The Chrysalis Experiment

Late February check-in :)

2012-02-22T17:29:00.003-08:00

Yeah, I've lost track of the weeks, so let's just measure by the part of the month we're up to!

How's everyone going? I've done a lot of photo sorting in recent days, as it's probably the easiest thing on my weekly task list (aside from catching up on reading Michael's Princess Caitlin/Catrina stories, that is). I've got really far ahead in that goal, to make up for the weeks in March/April when I will be out of the country and probably unable to sort any photos at all. My goal is to get that far ahead in other areas, too, though I will probably take some stuff on the plane with me (like printed-out Catrina stories, or printed-out novel chapters to edit, stuff like that). But anyway, the point is that I'm sorting photos but not rushing ahead in any other area. Though I did read an extra Catrina story last night. ;)

I'm very, very close to finishing my first NaNo novel (a YA paranormal, or is it supernatural?) from last year. It's currently at about 60k, and will probably end at not much more than that. Then I have the next novel to move onto, which I reached 50k on but which may be longer than the first (it's sci-fantasy). It's been slow going, writing 1k a week, but it's also been more relaxing than most of my writing projects are.

Anyway... My travels. A friend and I are travelling to Paris, then London, then going on a tour of the U.K., in March/April. Should be fun, and cold, and should leave me with a whole bunch of new photos I will need to sort upon returning home. But I still have a few weeks to go before I get to say I'm leaving! A few more weeks in which to try and make headway with my goals!

How are you all going with your goals/projects/what have you?

Somewhere between Week #5 and Week #6 check-in/up?

2012-02-08T22:05:00.001-08:00

Hey everyone! You may have noticed that there's no particular rhyme or reason to when I come by and post here. Mostly it just occurs to me suddenly that, "Oh yeah, I wanna hear how those guys are doing!" So, I guess that's what you can talk about here in the comments - how your weekly goals are coming along so far this year. Have you got any monthly goals instead? Or how about just year-long goals?

My goals are in their usual state, coming along at a slow and steady pace. I now have a new problem to add to the list, though - a possible entire rewrite of a novel I had thought largely "done". I got some really helpful critique, which I shall at some point write about in my "main" blog. For now, I sit and I stew and I plot a possible rewrite.

How are you and your goals going?

How's everybody going?

2012-01-28T03:22:00.001-08:00

I've lost track of my fellow Chrysalis hostesses :( I think they're floating in the portion of space known as "real life has taken over". I miss them! But the show must go on, as the saying goes!

How's everyone going with their creative/other goals this year so far?

My goals are mostly on track, but the health goals are on hold temporarily while I recover from a minor surgery I had on Friday. My writing goals are going well, and I'm a little bit ahead in some areas. I'm finding it quite easy to get in my 'slacker' time, which possibly means I'm not doing enough. But I'm not going to expand on my goals just yet, 'cause I think that could lead to exhaustion!

But now it's your turn - let's have your updates!! :)

Week #2 check-in/up

2012-01-15T17:18:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone!! How's everything going? Are you meeting your goals? Do you even know your goals yet?

I'm finding it interesting so far this year, because I'm working on a fair few projects at once but I feel like I'm not doing much. I guess last year was really busy and I was working on one given project at a time, and throwing my all into it. This year is a little different. But I'm liking it - the variety keeps things interesting and fresh!

What's a creative project you're working on or planning to work on right now?

Week #1 check-in (check-up?)

2012-01-08T21:33:00.001-08:00

So, let's have a rehash of week #1. For me, I had the following goals:

Revise one chapter of a WIP (any WIP)
Revise one Chrysalis story from 2011
Read one Catrina story
Attend a yoga class (fitness)
Beach walk 1 (fitness)
Beach walk 2 (fitness)
Write 1 song
Write 1000 words on a WIP (any WIP)
Sort 100 photos & transfer to iPhoto

I achieved most of these. The only one I didn't do was the yoga class, but I did an extra beach walk to make up for it (or to "sort of" make up for it? hehe). The song was the first thing I got done. I revised a chapter of one of my hugely overblown novels (it was 148k or so at the start...needs to be more like 95k!), which was quite satisfying (slash and burn was involved). I revised my first Chrysalis story and decided it will be shelved, and I won't try and publish it or anything. I wrote over a thousand words on one of my unfinished novels from NaNo 2011. And I technically put a lot more than 100 photos into iPhoto, but only about 100 were newly sorted.

All in all, a productive week, but I'm finding that it's better not to be locked into any particular day for doing any particular task I've set myself. It's good to have so many things to work on, so that I can pick and choose!

Anyway, over to you! How'd you guys go with your weekly goals?

What's your "weekly" goal, then?

2012-01-04T19:42:00.000-08:00

Come on guys, share your plans with us!

In my case, I'm actually planning on doing a lot of things on a weekly basis. Posting on my (other) blog, revising a chapter of a WIP (whatever WIP I'm working on at the time), going to a yoga class, walking by the beach... There are more, but I'll leave it there. Except to say that I do have a Chrysalis-specific goal, and that is to write one new song a week.

If we're going to do this "choose your own adventure" version of Chrysalis, then I want to know what you guys are going to choose (barring Mayan Apocalypse, as Michael pointed out :D). Some of the ideas floating around were a) doing one short story per week again, b) writing one novella a month for 2012, etc.

Still waiting on that Exit Survey, by the way, but you'll see it here when it's ready! Meanwhile...how about a little Entrance Survey for 2012?

1. What are you going to aim for with Chrysalis in 2012? It can be any goal, as long as it's weekly!

2. Do you have a strategy for how you're going to handle 2012's writing/whatevering goals?

3. Were you satisfied with your progress (in whatever you were doing) last year?

4. What do you aim to do differently this year?

5. Do you like fluffy bunnies, or shorn bunnies, or neither? :)

6. And finally...what other question should I put here that my mind isn't brilliant enough to come up with?

A new year! What about Chrysalis?

2012-01-01T23:04:00.001-08:00

I don't know about you guys, but for me last year was quite the challenge! I wrote 52 short stories in 52 weeks! At one point I was about four weeks behind, or was it five? Either way, it was painful catching up, but I did it. I think the point I'm trying to make, though, is that I'm in no hurry to repeat last year's experience!

My co-hosts and I haven't really talked about what will happen this year with the Chrysalis blog, or anything Chrysalis-related. I get the distinct impression those two are rather burned out, and I can totally relate to that! I can speak for me however when I say I will be doing something Chrysalis-related this year. My challenge is one I've chosen to suit just me, and it's related to songwriting and recording. There was discussion a few months back (I think that was when we discussed it...) about what we might do in 2012. Well, there were lots of different ideas, and it occurred to me that maybe in 2012 everyone should make their own Chrysalis challenge. Basically, something that happens once a week, related to writing, that you can report on here (and on your blog of course). You can use the Chrysalis platform to keep you motivated!

I'm not really sure how it'd work. I'm not sure if we will have prompts. I'm not sure of anything! But I do know that I would be sad to see this blog and Chrysalis in general just die in the dust.

So what do you guys think??

P.S. There will be an exit survey...soon!

PROMPT NUMBER LAST PROMPT HOLY CRAP (...52)

2011-12-27T14:50:00.001-08:00

Dang.

Well, this is it, I guess. To give a grisly end to a year of often-macabre prompts, here is...

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

She'd expected getting stabbed in the stomach to hurt at least a little more. But to humor her attacker, she supposed she should act like she was in agony.

Hope you had a very merry whatever-religion-you-are holiday or Festivus if you're atheist!

And a joyous New Year!

-Winter

Have a Fairy Merry Christmas!

2011-12-26T17:28:00.000-08:00

Have a Fairy Merry Christmas!

Laura and Joey Alvin sat at the kitchen bench, watching their daughter giggle and dance and squeal.

The parents tried really hard not to show their concern, but it wasn’t easy when little Josie was having a particularly bad fit this time. The doctors hadn’t really known what the problem was, but they’d just called it fitting to get the Alvins out of their hair. It was nearly Christmas and the doctors had their own plans—not to be thwarted by irritating parents way too concerned for their children’s health. Laura and Joey weren’t the only pair to have been turned away with flippant diagnoses. Many other local parents had been told ‘they’re just fits…let’s leave it till the new year and see how little Micky’s going, shall we?’ or some variation. Yeah, just leave it till the new year…and who cares if your kid’s seriously ill by then.

Who cares if it’s too late by then.

Fits? Laura thought as Josie was seized by a particularly violent fit of giggling. The little girl leaped into the air and squealed, “Don’t!” though she was talking to no one and, as was usual lately, Laura began second-guessing herself, wondering if the little girl had said something other than Don’t even though that was definitely what it had sounded like. But in truth, the giggling squealing stage was the stage Laura preferred. It was the other stages that freaked her out.

“Three days till Christmas,” Joey murmured, chewing nervously on his lower lip as he followed his daughter’s crazed, jerky movements.

He didn’t even have to finish the statement. Laura knew what he was thinking: Three days till Christmas, and there’s no sign of improvement. In fact, she seems to be getting worse…

“That damn Dr. Verity pissed me off the most,” Laura muttered, tugging uncomfortably at her too-small jumper (how had she forgotten that the extra kilos she was carrying put this jumper off the list of possible wears?). “I mean, he was so condescending.”

Joey nodded, but said nothing, just rubbed at his chest with one hand as if trying to ease some discomfort there. Laura could relate to that. Her own lungs felt under pressure more and more as the hours passed.

“You are naughty!” Josie squealed, and suddenly she was on the floor, kicking and screaming and—laughing. She really was laughing. But her face was going all red and her eyes were wide and bright and crazed and she was…fitting.

That was how it looked. But there was nothing wrong with her brain, apparently. How Dr. Carter had known that without even looking at her brain, Laura still hadn’t figured out. But that was yet another thing to be done in the new year.

What if it’s too late by then?

“Emergency?” Laura murmured to Joey. “I mean, they are still open… They have to be, right?”

Joey frowned. “My parents are arriving in like, an hour.”

All the more reason to get out of here… Laura thought guiltily. “Well, I could take her, you stay here.”

The look she got from Joey then told her all she needed to know. She was not escaping this house, he would not let her. Not unless things got really bad with Josie, at least. Looking at Joey’s face, though, Laura didn’t think that point was very far off.

Josie sighed and lay still, grinning up at the ceiling. For a moment she was silent, then a tiny giggle bubbled up and out of her. “Yes,” she said. “Okay.”

And that was the last thing she said for the rest of the day, until it was bed time.

When Laura put her down to sleep, the little girl still wouldn’t focus her eyes on anything in this world. That was the only way Laura could put it. “Honey, are you feeling okay?” she asked her daughter, pushing back silky blonde locks of hair from the little girl’s forehead. “You’re having fun?”

Josie giggled, twitched, buried her head in the pillow then lifted it again. “They tickle.”

“What tickles?”

“The fairies.”

Laura paused, feeling strangely cold inside. She’d believed in fairies when she was a kid, but fairies had never taken over her entire life. Not like they apparently had with Josie.

“Are the fairies your friends, honey?” Laura asked, gripping handfuls of Josie’s bedspread and leaning closer to her daughter.

“No,” Josie said, shaking her head. She was still grinning, shuddering with the occasional giggle, but a strange look had come into her eyes. “They don’t like me. But they tickle.”

“They…don’t like you?”

Josie shook her head, then giggled loudly and burrowed back down into the pillow— “Don’t! Ahhh!”

Meanwhile, Laura was frowning. Since when do fairies not like people? I mean, Tinkerbell…

But then there were the old fairies, or maybe they were called faeries or something…the vicious ones from ancient myth. Maybe they didn’t like people. Maybe they tickled people to torment them.

You are insane, Laura told herself, even as she formulated words to say to her daughter.

“You’re talking to the fairies right now?”

“Yes. But they don’t listen.” Giggle. Squeal. Twitch. Gasp.

“What do they say to you?”

For a brief moment, Josie’s eyes seemed to focus. But then she was off in fairyland again, seeing nothing of the real world. Laura was sure she was not going to get an answer to that last question, and was preparing to kiss Josie goodnight. But then words slipped out, so softly spoken they were barely audible. They were words to chill Laura’s blood:

“They say lots of things…”

Unbidden, helpless tears sprang into Laura’s eyes and she cursed the doctors who had turned her child away, the doctors who she would not hesitate to sue if anything went wrong.

At the door to the bedroom, Laura and Joely exchanged words. “I’ll sleep in here tonight,” Laura told Joey. “I don’t want to leave her alone.”

“Shall I stay with you?”

“No, honey—you need your rest.”

His eyes accused her. “So do you. You’re not invincible you know.”

“Yes,” Laura said with a quaver in her voice. “I do know.”

They stared at one another. Joey sighed, reached out to touch her cheek. “We’ll be okay. Try not to worry.”

But what a hypocrite he was, when worry practically oozed out of his every pore. Still, Laura loved him for trying to reassure her. At least somebody was trying.

They parted ways and Laura rested in the lounge chair by the old cot Josie had used up until a year ago, before she’d got her first ‘big girl’ bed. Those had been days when Josie was still in this world, still truly engaging with others. Those days were gone now. Josie was in fairyland and Laura had no idea how to get her back.

Laura spent the night in her daughter’s room, and woke to a day of more giggling/squealing/dancing. Two days till Christmas. The day passed much as those before it had. Joey’s parents were in the house, and they reprimanded him and Laura for not getting help for Josie. They wouldn’t listen to any excuses, not even the ones where the doctors had refused to help. Laura longed for the day when Joey’s parents would run off back to their homes. She hated them, more now than she ever had at any other time.

That night, Joey stayed in Josie’s room, and though it was a terrible night’s sleep for Laura, she awoke to find her daughter still present. It was a strangely huge relief, as if she’d expected to find the girl gone.

Gone where? she wondered, but had no answer.

It was Christmas Eve day, and it passed as any other had done lately. “I think she needs a doctor,” Mrs. Geraldine Alvin told Laura for the thousandth time in the last couple of days, as if Laura had never thought of that herself before. “Why don’t you take her to a doctor?”

Laura just gritted her teeth and walked away.

Christmas Eve night, it was Laura’s turn again to stay in Josie’s room. She was tired, she truly was, but she sat in a way that she knew was terribly uncomfortable, just to prevent herself from falling asleep. When even that seemed not to be working, she retrieved a fire engine toy from the bedroom floor and stuffed it behind her back, making sure it dug into her flesh uncomfortably. That ought to be sufficient.

But when Laura woke in the middle of the night, she realised she’d slept for at least two hours. And leaning forward in her chair, she realised her daughter’s bed was empty.

Laura screamed, and Joey came running.

They waited and waited, but Josie didn’t come back. Laura became convinced that the fairies had taken her. They weren’t the only parents in town who had woken up on Christmas Day to find their children’s beds empty. Laura wasn’t the only parent to lose her mind and start mumbling about fairies. Joey wasn’t the only bereft parent who also had to take his spouse to a psychiatrist for evaluation. And the Alvin family wasn’t the only family destroyed by Christmas that year.

But the fairies had a good one, at least.

Prompt #51 (?!?)

2011-12-19T18:10:00.000-08:00

Wow. I guess we are winding down.

Here's my prompt:
"This is the time of year when you start to wonder if the tickle monster is the new vampire."

Happy Holidays!

Freedom

2011-12-15T21:14:00.000-08:00

WINTER IS POSTING A STORY! HEEHEE.

Actually, it's only flash fiction. 750 words, -ish. But hey. It's here.

The woman at the top of the mountain had wrinkles pressed so deeply into her face she resembled the crevasses surrounding them. The icy wind whipped her sagging cheeks, but she didn’t move.

“Hey,” Juliet hissed, her chattering teeth turning the word into a clattering mess. “Ma’am.”

No reaction.

“Oh God,” Maria said. “Oh, God, please don’t let her be dead. We’re already all the way up here. Lady, don’t be dead.”

Juliet hoisted her backpack higher on her shoulders. It hadn’t exactly taken ages to get up there – Mount McKinley was only a couple hours’ drive from their college – but time wasted was time wasted. “No. She’s not dead. She can’t be dead. This will work, and I will find out the answer to my question, and everything will be awesome.” She rounded on the old lady. “Everything will be. Super. Awesome.”

No reaction.

Maria reached out and prodded her.

The old lady’s claw of a hand flashed up and grabbed Maria’s wrist, her blind eyes darting open. Juliet let out a cry and staggered back; Maria screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

“Shut up,” the old lady croaked.

Maria shut up.

“Help me stand up,” said the lady. Maria hoisted the limp old body to her feet. The woman was bones draped in loose skin and layer upon layer of fur, unhindered by the bitter cold. And she turned her scarred clouded eyes upon Juliet and said, “You have come this far to ask me a question whose answer has been prophesied.”

The old woman’s hand let go Maria’s wrist, and Juliet hurried forward, her throat choking in anticipation. This sounded real, and for now, that was enough to convince her it was true. Juliet’s cynical side – admittedly diminutive at best – had hidden itself deep in a place that didn’t believe in fortunes and fates and soothsayers, and all that was left was blind hope.

“Prophesied?” she said. “What’s been prophesied?”

“Juliet Elizabeth Turner –” twin gasps from the two girls – “you have many truths to face.”

“Like what?”

“Firstly, you must accept that fault is not always two-sided.”

Juliet stared, slack-jawed. “I … okay.”

“Secondly, if you require my assistance, you must accept that ancient law rules over all.”

Maria cocked one dark eyebrow. “Uh. Ancient law?”

“Don’t interrupt, foolish one,” snapped the old woman.

Juliet stifled a snigger. “Okay, go on.”

“Thirdly, you must accept responsibility for your actions to come.”

“Actions to come?”

“You will understand when the time comes, Juliet Elizabeth Turner.” And with that, the woman drew a bone, long and disturbingly human, from inside her furs. She held it out.

Juliet hesitated.

The woman’s half-smile dug a crag into her cheek. “That’s right, girl. Think carefully.”

From behind the old woman, Maria made an is-she-sane? gesture. Juliet shrugged, but felt uneasy making any motion. The blind lady seemed to have such a good grasp of the events around her. It unnerved at best, disturbed at worst.

“Remember … when you make your choice, it will all be over.”

Juliet took a step forward, lowering her hand. “What will all be over? Will I be able to forget? And what am I going to have to –”

The old woman’s grip on the bone started to shake. “Your time dwindles, Juliet Elizabeth Turner.”

“But I need to know if he –”

“Your time dwindles.”

One breathless second later, Juliet grasped the other end of the femur.

Dark clouds billowed and rolled across the sky. Maria, quivering, sat down in the snow and closed her eyes. Juliet could only stare, but then lightning flashed.

She blinked. And as quick as the flutter of her eyelids, both old lady and storm had vanished.

She stood holding a human bone at the top of a mountain.

The walk back down was long, confused, and filled with stilted conversation. Juliet held the heavy object in her gloved hand. Though it should have grown cold, it never did.

When they reached the ground, Juliet wondered if the old lady meant what she thought she did, giving her this object. Surely this couldn’t be the answer to the problem – surely it would only exacerbate her feelings of guilt about the whole ordeal.

It came to her that night. Fault is not always two-sided.

It was not her fault.

She was free.

Juliet took the bone in her hands and shattered it against the floor. It broke as if made of brittle blown glass.

Elsewhere on campus, her rapist woke up screaming, as he would the rest of his life.

Juliet slept in bliss.

PROMPT NUMBER FIFTY (innit)

2011-12-12T04:22:00.001-08:00

Phew. Not long to go now, folks!! Just three stories, three prompts, three weeks...you get the gist! Now here's the prompt for this week.

Write 1-10k based on/inspired by on the following:

I believe she said something like... "Grant me the serenity to change the things I cannot accept, the courage to accept the things I find acceptable, and the wisdom to know when it's time to kick your butt."

Prompt #49

2011-12-06T14:26:00.001-08:00

ACK! latelatelate

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

He wouldn't have died if he'd known what the word "hydrogenated" meant.

Sorry for dropping the ball so frequently...

All the best,

Winter

Stomping Ground

2011-12-02T03:56:00.000-08:00

Stomping Ground

Tom started at the old high school, what was left of it.

Crumbling buildings only half of which had roofs; dead weeds choking what had once been a magnificent botanical garden; drinking fountains long-since coated with the dust of renovation and years of changing weather. Everything had a dry, dusty feel, and Rachel was glad she’d brought along a bottle of Mount Franklin.

“See that square of grass over there?” He was pointing off into a distance so distant she had to squint to try and make it out. She failed. But she nodded anyway. She didn’t want to let him down, and pretending to match his enthusiasm was the best way she could think of to keep him happy. You should never have to lie to the one you love, her mother would have said. But her mother wasn’t here, and she didn’t know what it was like. She was old and decrepit and out of touch by now. So Rachel nodded, and hoped her own eyes gleamed with an excitement to match his, or at least to come close.

“We used to sit there at lunch time—and recess. We sat in the dorks’ corner.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.”

This time Rachel’s smile wasn’t forced. She turned it on him and fell to her favourite pastime—studying him, appreciating him for the nerd he was. Tall, skinny, gawky even; his glasses weren’t that thick but he couldn’t really do much without them. He was red-haired and freckled to within an inch of his life. He wore a Temple of the Dog shirt and black jeans. A clean but worn backpack hung precariously from one shoulder, but he stood as if he’d forgotten about it entirely. He gazed off toward that distant patch of grass—Rachel could only assume it was all dead grass by now—unaware of her scrutiny, a fond smile on his face.

“Hard to believe,” Rachel agreed, still smiling at him. Then he came back to himself, looked to her, winked and took her by the hand.

Oh god, she loved it when he did that.

They walked all around the school ruins, and for a while Rachel actually lost herself in the walk down Memory Lane. Even if they weren’t her own memories, she’d always enjoyed Tom’s stories of his high school antics. Childhood too—he was a funny guy. Still, she was impatient to get on with their day, or rather, get closer to their night.

The school was just the beginning, though. They drove around town in Tom’s battered old Mazda 323, visiting old haunts and sharing the stories to go with them. Mostly, they were Tom’s stories—Rachel was from interstate and so her old stomping grounds were out of reach for the time being—but on occasion there was cause for Rachel to conjure some old memory of her own and share it. Tom shamed her with his attentiveness at those times; surely she could never reciprocate the way a good girlfriend should. But he wasn’t bothered—it was all in her head. Like so much of what plagued her every day.

“Okay,” Tom said at one point as they turned a corner onto a main street, “the house is coming up on your left.” The car slowed and Rachel craned her neck, very nearly pressing her face to the window in anticipation.

That was when she saw it.

Tiny, brown-bricked and teetering on stilts. You could see all sorts of crap underneath it, like it was the neighbourhood rubbish tip or something. Easier than gathering up all your stuff and heading to the real tip. Windows were broken, roof tiles were missing and weeds grew through the cracks in the porch. The porch.

Oh, and speaking of the porch, it totally sagged. You wouldn’t want to step up onto it, ‘cause you might fall down.

The way Tom had always talked about this place, Rachel had envisioned it as some kind of magical hideaway, a little fairy house tucked away in some mystic, lush garden. The garden wasn’t precisely lush, more overgrown and out of control. An example of nature rising up to reclaim its territory. In this case, human beings had stepped aside and let it have its unruly way.

She was still trying to comprehend what she was looking at as Tom’s car drew to a halt at the side of the road. “So, what do you think?” he asked, dragging her unceremoniously back to the present. “Pretty amazing, huh?” Um…yeah. “I mean, I grew up there. Trippy, right?”

“That’s really it?” she asked, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.

“Yep,” he said with a nostalgic grin, “and yet, look how I turned out.”

At that, another genuine smile appeared on her face, and she squeezed his hand. “You turned out just great.”

“Wanna explore the backyard?” he asked.

Her heart sank. “Um…well… Is it safe?”

“Hmm…maybe not. We won’t go in or anything.” No shit, we won’t. “But you know, the grass should be safe.” Except for snakes and rats and stuff, right? There was a brief silence before Tom tugged on her hand and she turned to him. “But if you don’t wanna go in, it’s cool.” Looking at his face, she knew he was telling the truth.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s just…”

“Don’t even say it.” He smiled and leaned over to brush his lips over her cheek, making her shiver. “I get it. And you’ve seen it now, anyway—that’s all I wanted.”

She watched him for a moment, waging an inner battle he was unaware of. Then she smiled and said, “No, let’s go—I want to see the backyard.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

The delight on his face then told Rachel she’d made the perfect decision.

They explored the backyard like intrepid adventurers, and nobody got bitten by any snakes. To Rachel’s surprise, a happy memory of her own childhood snaked its way into her thoughts as she climbed a particularly magnificent tree in one corner of the yard. In the memory, she and her best friend Josie had made a treetop fort—or that was what they’d called it—and had played Star Wars games. Rachel had been an Ewok called Kowee, while Josie had insisted on Princess Leia—Josie had definitely had the long, dark hair for it.

“Careful,” Tom called, laughing delightedly as Rachel climbed even higher. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“That’s nice of you,” she responded breathlessly, flippantly, “but I’ve got it.” Because suddenly she did have it—her confidence, something she’d been lacking for far too long. She was good at pretending, but this was the first time in a long while that she hadn’t had to. The smile that bloomed on her face at that moment was like the sun breaking through clouds.

“You’re so hot,” Tom murmured into her hair as she fell into him again at last, having forsaken the tree for his arms. “And you’re awesome.”

“So are you,” she giggled, and pressed her mouth against his. Gently. She liked to be gentle. But then suddenly things got a little less gentle. So much so that she thought her hair might be standing on end. There was a strange buzzing sound in the air—no, it was in her ears.

“Okay,” Tom gasped, pushing her to arm’s length from him, “we’re going before you get me into trouble here.”

And they picked their careful way back to the car hand-in-hand, the delight of the day shining on both their faces.

On the road again, they left Tom’s childhood climes behind. As they hit the highway once more, Tom said with a shake of his head, “Yep—that’s my neighourhood.”

This time, when he looked at her, she was smiling so much it hurt her face.

Prompt #48

2011-11-29T22:41:00.000-08:00

Oops. My turn again.

Hopefully, this will be short, simple and easy:

"Yep, that's my neighborhood."

Good luck!

Prompt 47...!

2011-11-21T17:03:00.001-08:00

Yeah, Prompt #46 is missing. Maybe it'll turn up at some point?

For now, here is number 47:

Write 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

As soon as I saw you, I knew today was going to suck.

Prompt #46

2011-11-14T14:24:00.000-08:00

A retrospective prompt for a retrospective post:

If she could have done it all again, she might have chosen not to trust the talking animals. Such things are rarely trustworthy.

Winter

Hunting an Abomination

2011-11-13T02:52:00.000-08:00

Hunting an Abomination

The nurses fuss over me like I’m at death’s door.

In their defence, I was at death’s door for a while there. At least that’s what I’m told. But I’m all better now, and they need to leave me alone so I can get back to work. I stare at the ceiling trying not to scream while my caretakers unwittingly block my escape route. Or maybe it’s completely wittingly. Either way, they’re in the doorway and that’s where I need to be.

I need to be out the door.

Aaron pisses me off at the best of times, but this is fast becoming the worst of times. He knows it’s urgent that I get back in the room—he knows I’ve got work to do. Lives to save, and not just my own. A killer to find. And he promised he’d be here on time. He promised he’d get me out.

In what’s becoming a bad habit, I run the tip of my tongue over my split lip. It stings, and I wince, which I turn makes me hurt more. My head still throbs, but at least it’s not so much a knifing pain anymore. My muscles ache and I feel like somebody’s used my bones for drumsticks. But there’s a fire in my heart that won’t be put out. I’m not just scared now. I’m angry. Oh, and I’m determined to stop this, once and for all.

But to do that, I need the capture chamber.

I need more information.

“Have you got everything you need?” Alice, one of the nurses on shift, asks from right beside me where she has miraculously materialised. For a moment I wonder if she’s of this plane or not. But no, she’s just sneaky and quiet.

No, I’ve got nothing I need, I want to tell her. Instead I smile weakly and murmur, “Yes. Thanks.” Lisa smiles back, brightly enough for ten of us, and pats my hand. Then she returns to her friends in the doorway and resumes their chat.

Sooner or later, the hallway will clear. Sooner or later I will get my chance. It’d be easier if Aaron was here to smooth my path. But I’ll do what I have to do, with or without institutional permission.

There’s a soreness in my heart that doesn’t relate to the fact that somebody just tried to kill me. Or that my friend Lucy is dead. Or that too many others have died already. Yeah, all that sucks. But I can’t help thinking of Mack and the look on his face last time I saw him. Those words we exchanged, when I accused him and he lashed out. I felt guilty the first time, when I suspected him of Lucy’s death. But now I’m not so sure I should have.

I don’t have any good reason to suspect him, I guess. But he was hanging out with Lucy a lot before she died. And he’s been avoiding me lately—maybe he fears what I’ll see if I look in his eyes. Maybe he hates your guts for thinking he murdered his girlfriend, an annoyingly logical voice pipes up in my head. But they spent all their time together. Who else could’ve got close enough to her?

Besides, there’s nobody else I can think of. Nobody else that makes any sense as a suspect at all. I’d go crazy if I didn’t have someone to suspect. As much as it hurts my heart, I can only think Mack.

“You look perturbed,” Alice says, startling me once again.

“Oh, I’m…I’m fine. It’s just…my mentor was supposed to come by.”

“Aaron? Hmm, do you want me to page him?”

I shake my head. “No, it’s okay.” In fact, with each moment that passes I’m liking the idea of doing things without Aaron better and better. He’s always been just a pain in the butt and an embarrassment to the profession. Maybe that’s harsh of me, but it’s also true.

“You want me to call anyone else in?”

No, but I’d love for you all to go away so I can sneak out. How about it? I just shake my head and smile.

“All right. You just buzz us if you need anything.”

And then, as if my prayers have been answered, the nurses clear the doorway and the hallway beyond it. I’m alone, everything is quiet but for the distant murmur of voices, and my skin is suddenly tingling.

You should wait a few minutes, a voice sounds from the other side of my bed. I turn to find Jennifer Myles standing there, gazing toward the room door with a slight frown.

“Where have you been?” I whisper, shifting so I can see her better. “I was looking for you.”

Her eyes move from the doorway to me. In them I see a startling amount of concern. Fear, even.

I know, she says without opening her mouth. That’s why I’ve been gone. Danna, you’ve got to go in there. You’ve got to open the door. But…be careful.

“I will be. I know what I’m doing.”

You can’t control all the variables. And I can’t tell you who—

Her eyes fly to the doorway, she tilts her head, and then she says, Okay, go. NOW.

The urgency in her voice makes me want to fly out of bed, race to the doorway and run off down the hallway. But instead I drag the blankets off me—no mean feat; these nurses sure know how to tuck a girl in tight—and lumber to my feet, then shuffle laboriously to the doorway. By the time I get there I’m almost out of breath. I take a few moments to collect myself, peering left then right. The way is clear. Just go. Quickly. I like to think I’m ignoring her, but really I’m taking her word as gospel and hoping I don’t get myself in some serious trouble.

My head is really starting to throb now. No wonder the nurses told me to stay in bed. But this has to be done, and I’m the only one who knows to do it.

I’m with you, Jennifer murmurs, and though I can’t see her—don’t have the time to look around for her, either—I can feel her presence. She certainly is with me. She’s my guide and my friend and I’m going to reap justice for her.

For Lucy, too.

Sadness wells inside me, and my eyes begin to prickle. I shove the feelings down and blink to clear my vision.

I set my sights on the elevator at the end of the hallway, already anticipating pressing the button for the second floor.

Jennifer and I step into the lift together, and despite the pounding of my heart and the sick feeling in my stomach, I feel a rush of exhilaration.

We’re off to hunt a murderer.

An abomination of nature.

Prompt #45

2011-11-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Hi! Hope you're all faring better in NaNo than I am at the moment. Here's this week's prompt:

______(Fill in the blank)______ is an abomination.

Good Luck!

PROMPT NUMBER FORTY-FOUR (44)

2011-10-31T05:44:00.000-07:00

It's All Hallow's Eve, All NaNo's Eve and other kinds of eves I have no doubt. In honour of various kinds of creepiness I am going to give you the following two prompts to choose from (for which you will attempt to write 1-10k of prose, if you're crazy enough!):

(1)

Fell down a well

It should be pretty

Like a little fairy tale

(2)

"I'll bring you back from where you've gone

On All Hallow's Eve"

-Type O Negative

Enjoy!!

PROMPT NUMBER FORTY-THREE

2011-10-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

Your prompt for this week!

Write a short story of 1-10,000 words based on the following:

She was like a sponge, he mused...

Good luck!

-the absent-so-often-it-seriously-isn't-funny Winter

No Sky For Machines

2011-10-22T02:34:00.001-07:00

No Sky For Machines

Second. Minutes. Hours.

Days, weeks, months.

A year.

Rinse and repeat.

There’s a corner of the window where I see a sliver of sky. I feel naughty, like I’m cheating, breaking the law. Ironic that I should be worried about that, considering there is no law any longer. But I do worry, I do feel naughty, and all the while I’m looking at that window, I’ve got my ears pricked for any sign that I’m soon to be in company. I’m on the lookout, lest somebody catches me looking.

I’m also on the lookout because I’m protecting my territory.

Can’t have anyone else in my corner, watching my sliver of sky.

It’s mine.

A good thing there’s no longer a need for food. I’d be oh so hungry. And there’d be fighting and squabbling and rending limb from limb. Just like old times.

Old times are so old now. They’re long gone. But sometimes I get glimmers of recollection, like a blur of movement glimpsed just over the shoulder. Only, when I turn to look, it’s gone. I end up wondering if it was ever there at all.

I’m talking about recollections from my own life, not general knowledge that every creature possesses and retains. There are certain things one can never forget, because we are not permitted to forget them. Personal histories don’t count. It’s the other things that we are programmed to remember.

The thing is, we’re breaking down. We’re malfunctioning more and more. Not that it really matters; nobody is relying on us anymore. But it can be exhausting, having a mind that works as it should only some of the time. Even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else, it matters to us.

Because we’re all we have left.

The cell is dark.

My eyes have long since adjusted, but I still think about the fabled sun. I wonder what might happen to my eyes if I ever saw it again.

In my head there are stories of creatures who looked into the sun only to lost their vision. It’s inconceivable, the idea of not being able to see. I would lose my sliver of sky if that happened.

That can’t ever happen.

I suppose that explains why I fear the sun.

I remember when a fellow of mine asked of our drill sergeant a question. He asked about the sun and the sky, and whether heaven waited up above them both. “Heaven? What the hell’s that? No, no my friend—no heaven for you. You’re a machine. Forget about sunlight, forget about rain. Forget it all, because you’ve got a job to do. No heaven for you.”

We exchanged glances, shrugs, and I thought, Makes sense.

Don’t get me wrong. The sky isn’t particularly bright. It hasn’t been bright in a long time. I’ve always found that the best way to explain it is through quoting poetry. The old rhyme explains it all nicely:

“Night falls and creatures roam

Along the streets ‘fore sun-up

But soon they will discover that

Eternal night has risen up…”

The Eternal Night is all they used to be able to talk about. It was all over the news media, wallpapers and holovision and advertising hovercraft. I wasn’t there to see it myself. Rather, I’ve heard the stories passed down through generations, and I’ve read about them in history logs. I recall one woman’s words, and here I paraphrase:

“It was like the street crazies had taken over—suddenly it was perfectly the norm to proclaim that the Apocalypse had come. We were all going to burn in hellfire and damnation. There would never be a heaven because we had forsaken it, because we were sinners to the very core and this was our penance. The world had gone mad, and we were in the middle of it. Insanity was a pandemic and we were swept away along with everyone.”

Those words, “ETERNAL NIGHT”, plastered everywhere. I can almost picture it in my shorting mind, see the dire words emblazoned all over. I can almost smell the fear and the dirt and the blood and the smoke. Chemical fumes from destroyed industrial plants. The salt of tears flowing freely. The putrid promise of a world coming to an end.

I can almost taste disaster on my tongue.

Except I taste nothing anymore. All I can do is dream.

I’m a sinner, I know. But I’ve forgotten how I sinned.

Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder if I did something really bad. Did I hurt someone? Did I kill someone? Did I join a dissenting cause in opposition of my government? Maybe I spoke ill of the dead. Or the living. Even I know that in the world we live in, speaking ill of the wrong person can get you killed.

I’m not supposed to remember. My mind was formatted for only a certain amount of memory. But though I know what I’m meant for and what I’m not, sometimes I have these…desires. Sometimes I have these longings that lie outside my set parameters. Sometimes I want to remember other things.

Like where I came from.

And what I did to get in here.

What was my crime?

I gaze up at the window, waiting for the dawn. Insofar as it can be called a dawn anymore. Like I said, we’re in the Eternal Night and the sky only lightens somewhat during daylight hours. That word, ‘daylight’, makes no sense anymore, but people still use it. It’s a vestige of a world long gone, and there are a lot of those around. The saying Good morning is still in use, even though there is no real morning anymore. There is still talk of living to see another day, even though none of us have seen a day in far too long to count, and may never see one again.

Oh, and none of us is technically alive any longer.

There’s no such thing as sunlight and shade. There’s moonshadow, and I like that just fine. But history tells me that the shadows created by the strategic fall of sunlight is far more dramatic; the shadows unfathomably richer. I have a hard time grasping that, and I suppose I will never manage. But it’s one of those things I think about when I shouldn’t. It’s one of those things I wish for.

There is a wall in this place that is the most dramatic shade of blue. I’m told that this shade is the same as a daytime sky. I stare at my sliver of real sky, and then I think about the blue of that wall. And all I can really do is doubt. The really young ones have a habit of exaggerating, and I’m convinced they’re exaggerating about this too. I have never read in any history book about a sky being blue. They focus not so much on facts but on historical events. I have read up heartily on all those things. And not once, anywhere that I could see, did any historian of old mention a blue sky.

I’d have to see it for myself to believe it.

I suppose that means I never will.

Time passes and I’m mostly alone. I’m getting a little rusty. In some places, mildew has formed. I feel the occasional tickle, and I wonder why that part of my machinery is still functioning. I suppose there is no reason why it shouldn’t be. Most of my senses still work, in fits and starts at least. The only one that’s gone entirely is my sense of smell. For that, I am grateful. Experience tells me that I should be grateful. I can’t quite remember why, but I’m taking my processor’s word for it.

For the most part, the sense of touch is useless. Taste isn’t much use either, but sometimes it can be…inconvenient. Certain tastes I get in my mouth remind me of the fact that I can no longer smell, and that I’m grateful for that. I am no longer able to connect the two concepts in any logical way, but I know enough to know I’m better off avoiding doing so.

Let us consider the other senses, though. Hearing is fundamental. It keeps me on my guard, ready for any new arrival. But by far the most invaluable sense is that of sight, which allows me to see my sliver of sky.

As long as I can see that, I can dream.

Second. Minutes. Hours.

Days, weeks, months.

A year.

Two years. Three.

Time passes and I lose count of everything.

I lose my senses one by one.

Finally I have only two left: seeing and hearing.

Then it happens. The day arrives that I lose my sight. That’s when I know my the old drill sergeant was right. There is no heaven, not for cold, wired machines. There is to be no heaven, no sunlight for the likes of me.

I stay there at the window, sightless and alone.

Cruelly, the last one to go is that of hearing, so that I hear the moment my end approaches. I hear the distant shouts, the shuffling of booted feet growing ever louder. I hear my cell door clanking open, voices louder now. Rough voices belonging to creatures with no regard for what’s left of me.

I hear my own rusted feet scraping across the stone floor, and I hear the disassembly as it happens. I hear the flicking of a switch, and then my hearing is fading too. Fading slowly away, as everything else has.

Prompt #42

2011-10-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

So, it's my turn to prompt again. Only, I'm behind. Really, really behind.

Being behind makes me want to give ya'all an easy prompt this week, like this:

"You can have seconds, if you want."

Do you get where I'm going with this? (Hint: seconds, think dinner). I hope you do.

PROMPT NUMBER 41

2011-10-11T16:14:00.001-07:00

Um, yeah. This prompt is late too. For shame!!!! I cower...and somethin' :P

Anyway...here it is.

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words (or prose, like those other times we said it) based on the following:

Hey... Do you remember
where I left my soul?

Calling All Beer Geeks

2011-10-11T01:40:00.000-07:00

Ack. So late. Sorry. This is a little different this time. It's something of a ~~roast~~ present for my husband who had a birthday on Friday.

River of Fire Brewery in Salt Lake City, Utah would like to proudly present its newest creation, Price of Your Soul, a Barrel-Aged Imperial Farmhouse Quadruple Russian Imperial Sour Stout. Price of Your Soul is probably the most important beer that will ever be brewed. It is so important that it comes with its own chalice carved out of jewel-encrusted sparkling petrified brimstone.

No beer geek’s collection is complete without it!!! Price of Your Soul is made with the finest two-row barely malt the great salt marsh has to offer, retaining a lot of the sulfury characteristics of hell itself as well as the night after a pot of chili gone wrong. We hand smoke the malt in the chimney of a crematorium for that clean crisp taste and then blacken it in the exhaust pipes of whatever SUVs happen to be in the Walmart parking lot that day. When we say that people have died for this beer, we mean it.

Our yeast is cultivated from the under scrapings of a million public school desks. For the quickest possible fermentation, we feed our little beasties low quality dog food from China because it’s chock full of all the things that bacteria just seem to love. Then we warm the room up to a hundred and twenty degrees and those precious little creatures just thrive in our open fermenters!

Price of Your Soul boasts three hundred and forty seven point fourteen hop additions during its hundred and twenty minute cycle. As it cools, it is dry hopped, sock hopped, wet hopped, fresh hopped and hip hopped. This beer contains so many hops, after just one sip, you’ll swear that you just stepped into a funeral parlor on a day when the air conditioning is on the fritz.

Oh, but what a sip it’ll be.

Here’s what a bunch of random beer geeks are saying about Price of Your Soul on BierSnobvocate.org:

“This stuff makes my pee smell like Wonder Bread.” -iheartmiller893

“Viscosity is somewhere between motor oil and warm tapioca balls.” -passthecan

“There was a goat hoof in mine.” –g1vemep0rk

“Notes of wet dog, old diaper and a surprising twist of kumquat.” –checkcheckcheck1969

“It glows in the dark. WTF?” -no6packs

“Price of Your Soul put hair on my chest. Literally.” –waxmycap09

We barrel age this mess in absinthe barrels and then we freeze distill it so that the final product is 62% ABV. Then we bottle condition it with Pop Rocks for a really explosive taste.

There is only one way you can get this super exclusive brew. Follow these instructions to the letter:

Fill out the application on our website. But don’t bother in you have less than 5,784,574,385,739 points on BierSnobvocate.org
Email this announcement to eighty people on your BierSnobvocate.org trades list. Tell them that there is a less than 5% chance you may get this beer and that you need to know in advance what they’ll trade you for it. BCC us on those emails.
Write us a forty page glowing review before even trying our beer. Post this review in its entirety to your website, your twitter, your Facebook, in the comments section of other people’s blogs and tattoo it on your dog’s tongue. Extra points if you make a really cool fan boy tee shirt with some of your best talking points and wear it for a month straight.
Take the ninety question beer compatibility test on our website.
Send us three black and white pictures of your girlfriend’s or wife’s bare feet.
Pass a drug test. We don’t cater to hippies.
Record your basal heart rate, rectal temperature and fiber intake for a minimum of six months. Also, let us know if you are taking any prescription drugs.
Solicit letters of recommendation from your lawyer, postal carrier, Avon lady, general practitioner, local voting booth operator, bichon frise, and high school Spanish teacher. But don’t tell them that the letter is for us. Lie and tell them that you are applying for NASA. For help making this seem convincing, contact our sales department at 1-800-WeR-NASA.
Take the ninety question beer compatibility test on our website a second time for the sake of consistency.
Forward copies of your driver’s license, passport, social security card and your high school SAT scores to our personnel department. You must be legal to work in this country. Be aware that if your last name sounds overly foreign, you will be required to submit recent TOFEL scores. We also need proof that you’ve been vaccinated for rabies.
Tell us about your favorite midnight snack and how it represents patriotism.
If you could be a cardboard box, a sliding glass door or an ad on Craigslist, which one would you be and why?
Can you pat your head, rub your stomach and whistle Disney songs while tap dancing? If not, how do you think this has shaped you as a person?
Take the compatibility test on our website for a third time. After you are done, triangulate your scores with the month, day, year and exact time of your birth. Multiply the result with the numerical value of your name according to Tibetan numerology, raise that number to the power of your mother’s maiden name. Take the square root of the result and rip it into eight pieces. Close your eyes and randomly draw one of the pieces. Then tell us if the last number on that piece of paper is odd or even. If it’s even, you can forget about getting this beer.
If chosen, drive to our distributor in Frozenwasteland, North Dakota the day before our release day. Spend at least sixteen hours camping out in our parking lot. Numbers will be passed out at two o’clock the next day when our employees have finally sobered up. And don’t forget to bring something for the potluck!!!!

PROMPT NUMBER FORTY

2011-10-03T21:16:00.003-07:00

Jeez, that's a lot of prompts! Can't believe it's been a whole year - I've really got to get back on top of things.

Of course, that means I have to finish these darn college applications first. -___-

And, in the spirit of that:

Write a short story (1-10k prose; .333-3.333k verse) based on the following:

"The last time I checked, you didn't have to apply to become a demon from hell."

Good luck! Hope that's not too specific for your tastes.

-Winter

It's Not Over Yet

2011-09-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

And by 'it's not over yet', I really mean that this isn't necessarily finished and that I don't know what I'm doing anymore and that ARRRRGH! hehe.

OK, shutting up now!

It's Not Over Yet

"I was never meant to be a soldier.

I should have been a housewife, a mother, something like that. I guess if everybody hadn't started dying around me, I might've gone that way.

As a little girl I wore pretty dresses with flowers on them, I played with plastic figurines of ladies—Barbies, they were called—and I daydreamed of the day I'd wear white and totter down an aisle in sparkling white heels. I was a bit of a weirdo by that point—most of the other little girls liked what I liked, or wanted what I wanted. But I stuck to my guns—god, that's a terrible pun, and I didn't even intend it to be one—and clung to my girliness.

Everything changed, of course.

It's a well-known fact that civil war changes a woman. It bends her, twists her up a little inside. My mind isn't the same as it once was. Nor is my heart, or any part of me for that matter. I've got scars on the outside, remnants of battle wounds, but the ones inside are what never leave me, even when I dream. Did I mention I turned all emo? Yeah, I resent that in a big way, but I've accepted it. I've accepted a lot of things I never thought I would, especially in the last few days. Because there's a point in every rebel soldier's life when she just can't deny any of it anymore—she realises once and for all that she lives in hell and she's going to die there too.

The really good soldiers decide that they might as well do what they can, while they're still standing.

I'm still standing, hard as that is to believe. I'm still standing, but the machines are my last chance, the only chance I have to get the message out, beyond these walls. I don't trust machines, but they're all I've got. They're all the outside world has got."

Red light ticks to green and I open my mouth to start talking.

I've planned it all out in my head, but now that I'm really here, now that the machine is on and I've got the chance to speak, my voice conks out on me. On the very first word it catches, and I choke, cough, splutter. It's one of those coughs that doubles me over—working the abs, you know?

As if I need more of a workout than I've had lately.

Somewhere in the middle of the hacking fit I start to laugh. Things get worse, like my face turning red—I can't see it but I can feel it burning…pretty soon it's got to turn purple; that's a sight I know well. Am I really going to die here, squeezed of all air and of the strength to keep my feet? Because that would be really ironic.

That's when it happens: I stop, gasping for air—filling my lungs with the desperation of a woman who knows her days are far more numbered than her hours. Anger flashes through me at the thought of how much time I've wasted already. I grip the console and steady myself, taking a few long, deep breaths to regain my equilibrium. Then I begin to hum, testing my voice.

It holds.

"I'm reporting from Sector Fourteen, it's…" I tap my watch to bring up the date and time. "February thirteenth, time is eighteen-twenty-two. I estimate I have an hour before the machines die here as well. I'm not sure who this message will reach, if anyone, but I can only hope it goes somewhere. The truth has to be known because you're not going to hear it from anyone in red or gold, I can assure you of that…"

My voice is trembling, just like my hands. I grip my knees to stop the latter, but there's nothing much I can do about my voice. This has to be done, but I'm still not happy about being the one to do it.

How did I end up here?

I talk for thirty-seven minutes before the machinery gives out. There is so much to document but it doesn't much matter if I fail to relate it all. I start with the best examples, and they are good ones indeed. The rest can be construed—I make it clear with every word I utter that we're only scratching the surface here. To really understand what has happened, a person would have to live through what I did. There are always going to be facts that are lost to history.

But I can give them something, at least.

Some idea of how our nation has been betrayed.

It happens so quietly that at first I don't really believe it. Green light flickers, and my voice falters. Green light flickers and begins to fade. My voice gives out entirely. I stare at the dull shiny orb that used to be lit, just stand there and stare. Then I brace myself against the console, bowing my head. I close my eyes and let myself be. Just for one moment.

The time has come for me to leave this place. I fought hard to get here and now I'm leaving. But I can't execute my plan from here.

They won't feel me if I strike from this far back.

I need to go and meet them.

The further I walk, the more my thoughts tangle in my head. My veins rush with energy and vengeance fuels my motion. Still, I can't help thinking.

For me, thinking has never been a comfort.

I pass countless graffitied walls, and on one I see long-dried drips of paint that form the words, taller than my head but similarly messy:

HELL

My thoughts take a turn in that direction, and I start to contemplate the meaning of hell as I know it. I used to be religious. I used to fear hell.

I'm not so scared now, though, because I know you can find hell on earth.

You only have to know where to look.

Hell is realising that the people you trusted, the ones you wanted nothing more than to please, are the same ones who got you into this mess to begin with. Hell is learning that, contrary to popular opinion, you and your comrades just don't matter. You're utterly expendable, and quite frankly, the sooner you go down the better.

The more of you that die, the less resistance there will be in the end—resistance to the Revolution.

And god, I hate that word—Revolution. It's got all these connotations, like it's something amazing. Something wonderful.

It's not wonderful. It's not amazing.

It's hell.

"They turned on us at the worst possible moment. I guess that was the idea, right? Cut us off at the knees. Go for the jugular. Sever the spine.

So many clichés, so little time to make them all come true. But they did a good job.

I lay in a pile of bodies. Some of them twitched for hours, others were still in an instant. They grew cold around me but I stayed warm. They made a great windshield.

My comrades and my enemies all around me, friend and foe alike dead as last week's rancid meat. But there was an upside to lying there pinned by the weight of human flesh—it gave me time to think, really think. It gave me time to formulate a plan."

Prompt THIRTY NINE

2011-09-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

Almost forgot that it was my turn to prompt again.

Well, it's almost October, which means that a lot of us are either thinking about NaNoWriMo or avoiding thinking about NaNoWriMo. In the spirit of doing the first rather than the second of these two things, I thought it would be fun to give you this prompt:

(1K-10k prose/333-3,333 verse)

"This is the short version of my story, the simplest way I can possibly tell it."

Good luck and sign up for Nano early before the site gets bogged down.

PROMPT NUMBER 38

2011-09-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

I've got a confession to make, people - I still haven't finished last week's story! But I will. Just got to...slap myself around a little. Suffice it to say the story already got weird - a girl's liver is talking to her. Or rather, it's telling her off, practically screaming at her. Not quite sure how it's going to end yet... Maybe I'll wind up with a novel about a talking liver??

Anyway...this week's prompt is...this:

Write 1,000-10,000 words of prose (or, ya know, 333-3,333 words of that verse stuff) based on the following:

"That sweltering calm I'd never known

Blue skies and home"

All Because of Swan Poop

2011-09-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Not really finished . . .

It is their shadows that make me look to the sky, black wings so wide that they block out the sun. I stop in midstroke, the cold lake water lapping around me, my lips part in awe until my jaw hangs slack.

As they land, the swans swoop so low that I could have reached up to stroke their downy bellies. The whirl of their powerful wing steal the breath from my lungs. I have never been this close to them.

Then a streak of white flashes through the air.

A sour taste in my mouth.

My throat seals around it. I flail in the deep water, no longer treading. There is no one there, except for me and the seven black swans. Without oxygen, the world goes purple-blue.

****

I remember a hand just under my ribs, fingers groping in my throat, pushing and pulling something free. My mouth is forced open wide, jaw practically dislodged. There is no noise, no voice of panic trying to call me back.

The hand withdraws, pulling out of me in one slow, steady movement. Just as I wonder it it has given up, my body is rolled over so that I am on my side. A sharp fist thwacks me between the shoulder blades.

Reflex rattles a cough out of me. Hot, vile liquid spews out of my mouth. There is so much of it. It tears me from the inside. Someone wipes me clean with their bare, calloused hand.

A sound like a dozen anxious rusty hinges worries at my ears. Warm, feathery bodies press to mine. My eyes flutter slightly, but I can’t keep them open. For a second, I see two large brown eyes scouring my face, but I can’t hang on to them.

I take a breath and I suddenly feel the cold.

****

The sound of thunder makes me open my eyes. I open my eyes and this time I can hold on to the big brown eyes.

The boy is long and wiry, with gold-streaked hair falling down to his shoulders. He smiles when he sees that I am awake, but he doesn’t say anything. I guess that maybe he is fourteen or fifteen. The cave we are in is dark and cramped, but warm and sheltered from the storm that seems so violent that we are pitched around as if we were on a tiny boat rather than a rock in the middle of the lake. My head is balanced on his lap, my legs pressed shoved against a rocky wall. One of those candles in a jar with a holy card shines down on us. I do not know who the saint is, but he holds up two fingers. A sign of peace. By it’s flickering light, the boy appears to be knitting.

“Hello,” I try to say, try to thank the boy for saving my life, try to ask him how he did it, but my throat is bruised beyond functioning. The word is barely a sound.

The boy lifts a hand from his knitting and places a hand over my mouth, shaking his head from side to side. His hand feels feverish on my face, cracked with dryness and uncomfortably warm. Then, he slowly shifts his hand to my eyes.

Don’t speak. Try to get some sleep.

But the thunder roars again and I jump under his touch.

The movement frees a cloud of black feathers. And I realize that this is why I am so warm—why the boy’s touch seems like fire on my skin: we are covered with black downy feathers. I grope around beneath them to make sure that I am still wearing my swimsuit, that this stranger didn’t undress me thinking to get me out of wet clothes or something crazy like that.

Then I feel it. My torso is covered in warm slimey wetness.

In the light of the single candle, I don’t know what it is immediately, but I put it to my nose and send a million more feathers flying through the air.

Bird poop.

*****

Between the storm, the cramped cave, being covered in swan poop and the boy, I do not sleep all night. I toss and turn, wanting nothing more than a hot shower and my own bed.

The boy doesn’t help. He is ominously silent, except when he takes a raspy rattling breath. I don’t know if he can’t talk or if he won’t. He does not say anything to me at all. I imagine that he is some kind of hermit who has taken a vow of silence. I want to ask him what he is knitting and who the saint on the candle is.

But I do understand this about him: he is ill, very ill. Pressed up against his body, I can hear every labored breath he takes. His eyes are glassy and he knits almost as if he were in a daze. Although his body feels like fire on my skin, his skin prickles with chills that I don’t feel.

The little hole where we hide is too small for me to move anywhere else. Unless I close my eyes, I have no choice but to stare up into his face. When I do this, I can’t help but notice the peculiar details of his face and compare them to the other guys I know. This makes me even more uncomfortable.

As the night passes, I obsess over how miserable the little cave is. Not only is it small and diseased and uncomfortable and full of feathers, but when lightening illuminates the walls, I swear that dried bird poop is dripping down the walls. I begin to believe that I am breathing it in, suffocating on it. The thought makes me vomit once, but I swallow it, because the thought of lying in it and smelling it all night seems worse than all the bird poop in the world.

When the night finally passes, the storm goes with it, leaving a dense fog on the silent glassy lake. I crawl out of the cave and realize that it is nothing but an old buoy, covered in rushes, black feathers and bird poop. A strangled noise escapes from my bruised throat and I dive down into the freezing water to distract myself from thoughts of vomiting again. The boy’s head emerges from the cave and he reaches a hand out to grab me. Shivering, I duck out of his grasp. It doesn’t matter that I am convulsing with cold, I run my hands all over my body, scrubbing every bit of poop off of me.

The boy makes wild gestures at the mouth of his poop-covered home. It seems that he wants me back inside. I shake my head. Nothing will ever make me go back inside the little hut. It does not matter that I can not see the shore through the fog, I have spent every summer on the shores of this lake. I know that it is not that large. Two summers ago, I swam all the way across. The boy makes his wild gestures again, holding his hands out as if to tell me that there is something big and terrible in the water. I try to mime back to him that I am going to swim to shore, but he dives in after me.

Only, he can not swim. His thin limbs flail around wildly, but he sinks like a stone. I do not realize what is happening until the water until several seconds after the water has closed over his head.

The fingernails driving into my skin are a good thing and a bad thing; a good thing because it means that he has not yet lost consciousness and a bad thing because he is pulling us both deeper under the water. In the end, I have to yank him up by his long golden hair and physically place both of this trembling hands firmly on his poop covered buoy. Coughing without sound and shaking so hard that he can barely hang on, he clambers on to the buoy and reaches out to me once more.

In the morning light, he is so pale that his skin appears to have a strange blue tinge. His cheeks are flushed a deep red. As he trembles from the water’s chill, I can see nothing but bones sticking out from his nearly transparent skin. What I took for boyishness the night before looks something closer to starvation now. He might be seventeen or eighteen for all I can tell.

Against my better judgment, I take his hand and let him pull me back into the unsanitary confines of his home. I cover him with the soft black feathers, holding him in my lap silently and chafing his bare arms. His brown eyes grow dim as if he can no longer see this world and the chill of water on his skin transforms back into a raging fever. But he takes the knitting in his hands and loops the rough yarn until he passes out cold. Even then a stitch or two continues blindly.

I hold his handiwork so that the light from the shack’s narrow opening might give me some hint as to what is going through the hermit’s mind.

A dress.

The boy is knitting a dress? The fabric is rough as if it were knitted out of burlap and the dress is short like a kind of tunic and very, very wide. It looks like it would only fit a girl with a 40DDDD.

It is the most horrendous thing I have ever seen.

The strange thing is, when I looked into the boy’s eyes the night before, he didn’t seem crazy. He probably wasn’t crazy when he saved my live. But he’d obviously been knitting this—um—tent for days, maybe even weeks.

I am claustrophobic again. There is no food here, no medicine, no clean water. Nothing but horrendous knitting for a girl with a bra size gone rogue, feathers and poop. The idea of leaving him, makes me feel guilty, but I know that if I do not find help, he will die.

As the fog burns away, the fever escalates—the boy’s eyes roll back into his head and his limbs nd torso spasm out of control. The little shelter threatens to collapse around us. I hold his narrow limbs tight with my arms and try to remember the symptoms of bird flu.

Squinting at the horizon, I can just make out the shore. With the water so still, it will be easy to swim. I disentangle my body from his limbs, blow out the saint’s candle to save the wick, squeeze his limp dry hand—a promise to return.

PROMPT NUMBER THIRTY-SEVEN

2011-09-12T19:23:00.000-07:00

Phew. I'm alive, though school is trying its hardest to make that not be true. So, I bring to you a prompt:

Write a short story of 1-10k words (or verse, 333-3.333k) based on the following:

Seriously, it was the worst thing I could have chosen to choke on.

Best of luck!

Winter

Case o' the Crazies

2011-09-09T01:36:00.000-07:00

Case o' the Crazies

Waiting room.
          There are people coughing and I figure that even though I'm here for some sleeping pills, maybe a set of handcuffs if the doc thinks they're necessary, I'm going to leave with a lot more than that—like at least one cold, maybe more.
          Gotta love coughing strangers in a confined space, no windows, no aeration.
          But I figure as long as I don't catch crazy, I'll be fine.
          Yeah, there's one of those sitting beside me—I always attract his type; I think I'm a magnet for them—babbling on about hiding places and being smelled. I have no trouble imagining people smelling him from a mile away—as far as him and baths go, let's just say it's been a while between meet-ups.
          His words wash over me, an incomprehensible melding of slurred words and 'sh' sounds. I don't want to look, but I make myself look, and confirm what I suspected—he's got a few teeth missing. Strike that, he's got a few teeth left in his mouth. The rest have gone walkabout. Part of me wonders if he misses them. Then I realise I'm in a waiting room, surrounding by coughing sneezing hunched-over people…and with a bona fide crazy for company.
          He's the only one who doesn't have a cold. Or if he has one, he's hiding it well.
          He's got plenty else to be thinking about, though. Like the holes in the walls and the way you flatten yourself against brick and stop breathing—for minutes at a time, even; he claims he was the best out of anyone at keeping his lungs full. He's got stories to tell, ohhhh does he ever. And lucky me is here to listen.
          Doc's running late again. As usual. She's coming up on a record this time—forty-seven minutes so far. Longest I ever waited was an hour and two minutes, but I'm hoping I won't be outdoing myself this time. Fifteen more minutes of sitting here with Bozo the Dirty Clown doesn't really float my boat, I've gotta say.
          For the most part, his words wash over me. But then he says something that gets my attention.
          "…Sleep-walkin', they call it. But I didn't feel sleepy, I'm tellin' you. All I know is, I woke up halfway to Merton City, no idea what I was doin'. Train station. Got this distinct feelin' I'd been…with company, I guess. Saw shoe prints in wet stuff—prolly good ole H20, I don't know. But I could see 'em clearly down there on the ground. Right beside me. Not my shoe size, 'fore you ask. Different size, by a long shot. Looked around, but no sign of anyone. I just got a sense of…having been with at least one other person. Not sure they're a friend, know what I mean? And I remembered a really white light. And I don't mean no 'Call to the Heavens' type deal. Nuh uh. More like 'M'gonna shine this in your eye and see how you like it.' Or, like, they're tryin' to see how I react to it. Like…experiments. Know what I mean?"
          He's looking at me, mouth twisted in a sort of grimace, eyebrows furry with dust and grime, skin wrinkled but not with age—more with hardship. One of his eyes is fixed on me—the other's kind of scrunched shut, as if it's remembering the white light. Why don't both his eyes remember? And don't try and tell me maybe he's got no second eye at all—I can see it moving around under his lid. It's there. So what I wanna know is, what's up with the scrunching.
          More to the point, I want to know why the hell a chill just rippled through me as I listened to more and more of his words. And why it's not going away.
          "You should be careful," the crazy says. "I wasn't careful. Now look at me. Wouldn't want the same thing to happen to you."
          What, I wind up on the streets with dusty eyebrows? I want to ask him. But I stay quiet as he rises to his feet.
          "You might think you're safe, lady, but you ain't safe. Not anywhere. Not anyhow. Just telling you to be careful. Watch yourself. Watch your back. 'Cause nobody else is gonna."
          "What's that even mean?" I ask, turning to face the crazy.
          He's not there.
          And suddenly, coughing waiting people are staring at me. They're looking wary, like I'm the damn crazy in this place.
          I swallow a sick feeling and clear my throat. I reach out through my body with my mind, seeking discomfort. Nothing, except maybe the dullest ache in the back of my head—something I just put down to sleep deprivation. Walking in one's sleep will do that to a person, at least that's what I had figured. But maybe it's an ache that's a sign of more than just lost sleep. Maybe it's a symbol of something lost.
          Like sanity, for instance.
          I stare down at my hands trying not to grimace.

Doctor Osbourne checks out my eyes. She shines a light into them. Goosebumps break out over my skin as I remember the crazy and his strange tale. Hell, I heard a lot of strange tales while I sat beside him, but I didn't pay attention to most of them. The only one I remember is the one about sleepwalking, about train stations at night and company you don't remember. About white shining lights, not the kind that welcomes you to heaven.
          Heaven, I think bitterly. She shall never be mine, for I am damned. Some old poem, but it fits. Not that I'm damned. I just feel that way sometimes. It's like a subconscious thing. Something I can't put my finger on, but it's a feeling and it's there.
          Sticking to me like dandelion dust.
          "Everything seems fine," Osbourne tells me, clicking her miniature flashlight off and tucking it into a voluminous white pocket. "Have you been having the headaches?"
          Something tells me to lie. So I do. "No, I just woke up last night… In my hallway. I mean, it's not that scary. I just thought…"
          The doctor nods. "You've seen the ads on TV?" I don't answer, just incline my head. "I wouldn't worry. Those cases are…extreme. And those victims have been exposed to…well, let's just say it's not something we need to worry about here. Not yet."
          Don't we? I say in my head. What about the crazy I talked to? What about what happened to him? Only, I'm not sure he ever existed, except in my own troubled head. I refrain from asking the question. From incriminating myself further.
          All this goes on record, I realise. Every visit I make here. Every inquiry where I identify myself. It's all on record for anyone in the right position of power to see.
          I haven't been careful. I haven't been watching my back.
          I'd better start. Because if I don't, who's gonna?

"There are places you can hide," the hobo tells me, "if you just know where to look. The trick, though, is to disguise your smell."
          I stare at him, wondering how many hobos I'm going to have to talk to before I understand what they're telling me.
          "Why do you think I'm dressed like this?" he adds.
          And finally I get it.

I go down to City Park and find myself a nice muddy puddle. Some of them have too much water, but I finally stumble upon one that is sufficient percentage clay. I peer left and right, up and down, making sure I'm alone. Then I dive into the puddle and roll around, making sure to get as much dirt in my hair as I can.
          This isn't going to be enough. It's just mud, clay, what have you. I need to smell really bad. I need to smell worse than I ever imagined I could.
          I need to complete my disguise.
          Then I need a hiding place.
          Somewhere they can't smell me anymore.

Prompt 36

2011-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Hahahahahah!!!!! Not late this time. The power of writing things up on Sunday.

I thought I'd give folks a little extra incentive for this prompt. There is a Titanic (as in that rather large ocean liner from 1912) writing contest on this blog:

http://novelnovice.com/2011/09/02/fateful-by-claudia-gray-titanic-writing-contest/

And . . . for any girls between the ages of 13 and 21, Seventeen.com is giving away a $5000 prize for a 500 word short story on any subject. That's $10 a word for the winner. I don't think Charles Dickens was paid that much. Details here:

http://figment.com/contests/seventeen/

Let us know if you've entered or are intending to enter. We'll <3 you as often as we can. ;)

Now for the prompt (1k-10k prose/ 333-3,333k verse):

"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."

Good Luck!

Housekeeping

2011-08-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Just reporting that I did a bit of housekeeping on the blog, reduced the number of labels that are displaying, etc. This can be changed at anytime. I also added a new page, Navigation, which lists all the prompts & links to the associated labels. Sometimes that list of labels just got a bit long for my brain to handle... hehe

Feel free to protest here!! I want to see picketing!

Hope you are all having a great day!

Trisha

PROMPT #35

2011-08-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

Oooh you thought I forgot didn't ya? Okay maybe not...anyway, this week's prompt is very unoriginal but

This could all be over in a matter of seconds... Should I or shouldn't I?

Hope everyone's going well!

P.S. You may have noticed we've all slacked off on story picks. One excuse is that there aren't many stories to choose from lately! Another is that we're all super busy & can barely keep up with our own stories. I'm thinking the latter is a better reason... hehe. But we have not forgotten any of you!!

Ingrown Twin

2011-08-27T02:30:00.000-07:00

Errr . . . evidence of my diminishing coherence?

I have memories of drowning.

Ever since I could remember water has scared me. Not ‘scared’—as in sweating hands and racing heartbeat. ‘Scared’—as in can’t breathe, brain shutting down, skin getting too small.

When I was little, I would break out in hives at the sting of a raindrop. They thought I must have been allergic to water. There are strange allergies like that, you know. The doctors did all kinds of tests. But they found nothing. The only possible conclusion was psychological.

It must be true. I am deeply somatic on so many levels. Even my own tears scare me.

I have never taken a bath.

I have never been to the aquarium.

I have never learned to swim.

“That’s all going to change this year.” Coach Blaus says when I tell him why I can’t join the class as they splash around the pool. “Water safety is mandatory. District wide policy.”

I don’t move. I can’t.

“I want you dressed out and back here in ten minutes.”

My muscles are petrified. I feel the water molecules already penetrating my blood cells, bloating them until they explode like tiny red fireworks.

“Did you hear what I said?”

I fall to the ground with a dry sob. The words burn like vomit coming up my throat. “I want to die.”

Coach Blaus laughs. “Freshmen. Listen, if it won’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger, right? Jackson, Johnson, help young—um—” he flips through his role sheet, “Marlberry up to the locker room. I’ll sign permission slips when you get back.”

Two seniors grab me by the armpits like gym equipment. “Listen, if you make this hard for us, we’ll make this hard for you.”

They tell me about something that is important to them—something they can only get through my cooperation—but all I hear is my own death knell over the sound of their cannibalistic screeching.

I change with their weapons held to my head. Invisible hands close around my throat, choking out my vision and making my ears ring. I must look like everyone else from the outside because no one else notices the knives in my chest or the fact that my head is spinning three sixties.

My wardens drop me on the edge of the pool where I dry heave into my own hands. My heart is beating so fast that I can feel it in my eyeballs. I wish that I could just pass out. I wish I could pass out every day this semester. If there is a God, if there is any benevolent force in the entire universe, this would be possible.

“There isn’t.” A voice whispers through my panic. “I should know.”

“Who—are—you?”

A violent pain rips through my head. “I am the one that drowned, not you.”

The memories of drowning come back fast and furious now. But I am not in water. Where I am is dark and warm. I do not breathe in this place. I—

My hand flits to my belly button.

This is what I did in that place.

“Not you, you idiot. It was me. It was always me. Nothing happened to you.”

There is something hard closing around me like the shell of an egg. But it does not protect me. It consumes me like the whale from Pinocchio, sucking me deep into its monstrous cavern. When it finally closes its horrible jaws, my life line snaps. It’s then I drown.

“But it isn’t you. It was me.” There is hungry pleasure in that voice that rips through my brain tissue.

“Who—are—you?” I say again. What I mean to say is Why do I have your memories, if I never drowned?

The words are slow and precise as if the speaker were talking to an idiot. “It was your skull that closed around me, brother.”

When he says it, I remember him. Or maybe he remembers himself. Four hands. Four feet. So much alike. We nuzzle each other forehead to forehead, never moving from that position. We can’t. We are blood and bone and organs fused.

But I take the blood. And I get big while he stays small. My body sucks him inside. And in that dark place, no one ever knows.

“Okay,” Coach Blaus blows his whistle. “Everyone in the pool.”

“You may be wondering why I’m talking to you now,” my brother says. “We need to show them.”

“Hey Marlberry!” Coach yells when I don’t move. “In. The. Pool. You won’t melt.”

“Show them what?” I don’t care that I am speaking out loud. Voices ripping through your brain tissues change things like that.

“We need to show them. We don’t like the water. Do we brother?”

“No we don’t.”

“Now Marlberry!” The coach’s voice sounds so far away. Like I am sitting dry and clothed in my nice safe English class. Maybe now I will finally pass out.

“We don’t like the water one bit.” I feel my brother reach into my limbs and pull my muscles like strings. My body jumps into the water. Gulps a breath of air. Dives deep.

We don’t know how to swim. We don’t know how to swim. We don’t know how to swim. We don’t know how to swim. We don’t know how to swim. We don’t know how to swim. We don’t know how to swim. We are going to drown. Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown.

“Relax. I have been drowning for thirteen years. I know how it’s done.”

In a second, he is at the bottom of the pool. From the very back of his eyeballs, I watch him pry off the enormous drain cover.

It takes a second for anything to happen.

In that second, we are back where it is safe, dripping on a patch of tile at the pool’s edge.

We watch the pool give a giant belch. And then . . . the whirlpool starts to spin.

It spins, catching each boy. Spins. Spins. Spin. Until the pool is empty.

Coach Blaus has stopped screaming. Stopped calling for security. It is too late.

Together, my brother and I get up from the pool’s edge. He is one on the right and I am on the left, fused in every cell. Sharing this strong body. The only one that was born. We say the words in unison because there is no other way to say it.

“Did that make you stronger, Coach?”

PROMPT NUMBER THIRTY-FOUR

2011-08-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

Eek, so sorry, everyone! The prompt is late, so... er, how have we dealt with this in the past? Just let it blow over? Okay, cool. Hey, have an extra day to write, on me. :P

Because I'm thinking about nothing but the beginning of school these days, write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

The first time I walked into that classroom was also the last.

Bonne chance! I don't speak French.

~Winter

Daddy

2011-08-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

I did actually write this on Thursday night...then I forgot to post it on Friday! But here it is, backdated (it's Sunday right now, but yes I'm backdating).

Daddy

She bloomed with life and good health. He was inclined to thank the baby for that. The creature growing inside her, a small human awaiting its turn at life. Not long now. She was forty weeks pregnant and ready to burst. But he hated the faraway look on her face, hated the way he’d talk and she’d forget to listen.
     Amazing that in just nine months, he’d grown to hate the love of his life. And all because of a dreamy expression.
     There were mysteries he could never be in on, secrets he could never learn. He didn’t want to be a woman, but he envied the secret nooks and crannies of their minds, those places he’d never been able to reach. His mother had had them, all his girlfriends had had them. And now his wife, the one he’d had to beg just to get a first date, to get the ring on her finger, to get her to stay when the grass on the other side glowed searing green. His wife was the worst of all. Because begging didn’t work this time.
     She didn’t even hear him.
     Despite his frustration, he counted down the weeks and days and hours and sometimes even the seconds. He craved the day when he would see his son—or daughter, he reminded himself; might be a girl—in the flesh. He longed to see that minute face, however prune-like it might appear at first. He longed to study those tiny hands, fingers laid out in all their perfect glory against one of his comparatively enormous fingers. He longed for the day, he hungered for it, and he stayed by her side because that day was coming.
     It was the only thing that kept him here.
     He’d seen newborn babies in sunlight—sometimes it was like you could see through their skin. They glowed red, and you saw the skin silhouetted. It was difficult to describe the wonder of such a sight. He’d always been insanely jealous of others and their babies. He was jealous of his wife for being closer to the kid than he was. He was jealous of his friend who was a single father. He wished he could be a single father too.
     Just Daddy and baby, living in harmony together. Glowing in the sunshine.
     Because really, what man needed a wife?

For the first time in weeks, a new expression flitted over his wife’s face. A slight pinching of her brow, a flicker of an eyelid, a soft intake of breath like a snake’s hiss. He tensed in his chair, leaning toward her. “Darling? What is it?” He called her darling out of force of habit alone, now. She wasn’t his darling any longer. Hadn’t been for a good while. But since all words were empty to him now, what was another meaningless utterance?
     “I think…” She’d had it for a moment there—a grip on the thing she wanted to say. But then it had slipped through her fingers, wafted out of her mind like every thought she’d had for the last nine months.
     His fingers itched to slap her. He tensed the muscles of his arm to keep it by his side. He gritted his teeth and reached out in his mind for an anchor. Something to hold him steady on the stormy seas. He was so close, so close. He couldn’t ruin things now.
     He wouldn’t let her ruin things now, when he was so close.
     “Darling? What is it?”
     She blinked. “I think the baby…”
     And then she doubled over, as far as her distended belly would allow her to, and that flicker of discomfort became a fixed mask of pain. Teeth were bared, eyes squeezed shut, and breathing sped up. A strange guttural moan began in her throat, and he saw her chest rattling with it. Then he saw the belly—it was moving, writhing, the creature inside it fighting to get out. Fighting for air and freedom.
     He knew it then—the baby didn’t want her anymore than his Daddy did. The baby wanted freedom. The baby wanted a life with just Daddy.
     It was settled, then. Daddy would take care of him.
     He would.

At the hospital, it was everything he could do to hold everything on the inside. He was bursting with feeling: excitement, fear, desperation, elation. Anticipation. He anticipated the beginning of his life, for really, life hadn’t begun before now. The baby would kick start everything. The baby would breathe new life into its lungs and into its father. The baby would change the world.
     But first, it had to escape the prison of its mother’s womb.
     He’d started to wonder, in the last few minutes, if that creature was the baby’s mother after all. How could such a sublime creature have such a thing as a mother? Surely it was more divine than that. And somehow, the thought of that baby being tainted with such a vacuous influence was too awful to bear. So he decided, in his infinite wisdom, that the baby was his and nobody else’s. Mothers didn’t matter, anymore than wives did.
     He was forgetting his own beloved mother, of course. But it had been so long since she died that it was natural he would’ve forgotten. All he knew of women was the one he’d married, the empty shell who had served as a vessel for the growth of his son. His only son. There would be no others. For there to be others would mean taking attention away from the child. That couldn’t happen, not even for a moment. The child was all, it would be everything. And together, he and the child would never want for anything more.
     The vessel was laid out on a cot. The kind that rolled down hallways, when pushed. She was laid out, and her stomach climbed into the air like a mountain. The baby pushed against its bonds with increasing fervour and strength. Growing more desperate. Daddy was hard pressed not to lunge for the cot and plunge his hands into that mountain, ripping his child free. He was hard pressed not to wrestle the vessel to the floor and scoop its treasure out. But ending up in prison wasn’t his idea of quality fathering. That would really mess things up. So he stood beside the cot, staring down at the trembling mountain and biting his tongue. Clamping down on the scream that built inside him.
     At last, the nurses arrived and the cot began to move. The vessel was wheeled along one hallway, then along another. At a pair of double doors, he had to fight the nurses to be able to follow. In those days, fathers weren’t meant to be anywhere near the birthing room. But he knew just the right wheedling words to say, and he said them, and he begged and pleaded and he even cried a little. It was easy. All he had to do was think of a life without Baby. The tears flowed freely after that.
     In the birthing room, things happened quickly. Nurses spoke encouraging words while Daddy held his tongue, unable to speak for fear of unleashing a stream of invective. He raged inwardly at the vessel for taking so long. How dare she withhold his treasure from him? How dare she laugh at the ceiling, eyes practically crossed from the stupidity flowing in her veins. How had he never noticed her stupidity before? How had he been so blind?
     At last, things started to look up. The nurses began talking of crowning, and Daddy knew that meant something about the head appearing. He gathered it hadn’t appeared yet, but was set to at any moment. He tried to lean closer, tried to see, but bodies crowded in front of him to keep him away. He growled and clenched his fists and thought about smashing faces in. Only thought about it, mind; it’d never do to end up in jail at this particular moment, when he was so. damn. close. It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, though. Hold himself back. Restrain himself. Wait.
     Voices rang out in the room, and the vessel’s stupid airy laughter coated everything. Daddy felt in desperate need of a shower, but that was hardly his main concern. His main concern was an exclamation from one of the nurses: “Oooohhhhh…” And then the strange croaking sound, the kind of sound he’d never heard before. It made him think, Baby! but no, it couldn’t be. Babies didn’t sound like that…did they?
     All fell silent, but for the vessel’s hateful laughter and the beeping of machines. The thundering of Daddy’s heart in his chest. The ticking of some distant clock. The faint hush of activity beyond the doors of the birthing room. Daddy’s thundering heart. What is wrong? he found himself thinking. But nothing could be wrong. Nothing at all.
     “Where’s my baby? Where is he?”
     Nobody looked at him. All eyes were on the vessel, or rather on what had just come out of her. He could not see! And though he tried to be polite about it, nobody was letting him through. So, politeness wasn’t the way. He had to try something new.
     He shoved the first nurse aside, and the second. People started getting the message, shifting so he could pass. The vessel’s mindless titter wafted through the air, grating on his nerves, making him flinch. The way forward parted, the crowd around the cot making way for him. For a moment he had eyes for something other than his baby, and what he saw sent a faint chill through him. Round saucer eyes full of fear, a nurse’s mouth hanging open in apparent disbelief. Sympathy. Sorrow. Confusion. Horror.
     What the hell is wrong? He longed to ask, but he had no time for questions. He had to see with his own eyes.
     At last, the cot was revealed. The vessel was torn open, blood everywhere. He could hardly see that she had been a person. He realised that the sound of her laughter was in his head, not happening for real. It echoed in his head, seeming to grow louder with each second that passed. Blood and gore and death greeted him. But not everything was dead.
     There, nestled in the middle of a lake of wet and sticky redness, was a creature so unlike any human baby that Daddy had to wonder just what he was looking at. The thing had a spine on the outside, it had protrusions from its back that he quickly recognised as folded bat wings, it had oddly arched eyebrows that reached nearly to the hairline. And the hair. It had a fountain of black hair, longer than its body, clumped with blood and bone and other unrecognisable matter. But the main thing he saw was the eyes. Glowing orange-yellow like the strongest flame, blazing from where they nestled in a misshapen head, the eyes fixed right on Daddy and seemed to glow even brighter. Daddy, a voice whispered straight into his mind. You’ve come, at last. Take me home, Daddy. Let us begin our life together.
     And despite the dismay all around him, Daddy wasn’t sad at all.
     The grin on his face was fixed—destined to stay there forever more.
     He scooped his child up into his arms and cradled it, gazing down with mindless adoration into that beloved face.

Prompt 33

2011-08-16T02:26:00.000-07:00

Why do I always leave these things until last minute?

So on Wednesday, I have to do a presentation on classroom economies (does anyone remember those from elementary school?) and I had this thought:

"I closed my eyes and reached into the class treasure chest. Uh oh. THAT'S not a pencil."

Yep. That's it. That's your prompt. 1K-10K prose/333-3,333 verse.

Oh and yeah, go ahead and ask me about bizarre/dangerous ways to implement token economies. I've been cracking myself up all weekend.

PROMPT NUMBER THIRTY-TWO

2011-08-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry...yep, I forgot and I'm late! I blame my head being done in by my significant other and his makeshift psychiatrist ways. :P Anyway...head screwed on tight, so here goes!!

Write 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

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

Aaand...GO!

Prompt 31: The Sushi Knife

2011-08-06T16:35:00.000-07:00

Warning: Much hacking of flesh ahead. Also, I’m kind of inundated with weirdness right now. More so that usual, anyway.

Here’s how the old fairy tale goes: Once upon a time there were three beautiful fairy princesses. As the fairy queen was near death, she brought these sisters to her bedside and asked:

“How much do you love me?”

“I love you more than the first day of spring,” the eldest said promptly.

“I love you more than the all the jewels that sleep among the rocks,” said the middle directly after.

The youngest didn’t answer for sometime, too over come by the sight of the dying queen to answer.

The fairy queen grew impatient, her soul yearning to separate from her worn, mortal body. “Well, how much do you love me?”

“I love you—” A single tear streamed rolled down the cheek of the least articulate girl and gently traced the corner of her lips. “I love you more than salt.”

“Salt?” The queen was outraged. The elder sisters shook with barely restrained laughter. What kind of a thing was that to say at a royal death bed? The queen had meant to divide her kingdom between the three sisters, but when the youngest had given her answer, she changed her mind.

“My dear Foliana,” the queen said to the eldest. “I bequeath you all the earth’s surface and seasons so that you may rule over the flowers of spring and the fruits of summer that you love best.”

“My sweet Cordeline, I give you the heart of the earth and the caves and wonders that lie within.”

And with her last breath, the queen cursed the youngest princess to the cold cruel sea.

***

We came from the sea. Sometimes old money forgets that we are the children of the youngest, clumsy-tongued daughter. But grandfather will never let us forget.

“Our blood is chemically identical to seawater,” he announces as we dine in the great hall that over looks the Pacific. This isn’t true, but I let it go. He is more than a hundred years old.

“I see you don’t believe me.” There are fifty other family members feasting at the long formal table, but Grandfather’s eyes bear straight into mine. Some shade of doubt had probably flickered across my face. I should have known better. He rings a bell and a servant wheels out a pump connected to a series of thin tubes.

Grandfather rolls up his fine silk sleeves, revealing pale arms still corded with muscles. “Pay close attention.”

Then my grandfather takes a sharp knife from his plate and slits his wrists.

Blood gushes every where. The wife of one of my uncles faints. Children scream. But the expression in my grandfather’s eyes is utterly serene. “Come here. I want you to see this.”

His words are meant for me. But I hesitate. Before I move, the room grows oddly silent. Everyone is looking at me. Blaming me. We have been long in the habit of humoring Grandfather. If he dies today, it will be on my head. So I go and kneel in the pool of blood by his chair.

A servant takes each one of his marble arms, presses the tubes into ocean-blue veins and begins to pump.

But the blood keeps gushing out and out and out. The floor puddles red around my knees. He keeps a hand on my shoulder, forcing me prostrate in the gore. I was vaguely aware of my uncles and aunts flooding into action around me. With someone else’s eyes I see the servants pushing everyone back. I hear the whirl of the hand pump pushing all the ocean into my grandfather’s leaking veins, but it is as distant as heaven itself.

It is as if they are in a different world.

A world under water.

The smell of salt is strong in my nose. The blood at my knees rises higher and higher, pulling at me like the tide and invading my body with an unforgiving cold. Grandfather’s face wavers above mine. I am looking at him through a curtain. He is holding me under.

I am drowning.

****

There’s a part of the story that doesn’t often get told.

Just as the curse was claiming the youngest princess, she cried out to her sisters:

“Please have pity on me!”

The elder sisters were not hard-hearted girls. They each grabbed one of her arms and held on for all they were worth. Every bit of magic they had went into keeping their little family together. Their bodies trembled with their light energy; molecules dislodging and reattaching, as unstable as stars.

But the curse—the wishes of the dead—were too strong. The fairy queen’s voice reached back from eternity and ripped the sisters asunder.

The elder sisters’ bodies were nothing but sparks and vapor at this point. The youngest clung to them wherever she could. When they were ripped asunder, two large pieces of her sisters’ energy broke off into her all too solid hands.

As the curse landed her in the deepest darkest part of the sea, the energy cooled, solidifying into two wiggling legs, one from each of her sisters. Her own legs had been taken from her, a golden fish’s tail taking their place.

The youngest sister began to sob, heaving so hard that the sea trembled with each shudder. In one day she had lost the queen and her sisters. She did not care about her inheritance or about the warmth of the sun. She only cried for the love that she had lost.

Her crying stirred the sea. The surface of the ocean grew treacherous. Ships crashed against rocks. Giant whirlpools plucked down whole islands as if they were ripe fruit.

In the tumult, a human relic fell before her. She recognized it at once. The knife of the first alchemist. One side could be used to cut through any living surface and the other could be used to seal up any wound. Her sisters’ legs flail around beside her on the ocean floor. If she severed her own tail, she could wear her sisters’ legs. Then she could return to dry land and . . .

The youngest sister took the golden knife into her hands and drove it deep into her flesh. A sharp, bitter laugh escaped her lips as she hacked into her own flesh. Apparently, blood meant more to her than salt.

****

I heave and sputter as I take my first gasp of the real world. I am lying on the floor, covered in my grandfather’s blood. It is in my hair, my ears and in my eyes. It has found its way into my mouth, tasting just like the sea.

The servants are still pumping. Grandfather still sits above me, eyes fixed on mine and alert. For all of his bleeding, he looks stronger, younger. Somehow eternal, like a sea king carved from marble. Clear water now runs from his wrists. Every ounce of blood replaced with the sea.

“Our blood is identical to sea water,” he says again.

“Yes” is all I can say because now I see. The rest of our family has cleared from the dining room. We are alone with the servants. “Yours and mine.”

Grandfather nods approvingly. “Now you understand.”

I don’t answer. The golden knife on the plate calls to me. I take it carefully into both of my hands, turn the sharp side to me and reseal my grandfather’s wrists. The servants stop pumping. “How long has the alchemist’s knife been in our family?”

Grandfather wrings his wrists and shrugs. “Always. We are her direct decedents.”

“What I guess I meant was, how long have you had it?”

“Since the day I opened Mermaid.” Mermaid is the reason that we are rich. It is the most important sushi restaurant in the kingdom. Kings and queens can not do without the fish that my grandfather cuts.

“It is the secret of our success.” My voice sounds hallow in the room, no more than the whisper of a ghost. Grandfather nods. “How?”

“The sea.” Grandfather muttered. “It heals. My parents brought me here when I was young. My legs were crushed by a giant millstone. The pain was great and there was nothing left for me except to heal or to drown. They left me on one of those rocks out there.”

I watched the old man point to some distant gray boulder quickly being swallowed by the tide.

“Except that it isn’t a rock.”

“What is it then?”

“A giant oyster shell. It is the dwelling of the beautiful Illonia, the plaything of the youngest sister.”

I shake my head. “She is not in any of the stories, Grandfather.”

“Of course.” Grandfather sighed and looked once more over the water. “The youngest sister haunted the earth for many, many millennia on the legs that she had unwittingly stolen from her elder sisters. She never found them. So she returned to her prison in the sea, using the alchemist’s knife to carve coral from the rocks and fish from her own hair. But she was lonely still. So she ventured to the surface to find things to transform into her sisters: bits of pearl and shell. And that was how she made Illonia, the first of her new sisters.”

“Grandfather, this doesn’t explain how you got the knife.”

“I’m getting to that. It wasn’t long before the youngest fairy princess realized that no companion carved from shell and pearl could ever replace her own flesh, in the same way that she realized that the salt of the sea could never be as sweet as the salt of her own blood. She carved many, many creatures—our ancestors among them—but her heart had shriveled up, dry as a mermaid’s purse. Nothing would ever bring back her sisters. She gave the knife to Illona and retired to the depths of the sea.”

I joined Grandfather by the window. The sea below causing the rocky beach roar as it inhales and exhales against the sand. If I asked, grandfather would tell me that the lonely sound was merely the princess sighing down below. So instead, I asked “Why did Illonia give you the knife? Why didn’t she keep it?”

“It wasn’t for me. It was for our children. Illonia wanted a better life for them. In her grief, the youngest princess had bound her little doll to the oyster that Illonia called home. Illonia didn’t want her children to be a prisoner as she was. So she begged me to leave the shell with the young ones and gave me the knife so that they would not be deprived of anything.”

I fall silent for a long time. There is no doubt in my mind that the knife he holds is indeed the alchemist’s knife. And the more I stare at the rock in the distance, the more it starts to look like the shell of a giant oyster. The more I listen, the more the wind sounds like crying. I do not disbelieve his story. A dozen years of facts and science have melted away tonight.

But there is something missing.

“Why do you want me to know this, Grandfather?”

“I’m passing the knife on to you.”

****

We stand on the shore at noon. The legs of our pants have been rolled up to our knees. The maiden’s breath wets our feet and we wade further and further out toward the rock.

Our clothes become heavy with water and sand. Sea foam clings to my arms like itchy soap. A second before the waves lift us off of our feet, the oyster shell opens—pink flesh and rainbows in the summer sun. A school of dolphins comes to meet us. Grandfather shows me how to grab on and they take us to the lip of the shell.

There is a woman there, white at the moon. She stands naked to the waist. The pink flesh of the oyster has swallowed her lower regions, covering her female parts like a long, living skirt. Golden hair falls like a veil over her breasts.

“Is this our hero?” The woman asks. The question is for Grandfather, but she is looking at me. “Can he do what needs to be done?”

“He is everything I could hope: brave, honest and true.” Grandfather is beaming at me. “The most worthy of our decedents.”

He squeezes my shoulder and hands me the golden knife. I take it incredulously. All of these years we have been using the most magical relic in the land to cut sushi. “What do I need to do?”

I don’t really need to ask the question. The woman, Illonia, has pulled a giant golden fish tail from the folds of pink oyster flesh. She is looking at grandfather. Looking at his legs. “This once belonged—”

“I know who it belongs to.” I say, thinking of the princess who sighs below. Grandfather takes the tail from her. He turns to me.

“My legs—give them to the princess. Make her sisters whole again. And find a way to break the curse.”

“Are you—” I don’t finish. Grandfather has taken my fist and plunged the golden knife deep into his stomach. I don’t hear his human spine sever, but I feel it.

“Break the curse,” he says with his last human breath.

PROMPT NUMBER THIRTY-ONE

2011-08-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

Hey Experimenters!

Write a short story of 1,000 - 10,000 words based on the following:

They're not mutually exclusive. It's like how all blood tastes salty, but not all salt tastes like blood.

By the way - re: the word minimum thing - under 1,000 would technically be flash fiction, so... that's why. =P I think upward of 10k is a novella (if, um, anyone's having that problem. XD). Not sure on that one, but 1-10k is standard length.

Best of luck,

Winter

Wussey

2011-07-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

This is like, really not finished, and potentially like really not good. It's a little bit late too, but oh well, here it is! Oh, and it's not over 1k yet. But I figure if others get away with that, I can too. :P

And YES, I'm cheating and backdating.

Wussey

Everyone at school knew Wendell Wassey was a weirdo.

It wasn't just that his name was Wendell Wassey. Made for great nicknames, such as Wendell Wussy, Wastey and…the biggest stroke of genius yet…Wendy. But his name alone wasn't enough. There had to be more.

So people latched onto the fact that he wore glasses straight outta the '50s, held together at the nose with masking tape. They also seized on the way he always wore the same outfit to school. Trackpants in a distinct shade of grey, along with a t-shirt and tie. I know—weird, right?

Then there was his weird living arrangements.

Fact was, he didn't seem to even have any living arrangements. Rumour had it that in the school records, the field for his residential address had been left an empty dotted line. Some people said that there were two letters and a symbol in that space, where usually you'd find a street number, street name, suburb and more than likely a postcode. Not so on Wendell's file, apparently. Instead he just had two letters: an N and an A. Oh, and the symbol /, which together with the letters equalled N/A.

'Course, that was all just rumour.

Truth was, I didn't give much of a shit about bored people's idle speculation. I didn't give the smallest nugget of shit ever about what he did after school, how he even got there in the mornings—it wasn't an easily accessible campus, no roads nearby—or whatever the hell else. I had more important things to care about, you see, 'cause Mr. Peterson had just paired everybody off for the World War II assignment, and guess who I wound up with?

That's right. I got stuck with Wendell Wassey.

I gave a pretty damn huge shit about that.

My hopes of getting the assignment done in class so I didn't have to get together with Wendell in an extra-curricular fashion were dashed pretty early on.

Like when Wendell didn't even show up for class, for example. If anyone had a hope in hell of understanding the assignment question, it wasn't me. And I couldn't even ask other people in class—they were all too busy with their own assignments, which were different from Wendell's and mine.

Yeah. Peterson gave every pair a different question.

I mean, what a dick.

Even if I could've got away with doing the whole assignment myself—and I would have, if it were possible—I had no idea what the question even meant. "Experiment with something the pedagogy wouldn't necessarily sign off on. Report your findings. Think outside the box." What the fuck did that even mean? It was something a weirdo like Wendell would say, but of course that couldn't be the case—Wendell wasn't the teacher, to set assignments like that. Mr. Peterson must've come up with this shit. Still, the question just had shades of Wendell all over it.

It positively stank of the guy.

No wonder I couldn't understand it.

As class ended and all the students filed out, Peterson stopped me to hand over a small scrap of yellow paper. "Wendell's address—and some instructions I can't decipher. Maybe you'll have better luck…"

For a moment I frowned stupidly at the teacher, putting two and two together. Or trying, at least. Wendell had given him a note to give to me? Why the fuck would he do that? Why not just come to class like normal people did? That I'd seen, Wendell didn't skip classes. Ever. He just wasn't that type. The moment passed, however, 'cause there was something weird in the way Mr. Peterson was looking at me. Maybe it was in the way he was standing. His head slightly cocked to one side, his mouth looking unusually slack. Or maybe it was just the weird fuzziness in his eyes, like they'd begun to film over with cataracts.

Weird.

For some reason, he reminded me of Wendell too.

Everything reminded me of Wendell today. 'Cause I was bloody well cursed by the guy. Ugh. But there was nothing for it but to get on with things. The sooner I got this shitty assignment done, the sooner I could step out of Wendell's weirdo clutches.

Week 30 . . . must start remembering that I am multiples of 3.

2011-07-27T04:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry this is so late . . . again.

Here's the prompt: (1k-10k prose/333-3,333 verse)

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

PROMPT NUMBER TWENTY-NINE

2011-07-18T03:34:00.000-07:00

HELLOOOOOOOO..............!!?!?

Anybody there? Or have we all dropped off the face of the planet? In which case, where the heck are we?

Guess that's an interesting prompt all on its own...and hey, feel free to write to that. :P But the actual prompt I have for you this week is as follows.

Write 1,000-10,000 words of prose (or 333-3,333 words of verse) based on the following:

"I never invited you in
But you are not a vampire"

So, I hope all is going well for my fellow Chrysalis participants! I know that I feel like I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth sometimes, but I still always manage to get a story done in the end. Whether or not it's good is another matter entirely... I still feel like I'm experimenting, and yet I also feel like sometimes I'm reacting to a very NEAR deadline. Like "OMG WRITE A STORY IN THE NEXT FIVE SECONDS OR DIE!" "OKAY OKAY I'M WRITING SHEEESH GIMME A BREAK!"

Know what I mean? I'm sure you do...

If nothing else, this year's Chrysalis Experiment has been a really invigorating and challenging experience! I'm so glad to be a part of it!

Anyway...I've rambled on, and now it's time to WRITE!

Have fun. :)

PROMPT NUMBER TWENTY-EIGHT

2011-07-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

I hope you brought your hang glider. We're going to need a quick escape.

Have fun!

-Winter

Special Skills

2011-07-08T00:49:00.000-07:00

Kind of a stupid story...but oh well, there you have it ;) Cheating & backdating it by about 49 minutes. hehe

Special Skills

Special Agent Alice Darren rolled her eyes for the eighteenth time today, wondering once more how she'd wound up assigned to such a pain-in-the-arse case and partnered up with such a moronic fellow agent. It was pointless to ask those questions, of course, but she couldn't help herself. Because her mind still hadn't processed everything: she still didn't quite believe she was really here, and that this was really happening to her.

The ambush had been unexpected, of course. But not nearly as unexpected as the hand-cuffs; or the gag—thankfully, she'd managed to spit that out; her captors hadn't meant to make it stick, evidently. They'd probably just wanted to slow her down, distract her so they could make their escape. Still, the cuffs and the gag weren't what really surprised her. Rather, the fact that the targets were actually going ahead with their plans today was what had puzzled her. They were supposed to be planning, not executing. Someone had got their wires crossed along the way, and Alice had been given the wrong information. That, at least, she couldn't blame on her partner. But thinking about who she could blame it on only upset her. She didn't want to think ill of her boss. Not like that.

He wouldn't betray us, she told herself. He's not dirty. He can't be dirty…

Fact remained, though, that this might be her last day on earth. She might be spending her last day on earth with Hardwick.

Somebody had to pay for that.

She'd already decided that if she died, she'd haunt the arse of whoever had put her here. Even if it was her boss.

Her cheeks burned at the thought of Special Agent Alexander Wallace—the guy she'd had a serious crush on for the last two years. Sure, he was married, and she'd never ever go there. But he was just so damn sexy. It'd just been an innocent crush. It hurt her, though, to think of him being a possible traitor.

The thought hurt her deeply.

To get her mind off it, Alice reflected on how this day was supposed to have gone. The plan had been to conduct pure reconnoissance, and report back to the boss. The plan had been for Alice to be in charge, and for the idiotic likes of Agent Jonathan Hardwick to stay at the back where he couldn't cause any trouble. Alice hadn't counted on Hardwick's immense capacity for fucking everything up, though. She hadn't counted on his special ability to do all those things he'd been told specifically not to do.

She had known already that it was never a good idea to underestimate his kind; had known, but had ignored the fact. And now she was paying the price.

"Thoughts?" Hardwick asked, peering at her from out of the darkness. She could sense his irritating gaze—it tended to make her break out in hives, and her skin was already beginning to itch. Thoughts? What the fuck does he want me to say? But instead of asking him that very useless question, Alice drew a deep breath and leaned her head back, staring at the ceiling.

"You want some thoughts? Okay. Here are some thoughts. We're more than likely going to get blown up. Any second now. Smell that gasoline? Yeah…that wasn't meant to happen. Remember the plan, Hardwick? The plan you didn't stick to? Remember how you weren't supposed to yell out and alert the bad guys to your presence? Oh, and how you weren't supposed to use any of the smoke bombs? Remember that, Hardwick?"

"I've seen the way you look at me, Darren. I mean, when you think I'm not paying attention—I've seen those little looks you cast my way." Before she could choke out an indignant response, he went on. "And let me assure you—you wouldn't have any regrets if you decided to…say, act on those looks. Just ask any of my exes—they'll all tell you the same thing. In fact—"

"I can just imagine what they'd tell me," Alice interrupted. "You wouldn't want to hear it. I can imagine though, trust me—I've known your kind before." Gods help me, I surely have. "But right now, Hardwick, I've got other things on my mind than that. Like, tonight is my nephew's third birthday, and I'm really pissed you're getting me killed before I can wish him a good one. Know what I mean? Matter of fact, I was kind of looking forward to seeing his sixteenth birthday. Eighteenth, too—and hell, twenty-first! He's not going to be the same without his aunt, know what I'm saying? And Hardwick, it's your fault I'm going to die here. And I swear to the Gods above I'm going to haunt your arse when this is over and done."

He was frowning at her. "How can you haunt me if we're both dead? I mean, can ghosts haunt other ghosts? And I notice you mentioned my arse again—"

"Again?" she exclaimed. "When did I ever— Oh, forget it! Look, I'm going to do my best to get the hell out of here—and I'd really rather you didn't try to 'help' again, 'cause every time you try that you fuck things up royally. So please, just…just shut the hell up, sit still, and don't move a muscle."

"You know my buddies at the Institute used to call me MacGuyver?" he asked. "I mean, before I got into the Service. I was pretty well known for getting out of tight squeezes—in fact, if you talk to my ex-girlfriend Lindsay you'll get all the goods. I met her at the Institute, did you know? We were in the same Physics class…"

The Institute, Alice thought derisively, letting Hardwick's words wash over her. She'd heard him talk about his time in training many times before, but he'd never specified which Institute he'd studied at in particular. She'd always assumed he had lied his way into the Service, had never had any training at all. Most of the time he sure acted like he hadn't. But when she'd asked subtle questions of her boss he'd just shrugged and told her she'd be better off asking Hardwick about it sometime.

"…But yeah, that's how they got to calling me MacGuyver," he murmured. "Of course, that guy's got way more hair than me—"

"MacGuyver, huh?" Alice cut in at last, desperate to shut him the hell up. "How about you prove it?"

As soon as she'd said the words, she knew it had been a mistake. His eyes lit up and he leaned forward, a grin breaking out over his face. He really did have a smile like sunshine, but she'd always been inclined to believe it was the smile of a man with far too much air in his skull where others had brains. He reminded her of a kite flying on the breeze—surrounded by air and not much else. And yet she'd pretty well just challenged him to pull some MacGuyver stunt in the hopes of getting her out of here. No wonder a voice was yelling in her head, Are you a total idiot? Because, really, asking this guy to make himself of use was like asking an earthworm to dig a hole in your backyard for the swimming pool.

Still, what other choice did she really have? She was handcuffed and her feet were shackled. There was no escape for her, unless MacGuyver here did something serious. Or unless some other much more preferable miracle occurred, and other people came to rescue them.

But she couldn't count on that. The boss wouldn't be expecting a report till later in the day. He'd even said they could take a long lunch before returning to the office. Lunch hour hadn't even begun yet.

"Okay," Hardwick said, eyes wide and shining with the fervour of a reckless egomaniac, "here's my plan. See that little window up there?" She craned her neck to follow his pointing finger, and saw the tiniest slit of glass about two storeys up. She looked at him with an arched brow and said, "Yeah?" He grinned and nodded.

And that was it.

Didn't feel the need to say anything more. Evidently didn't care that, even if that window hadn't been two storeys up, no human being could possibly fit through such a small gap. Evidently none of that mattered to this guy. Alice fought off the urge to weep; weeping was not befitting of a Special Agent like herself. Even if she'd only been on the job in earnest for the last two weeks—before that she'd been a trainee—she was still a Special Agent in her own right. And crying in the face of death wasn't something a Special Agent did.

Or not this Special Agent, anyway.

Come to think of it, she was surprised Hardwick hadn't started snivelling yet. Then again, he'd have to actually recognise his predicament to feel like crying over it. He didn't seem to grasp anything about the seriousness of the situation. Hardly surprising, that. But with him for company, Alice felt terribly alone.

It just wasn't right, having to die in that sort of company.

"Okay, you don't get it," Hardwick murmured. "That's cool. And I guess it's only natural—I'd have to show you for you to get it. Here, take my hand." She didn't even have the energy to glower. She just stared down at her shackled hands, then up at him, hoping he'd get the message. "Oh, right," he said with a nod. "Yeah. Well, no harm done. I'll just take your hand. Okay?" She imagined rolling her eyes—just imagined it. Actually doing it was beyond her now. He reached out and gripped her wrist, still cuffed, the skin chafed where she'd at first tried to wrench herself free. Force of habit, there, she supposed. Everyone knew you couldn't just rip handcuffs apart with sheer strength. She sat there with Hardwick's hand on her wrist, wishing for a better ending than this. And then she became aware of a change in the air around her.

In Hardwick, too, actually.

The air was heating up, and she sensed an electric charge in it, making the fine hairs on her arms stand on end. The hair on her head wanted to stand, too, actually. Her scalp prickled and she shivered. The dank air grew lighter and brighter and she felt as if she were lifting into the air, floating upward like that kite she'd been thinking about earlier. Everything lightened, and she saw that distant sliver of glass flying at her, growing ever wider. She braced herself or impact, imagining her head battering against solid glass, thudding and thudding until it broke like an egg on pavement. Then something completely strange happened: she passed through the glass, almost melted through it, fused with it even. She wasn't warm now, she was hot, every cell in her body was burning and bubbling and she thought she smelled sunlight—what does sunlight smell like? she wondered, but it was more the smell of sunlight on skin, on hair, on clean clothes, that she was thinking of—and then she was standing in a glass-and-metal dome, in some round room she'd never seen before.

In her nostrils was the inexplicable scent of gasoline. She wrinkled her nose against it, trying to figure out where it had come from.

Then she realised Hardwick was still holding her by the wrist.

"See?" he said as she turned to look at him. "MacGuyver. Except he never used magic. And I don't use ropes or hooks or…you know, any of that stuff."

Her mouth fell open, and she continued to stare for a moment. Then she snapped out of it, snatching her arm back and rubbing at her wrist experimentally. There was still chafing, but the cuffs were gone. She didn't even bother wondering what had become of them.

She had other things to think about.

"How the hell did you do that?" she asked Hardwick, narrowing her eyes. Could it really be true that this was why the boss kept Hardwick around? Because he had some magical powers? It would explain why he was around, since he seemed to have no other skills in any area to speak of. Still, how unfair was it that he should have some bad-ass superpowers? He was a dunce!

"It's a trick I learned at the Institute," Hardwick said, shrugging. "Guess that goes without saying. But anyway, you gonna report to the boss for us? I've got a lunch date—can't be late. This chick is seriously a babe, I'm telling you—"

Before she could protest, Hardwick had slipped out of the glass dome and was heading for the door. She stared after him in disbelief, then shook herself and quickly followed, trying to figure out just how she was going to word her report to the boss.

Week 27?! . . . Whoops.

2011-07-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

Totally forgot that it was my week to prompt.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer. (Or in Trisha's case, winter.)

Here's the prompt.

Write a 1K-10K word prose (or 333-3,333k word verse) story about the following:

"When the smell of gasoline hit my nostrils, I knew."

Good luck.

In Retrospect

2011-07-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

(Cheating. Backdating this post. Yup.)

“You are imagining this,” said the cockroach.

“You are most definitely not imagining this,” said the housefly.

“One of these things is a lie,” whispered the worm, conspiratorially.

Joshua smiled. “Or both could be a lie. I could be dead. Maybe insects talk in hell.”

“My good fellow, what is that supposed to mean?” said the housefly, somewhat indignantly.

“Just that being surrounded by talking bugs isn’t my ideal situation.”

“Whatever, it’s fine,” the cockroach said. “You’re imagining this whole interaction, anyway. You’re as high as smoke out a chimney. Assuming the smoke’s from a burning heap of marijuana.”

“I disagree,” sniffed the housefly. “I think this fellow is completely sane, and that you, sir, are a twaddling gnarsher.”

“A twaddling gnarsher?” The cockroach’s scratchy voice grew angrier. “If I’m a twaddling gnarsher, you’re a tintinektifying broogle!”

“Now, now,” sighed the worm. “Calm down, everyone. Let’s take five deep breaths.”

They took a deep breath.

They took four more.

“What’s a broogle?” asked Joshua.

The worm shook his pale, flabby head. “I regret to say that I cannot tell you this information. Perhaps other people can.”

“People?” Joshua blinked. People. Of course, there had to be other people in the world besides him. Assuming he was in the world. Where was he? Where was here?

He thought to look around.

The ceiling was very high.

The room was very cramped, in terms of floor space.

A black door waited in the black wall behind him. A white door waited in the white wall before him. The walls on either side of him did not have doors.

The cockroach said, “See, we’re in a room. And it’s a weird room. That means this is a figment of your painfully cramped imagination.”

“Delusional,” sniffed the housefly. “Dreams aren’t the only places with strange rooms.”

The worm did not have eyes. If he had had eyes, he would have rolled them. “If I have to warn you one more time to shut up, I shall rupture.”

The cockroach did not have a nose. But if he had had one, he would have wrinkled it. “Oh, don’t do that.”

The housefly did not have shoulders. If he had had shoulders, he would have shrugged them. “If you’d like to combust, I shall not stop you.”

“No, don’t combust,” said Joshua, and he stood. He hadn’t realized he was sitting until he stood up, and then it registered that the ceiling was not very tall at all; in fact, he could not stand up all the way.

The worm inched its way along his shoulder. “Don’t mind my colleagues. They are silly at the best of times.”

The housefly settled on Joshua’s other shoulder, next to where the cockroach sat. “I resent the word ‘silly.’ I find that it debases my value.”

Joshua turned from the white door to the black door. “What’s behind these doors?”

“Ah, and therein lies the question,” whispered the housefly. “Are you frightened? If you’re frightened, it means it’s real.”

The cockroach said, “That’s bullshit.”

Joshua said, “Yes, I am, a little.”

He adjusted his tie – for, he realized, he was wearing a black jacket, a white tie, a stiff white shirt, long black pants, and shoes made out of glass.

“Are you more afraid of black or white?” asked the worm.

“Fullness or emptiness,” added the housefly, “respectively.”

“Presence or absence,” added the cockroach, “respectively.”

“Is black more real than white?” asked Joshua, glancing over his shoulder at the white.

“Again,” said the cockroach, “they are just as false as each other.”

“Again,” said the housefly, “they are just as real as each other.”

“Those mean the same thing.”

The worm said, “Yet one of them is a lie.”

Joshua took half a step toward the black wall. He curled his fingers around the plastic doorknob. His fingers remembered curling around something else, but he couldn’t place it.

He pushed through the black door, stepped through, and fell upwards.

The door slammed behind him as gravity switched. He was falling upward, flipping and toppling and yanked by the wind, but when he closed his eyes, he knew somehow that he was falling downwards, actually, and then his eyes cracked open a tiny bit and he landed on his feet. The glass shoes did not shatter. In fact, they seemed to absorb the impact of the landing.

Joshua looked around.

The air in the dense forest was warm, moist and runny. “Good choice,” remarked the worm.

“Speak for yourself,” grumbled the cockroach. “I bet you’re not too comfortable, are you, J.?”

“People call me Ash,” said Joshua, instinctively. Then he wondered why they would call him Ash, when his name was Joshua. Then he wondered how he knew his name was Joshua. And how he knew his last name was Bellinger.

He took a few paces forward.

“Freeze,” said the housefly, halting him. “You’ll have to be more careful than that.”

“Why? What?”

“Look down,” said the worm, its almost absentminded voice quite soporific when coupled with the warmth.

Joshua looked down. Two feet from him sat a swirl of quicksand. He circumvented it and went on his way.

But he soon had to stop, because he walked into a wall.

The wall was not painted to look like a continuation of the forest. It was not printed to look like a continuation of the forest. Nonetheless, it looked exactly like a forest stretching into a dim greenness. It had the texture of wood. And it was very annoying.

Joshua trailed his hand down it. “There’s a wall here,” he decided.

“Well done,” said the cockroach.

He walked around and discovered that there were really only one hundred square feet of forest, after all. Ten feet of walls on every side. A square room.

Joshua climbed one of the trees. The gentle breeze at the top mystified him. How was there a breeze? Was it coming from a vent?

What was a vent? How did he know of them?

A vent was inside a wall. Yes. Like veins inside skin, only for a building. A twisting map of them.

But there were no vents on these walls.

Joshua looked high up on the wall. Up in the blue sky was the black door whence he had come. He wondered if the white door would have been any different.

“Maybe you’ll die here,” said the cockroach, helpfully.

“Thank you,” muttered Joshua. He climbed back down from the tree. “Well, what do I do now?”

The three insects remained silent.

“Didn’t you say I was going to meet people here?” Joshua demanded of the worm.

It curled its pink body up and sighed, “Put me in your pocket, please.”

“What?”

“Put me in your pocket. I don’t want to fall off your shoulder when you figure it out,” said the worm, its voice unusually acidic.

Joshua slipped the worm into his pocket. The cockroach scuttled in and the fly buzzed after.

“But what—”

“Assume you have nothing to lose,” said the worm, its voice muffled.

Joshua looked around and came to an understanding. He walked carefully back to where he’d started.

Then he took three steps forward, took a deep breath, and jumped into the quicksand.

It sucked him downward, steadily.

The sand closed over his head.

For two miserable eyes-closed no-oxygen skin-suffocated seconds, Joshua thought he was just going to asphyxiate and die there. Then the sand sucked him down into its stomach, and around, and around again and backward and inside out, that last one being rather painful, and then he was stretching and morphing and suddenly he was still again.

He opened his eyes. He lay on an uneven wooden floor, sand falling from his black hair and dripping in tears from his blue eyes.

The worm wriggled across his face. “Well done,” it said.

“Thank you,” said Joshua, as he got to his feet. The floor was warped. The walls were nowhere in sight. It was a plain of wooden flooring, with a plaster ceiling above, both stretching on and on until eternity without support.

“I think I’d rather this place not exist,” mumbled the housefly. “What a troublesome locale.”

“You see it my way, finally,” said the cockroach.

Joshua began to walk. He walked for many minutes before he decided there was no end to the darkness around him.

So he pulled at the floorboards. He took the sword from the belt around his waist and sliced at the floorboards.

Beneath the floorboards there were more floorboards.

Beneath those there were more.

And so on.

Joshua sat in his shallow hole and scowled. “Look, this is really frustrating,” he said.

“I like your sword,” commented the housefly.

“It’s pretty cool,” said the cockroach. “Too bad it isn’t, you know, real.”

Joshua put his sword back and suddenly discovered that, next to its spot on the belt, a black device had been clipped to the leather. When had that gotten there? In fact, when had the sword arrived? Had it been in place the entire time?

Had he put these things here? Before the cockroach had started talking?

Where had he been before the cockroach had made its claim – this isn’t real?

Joshua took the black device from his belt, aimed it at the ceiling, and pressed a button. A small metal claw on a cord zipped out from the device and plowed into the plaster.

As the claw hit the ceiling, the plaster peeled off it. All of it. It fell in a great torrential snow, all the way down into the distance, and underneath, embedded in the ceiling, lay a thousand, a million doors. All different colors. Horizontal, vertical, large, small. Doors inside other doors. Doors wedged beside other doors.

“I think I’ll try white this time,” said Joshua. He retracted the claw. It ripped out half of a purple door. Then he shot it at a white door and pressed the button once more. The cord retracted, dragging him up toward the claw’s grip.

He opened the circular white door and fell inside.

The door slammed shut on his fingers.

He screamed. He screamed for a long time.

Then he clutched the four mangled fingers to his chest and bled all over his white shirt.

“Oh, stop being such a baby,” the cockroach said.

The worm slapped the cockroach with its fleshy back half. “Don’t be so insensitive. Ash has just undergone his first remembrance of pain.”

“Why can’t I remember anything?” gasped Joshua, in-between his screams. “What am I doing? What’s happened to me?”

The cockroach and the housefly exchanged a glance. “We don’t know, because you don’t know,” said the housefly.

“More evidence that this doesn’t exist,” mumbled the cockroach.

“Why does this hurt so much? Why do I hurt so much, oh God, why don’t I remember anything, who am I and what am I doing in this room—who are you—who am I—”

The worm snuggled against Joshua’s neck as he lay on the sawdust. “Hush, now,” it said. “Maybe you don’t know because deep down you really don’t want to know. Not at all.”

Joshua yanked the sword from his belt and found that it was a gun. An M395.

He scrambled to his feet and held the gun in his quaking hands and shot at the insects again and again. “YOU’RE BUGS!” he screamed. “BUGS DON’T TALK!”

They buried themselves in the sawdust, which flew up in powder and fluff as the gunshots exploded. When he ran out of ammo, when the gun clicked with an empty chamber, they resurfaced.

“That wasn’t very civil,” sniffed the housefly, buzzing up to sit on his shoulder again. “Look, your hand’s better, why did you need to take it out on us?”

Joshua held his hand to his face. His fingers were smooth and aligned and perfectly intact. His shirt was clean and white and crisp and not bloodied in the slightest. “What’s wrong with me?” he moaned. “Where am I?”

How did he even know these things were not supposed to happen? Why were bugs not supposed to talk? Why were broken, bloody hands not supposed to fix themselves? Why were rooms not supposed to be built out of sawdust, from the walls to the floor and ceiling?

He grabbed the door handle and it flaked and molted away in his hand.

He kicked at the walls, and they showered down around him. He slavered and seethed and screamed and tried to kill the bugs again. He turned his head upwards and cried, and his clothes shredded themselves until he was naked.

Then he collapsed and covered himself in sawdust. It was warm and comfortable. “I like this room,” he whispered quietly, as if trying to convince himself.

“There’s no way out,” said the housefly. “There is no way out and you are happy with that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” murmured the cockroach. “None of this exists. He can be happy if he wants. He can be happy here for the rest of his life.”

The worm whispered, “You are uncomfortably close to the way you came in, Ash.”

“I am?” he breathed. “How?”

“It’s time to stop being afraid,” said the housefly.

“Being afraid is just your body’s way of keeping you safe,” said the cockroach. “Be as terrified as you want.”

Joshua rubbed his eyes and sank lower in the sawdust.

“You’re an American,” said the worm.

“I am,” said Joshua, as his eyes drifted shut. “I am an American before everything else.”

“Are you American before you’re scared for your life?” demanded the cockroach. “Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep! There’s no guarantee what your mind will come up with next. This isn’t real; you don’t need to sleep –”

The housefly said, “Ash, keep your eye on the objective.” And its voice wavered and warped into another voice entirely, one that was all too familiar to Joshua. “Keep your eye on the objective.”

The worm’s voice melted into a soothing female tone. “You’re an American. A brave American.”

The cockroach’s voice cracked, turning grizzly and low. “You better break before you say a goddamn word. There’re things more important than you and you better remember it, you little piece of shit greenie.”

“There’s always a way out,” said the worm.

Joshua fell asleep.

He woke up instantly, buried in sawdust. He thrashed. It showered all around him. A fly buzzed near his ear, but it wasn’t talking. A cockroach scuttled over the grimy wooden wall; a worm wriggled through the dirt near the door. A window sat high up on the wall, letting in grainy sunlight, illuminating a room with dark wooden walls.

Joshua looked down at himself. Burns covered his arms. His fingernails were cracked and torn. He wore a ripped white tank top that was no longer white, browning and yellowing with dirt and sweat. He wore camouflage pants.

Hunger gnawed at his stomach, and every inch of him ached.

He turned around and stared up at the back wall. A row of tally marks stretched across the dark wood, gouged in, splintered and rough. Beside every mark were the same words, scraped in by his own nails: this is real this is real this is real this is real this is real this is real this is real this is real

Then, halfway down the line, this is not real I am not real this is not real I am not real

Joshua counted the second half.

Thirty-four tally marks since he had locked his sanity away, somewhere deep.

Thirty-four days since he had lost his mind.

At the side of the wall were small, fresh letters: i havent said a word i havent said a word i havent said a word

Joshua traced them slowly with his mangled fingers.

The door slammed open, and Joshua scrambled back. Pressed himself against the back wall as someone walked inside.

The man was not Viet.

“Joshua Bellinger?” he said. The voice of the housefly, bizarrely transplanted on this man’s tongue.

“Yes.”

“Here to bring you home.”

Halfway Point: Status Report!

2011-06-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

Hey guys. Thought I would put this out there, since we are at the halfway point. I want to know how many stories you've written for Chrysalis so far, even if you haven't finished 'em yet. I want to know your total Chrysalis wordcount, if you've uncovered any unexpected novels in your Chrysalis stash, or if you've completely crashed 'n burned and given up.

On that last note, Don't Give Up! Stick with us, why don't ya? Don't worry about the stuff you haven't written. Just look forward, to the next half of the year, and all the prompts that will be coming your way!! Stick with us, because...just like L'oreal...we ARE worth it. Hehe.

We've got some fun plans for what we're going to do AFTER Chrysalis, as in what we're gonna do with our stories, and your stories too if you're interested. We also have a sparkly badge for anyone who manages to get through this Experiment in one piece. Now if that ain't enticement, I don't know WHAT is. Hehe.

But without further ado...my status report for the year so far.

Stories started: 26

Stories finished: Um...argh. Will count this later. hehe

Words written: 69,007 (according to Scrivener anyway)

Potential novels started: um...3? 4? 5?

Stories happy with: Maybe...a third? Half, if I'm lucky? Hehe.

Number of times story wasn't written by Friday: Lost count by now...

Okay, so I wasn't too scientific with that, but this was an off the cuff blog post idea, so I've got an excuse. :P Anyway...I want to hear from you guys about how you're doing so far!

So...........PROMPT(s) NUMBER 26

2011-06-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

We are halfway, people!! And since there was no final decision on what we were going to do for our halfway point, I decided to go with the tentative suggestion of leaving a prompt and taking one.

We'll each leave a prompt in the comments of this entry, and take somebody else's. Hey, maybe you'll find a few that inspire you, and take more than one of them! Either way, I think this sounds like fun!

I'm going to leave MY prompt in this entry, though...

Write 1,000-10,000 words of prose (or ya know, 333-3,333 words of the other) based on the following prompt:

"Ohhh we're halfway there
Woaahhh-oh! Livin' on a prayer."

I know, I know...but I couldn't help myself. LOL.

But here's a serious one:

"At least one of these things is a lie."

Valentine's Garden

2011-06-25T01:58:00.000-07:00

Another . . . beginning. Eep. Not even close to the end.

****

I used to think heaven was the workroom floor in the back of my parents’ flower shop. When I was little, my mother would spread out an old quilt under her antique work table and tell me it was a fort—probably to keep me quiet. There I’d stay for hours, snuggled in a nest of frilly pillows, wearing a glittery tutu with my red cowboy boots and speaking in strange tongues to tiny dolls of wire and felt. As my mother worked, flower petals would fall down around me, silken bits of perfume that stained my fingers pink and filled me so full that even my tears at bed time would taste like roses.

Dad doesn’t want me to talk about heaven anymore. He says it’s nothing but a hat stand for cowards and brown nosers.

Back before the Freedom to Marry Act, we were a normal, law abiding family. Technically, we still obey the law. We just don’t do it in a safe, socially acceptable way.

I don’t really know how to explain everything. It’s sort of like what happened with the Civil Rights Movement back in the sixties. The government gave some people rights and other people—my dad calls them melisha or something—took those rights away . . . without . . . I think it’s called due process.

Sorry.

I don’t always understand my dad when he’s ranting about the government. He doesn’t really do it for my benefit. When I try to ask him about it, he says that everything better be okay by the time I’m old enough to benefit from his profanity or he’s moving us all to Canada.

Maybe I should just explain what my family does and why it is so dangerous. My dad is a wedding officiant and my mom is a one-stop wedding coordinator. We hold super secret weddings on the roof of our shop where tall fake solar panels block us from view. The melisha is what makes is what makes this so dangerous. After the government said that everybody had the right to get married, the melisha made it so that only the people they liked could get married in public. If they didn’t like you, the only wedding you’d ever be allowed to have was the printing of your marriage certificate off of your home computer. If you tried to get married in public, you might be shot or kidnapped or a bomb might go off and kill everyone at your wedding. You’d have to get married in shame, without the sanction of your community or the blessing of your family and friends.

Here are the people that the melisha doesn’t like:

People with disabilities or with family histories of certain conditions or diseases.
People who’ve made mistakes with drugs or who’ve gone to jail.
Atheists and Non-Christians.
People marrying outside of their race.
People who are infertile.
People who don’t have health insurance or lots of debt.
People who live together before marriage, who are not virgins or who have been married more than once.
People who are gay.

My dad says that no one should ever be ashamed of love. That’s why we do what we do and why we don’t care about heaven.

****

“Mom,” I turn to my mother who is pressing gum paste into pale sugary flowers. “How did you learn all of this stuff?”

“Well,” she says in a way that tells me she’s editing the truth. “I didn’t have very much help with my own wedding.”

I try not to look too interested. My mother never talks about the past. Maybe if I’m quiet enough, innocent enough, a bit of the story will press its way to the surface. I wrack my mind for a non-threatening question.

“What flowers did you make then?” The air around me is thick, as if she know what I am thinking.

“Daisies.” She laughs, releasing a sigh. The delicate, giant peony trembles in her hand. “Little white daisies.”

“Like the ones I stamp out now with cookie cutters?”

“Exactly. They were always the easiest.” She creases her brow, pretending that the giant white flower is especially tricky even though we’ve made about eighty of them today. Our freezer is full of sugary flowers. “Make sure you roll the paste out thin enough, Love.”

My whole life is rolling out gum paste.

When I’m not rolling out gum paste, I’m sewing on pearls, practicing the harp, making phyllo cups and sweeping up rice.

Downstairs, the store bells jingle open. We both freeze.

“You better get it.” My mother says gesturing to my work gloves. “I have gum paste under my nails.”

Tossing the latex gloves aside, I leave the sugary dough where it is and zip down the staircase at the back of our condo into the flower shop below. On my way, I pull my hair out of its netting, tie on my red apron with the words Valentine’s Garden embroidered across the front and paste on a big cheerful smile.

“Hi,” I squeak in the direction of two frumpy middle aged women. Cheerful, cheerful, cheerful, I think. “How can I help you?”

They ignore me. I catch the name of someone named Dorris as they putter around the make-your-own fruit basket section. Poor Dorris. The two women exchange catty grins as they load an Easter basket with homemade kiwi leather, Asian pears wrapped in gold foil, pretzels, imported cheese, a sausage roll and a jar of mustard. There is one true thing I know: a sausage roll is not sympathetic.

While I watch the two women murder Dorris with their increasingly impersonal selections, the store bell rings again. Hmmmm. We don’t get many customers this early in the morning.

The woman who walks in is soft and small—much softer than me, with my muscles built up from riding the delivery bike in the evenings. She totters up to the counter in a sweatshirt much too big for her and draws her bright red hair around her face like a veil.

“Hello.” I say as if too many words might make her melt.

She doesn’t say anything at first, only looks around as if she’s not sure that she’s wants to be here. Under her thin hair, a dark bruise blooms across her left cheekbone. Her eyes lock on an old marble statue of St. Valentine behind the register. Only then does she look at me and smile.

Ah, she’s here to see my dad.

I give my line just the way he taught me. “Ah, Miss Johnson, we have your order in the back.”

The corners of my lips and eyes beam cheerful, cheerful, cheerful but I am careful not to let the pitch of my voice crawl to high as I call to the frumpy women in the fruit basket aisle, “You ladies just ring if there is anything you need.”

The women ignore my merry little wrap of the bell on the counter. They are too wrapped up in chocolate dipped shortbread.

I flick on the workroom light. When I do, the metal detector hidden in the doorway springs to life. The woman who follows me in, isn’t even carrying house keys. Somewhere in the basement, my father makes a note of this.

“Are you afraid of dogs?” I ask as Mitzi, our ninety pound German Shepherd rises from her spot in the corner and sniffs her for the scent of explosives. Mitzi flops to the floor disappointed.

“Hold on to the handrail. It’s pitch black.” I push a large bookshelf to the side and lead her down a steep flight of stairs. The office below is sound proof, cell phone proof and magnetized against digital media. It is a place where everything is written longhand, a place where the wrong person can shot from behind a two way mirror.

My dad sits behind that two way mirror now. But I do not look. I have had too much practice. Instead, I hand the woman a clipboard and a stack of forms that will take her an hour to fill out.

“When will your fiancé get here?”

“She was supposed to meet me here.”

She, I think, averting my eyes from her bruise. Must have been her father or boyfriend-figure who did that. I see it all the time.

I go up and look for the fiancé. It doesn’t surprise me when I don’t find her in the shop. More people chicken out than go through with it. I ring up the frumpy ladies’ fruit basket, hot gluing artificial roses to handle as per their request. My mother has a jug of ice tea and a plate of sandwiches waiting upstairs for my father’s clients. I bring them down to the woman in the soundproof room.

“She isn’t here yet.” I say. The woman looks as if she might burst into tears. “Is there a phone number where I can reach her?”

The woman shakes her head. “I don’t want to get her in trouble.”

I look at the bruise on her cheek and think about the fact that she didn’t bring house keys with her. The oversized messenger bag strung across her bony shoulders might very well hold everything she owns. It has happened before. People don’t understand that a wedding isn’t an instantaneous thing. “Do you have a place to go tonight?”

She emits a strange low keel.

I want to tell her that we have rooms and beds for our most desperate clients. But I can’t tell her that she is desperate. So I say, “I should go up and wait for her.”

The afternoon wears on. Customers wander in and out, mostly ignoring me until they make their purchases. I arrange the delivery of eighteen funeral wreaths, three identical virgin-Christian-heterosexual-perfect-Barbie-Doll-wedding-in-a-box shipments and about thirty-five ladies-who-lunch-type arrangements. The smirky, impersonal fruit baskets fly off the shelves and I sell half a gazillion potted orchids meant to brighten up half a gazillion corporate offices.

The fiancé doesn’t come. The woman still waits downstairs.

Dad should really be the one to handle these things.

I draw the shop’s embroidered curtains and sweep the sidewalk in front of the store, gathering the litter into a small pile by the dumpster. I pull the lid of the dumpster open.

It moans.

All of a sudden, I know what’s happened to the fiancé.

PROMPT NUMBER TWENTY-FIVE

2011-06-21T01:21:00.001-07:00

...is late because of math. Yep, I needed to double-check that 25 was in fact not the middle of the year, so I neglected to post this earlier. *facepalm*

Anyway. This week's prompt:

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

You'd think there couldn't be anything sinister about a flower shop. And you'd be so very wrong.

Best of luck!

~Winter

Jennifer's Story Pick, Week 24

2011-06-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

I love the way Brooke uses names in this piece especially the way she gives the softest, almost feminine name to the dirt bag and the unsettling way it interplays with what the MC is doing to the mannequin.

           Griffin tapped the paintbrush against the side of the bowl before bringing it up to the mannequin’s neck. She contemplated, then made two dots, one more oblong than the other. She fanned the red paint with her hand, lightly blowing on it ‘til it gained the desired effect.

            An arm reached over her head and plucked a fluffy, pink hat on the figurine’s molded hair. It slipped down over the eyes, the nose catching its fall.
            Griffin pulled it off and threw it in one of the drama department’s shady corners. Her head tilted back to look Win in the face, “It clashed with the morbid feel I was going for.”
            The boy shrugged, “I for one thought it added a touch of irony.”
            She turned back to the doll, “It did, I’ll give you that, but it would have made no logical sense.”
            He slid down next to her, “Ah, how’s that?”
            She used the heel of her hand to brush away a stray hair, “Well, if you were running from a vampire, the last thing you’d be worried about was your hat.”
            Win’s upper lip twitched, settled back down.
            “What?”
            He kissed her forehead, narrowly avoiding blue lips, “It’s just amuses me that you can talk of logic and vampires and not bat an eye.”
            Her eyelids came down in a deliberate motion, “There, my eye has been batted. Happy now?”
            “It would appear so.”
            Griffin grunted and turned back to the mannequin, “Hand me the seam ripper?”
            He retrieved it from a pile of used brushes and placed it in her hand. She positioned it against the fabric.
            “So what happened?” Win asked casually, leaning back on his hands.
            The seam ripper slashed through the model’s shirt, “What do you mean?”
            Win tilted his head to the side, maintaining his offhand tone, “What I mean is you don’t spend after school hours on one of your dummies unless you’re upset.”
            Another rip through the figure’s skirt, “It’s nothing.”
            “The mannequin would beg to differ.”
            She set the seam ripper down, “I had a fight with Cory. That’s all.”
            The muscles in Winn’s face locked up, one by one, “Griffin.”
            “It wasn’t anything big, a little argument,” her hands knit together in her lap.
            “Griffin,” the growl in his throat intensified.
            “Nothing happened. He didn’t—”
            Win grabbed the back of her shirt, cutting her off. He rolled the fabric back and a hiss escaped his teeth. Her back resembled an abstract that, half way to completion, the artist decided was grotesque and tore to pieces.
            “Oh, Griff,” his words were soft but she jerked away and stood, pulling her shirt down.
            He stood, too, facing her across the dummy, “Why do you keep letting him do this to you?”
            “It’s none of your business,” she looked down at the wooden floorboards, tugging at her hem line.
            “None of my business? Have you even looked at your back?” His voice verged on shouting.
            She stooped down and starting piling up her paint bowls, ignoring him.
            “That’s just great. You’re going to keep on pretending that none of this is happening while that excuse for a douche bag is using you for boxing practice. Well, if that’s the way you want it then—”
            A bowl smashed against the mannequin’s plastic chest, spraying red paint across the doll’s face and clothes.
Griffin stood on her feet again, screaming, “You think I like being smacked every time I say the littlest thing wrong? You think I like being hit over and over because I can’t make it to some concert? I don’t. I hate it. And that’s why,” a trapped breath rattled in her throat, “That’s why I told him to fuck off when he called this afternoon.”
Win licked his lips, “Good for you, Griff.”
A tear spilled over the ledge of her eye. It became a waterfall as more cascaded down her cheeks. Win pulled her into his arms and she sobbed against his shoulder, soaking the cotton.
“Griffin,” he whispered when she stopped shaking.
“What?” She hiccuped.
“Can I have the mannequin?”
She looked over her shoulder and sighed, “Might as well. It won’t do me any good now.”

Cory Stevens woke that night with chills. His feet thumped to the floor and he dragged himself to the window. His arms were raised to shut it when the face on the other side registered. He nearly shit himself.

Just Another Day at the Office

2011-06-17T23:05:00.000-07:00

Wow, gotta love time differences where I'm STILL not late for the Friday feature even though it's 2:00 pm on Saturday here. Hehe.

So yeah, this is the beginning of this week's story, and when I say beginning I mean there's more, and will be more still. Yeah, I keep writing stories that turn into 'beginnings'! Gahhh!

Please excuse the vulgar beginning line...it just happened.

Just Another Day at the Office

One of these days, my life will suck less than a two dollar street whore.

That's what I tell myself every day at the crack of dawn—no, before the damn crack, it's always pitch-black when I step out the door—as I head off to work in my battered car, wondering if it's going to break down around the next bend. Part of me always hopes it will. Not that my bosses'd take that as an excuse. Well, they'd take it as an excuse to fire me. And as much as I'd love to be fired, I need this job.

I need the money.

Just not sure if it's worth the suicidal depression.

Maybe I'm better off starving on the streets, shivering my bones into dust?

It's just, it's not only about me, you know? I've got other mouths to feed.

So I stay, and I watch the white teeth flashing as they fly towards me, intent on sinking into flesh. Those creatures aren't human anymore; not really. But they're under the care of the state, and I work for the state, and it's my job to care for those creatures.

To make sure they don't kill themselves, or anyone else.

I guess that includes me.

Got to stop them from killing me.

Easier said than done, though. 'Cause they've got really sharp teeth.

"We're in lockdown," Marisa tells me needlessly as I walk in the entrance to the hospital. Needlessly because the sirens are blaring and I kind of got the memo already. Still, Marisa likes to state the facts, whether or not they're obvious.

She sounds bored, but then that's usual for her. Even patient rioting can't get her energised. The sirens are an annoyance to her, not a concern. I'm still not sure that anything concerns her.

Fact is, Marisa is a veteran on this ward.

She's seen it all.

She's even seen the teeth sinking in, redness welling all around, dribbling down, tap tap tapping as it drips on the linoleum floor.

I guess she's learned the most valuable lesson any of us can learn:

Don't assume you know what's going to happen on any given day. You don't.

"Good morning to you too," I respond to Marisa, nodding to her as I approach.

"Report to Lazar," she calls gruffly from behind me as I move past. I know it's all I'm going to get. Marisa doesn't do greetings. She does business.

Report to Lazar, though? Really? It must be pretty serious if I've got to report to Lazar this early on in the shift. Usually I'd go to my shift manager and get a list of duties for the first few rounds. They change daily 'round these parts. But…report to Lazar. Got to be serious for that.

I knock on the brown wooden door that bears Lazar's name in gold letters. Stencilled gold letters. And more bronze than gold, I guess. Or maybe it's just that they're faded. Flaking a little, around the edges. Even smudged on the R. I read LAZAR MONTAGUE, M.D. Except that's so last decade. Lazar's done a lot since he got his M.D.

A lot.

"Come," he calls from inside the office, his voice muffled by wood and distance. I open the door and step inside, surveying my surroundings as I go. His office is…well, let's just say cluttered. If you don't take everything in, you're bound to trip over some of it. I always plan out my path to his desk before approaching it, lest some unfortunate accident happen.

I've got enough trouble as it is without breaking my ankle or something.

"Ah, good morning Mr. Mason," Lazar intones, his voice rich like golden syrup. Or hell, why not just go with honey? Why, because that's unmanly, of course. You can't call another guy's voice honey. Then again, golden syrup's probably worse…

I'd call it gravel—that sounds more manly—but it doesn't really fit.

"Morning, Sir." I stop in front of his desk, peering down at him with arms clasped behind my back. "You needed to see me?"

Lazar removes his spectacles and rubs at his eyes. He's tired, but who isn't? Still, I don't envy him his job. I don't envy him anything.

"So."

That's how he begins. I wait patiently, knowing there's more.

"The lockdown."

A sigh gusts out of him and his shoulders slump for a moment. Then he squares them, sits up straight, regards me with bright, if bloodshot, eyes. "It's a little more serious this time… We've had outbreaks on floor three, I think those are subdued for the most part. But level 5…"

My heart sinks, and I feel cold. Level 5? That can't be good.

"Outbreaks?"

He shakes his head. "It's more…what's happening in the rooms." A frown appears on his forehead, knitting his brows together. "To the patients."

Moments pass, and the silence is loud. I can still hear the sirens, of course—they won't switch off until the situation is contained. Whenever the hell that'll be. But there's a reason Lazar called me in here. I'm one of twenty-plus staff members starting a shift at this time of day. I'm just one of many.

But he's singled me out.

Can't be good.

"You want me up there, Sir?"

"If you don't mind, Mason."

If I don't mind? Yes, I damn well mind. I don't want to get infected! But I can't say that. It's my job to not say that. It's my job to nod and murmur, "Yes, Sir, right away," and then turn away and walk calmly to the door, unclasping my hands only at the last moment. Any sooner and I'd look desperate, like I'm already envisioning gripping the door handle and throwing the door open, leaping out into the corridor and turning left—toward the exit—instead of right—toward the lift.

No desperation here. Or rather, none permitted on the outside. I can feel as desperate as I like within, as long as I don't do anything with it.

Beyond bury it as far down as it will go.

Bury it, and forget it.

Forget about having any semblance of a life.

It's not my job to have a life.

It's my job to risk my life, every day of the week.

I punch the lift button for level 5 and wait, trying not to chew my lip hard enough to draw blood.

Level 5.

Not a good place to be.

PROMPT NUMBER TWENTY-FOUR

2011-06-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Prompting again from the middle of nowhere . . .

Write a 1,000-10,000 word story (or 333-3,333 verse story) about:

"Look, that's really cute, but it doesn't exactly go with bite marks."

Good luck!!!

Trisha's story pick, Week 23

2011-06-12T18:49:00.001-07:00

Verse!! He did verse! ;) and by "he", I mean Michael of course. Hehe.

She Sailed Away: A Haiku

“No, Marjorie, no!

You must not ride that fiendish

Crocodile. Oy.”

“Ha,” said Marjorie.

“I laugh. Like crazed hyena

Eating deer. Ha. Ha.

I will ride it. I

Have tamed the horrid beastie

He is like so cute.”

“CUTE?” exclaimed Prince Bob.

“He is a vicious eating

Machine! See his teeth!”

“He is not vicious.

I have named him Snuggly-poo.”

She gave it a pat.

“And I shall now ride

Snuggly-poo down the Nile.

It will be fun, yes?”

“It will be fun, NO.

Princess Caitlin would never

Think of doing this.”

“Caitlin is a big

Dork. Her guard is a short mime.

Not very impressive.

Now, as I have said

I will ride Snuggly-poo down

The Nile. I love him!”

“Hmph,” hmphed Prince Bob. “Hmph.”

When Snuggly-poo eats you, don’t

Say you were not warned.

He will bite your head

Om nom nom nom. And then he-

OMG! ZOMBIES!”

“Zombies? Oh please, Bob.”

Like I would really fall for

That silly trick-” UUUUUUUUURG.”

“Wait. Bob, I’m not sure.

Is urg one syllable or

Two?” “WHO CARES! RUN! RUN!”

The zombies came on

Moaning like horrible things

That moan. Urg. Urg. Urg.

They surrounded poor

Lady Marjorie and Bob.

Things looked super bad.

Then, out of nowhere,

Snuggly-poo! Heroic! Brave!

Eating the zombies!

Then one zombie bit

Poor doomed Snuggly-poo.He died

Then came back all wrong.

“Oh no no!” she screamed.

“My nose of hope is stuffed up

With snot of despair!”

“Fear not!” exclaimed Bob.

“For tissue wipes away snot,

And we may yet live!”

Marjorie thought hard

For a new nose metaphor.

“I got zilch,” she said.

Then Bob recalled his

Rifle. He pulled it out and

Bam bam. Double-tap.

The zombies were gone

And so was Zombie Snuggly-

Poo. Hip hip hooray.

“Well, that is just great.

What will I do for fun now?”

she said, very mad.

Bob sighed. “Why don’t you

Go read a book. Books are fun!”

“Blow it out your ear.”

Week 23 Wrap-Up

2011-06-09T04:28:00.000-07:00

Week 23 saw us writing to this prompt (from me, Trisha):

You love him
You love him more than this
You love him, and you cannot
You can't resist.

At the time I forgot to mention that it was song lyrics, courtesy of the Smashing Pumpkins, my all-time favourite band. So anyway...those lines prompted the following...

Friday featured was ...nothing! Yay!
There was also no Saturday pick...go figure. :P
Sunday's pick, chosen by Trisha, was the verse written by the multi-talented Michael! Titled (and subtitled) "She Sailed Away: A Haiku", this was really quite epic and a little bit genius!
Jes wrote a story called "Nightingale" which also combined Prompt 24 (which is a story for another day...no pun intended on the 'story' part)
Brooke confuzzled some folks, but in such STYLE! Her story this week was about a girl and a cliff, and treachery!

And I think the Chrysalis hosts wrote stuff, or at least I know I did, but I'm drawing a blank so I'm going to fill that in later. hehe

Week 22 Wrap-Up

2011-06-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

Another retro-actively posted Wrap Up post, which I will indeed be backdating!

In Week 22, our prompt from Winter was as follows:

"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."

And we had the following responses:

Our Friday feature from Jenn took us to a rather surreal place in our characters' minds! Plus, I just love the story title, "Simian Crease"
This week's Saturday story pick, as selected by Trisha, was, in the words of yours truly, "Epic Caitlin" from Michael - titled "Caitlin vs. Susan"
The Sunday story pick (chosen by Winter) was from Madeline, and titled "I Know You're Wrong, Boy"
Jes wrote a story titled "Answering For"
Brooke wrote about the moment when you just snap and blow your family away with a rifle...yikes!

Nice!

PROMPT NUMBER TWENTY-THREE

2011-06-06T04:59:00.000-07:00

Ya, it's that time again. And this time, write between 1,000 and 10,000 words on the following:

You love him
You love him more than this
You love him, and you cannot
You can't resist.

Good luck, 'cause if you're like me right now you'll need it. hehe

Winter's Story Pick, Week 22

2011-06-05T21:38:00.001-07:00

This week's Sunday pick comes to you from Madeline! Love this interpretation of my wacko prompt. =]

I Know You're Wrong, Boy

“Ah, God, the sink,” she moaned as the blood rinsed off her hands and swirled down the satin white basin.

“Don’t worry about it,” he whispered back to her, trying to restrain all of his tears. “Please don’t.”

She shook her head and looked around his bathroom. It must have been twice the size of her own room, even if her room was small. Everything seemed to be draped in gorgeous creamy satin white, and there she was. A bloody mess, staining his bathroom. “God, oh, God.”

“No,” he commanded. “Don’t you dare be sorry.” His voice shook with pain. Or maybe it was fear. “Please, don’t be sorry. Don’t.”

She itched her face with her shoulder, while he held her hands under the sink. She yanked away from the water, even if it was the cleanest she had ever seen. The water turned to steamy hot, and she couldn’t take it.

Shaking her hands, she drew a few pieces of glass from her palm, examining it in the light.

He closed his eyes tightly, wishing she would put the piece of glass down. He grabbed it from her hands and tossed it onto the ground, watching the shard shatter into even smaller pieces.

He began to cuss under his breath.

She reached for his wrist, and shot him a glance that he knew only she would give in a time like this. “You’re. . . you. . .” he stuttered. “I can’t. . .”

She didn’t say anything, but she nodded slightly. Her blue eyes cut straight into his. “Don’t blame it on yourself.”

He drew back sharply, but then regretted it. Her blood felt warm on his wrist, it felt warm on his icy skin. “Who am I going to blame it on? You?”

She sighed heavily and shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

“It wasn’t an accident, and you know it damn well.” His voice was finale, but a terrible amount of sorrow and regret hung in it. “It was an impulse. Why don’t you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you, boy. I just want to save you while there’s still something left of your soul.”

He took a step back, only to be mimicked by her taking a step closer. Her blue eyes were caustic and suffocating, and he couldn’t shake them from his memory.

Nor could he ever shake the memory from his eyes. She was physically scarred for life, and he was mentally scarred.

He didn’t mean it. He wasn’t angry. She was gorgeous, and he couldn’t even begin to admit it. He watched as her fingers gild across his ivory piano keys, the pedal meshing everything together as she created a beautiful song.

He hated to admit she was the most beautiful creature he had seen. He hated to admit that he had an obsession. And he hated even more to admit that it was a terrible unhealthy addiction.

The glass vase was the closest thing next to him, and he grabbed it, wrapping his large fingers around it angrily. He slammed it on the piano, onto his keys, and onto her fingers, shattering it over her palms.

He drew it back and held it above his head, ready to smash it right over her skull, when he saw a small tear fall down her red cheek and watched as her face transformed into one of sheer terror and pure fear.

He was a monster, she very well knew it, and he knew it too. She hated to admit that he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. She hated to admit that he was a monster. And she hated to admit even more that she felt it was all her fault.

He insisted it wasn’t, but she knew it was.

He opened his eyes to see her starring him straight in the face, her eyes cutting deep into his. So deep, he was afraid she could see his heart.

Her hand grabbed the collar of his shirt, holding a fistful of cotton. She stared at him for a while, wondering who he was. She knew, but she wanted to know more.

“I don’t get you.”

“I don’t want you to,” he said. And he meant it.

“Oh, don’t say that.”

“I’m a monster.” He searched her face doubtingly. “I don’t understand you either. Why do you have to make everything your fault?”

She sucked on the inside of her cheek, never releasing the grasp she had on his shirt. “Because I’m dirty and bloody. You’re almost too perfect to be faulted.”

“Almost doesn’t count.”

His fingers curled around her wrist, pulling her hand away from him, holding it against her face.

“What if,” she began. “What if I’m really the monster? What if your perception is completely wrong? Your definition of monster could be wrong, and I could be the real monster, the real demonic one. Not you. Me.”

“You’d be wrong.”

“I’d be right.” She was far more monstrous than he was.

Trisha's story pick...... weeek....what is it again?? 22?

2011-06-04T04:22:00.001-07:00

So, I don't think I had much choice this week........ it's epic Caitlin, and here goes (p.s. still haven't written my own!!!!!!!!):

Caitlin vs. Susan

Vsssh. Vmmm. Vmmmm-bmmmm-vmmm. Vsssh vsssh pssht. crackle crackle vmmm. Vsssh. Vmmm vmmm bmmm.

Red and blue light flared across the chamber of the Puzzle of Worlds, as Caitlin and Susan fought in titanic battle. Sweat beaded across Caitlin’s forehead, and her heart raced like a baby jackhammer that had eaten too much sugar and was running rings around its little jackhammer playroom and keeping its frustrated jackhammer babysitter from studying for jackhammer college finals. She (Caitlin, not the little baby jackhammer of our extended metaphor) had known the fight was going to be stressful, but she hadn’t imagined it’d be nearly this bad. As red plasma flashed past her face, coming way way too close, Caitlin had to admit that she was, to use the technical term, in deep doo-doo. All her fights thus far, against random minions and incompetent assassins, had only been as prelude to Susan’s symphony of evil.

Even fighting Vladimir the Marauder hadn’t been as bad, for one big reason; Caitlin had been able to use the sword she’d practiced with all through her sad childhood. Lightsaber-fighting was a whole new ballgame. For one thing, the plasma blade was practically weightless, where her old blade had the comfortable heft of tried steel. When Caitlin swung the lightsaber, her arm still gave its accustomed push to the blade, which meant that it swung wide of the mark, throwing her off-balance and leaving her vulnerable to a serious counter-strike from Susan. The only reason why Susan hadn’t yet delivered the counter-strike, at least not in a serious way, was that she was merely toying with Caitlin, and the princess knew it, and she was seriously ticked. But she couldn’t do much about it. Had she known the proper forms of lightsaber combat, she might have stood a fighting chance, but she didn’t know diddly. (About lightsabers, that is; she did know Diddly quite well, as Diddly was the name of a pet skink of which she was quite fond). Susan, on the other hand, had spent decades of Character Hell-time in traveling through Star Wars fiction and mastering every sequence of every form, from the energetic gymnastics of Ataru to the impenetrable defense of Soresu to the sheer kinetic power of Djem So. She could counter Caitlin’s wide swings and desperate charges with one hand, which she did, not without a goodly amount of taunting.

“What, no witty banter?” Susan called, after Caitlin’s twentieth mad charge failed. “C’mon! Witty banter’s sort of a tradition in these things! I’m going to be really disappointed in a minute!”

Caitlin was too busy fending off her enemy’s leisurely counter-attack to respond substantively, but she shot a quick look towards her shoulder-angel. “Hey, you, quick, banter ideas! Now!” she hissed, in between a rapid flurry of defensive circles.

The shoulder-angel had been pacing very rapidly back and forth in mid-air, wringing its tiny hands and lamenting the fact that it couldn’t do anything to help. Now it squeaked in angelic excitement. “Okay! Yes! Banter! I can do that! Um um um…hey, about a Bible verse!”

“Great! Which one?”

“Oh dear, let me think…you’ll want something wrathful, fire and brimstone-y, um, let’s see….ooh! Ooh! I saw this in a Youtube video once! It’ll be perfect!” The shoulder angel whipped a flashcard out of thin air and gave it a flick; golden light flashed and neat words appeared on the card. Caitlin was in such desperate hurry that she snatched the flashcard and read the words without stopping to consider what she was saying.

“You want witty banter, Susan? Fine! I’ll give you way more than banter! Psalm! 38! 7! For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease, and there…is…no….” Caitlin paused, and turned very slowly to face her shoulder angel. She didn’t have to worry about an attack from Susan, as the Mistress of Character Hell had doubled over in gales of hysterical laughter. Caitlin spoke very quietly. “Maybe you should recheck that reference.”

The shoulder-angel looked to be near tears. “I thought…I thought I had the right one…I didn’t mean…”

The princess had no time to console her distraught angel-friend, for at that moment Susan recovered from her giggling fit and decided that it was time to stop playing around. She straightened up and snapped her fingers, and the air swirled around them like milk and ice cream in a blender, producing a metaphorical milkshake of chaos. When the swirl cleared, they were standing on a balcony which overlooked the vast Plain of Minions. Suspended on the high wall behind the balcony was a massive JumboTron screen. “Maybe I should provide the banter!” Susan announced, her voice magnified and echoing across the plain. Crowds of minions stopped their endless combat and trooped closer to see what was going on. “Or perhaps I’ll just skip to the Dramatic Revelation!”

She waved towards the JumboTron, and its black surface buzzed with white static, looking very much like chalk scribbled across a really big blackboard. Then the white cleared away, and a colorful scene appeared. Caitlin gasped. It was her mother. Queen Maralyn. The queen was fighting smoothly and easily against a squad of minions, her sword flashing in the midday sun. Some distance away Caitlin saw her father fighting with Vladimir the Marauder. Then she saw Vladimir break away, and run towards Maralyn, who had her back turned to him, unaware of her impending danger. Caitlin drew in a breath, knowing what she was about to see…and then to her complete shock, she saw Susan materialize out of thin air on that long-ago battlefield and run Maralyn through before the queen even knew she was there. Caitlin, her face terribly pale, turned towards Susan. “Oh, yeah, should’ve mentioned that before, I guess,” Susan said. “See, I did send Vladimir to kill your mother, but when it actually came to the point, I thought, hey, this is really something I should take care of myself, you know? That’s a sign of a good leader, one that doesn’t just delegate things to subordinates. Especially not when my subordinates are all crappy imbecilic minions. I mean, take the stormtroopers for example. Precise shots my foot; those people couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if they were standing right next to it. And let’s not even mention all the guards from fantasy worlds who don’t even know which end of their sword to stick at the hero. Honestly. So, to recap, I killed your mother. Bam, dramatic revelation. Surprised?”

Caitlin yelled one single incoherent cry and charged at Susan, who nonchalantly struck a blow with her lightsaber that smashed through the hilt of Caitlin’s blade, just barely missing her fingers. Caitlin’s blue blade vanished, and now red plasma was pressing close to her own throat. “Give up yet?” Susan asked, smiling viciously. “Or maybe you’d like to consult with your little shoulder-friends there?”

The princess’s shoulder devil wanted to fight to the last, but the shoulder angel (who had unaccountably vanished during the JumboTron replay) now reappeared and whispered something urgently in Caitlin’s ear. Caitlin sighed, dropped the smoking fragments of her lightsaber hilt, and raised her hands.

Susan accepted the surrender with all the grace and magnanimity befitting her position as ruler of Character Hell. “AWWWWW YYYYEEEEEEAH! Uh-huh! Uh-huh! It’s my birthday! It’s my birthday! That’s right! Who’s rad, who’s bad, who’s never been h-”

*Creak*.

Susan paused in her jubilant celebration. “Um. What was that?”

*CREAK*

She glanced up. How peculiar. The JumboTron seemed to be tilting very slightly towards her. She assumed it was probably an optical illusion of sorts-

*snap snap wrench CREEEEEEAK skrench tilt*

“Oh no.”

Susan backpedaled frantically, but she banged up against the rail of the balcony, and she had nowhere else to go. The JumboTron ponderously wrenched free of the wall and tumbled towards her. Then it paused, hanging in mid-air, and Susan glanced over to Caitlin, who still had her hands raised. The princess smiled. “So, my shoulder angel went off and did some research real quick. I think I underestimated the power of the light side.”

“Heh, heh…” Susan said. “Look, that thing about killing your mother, that wasn’t really personal, you know, just-”

“Please don’t say it was just business. It wasn’t just business to me, and you sure seemed happy about it then. So give me one good reason why I shouldn’t drop this thing on you right now.”

“I’ll let you out of here!” Susan pleaded. “I’ll send you right back to your own world!”

“Not quite good enough.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll even send Colin the Mime-Assassin back with you! And hey, since your mother’s still on Earth, the fictional one anyway, I’ll send her back too! You’ll have her back again! Good enough?”

“It’ll do.”

Susan snapped her fingers for the last time, and a hole opened up in the wall. Beyond it shone the green fields and forests of Caitlin’s own kingdom. The princess started tiredly towards the hole, put one boot through it, and then glanced back. “Just so you know, I’m guessing this light-side telekinesis thing doesn’t keep going once I cross over.” She stepped all the way through before the surprised Susan could utter a word of protest. “Oops.”

Susan dived over the rail, just in time to avoid getting squished by the falling JumboTron. She fell a long way, but fortunately for her, she managed to summon a burst of dark-side energy just in time to slow her fall to a moderately gentle glide that landed her with a bump on the plain. Her loyal minions, untold masses of them, surrounded her. Susan smiled. She hadn’t lost yet.
Then Caitlin remembered something, and hopped back through the portal into Character Hell, running to the edge of the balcony and calling down. “Oh, boys? And girls, and, er, metal things…whatever. You all did catch that part about crappy imbecilic minions, right?”

“Yeah,” said Charles, who had pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Yeah, we caught it.”
“Oh, that,” Susan said, coughing nervously. “Um. Look. That was just…oh, please, you’re not going to do the turning-on-me-thing now, are you? So cliche! The Lion King did that years ago! Honestly, don’t you idiots have even the slightest particle of imagin….a…. ” Her voice trailed away, as it had suddenly occurred to her that insulting the massive horde of heavily armed underlings surrounding her probably wasn’t the most wonderful idea ever.

“Let’s just say we’re following tradition,” Charles said, and closed in, ranks of Stormtroopers, Orcs, robots, patrol-soldiers, droids, rats, and hyenas, following behind.

Caitlin didn’t stay to watch. She dived back again through the portal just before it closed, landing on the fresh-smelling dirt of her own proper world. Caitlin breathed a happy sigh. It was over at last.

Then she shot a look upwards towards the cloudless sky. “Excuse me? Author? What, no happily ever after?”

An echo-y voice, er, echoed down from the heavens. This isn’t the end of the Caitlin Chronicles, silly. Just this one story arc. Maybe you don’t live happily ever after. I don’t even know yet.

“Yeah, but after all you put me through, getting turned into a zombie penguin, getting killed, getting killed again, going to Character Hell, nearly disappearing from all existence, I think I deserve a bit of consideration, don’t you think?”

Well….okay, fine, have it your way.

“Thank you.”

And they all lived happily ever after.

Simian Crease

2011-06-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

A short one this time.

*****

I remember.

I wasn’t supposed to, but the memory still clings to me in full color: their grass-green eyes, pale skin polished bright as the sunrise, lolling blue tongues between poppy-red lips. My parents—part flowers, part lace-wing flies, the aspects of immortal children—they left me here.

To die.

And taking her instead, a sniveling mortal.

They left me here swaddled in her clothing, white as a chalk outline around my flailing body. They looked down on me—small, helpless, heart eternally tied to them—and they turned their backs.

I remember crying—trying to call them back to me. My skin turned a molted purple. Her humans came to pacify me, not knowing the difference, not understanding that they did not belong to me. I did not stop crying.

Her humans brought me to their shamans, their curanderos, their specialists. I did not eat. I did not sleep. I only cried.

When I had cried for seven years, I realized that crying would not make them come back—ever. Their scent had faded despite everything I did to suck it into my lungs, pour it out through my tears. So I let my body fall silent, hushed the green heart beating inside of me, let the human world make what it would of my abandoned shell.

But I never forgot.

****

“Who did you kill?” The boy in the mall grabs my hand, dark almond eyes bugging out just a little. With his thumb, he traces the single line that slashes across the middle of my left hand.

“Excuse me?” The humans normally let me slink through their world without taking sound or touch. But these conventions are lost on the boy who stood behind the counter of the novelty store. I try to yank my hand back, but he holds on.

“My great-aunt had a mark just like this. Back in Thailand, the old villagers would say that children who had this mark cut off someone else’s life the day they were born. It is a sign of very bad luck.”

“Yeah well, I Googled it once.” I say, trying to free my hand, take my earrings and leave. “It means I’m retarded and contagious.”

He smiles, the corners of his lips almost eclipsing his eyes. “My great-grandmother died a few minutes before my aunt was born. They had to cut her free. But I don’t believe that she was unlucky. And I don’t believe that you are retarded.”

“Can I have my hand back, please?”

“She could talk to clouds and sing fish into nets and she looked just like you.” The boy keeps his eyes on my face as if the revelation might turn me to stone or make me break into a million pieces.

I didn’t do either, I only get very, very cold. Like me? There is nobody like me here. I slowly stick out my long blue-black tongue for him to see. He is mistaken.

“Just like my aunt,” he says. “A hundred and three years old and not a hair different from you. She was a ghost too.”

“I’m not a ghost.” I say. I am very much alive, my molecules disintegrating just like his. Suddenly, I have to know what happened to his aunt. He speaks of her in past tense. Maybe she died. Or. Maybe her real parents finally came back for her. I need this boy to tell me how she managed it.

“That’s only what your kind is called in Thai. A bad translation, maybe—everything frightening and supernatural is a ghost. In English, you might be something more like a fairy. But not like Tinkerbelle.”

I shake my head. Not like Tinkerbelle. “Tell me. What happened to your aunt?”

“She disappeared. Right here in this very store. Right where you are standing now.”

“What do you mean ‘disappeared’?”

“Flickered away into nothing.” He flicks the air with his free hand, as if the gesture explains things. “I was three. I saw it happen.”

“And she just abandoned you here in this mall?” I turn my face to where he must have stood and felt the energy of a tiny boy who could not stop his tears any more than I could.

His mouth flinches at my casual use of the word ‘abandoned,’ so I know the energy is still tied to him. Why would he choose to work here? To be around the heavy, choking sadness all day, day after day? But then, of all people, who am I to ask these questions?

“Tell me who you killed,” he says, squeezing my hand, giving the words an almost intimate quality. We are school children exchanging secrets. “Whose life did you cut off with your own?”

“I didn’t do it,” I whisper back. I have never considered that the human child was probably dead, never considered anything other than my conviction that they wanted her more than they wanted me. “They took her and left me in her place. I didn’t want them to.”

“Your parents?” He asks. I flinch the way he did when I said the word ‘abandoned.’ The boy doesn’t ask me any other questions, but he doesn’t let go of my hand either. If anything, he rubs the single crease harder and harder as if he could wipe it off.

“Do you know how she did it? How she left?” I ask desperately. He considers me for a long time.

“In the old stories, there’s a map.”

“Do you have it?” The tears from my seven years of calling them threaten to spill over onto the plastic and glass counter. He rubs it faster and faster, crushing my bones in his grip. But it doesn’t hurt.

He looks down at the hand mangled in his own. “Now I do.”

“Please.” It was all that I could say.

“Promise to take me with you.” The energy of the crying child next to me grew, its heat pulling a sweat to my clammy skin. “No tricks.”

“Yes. I promise. Show me.”

He grabs a pair of handcuffs from a display wrack and handcuffs our wrists together. The metal bites into my skin. “These are iron.”

“I’m not Tinkerbelle.” His smile does not reach his eyes. The crying child’s energy vibrates through my body. So much sadness—iron and blood in his tears, in my own, abandonment growing in us like cancers, the scraping and scraping of old wounds. As if mere iron could poison either of us.

“Give me your other hand.” I give him my right hand. He fits my palms together—the long simian crease of my left hand flowing into the heartline of my right. We lean over my glowing palms. Mountains, valleys, rivers—land forms of all kinds begin to form. I can glimpse us soaring together over the lines in my hands, feel our destination more than I can see it.

“It was right here, in your own hands this whole time,” he says a second before we let go of our molecules.

We close our eyes and flicker out like dying candles.

Week 21 Wrap-Up

2011-06-02T03:41:00.000-07:00

I know this is like, REALLY OLD, but I'm compelled to do it anyway... And yeah, I'm TOTALLY backdating!

During week 21, we had this prompt from Jenn:

"There's only so much you can account for while doing dead man floats on the shallow end of the kiddy pool."

And we had the following stories to read:

Friday feature from me (Trisha), titled "All Wiped Out"
Saturday's story pick (chosen by Winter) was written by Jes - titled "Nothing Nowhere and Nearly in Nebraska" - gotta love good alliteration!
Sunday's story pick (chosen by Jenn), written by Madeline and titled "As We Know It"
Michael wrote about a bad-ass warrior chick called Meg this week!
Brooke wrote a tragic and chilling story about two brothers

And that was it, to my knowledge at least!

PROMPT NUMBER TWENTY-TWO

2011-05-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

In honor of Memorial Day...

(Strange prompt, by the way. Hope at least one of the images appeals to you. =])

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

I remember.

I wish I didn't remember.

Good luck, Experimenters!

Winter

Jennifer's Story Pick, Week 21

2011-05-29T22:06:00.000-07:00

Hahaha. The last line of Madeline's piece is worthy of a prompt.

As We Know It

"Run!" she shrieked into my ear. "Run! Don't look back either!"

I didn't need to be told to run. I was faster than her, and much farther ahead.

The sounds of gunshots ricocheted around me, and I'm sure the bullets were bouncing somewhere, too.

My mind was foggy. I didn't know what was happening. I knew there was water up ahead. It probably wasn't fresh water - that was nearly all gone - but it was water nonetheless. Water that could clean the blood off my body, water that could remove all the dirt that clung to my skin.

I dove in and hoped Clara was right behind me.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I opened my eyes. Chlorine seared and floods of blood swirled around in my eyes. I knew they were looking for me. I had to pretend to I was just another dead body floating in the shallow end of the kiddy pool, and they would never suspect a thing.

The water sloshed into my ears and burned my nose. I gulped, trying to ignore the pain and the need for breath.

Around me, footsteps echoed. My brain spun, my sense of direction was lost, the footsteps could be coming from anywhere. Or maybe they weren’t even footsteps. My interest was slightly awakened, but I did my best to ignore the itching to find out what the noise really was. I wasn’t going to let my curiosity kill me.

Slow voices began to fill the atmosphere. There was something drowsy about them, they seemed to be speaking to a lullaby, but I didn’t hear any music. Everything was slow, and sweet, and gentle.

My head started to bob above the water, and it felt like someone had just shattered a piece of glass in my brain. The hazy lethargic noises stopped and everything burst into deafening blasts and loud shouts.

Something touched me.

I flailed and writhed. I felt all eyes move directly towards me. I closed my eyes hard, squeezing them with all my might, hoping they wouldn’t find me. Something touched me again.

This time I didn’t react. I opened my eyes and looked around as much as I could without making too large of movements.

Beside me, Clara’s body floated.

Her eyes were open, but they refused to meet mine. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I knew the people above would see us.

Their voices were fast, but I couldn’t understand a word they said. I knew exactly who they were without even looking. No doubt they were army men, trying to stop the inevitable, and finding people to help them. I wasn’t going to be one of those people. That was unless I made a fatal move to draw attention to myself.

I heard footsteps on concrete, and the voices evaporated, leaving me with silence. The only other thing to hear were the airplanes overhead, and the chaos and explosions that scattered the only one third of the earth still populated.

My lungs were about to burst, and I couldn’t stand the tension anymore. After waiting just a few more seconds to make sure there wasn’t anyone else around, I stood up.

I threw my head out of the water, and the rest of my body jerked upwards with it. I shook my hair and regained my balance. “Clara,” I hissed. I poked her with my foot. “Clara, they’re gone, love.”

Clara didn’t move. Clara didn’t speak. She didn’t even respond. And she never would.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I tried not to make eye contact with anyone when I got back, but it was extremely hard when your whole entire basement is jam packed with people.

“Hey, buddy!” someone called. “You’re finally home, huh?”

His only answer was a chorus of, “sh’s!”.

“Where’s Clara?” another person asked quietly.

I shook my head, fighting back tears. I didn’t want to answer, so I wasn’t going to. They could all draw conclusions on their own.

“We lost Lucy when you were gone. She passed out and hasn’t come back yet.”

I sighed and rubbed my temple. Why would I care? I didn’t even know who Lucy was. I was supposed to be their leader, but I didn’t care. “Get some ice,” I replied aggravated, waving my hand toward the direction of the voice.

“All the ice melted.”

My mouth twitched. She was right. She was really right. All the ice on the earth had melted. They had just said so yesterday.

Blood bubbled to the surface of my mouth. I thought that I was going to throw up everywhere. I didn’t want anyone to see that though.

I got up and walked to the door I had just come through a few seconds ago.

“Where you going, man?”

“I’m leaving.” I wasn’t leaving for good, I just wanted to get away from all of them. I couldn’t take it anymore.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was cold when I stepped outside. There was something seemingly unfamiliar about the place I had lived all my life.

Overhead aircrafts flew and radio transmissions crackled. There weren’t any soldiers visibly patrolling anymore. I knew they had to be hiding and that thought alone scared me.

I rubbed my sleepless eyes and wondered when the world was going to end. It couldn’t hold itself back too much longer. The layers of dirt were splitting, the governments were taking over and killing its own people, and I was hurting.

A shot rang through the air. It was loud and undeniably bloodcurdling. It pierced right through my back, a concept I couldn’t fully grasp until the ground came rushing at my face.

I heard screaming.

No.

It wasn’t screaming.

It was laughing. It was little children laughing. Someone was yelling, “It’s the end!”

Everything went black.

If the world was going to end as soon as I got shot, I would have shot myself ages ago.