Mind your own,” Allie said with a snap, dropping her arm. “I’m only fixin’ to call him ‘cuz I heard tell down at the station that the cops is fixing to bust Perkin’s Bar for sellin’, and I don’t wanna see him go to jail if he don’t need to.”

I’m pretty sure I’d glared at her.  We both knew it wasn’t  true. And we both knew it wasn’t none of my business.