A Ghost Story

I got tired of my previous trains of thought and went another direction this week, with a ghost story. Shoo-woop! Haven't ever written a serious one, now that I think of it. Anyway, this week's efforts are unfinished, but since it's shaping up to be a longer story, I decided I would post in installments. Will keep posting as I go. Happy reading, writing, and Sunday everyone!

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(A Ghost Story)

Every night she slipped through the lodge made of pale white wood and it reminded her of embers turned to ash. The most awful things in the world were made visible in the dying embers of an already dead fire; this she knew, should she have the ability to know anything any more, which she did not, for she was not, nor ever would be again. Yet she moved through the halls and did remember, by one of those tricks of fate or fortune or failure to die properly, and as she she did her nightgown fluttered incandescent along the smooth paned floors that were worn by those whose flesh still had weight. As she thought of that sad awfulness, gliding night by night in the world in which she no longer lived, down and back the lonely hotwired hallways of an almost white lodge on a sparkling white mountain under a rude thin sky and laughing moon, she dreamt of things she no longer understood. Of a girlhood in the distance, with apples in orchards and rattlesnakes on the porch in sunlight, of wind, of sluggish rivers against which the great Midwestern cities trembled, and knew not for sure how she came to be where she was. For the dreams were disjointed and spiteful. The apples were made of worms and the rattlesnakes enchanted sorcerers; the sunlight bit at her unflesh with rays like sharp teeth, the wind spoke sermons backwards and babies pitched themselves into rivers from the tops of apartment complexes overlooking the bottoms. She hated and feared the outside, even more than she hated and feared the halls, just as all those who are dead hate more the fact that they have an outside still with which they tread and pace and wail into their last vestiges of existence, more than they hate the inner workings which let them know they are stuck in that everlasting decay. It was as she was amidst these hateful almost-thoughts of fear and paradox that she met a living woman who spoke to her.

“Can I take your picture?” the living woman asked the dead. The living woman was one who strode the alleyways of the spirit and yet was blind to it; her hands ran palm to cool damp stones of the walls that led from one street of quickened flesh to another street of rot, and she never noticed the change of tone. She only asked, where is my camera? How best do I capture this?

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.

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.

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?”

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.

Peach Cobbler Gone Meaty

**I'm early! I'm early!  Wooo!-- Of course it's competely unedited, but I wanted to get this up before the whammy! feeling I'm currently experiencing fades.

This week's TCE prompt was "This might not be the best time for getting philosophical."

I dove into completely uncharted waters for this one, and even if it's still wonky in spots (which I shall try to fix), it was a lot of fun to write. Hope you have as much fun reading it! Contains mild swearing**

 Peach Cobbler Gone Meaty

If Credence Peaman had even the slightest bit of imagination, he would have stopped flat in his tracks, caught a taxi, and went straight to Lambert International to fly himself back home where he was safe and sound. But, as per usual in stories such as these, poor Cree had only one smidgen—a very tiny smidgen, at that—of imagination, and it was currently employed in the replay of Molina’s fine, fine hit during the game that afternoon, thus pretty much ensuring a twist of fate at which we readers can only shake our heads.

But yes, Cree’s imagination.  What a beautiful hit,  he thought to himself as a taxi drove past. Looking up and down the cobblestone street—you see, he rather liked that all of St. Louis’s downtown was cobblestone—he wondered which of the shmoozy looking lounges would have vegan-friendly meals.  A thick dirt-colored Shetland eyed him nervously, dancing his forelegs and whinnying when Cree crossed in front of the sleek carriages in which tourists liked to take rides.  But Cree paid no attention. Horse just doesn’t sound good tonight, but maybe I’m wrong, he thought to himself.  Then he wondered why exactly he thought that … and warned himself that days reserved for baseball should not be used for philosophizing. Cree continued, as we say, along his merry way, whistling the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Soon, but not quite soon enough for Cree, he was seated before a nice meal of supposedly vegan-friendly rice and such, in a fairly small, hokey sort of bar with lots of garish neons and loud live music in the adjacent room. The music was loud almost to the point of being obnoxious —in fact, the late-afternoon, early-evening crowd seemed to him a great deal of loud, almost obnoxious types of people, though obviously loyal to their little local joint. This meal, however, was seriously lacking, and did not inspire any grand feelings of loyalty in Mr. Cree Peaman. He looked around for his waitress. Ahh, there she was, talking to the tiny old lady with the brown-gray hair cut in a bowl shape at the end of the booths by the doorway.

 “But I swear it, I do, I tell you,” she was saying insistently, her hands laid square beside her untouched food as she spoke to the waitress, “me and my cats, you know, we’re all each other has, I tell you, and they just, well, I tell you, they just aren’t acting right. I tell you, they just aren’t acting right!” And the poor waitress nodded patiently, smacking some gum.

“Yes, Ms. Helen, I believe you. But how is your chicken? Does everything taste alright?”

“I’ll tell you a story; that’ll prove what I’m saying to you. I tell you, they just aren’t acting right. I think it’s moving to this new apartment next to the hotel; all sorts of people, you know, and animals, well, I tell you they just sense things. They just sense things.”

“Of course, Ms. Helen. You just let me know when you need something.” Cree raised his hand for the server, but Ms. Helen pulled her back before she could move too far away.