Month: March 2014

Super-Secret Hidden Writing Goals

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I am pleased to report that I made my writing goal for today.

I am less than pleased to report that it’s the 4th day in a row in which I have just barely made my writing goal for today.

Disappointment over not exceeding goals is sort of a first-world problem to the stars; this I fully realize.  Truth be told, though, 900 words daily for five days every week is not the “real” goal.  Okay, it’s the goal I talk about and it’s the goal I won’t allow myself not to meet.  I understand it’s maybe even still a little bit of a lofty goal for a guy like myself with a full time job and a full time baby and a full time wife and a full time distractable streak hold on while I get a cookie.

Where was I before I ate that ENTIRE BAG OF COOKIES??  Ah, secret goal.  Yes, the 900 words is the public goal, but the secret goal for my id-writer half is more like in the range of 1200-1500 words daily.  “Why two goals,” I hear myself asking myself.  “Because,” my self tells myself, “the first goal is for your baseline don’t-feel-like-sharknado-goal so that you can have the sense of accomplishing something for the day.  It’s the congrats, you got up and put on pants today – you have officially reached the bare minimum for living in society, you may now relax goal.  It’s not the goal you strive for, it’s the baseline standard you set for yourself.”  “What kind of sadist (masochist?) sets a crazy-ANTZ goal like that for himself,” lazy me further asks, “it’s bad enough I’ve undertaken this writing project in the first place, now I have to deal with a bare-minimum goal that’s higher than it really needs to be AND a super-secret psycho goal?”  “Only if you want to feel a soul-saturating sense of true accomplishment.”

Lazy me then kidney-kicks Overzealous me and curb-stomps his neck.  And overzealous me has gotten curb-stomped a fair bit this week.  While the soul-saturating sense of true, deep, secret second goal accomplishment is nice, it just hasn’t happened this week.  Maybe I’m coming down off the high of committing to this project, maybe it’s because I’m about to start the murky middle of the book, maybe it’s because the freaking bottom dropped out of the temperature outside and my lizard blood is cooling in my veins.  One way or another, I just haven’t been able to push through and go the extra mile this week.

This is the same problem that led to my running injury, of course.  The desire to be greater than the challenge rather than just meeting it.  Had I been satisfied with simply starting back to running a little bit at a time following a minor injury, odds are I could have avoided overdoing it and borking things even worse than before.  (By the way, I borking love the Swedish Chef.)  Similarly, if I could just be pleased with myself for meeting the public goal, I wouldn’t have to deal with the sense of shortcoming that I’m suffering on the inside from not meeting the real goal.

Having two goals suddenly strikes me as kind of dumb.  But then, id-writer says NUT UP, SOLDIER, AND WRITE SOME FARGOING PAGES.  This little internal feud is not likely to get resolved or to go anywhere, so I just need to make sure it keeps pushing me forward.

This kind of circular thinking was almost certainly driving my words today; I slipped into a much more verbose, Douglas Adams-esque prose, which never fails to make me smile.  Problem is, I fear it may be a little bit too verbose to be viable if I want to move toward actually getting this thing published.

HOWEVER STILL FURTHER, the first draft is not a time for second-guessing or over-editing.  The important thing is getting the words down.  I accomplished that, and while I don’t know if the way I’m telling the story is right, the story I’m telling definitely feels right.

Here’s a bit of the text in question.

  • “Still,” the reader might protest, “a live chicken?  Surely the ability to produce such a thing at will is nothing short of magical and should, therefore, be outside of the realm of her ability.”  Too right.  And were the muse in question any other than the muse of comedy, the reader would indeed be correct.  However, being, as she was, the muse of comedy, Thalia always kept chickens around in various iterations (live, on the verge of laying eggs, shedding feathers crazily, cooked, rubber) because the comedic possibilities really are inexhaustible, as Gonzo of the Muppets would readily avouch.

    Comedy, however, was the least of her concerns at the moment; what Thalia wanted was a distraction, and as far as distractions which can be found in crummy apartments in metropolitan areas go, a live chicken will certainly do in a pinch.

     

So, I dunno.  Probably too wordy.  But it still kept me on track for today, and that’s 14 writing days in a row on track, and THAT AIN’T BAD.

Why All Parents of Small Children Should Learn to Love the Mall

Pavowski1 Comment

Taking a day off from work as a teacher is an odd proposition.

Sure, you get the day off, and you don’t have to go in to the office, as it were, but it’s impossible (perhaps I shouldn’t speak for the legion – for ME it’s impossible) not to think, throughout the day, “Oh, my 4th period class is starting right now.  I hope they’re getting their work done.  I bet STUDENTNAMEREDACTED is being a jerk to the sub.  I’ll make them all write a five-page essay when I get back.  Nah, no I won’t, that’s more for me to grade.”  Okay, I didn’t have to go in today, but I had extra work to make plans for today and I’ll have extra work to get caught up when I get back tomorrow and for the rest of the week.

This is why I don’t take days off.

That said, it’s nice not being at work.  Got to spend the day with my dear wife and the sprout and my sister-from-out-of-town, and it’s all pretty swell.  Took the sprout to the mall to let him run around before his nap because it’s a bit too cold to be running around outside today (shut up, it’s cold in the South today; I know, it’s colder up North, SHUT UP).  It’s been a while since I’ve done this with him, which is a shame.  There are only a few places that the boy is allowed to run around off-leash (meaning I can just sit and watch him play); one is the living room, which hardly counts, and the other is the mall before it opens.

Say what you will about how this proves I’m a hopeless zombie in a consumerist culture, but the mall is freaking AWESOME.  As long as you get there before it opens.  Before it opens, the mall is that rarest of things: a paradise for parent and kiddo alike.  Don’t believe me?  PICTURE IT:

You’re two feet tall.  You are learning to walk / run / speak, but your stick-in-the-mud parental units will hardly let you take five steps without scooping you up to save you from falling down the stairs or knocking over the dining room table or throwing pancake syrup all over the dog.  The yard is no better; you can run free but the units are always stalking you to make sure you don’t run into the road (where, let’s face it, all the real fun is) or fall in the sinkhole or fall on the driveway and crack your skull and let your brains leak out onto the concrete.  (Why do kids have a death wish?)  Then, you arrive at the Mall.  Huge, wide open hallways, most of them carpeted.  Enormous, wall-covering murals and windows presenting a delightful banquet of color for your tiny eyes to feast upon.  The walls echo as you shriek in delight, and your own voice fills the cavernous space with an aria of joy and wonderment as you stretch your tiny legs and careen off into the wide-open spaces feeling an exhilaration you’ve felt only in your tiny, lunatic toddler dreams.

Smell what I’m cooking?  Now, the adult side of the picture:

You’re indoors: there is no traffic to save the kid from.  There are very few people around: no potential kidnappers to guard against.  There’s a carpeted and cushioned playground: you can turn the kid loose without fear of him smashing a tooth out or breaking another goldfinger glass / plate / priceless Hummel figurine.  It’s large and spacious and full of ambient noise: nobody cares how much noise the kid makes, you might as well be in a baseball stadium.  And there are no toys.  I’ll repeat that.  THERE ARE NO FARGOING TOYS.  Toys which the kid strews in his wake like a deranged Santa’s Workshop Hansel and Gretel.  Toys with inexplicably sharp bits upturned for your hapless, tender underfoot.  Toys that overwhelm your home and your soul with their inexhaustible supply, a zerg rush of plastic and plush (whoa, I liked that).  NO TOYS.  *Beams of sunlight pierce through the overcast sky as a choir of angels begins to sing*

So I reiterate: the mall, for both parents and kiddos, is the haberdasheryfied sharknado.  BEFORE IT OPENS.  After the mall has opened, if you plan on taking your toddler there, just cut out the middle man and kill yourself.

Anyway, the sprout had a blast and holy god, he is getting fast.  Like, I can no longer keep up with him at a brisk walk fast.  Sailing through the air as he takes one leaping bound after another fast.  Faceplanting into a full scorpion-stinger fall when he loses his balance because he ran too fast fast.  It’s awesome to see, and it means that very soon, I’m going to be testing all the running I’ve been doing these past two years (I started, ostensibly, so that I’d be able to keep up with the sprout when he got bigger — well, he’s bigger now, by crackey).

So, all that excitement, and I still got a solid 1000 words in on The Project today.  Oh, and another thousand HERE.

Here are some of the best of them:

  • Part of him knew he should take action, defend himself or something, but all he could do was think about pandas and try to figure out how to stop his brain from vibrating.  The pain was exquisite, but more exquisite was the ringing sound in his ears and in fact his whole head, which as far as he could tell was a perfect b-flat.  Unlike a perfect b-flat, which sounds sort of warm and makes you feel mellow, this one was inexplicably painting his vision yellow.  Hands grabbed him roughly and conducted him to a chair where he fish-flopped a few times, casting his head back and forth, trying to remember whether he had one ceiling fan or, as his eyes seemed to be telling him, fifteen.

I just now realized that I rhymed “mellow” and “yellow” in there, and I am not at all sure if I approve of it.  Future me will have to decide if he wants to be a poet or just let it slide.  Okay, that one was deliberate and awful, and I apologize to the committee for the error of my ways.  FARGO.

Tomorrow is runday funday, so I will get to test out the heel again.  The word count has slowed to a trickle the past few days; hopefully I can finish the week strong.

 

I don’t always blarg about running…

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More work on the Project, more stumbling blocks, more throatpunches for the stumbling blocks.

I don’t pity Future Me when he comes back around to the words I got down today.  I went back and forth several times during the writing trying to decide whether I wanted the scene to be set in one place or another, whether or not I wanted a certain character to be present, whether whole swathes of exposition should be there at all… yeah, today’s draft is basically a thornbush of dubious dialogue and confusing directions to my Future Self.  “SOME TIME PASSES” and “PROBABLY GOING TO WANT TO CUT THIS” and “WHOOPS NEED TO DO THIS SOONER” are just a few of the notes scribbled in blood in the margins.  Okay, not scribbled in blood, but only because KEYBOARDS DON’T BLEED.  The id-writer had no patience today for sorting through things, and with good reason: I find myself mired in a scene that probably went on for too long.  It gives a lot of exposition which I feel is useful for me but not necessarily useful for any hypothetical reader; information that is probably better discovered scrawled on the cliff face as you hurtle downward past it toward the rocks.

Maybe that was a bit too stream-of-consciousness to make sense.  Can’t question it.  Today is a day for progress.

Anyway, I got the requisite 900 words (953 to be exact) but I’m not quite satisfied, so I will probably go back to it later.  In the meantime:

A post about running!

I don’t always blarg about running, because for the most part, there isn’t that much to say.  I mean, sure, every run is a good run, and every run is a revelation of the air in your lungs and the majesty of nature and the dodging of traffic and blah blah blah.  But you can only write about that so many times before it all sounds like so much whooshing in the ears.  So when I write about running, I try to have something specific to say.

My running has been in the ditch this year, and that could be more literal only if I had actually fallen into a ditch.  In January I suffered a horrific illness which kept me bedridden for days followed by a truly unpleasant foot injury (I snagged it on a nail in the back porch) which had me hobbling for weeks.  My wife would want me to point out why I was barefoot on the back porch in the dead of winter in the dark, and I would point out that every story needs a little mystery.  (I was peeing to save water vis-a-vis not flushing the toilet.  This made perfect sense to me at the time.  It was a weird month.)  GOLDFINGER IT.

So that was January, and in proper tolerate-no-weakness, progress-or-death fashion I went right back out and attempted to run way more than I should have as soon as the foot was even functional again.  Because I had to make up for lost time, right???  SO I INJURED IT AGAIN.  This time it’s a lot less obvious what the nature of the hurt is — something in the heel, probably a strain or a sprain or plantar fasciitis or I don’t know I’m not a fargoing podiatrist.

Whatever it is is (yes, “is is” is sometimes correct, holy Sharknado I just blew my mind by writing “is is” is and it was STILL correct) bad enough that I’ve scheduled a meeting with a podiatrist in two weeks.  I’ve been to the doctor’s office for my own discomfort exactly twice in my life (that I can recall.  And if I can’t recall it, it didn’t happen.  I think that sounds like a good rule).  Both times were for what eventually turned out to be kidney stones.  You know, only EXCRUCIATING AND BRAIN-CHOKING PAIN, the kind of pain that makes you wish you could literally disconnect your head from your body for a while to make the pain stop.

This pain is not that bad, but it’s gone on long enough that it’s time to acknowledge that there may be something actually wrong.

But here’s why I’m stupid.  (Really, I should be writing, here’s why I’m stupid IN THE HERE AND NOW OF THIS MOMENT TODAY.)  I am doing the classic guy thing: “naw, it’s fine, rub some dirt on it, no problem” in that I have started running again regardless.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not out there gritting my teeth and fighting back tears at every step.  In fact, when I run, the pain for the most part goes away.  It’s later in the day, after I’ve been sitting or walking around, you know, NOT RUNNING, that it starts to hurt.  So I have logicked for myself that it can’t be an issue of actual damage (elsewise it would surely hurt all the time, I mean, that makes SENSE, right?) and must therefore be something more like a strain (some muscle or other gets stretched out and relaxed during activity, then tightens up like a piano wire afterward).  This makes sense to my lizard brain and is how I’m justifying continuing to run.

We will see in a few weeks whether it’s actually fine or whether I’ve destroyed my feet beyond repair like Kathy Bates in Misery.  (Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth a little bit.)  So far it’s fine.  But therein lies the problem.  I convinced myself that it’s not so bad; that I can continue to run.

Let me detour to reiterate a fundamental truth that I believe to be true.  THERE IS SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN ABOUT RUNNERS.  Bear in mind, I’m talking about capital-R RUNNERS.  Ask the average person if they’d like to go out for a run, and they are likely to say anything from “No” to “Get bent” to nothing at all in favor of a speedy shin-kick.  Ask a Runner, however, and the answer will be something like “Hey, yeah, I could go for three or four or five miles, I mean I ran this morning but I could use a few more today, in fact why don’t I run from my house to yours so that I can make it an even 10?”  We are messed up, and I fully own belonging to that group.  Card-carrier.  Except we don’t have cards, we have dirty socks and worn-out shoes.

And yes, I’ve read the articles and some books and the studies that show that humans are basically custom-built to run long distances, and I buy most of it.  THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE BEHAVIOR.  What kind of an idiot convinces himself that he’s not really hurt so that he can engage in the activity which probably injured him in the first place — an activity, by the way, which is utilized as punishment in VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER SPORT.  It’s like that parasite that takes over an ant’s brain and forces it to camp out on a blade of grass for the sole purpose of getting eaten so that the parasite can end up in a cow’s digestive tract.  (This is a real thing, I read it on The Oatmeal.)  There’s some similar parasite that infects the brains of normal humans and causes them to think it’s a good idea to run for hours and hours and hours every week.  I’m convinced of it.

So I’m injured and finding ways to run despite the injury.  Such, it seems, is life.  I’m doing it smarter this time than I did back in February; taking nice short distances, going at what feels like a snail’s pace.  So far, it’s working, though it’s tortuous reigning myself in when my brain is constantly whispering go faster, go farther, you’re a wimp, GO GO GO.  But I’m determined to make a positive out of it, and here’s another thing I’ve convinced myself of.  While my physical self has suffered, my metaphysical self has grown. While my body is waning, my mind is waxing, and while my running has been pathetic of late, my writing has been prolific.  The trick will be to keep the two balanced as I (hopefully) bring my physical self back up to speed (oh no, the running puns are starting again, HIDE).  Hopefully there’s enough wax to go around.

+2 points for the continued metaphor, but -10 because… ew.

Thought I Took a Spill

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Yikes, I let a couple of days get by without a blog post.  Unless you count Saturday’s Flash Fiction.  I DON’T.  Those little Flash Fictions, tangential though they may be to the Project, count as REAL WRITING, and the blog doesn’t.  Never mind that some of my blog posts go on longer than some of my daily court-mandated Project writing (The court, of course, is the court convened by my id-writer and his slavering, ink-blood crazed alter egos).  It doesn’t count for my daily WordCount ™ and it therefore does not count.

That said, I feel a little bit of failure when I don’t get around to posting just a little bit here.  Okay, my frame of reference is not long enough for me to claim a statistically significant sample size (alliteration x4, c-c-c-combo!) but I feel like if my daily progress on the Project is the equivalent of hooking the car up to a two-ton trailer and dragging it down a muddy road to make some productive work happen, then my writing here on the Blarg (yep, just renamed the Blog to “The Blarg”, make it so) is the equivalent to unhooking the trailer and driving 200 miles an hour down a side street.  It burns out the gunk, clears the pipes, stretches the metaphorical legs of my metaphorical engine so that I can do more metaphorical “writing”.  Wait, the legs aren’t metaphorical.  And neither is the “writing.”  (The quotation marks, however, ARE metaphors — for the BLINDERS I HAVE TO PUT ON TO GET THE GOLDFINGER WRITING DONE SOME DAYS.)

At any rate, failure to blog felt a little bit like failure to write over the weekend, although I clearly did that.  Upon further review, the ruling on the field stands, and I am DonDraper pleased with my latest bit of Flash Fiction, The First Wave.  That one took me in new directions on a couple of fronts and, well, I said it already but I’m pleased with it.  Go me.

In fact, The First Wave felt doubly like a success because I completed it under duress: I wrote about 60% of it on the car ride back from my nephew’s birthday party in Alabama.  I deliberately did not name the city in which we were in (oh man, my English teacher brain hated letting that one slip by), not out of a concern for anonymity or avoidance of non-existent stalkers, but because it’s Fargoing Alabama which means it doesn’t matter what part of it I spent the day in, it was still Alabama, and that’s bad enough, isn’t it.  (My apologies to friends, relations, and other acquaintances who might enjoy Alabama, or worse yet, live there.  But you live in Alabama.  Come on.)  So yeah.  Conceived and written under the duress of Alabama.  Huge W-I-N.

Then I took Sunday off.  And proceeded to do nothing with the entire day except go to the store and flollop around the house.  A rare and pretty glorious day, one that merited a break even from Blarging.

But it’s Monday, and that means a return to the breach.  It was a busy day at work, compounded by the fact that I’m taking a day off in the middle of the week.  By the way, as a teacher, calling it a “day off” from work is a complete misnomer.  Because there is no respite.  You have to leave an assignment that the kids aren’t going to do.  You have to decide how harshly to penalize the students who don’t do the assignment and how to fairly balance that against the poor kids who, bless them, actually do the assignment and continue to distinguish themselves from the herd, like golden manatees in a slobbering, sorry school of sea-cows (c-c-c-combo!).  And then you’ve lost a day of instruction and you have to get back into the rhythm.  And then there’s administrative business coming down the pike that you missed on that day, but, surprise, the information you missed on Monday is needed to properly complete paperwork on Tuesday and oh, you’ll just have to come meet with your administrator for thirty minutes to get “caught up”, just come in during your planning period WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO GRADE PAPERS AND GET BACK ON TRACK FROM THE DAY YOU MISSED AND DON’T FORGET TO CARVE OUT A BIT OF TIME DURING LUNCH TO GET YOUR WORDCOUNT FOR THE DAY IN RAARRRGH BLARGFARGLE *begins throwing cats*

I’m not going to lie.  Teaching is not a bad gig a lot of the time.  But it’s also a little bit demanding and overwhelming and stressful a lot of the time.  If you have a teacher in your life, hug them.  Seriously.  This is what we’re up against:

wpid-IMAG0900.jpg

That was written by an 18-year old.  (The green is mine.  If you look closely, you can see the hopelessness with which I wrote it.)

…Yeah, you might have gathered that I did not get my desired word count done during the day.  But it’s all good.  I’ve finished it up this evening (almost 1400 words today) and topped it off with this post which is creeping toward the 1000 word mark, which means it’s time to stop it BEFORE THIS BLARG POST BECOMES SENTIENT AND BEGINS EATING MY BLOODY FINGERSTUMPS.

I keep meaning to post more about parenting and running.  The sprout has had a couple of gems lately that really are worth relating and I’m getting back up to speed (oh god, the puns have started, RUN [OH GOD IT’S GETTING WORSE]) with the running and I have some musings to post about that.  But that will have to wait.

Here’s a favorite passage from today’s work.  It’s not particularly lyrical or evocative, but I felt it captured pretty well a moment that would be much easier to capture onstage or in film.  Word pictures!

  • Andy nodded at her.  She nodded back at him.  He continued nodding, turning his nods toward Thalia, who received them, smiling, and returned them.  He nodded up at Lexi again.  She nodded back again, helplessly.  Clearly it was up to Lexi to take hold of the situation.

Now, to do some dishes and sleep.  Yeah, I go to sleep at 9:30, wanna fight?  (I do not want to fight.)

The First Wave

Pavowski10 Comments

I approached this week’s Flash Fiction Challenge from Chuck with a healthy dose of self-doubt.  I tend to be a bit long-winded when I write, and the limitation of 1000 words spread out into 10 chapters felt tailor-made to put the screws to my brain.  I pondered on it, meditated on it, kicked around about four or five different story ideas before finally arriving at one I liked and then mutating it into something horrifying.

Honestly, I don’t know if my short stories are trending dark because I’m writing comedy or if I wanted to write comedy because I’ve got these dark stories bubbling up.  One way or another, this one’s probably the darkest yet, and I don’t really know what to make of it except to let you know that this is all artifice and is probably the product of too many crime procedurals and alien movies.

I wasn’t sure about the first person viewpoint, but I didn’t know how else to write it.

In fact I’m not sure about the story as a whole.  I just don’t know if it works.  But this blog is not about what works, it’s about THE WORK.  So here’s the latest.  Like all my short stories thus far, it’s edited only a little bit (mostly to get down to the word limit).  If you’re out there, let me know what you think.

Coming in at 1000 words on the nose:

The First Wave

1.

Things aren’t supposed to happen like this.

I’m a scout, not a soldier, but the link has been silent so long that they must think I’m dead or lost.

It’s been almost eleven months since I was last contacted.  The feeling is unmistakable.  A tingling at the back of the neck, a rush of blood to the head, and then a ringing in the ears that means a transmission is coming.  The body becomes a lightning rod for sensation, and underneath the sensory rush that follows, the messages can be heard.

So when my skin tingles while I’m waiting in line at the Starbucks to sample my two hundred thirty – third flavor/texture combination, I know in an instant that I’m not forgotten, that today may be the day it begins.

But something’s wrong.  The waitress notices me. Looks at me for half a second too long, the way you look at a misspelled sign. You know what it’s supposed to say, what it should look like, but it’s wrong, and you pause to process it.  She smiles to cover it – very cagey – but I know what she saw.

Maybe she doesn’t know, though, so I ask for her phone number and she gives it to me, scribbling it artlessly on my coffee sleeve.  I return her empty smile and beat it out of there, cursing myself.  She distracted me, and I missed the transmission.  I can only hope they’ll send it again.

2.

Back home I scan all the frequencies and search my residence for signs of contact, but come up empty. The receptors are as blank as they’ve been for months, their green glowing grids blipping ceaselessly.  Maybe the shiver was a false alarm.

But if that’s so, what did she see?

3.

A tap at the window wakes me up.   I fly to the sill and throw it open, and the freezing air smashes me in the face. No signs of life on the ledge or on the street below. I don’t look up; never up.  If I look up and they’re there, then it’s over. If I look and there’s nothing, it only reminds me I’m alone.

I’m so tired from loneliness.  Tomorrow I’ll call that waitress, even though I’ll probably have to kill her.

4.

Somebody was here last night.  Whoever it was took something or…  moved something or…  I don’t know what it is, but there’s a wrongness here, pressing outward against the walls, an over-inflated balloon ready to burst. I tear the apartment to pieces looking for what’s lost but it’s gone, stolen, maybe destroyed.

I remember that I have to call that waitress. She can’t see my place like this – it looks like a lunatic lives here. I methodically put everything back exactly the way it was before I lost it.  I even put the dirty dishes back on the table.  It only takes me three hours.

5.

We met for sandwiches. I asked why she didn’t want to meet for coffee like normal humans do and she looked at me like I was stupid. I’m not stupid; just because you serve coffee doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a coffee. I think she thought I was joking because she laughed, her pretty cheeks stretching back the corners of her mouth.

She knows.

6.

When she left me, the transmission came through clear as day. The time is not right. She cannot interfere. I tried to question them, but as ever, my words spiraled out into the ether, and no further directions were forthcoming.  I was, as always, on my own.

7.

It’s unsettling how little people look out for their own safety.  Lock the front doors, lock the windows, and call it a night.  But my waitress doesn’t lock her balcony door, and she only lives on the 7th floor.  A quick shin up the fire escape, a shimmy along the ledge to her window, and I’m with her.  Granted, most people wouldn’t risk their necks on this three-inch concrete outcrop, but thoughts of my own mortality were taken from me long ago.

It smells of her, and it smells of coffee, and I’m overcome by sadness and doubt.  In a few moments, she’ll be gone; all that she is and was and ever might be will be erased.  For a long moment I pause at her bedroom door, my hand slick on the handle, the blade humming in my pocket.

The act sickens me.  I’m on her before she’s even awake, the silver sings across her throat, and my hands clamp down on her windpipe as the life sprays out.  In seconds, she’s gone, but I stay there, holding her, hyperventilating.

The parasites ooze out of my ears and flow down my arms in a grey-green river, mingling with the blood and rushing in through the smile in her neck.  The horrible sucking sound of their ingress turns my stomach until I hear it, the transmission again, whispering under the tumult  in my brain.

And I understand.  I’m not scouting for the first wave.  I am the first wave.  It begins with me.

8.

Giddy with hope and purpose, I convey her body delicately out onto the balcony, where she will find the moonlight that she needs.  I stay with her until the sun is almost up, then I leave.  She’ll need some time.

9.

The next day, she is back at work.  I order number two hundred thirty-four, and she smiles at me knowingly.  They are hard at work in her.  I smile back and drink my coffee thoughtfully.  The sweetness is almost too much to bear.

10.

I step outside and feel the sun on my shoulders.  I look up, for the first time in a lifetime.  They’re not up there.  But I’m not alone anymore.

A woman, engrossed in her phone conversation, bumps me, dropping her armload of papers.  I help her pick them up, but when I hand them back to her, she looks at me for a little too long.  I feel my neck start to tingle.