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.

Grateful

Just have to edit it now, but I think it's finished. Might certainly change the title, btw. Contains adult content and swearing.

...

Grateful

Kathy first met him in north concourse of the Miami airport. Outside the dusk air was shimmering off the pavement and the large heady clouds that had formed over the Everglades rolled close to the ground so that water somehow seemed to be everywhere. They did not speak until after everything had happened. There was a little old lady in front of her, waiting in line for coffee. As the woman struggled with her bags, a young man who was possibly still a boy rudely shoved in front of her and began ordering. Then Gracen—for that was his name, she came to find out—took control of the situation. The swiftness with which he handled it was admirable; first a loud but calm voice, then a grab by the shirt collar, then a quick twist and the young manboy was out of the line and in propelled into the arms of two airport security men, and the little old lady was being gingerly helped forward. He turned to Kathy then, and asked if she were alright, touching her gently on the wrist to draw her attention away from the security guards. They got a coffee together.


“I’ve just gotten out of the AmeriBubble,” Kathy pronounced to him, sipping her hot coffee in the artificial chill of the airport. Sudden bouts indoors in Miami always made her feel like she was moving through a bowl of JELLO. “Been wanting to go somewhere new, somewhere with beauty instead of grime or crime or whatever people think Miami has, before I go for my master’s in the summer.”

“What’s the AmeriBubble?” he asked.

“Oh. It’s this…well, I was in AmeriCorp working with these impoverished kids in Oklahoma, and … it’s just that you spend so long around this tiny group of really, uhm—I guess you could call us do-gooders—and everyone’s out in the middle of nowhere all working towards this common goal of helping out these kids, really great kids I mean, even the awful ones, because there’s always a spark of something wonderful in a child, and you kind of create your own little world, away from politics and pollution and crime and the rat race and all that. The AmeriBubble.”

“I see.”

He was a handsome man. She thought she’d continue.

“Anyway, I got back home and I looked around and thought, I’ve just got to get out of here. If I spend another week in this place I’ll go crazy. It’s too … off … to come to after the Bubble, too fake.”

“So you like things to be real, do you?”

“I do. Definitely.”

“And then what about what’s between us?” Gracen pried her hands slowly from her coffee and smothered them with his own; they were large hands, careworn, but Kathy thought she could detect a softness there that other women would have missed. Then he pulled her forward and kissed her.

Belated WIP: Definition Of

 Yes, it's not quite finished, and yes, it's missing a title. All in good time, my pretties. All in good time.

*cackle--I mean, cough*

Definition Of

Every part of my body hurt.

I tried to move. Couldn’t. Wasn’t even sure I should if I could. Gave up. Blinked. Let the room come into focus. I’d gotten flowers—not a lot, but enough I felt kind of stupid. Flowers are for sweet girls, not for guys in the hospital hit by drunk drivers. Oh well. The blinds were pulled partially and a thick chunk of light fell across my bed, where my two legs—were they broken? Apparently they were—lay awkwardly. Oh. If I let my eyes loosely follow the chunk of light I could see where it finally pooled: on the girl. Her head was lowered to her chest, asleep and hanging by a string of light it looked like from over here, and the sun warmed her brass colored hair so that it shined like some kind of spun metal as it fell down over her shoulders. So familiar.

It took me a few tries, but I finally got it:

“Hello.”

Her head whipped up and she peered at me, bleary and full of sun, eyes opening and closing frantically. Then she smiled, widened her eyes, and pressed the red button on the alert wand that her hand had been clamped around.

Hmmm, what to call it?

Yet another work in progress...--> Hope to finish soon!

Untitled

She'd been driving for hours, zig zagging so much as she stole down the highways that she wasn't really sure what state she was in any more. In any way. The bloody fishing line rolled loosely on the passenger seat. Have to clean that up eventually. The cell beside her rang. Shit. She hadn't even thought to get rid of the phone; she really wasn't thinking clearly. Oh well. Too late now; might as well answer it.

"Hello?"

Sunflower fields slipped by her in the darkness; she could smell the rich earth through her window, cracked so she would be able to smell something else than the blood. Sunflowers...What, that would be Kansas, maybe? Sure, Kansas.

"Tara? What the hell happened?"

Jensen.  Glad to know someone on her side was calling, even if he did work for the sherriff. Even if... she swallowed, touched her swollen skull automatically, right where the hair had matted and dried in a mess of sticky, crusted blood, then shifted the phone on her shoulder. The movement made her blink slow and hard.

"Hey Jensen. Driving right now; sorry I can't talk."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. Don't hang up. Tara?...Tara?! Tara!"

Tara grimaced.

"I'm here."

"Good. I've got to be quick." His voice was mumbly, quiet. "It's all over that Trey's dead. Heard this evening. It true?"

"I--I've got to go, Jensen."

There came a solid moment of held breath through the line.

"Alright, alright. Hey listen, just, uh, you know. Take care. Get rid of the phone. Dye your hair, pay for everything in cash. You got cash? Shit, I shouldn't be calling you. Yeah, get rid of the phone. Remember, we love you."

"Yeah. You too, Jensie. Tell Anna and the girls I send my love. And that I'm sorry."

"Will do. Get rid of the phone."

As soon as the call ended, Tara rolled the window down and chucked the phone out of the truck and into the darkness. It landed in one of the sunflower fields, the heavy-headed stalks silhouetted like rows of old and dying men as the first bit of gray predawn seeped over the horizon. Jensen was right about the phone. For a brother in law, especially to the man she just murdered, Jensen was alright.
###

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!

Untitled

(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?

Distance

I shall attempt to continue writing a short story each week this year, and so, here's the first of 2012! As usual, it remains unedited and whatnot. Title *wrinkles nose* doesn't work yet but I'll have to fiddle with it to get it right. (*cough, cough* Suggestions welcome!) 

Note: Contains some mild cursing, but nothing too bad.

Distance

Behind the hill that was almost a mountain to some and just a bump in the rocks to others, she lengthened her stride. The sun was coming up. It was one of the angry suns. Angry suns meant beauty and a bit of snow later in the day or week. His breath puffed out to the rhythm of the words as they crunched through his mind. This high up, suns were usually a calm thing. A steady thing. The mountains did not care that a sun rose or a sun set beyond their peaks. For they were too old. Had seen too many suns. But some mornings—he paused for breath as she tramped farther from him --mornings like this there was a raging grace that swept down the sky to the rocks of the peaks as if to demand that someone, something, especially the mountains, take note that there was indeed a sun, and by God, it was indeed going to rise, and from it would spill the clouds down and across in orange and fuchsia and a blue violet, the colors the heavens left behind when they fought the earth and bruised one another.

He started again. Poked his snow pole deep. She stalked up the path without one. The colored light strengthened around the two of them. Now she was a good fifty foot ahead and above him. Always ahead and above. She became more than just a dark silhouette in the predawn. She was suddenly a creature. A being of life made of secondhand nylon and polyester and wool. And here and there, bits of dawn-pinked flesh and staticky hair flying out from under her cap.

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--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 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.

Fair Fraulein, Pt 3

Numero tres! Read part 1 here and part 2 here. The final section will be up tomorrow for the Chrysalis Experiment prompt...By that time, hopefuly I'll have a proper title. Err, yeah. Promise. Scouts honor.

Fair Fraulein

part 3

Wrap wrap, wrap. The tea cups, thick cream sticky in their bottoms, slipped into the wash sink. I walked to the door, rubbing my palms on my apron. Through the crack between the door and door-frame I saw a hunched old woman…she looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Perhaps she had news from the northern nobles.

“Yes?” I asked through the door crack. It was a lovely gold and brown autumn day; dust clung to the folds of her cloak, leaves and bramble to her hems. Her hood was up.

“Ehhh, pretty child, good day, good day.”

“Good day to you,” I said cautiously.

“Eeehh, we shall see, shan’t we? Ehhh, I have good things to sell you, if you’d but have them. Handsome, sturdy things, trinkets and cloths of all shapes and sizes.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Eeeh, yes, pretty child. Would you like to look at them?”

I hesitated. We’d been avoiding strangers, but I was sure I’d seen this old one somewhere before … somewhere … I just couldn’t remember.

Fair Fraulein, Pt 2

The second installment of my latest longish short story. To read Pt 1, click here.

Fair Fraulein

part 2

“Can we keep her? Please? P--lease?”

“Shhh, be quiet. You want her to wake and see us?”

“But I—”

“Quiet, I said!”

I opened my eyes slowly. Faces hovered above me, and a roof above them. A roof. I was indoors. When had that happened? I tried to speak, but the pain in my head---I put my hand to my face.

“She’s awake,” said the second voice. I couldn’t match it to a face. Struggling, I pulled myself to my elbows.

“Careful; careful now,” warned the eldest of the faces. His was a queer, heavy-jowled head, squarish and with short white beard yellowed with dirt. “You’ve hit your head, and been too cold for too long. Be easy, Princess.”

Princess. They know who I am. She’ll find me. She’ll find me and kill me!


“Easy; easy,” continued White Beard. “No need to worry. You’re among friends.” The second voice from earlier snorted. It belonged to a little man at the food of the bed they’d laid me upon. Dwarves, I thought. The last time I’d seen a dwarf, he’d played acted from a wooden cart when one of the French lords came visiting. It thought he’d been the only one.

“I know,” said the first voice excitedly. “She can run the house for us while we sneak into the mines!” The first-voice dwarf walked around the others, and came to stand at my left, near my head. His smiled was lopsided but kindly, his chin bare.

“Pretty little princess, scrubbing our floors?” said the dwarf at the end of the bed. “I think not. Most likely she doesn’t know how. Most likely she doesn’t know how to do anything at all.”

Fair Fraulein, Pt. 1

This is a slightly longer fiction peice I've been writing; I'll post some each day until Friday, when I'll tie in the Chrysalis Experiment prompt.

And so...

Fair Fraulein

part 1

Every night before my seventh birthday, I climbed atop the settee in my stepmother’s room, curled like a cat, and watched her prepare for bed until I drifted into sleep. Sitting in front of her mirror, whispering bits of song to herself, she uncoiled her braids and brushed them, pulling her long hair out from her body with a sleek horn comb. Every handful that dropped from the comb fell about her like a golden drape; she was this pale, high, shining thing, colored like the sparkling mead my father was so fond of drinking as we supped.

In short, she was nothing like me.

My days were tedious; Father — the servants whispered my mother’s untimely death had left him shaken at the fate of his kingdom — insisted I not only learn the womanly tasks of song, dance, embroidery, lace and language, but also the tasks to which he had long since grown accustomed. I sat beside him as the nobles paraded their so-called problems before him, having practically crawled to get into position, a pile of pillows balanced on a heavy chair next to Father. It was what he wanted. So every day, beginning before the dawn even, I poured over maps, listened to gray-faced men dictate accounts of the treasury, went for rides in the country with visiting dignitaries who thought the woods better for gossip than stuffy palace chambers, and sang, and danced, and sewed till my fingers bled, and mixed my Latin preterits with my Spanish, and…

Then I watched my beautiful young almost-mother comb her hair at her mirror, until sleep carried me — or perhaps it was one of my ladies — to my bed.

As I watched her the night after my birthday, I realized her mouth, always curved in a petulant little smile, had suddenly focused on my reflection in the glass, and turned into a snarl. Half asleep, I ran from the room.

The next day, the lessons with my father ceased. I thought I was to double up on my womanly duties; I swear my fingers cried angry tears at the thought of more embroidery, long before my eyes did. But no. My stepmother, standing at the window of our aviary, had said to me, “A princess — even an ugly one such as you--must be seen in grace and repose, not in work.” She spoke with her face to the window, on the kingdom. My father, busy with the doings of running a land, grew to be a stranger to me. By the time I was ten, I was kept from my embroidery and my dancing. Suddenly my days were empty. My father died that winter.

Then my stepmother ascended the throne as regent, while thick snow fell from the sky.

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.

Pearly Whites--Campaign Challenge 1

Hooray, the first Campaign challenge! Today's task was to create a quick post of 200 words which began with the words "The door swung open." Additional challenges were to use exactly 200 words, which I did, and to end with the words "The door swung shut." Which...I almost did.

So... here's my post, and now it's back to the grindstone for me...

Pearly Whites

The door swung open to the park’s Children Center. Along the right wall there stretched a encased habitat of forearm-sized baby alligators. They chirped at Erika as she wandered in, fluorescent lights shining eerily down upon work tables strewn with broken crayons and tipped-over juice boxes. But no children.

“Hello?” Silly really, since the room was obviously empty, save for her. And the chirping alligators. Who knew alligators chirped?

Erika pulled out her phone. Leanne being on time for their nature walk was unlikely, considering her little Janice was still a toddler, but she always called if she was going to be late. Nope; no missed messages. Erika began to pace the the room, running her fingers over the displays, all happily labelled for the children, neon yellow smiley faces dotting their surfaces.

It seemed odd for it to be so quiet here; childless. She scanned the room carefully. Chairs were tipped over. Papers, ripped. Then she heard it—a sound that was certainly not a chirp. Eika turned. A mama alligator brandished its teeth at her. In its mouth there shined a single pearl, from the necklace Leanne always wore. As the chomping began, the door finally swung shut.

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. 

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.