Month: December 2014

All in One Night

Pavowski11 Comments

Chuck’s challenge for the week: Holiday Horror.

At first I was delighted by this challenge, but now I feel horrible about what I’ve written. I guess even in my jaded, irreverent heart, there are still some things that you just shouldn’t mess with.

That said, Santa takes a dark turn in this one. Spoiler Alert. It ain’t pretty.

 

All in One Night

By every rubric, Bucky Burkhalter was a naughty kid of the highest degree.

When the other kids cleaned up their act, starting after Halloween when parents began dropping Santa’s name, Bucky redoubled his efforts. He terrorized his teachers by leaving upturned tacks in their chairs and erasing their blackboards when they were out of the room. He harried his classmates with endless wedgies, noogies, spitballs to the back of the head, and slammings against lockers. He trapped stray cats in the neighborhood and tortured them, twisting their ears and lopping off the ends of their tails.

Bucky’s mom stayed later and later at work, and his dad stopped coming home at all. Which meant more time alone for Bucky to practice his reign of terror.

On Christmas Eve, while the other kids lay in their beds dreaming of sleds and wagons and video game systems, Bucky roamed the streets throwing eggs at cars, yanking icicle lights off of houses, and depositing dog turds in mailboxes. He arrived home just before midnight and found the lights on in the house. Mom was passed out upstairs, one hand still limply cradling a half-drunk bottle of Kentucky whiskey. Dad was gone for the fourth night in a row. But as he crept in through the rickety screen door and padded across the peeling linoleum to steal a beer from the fridge, Bucky’s heart froze in his throat. He smelled something. Through the haze of stale cigarette smoke and the lingering air of mildew and despair, the impossible aroma of cookies and peppermint tickled his nostrils. Somebody was here.

Bucky ducked back outside, wrapped his sweaty, stubby fingers around the Louisville Slugger he’d stolen from Bradley Allen, and stole into the house ready to swing for the fences. His mom didn’t cook. More likely some insufferable grandparent had come by to “rescue” him, like his dad’s mom had tried to do a year ago. (Mom threw a knife at her and then called the cops.) Stopping at the hallway to the living room, Bucky took a deep breath. Whoever it was was in there. Had a fire going. He stole a glance, but all he could see was a pair of big, shiny black boots propped up on the ottoman–dad’s threadbare, puce-colored armchair was turned away from the door, obscuring his view.

“You can come in, Bucky,” came a voice as deep and hearty as a bowl of beef stew on a cold night. “And you might as well put down that bat, too.”

Gobsmacked, Bucky let the bat fall from his fingers and wandered, dreamlike, into the room.

It was his living room, all right. Same old dusty room. Bare wooden floor. Frayed rug in front of the fireplace that hadn’t been used in ages, though now a fire crackled merrily there, throwing a jubilant light across the depressing furniture. Bucky gave the chair a wide berth as he passed it, and couldn’t keep his mouth from dropping open as he beheld the man in a bright red suit sitting there, sipping from a mug with his white-gloved hands, the froth of some steaming beverage caking his prodigious mustache under his ruddy cheeks.

Santa Claus.

It was every kid’s dream, even Bucky’s, and even though every instinct in his head told him that this was all wrong–this wasn’t supposed to happen, you aren’t just supposed to walk into your living room and see Santa Claus–he went all gibbery and started fawning anyway

“Santa Claus? It’s really you?”

“Sure as snow,” the old man replied with a wink.

“What are you–” Bucky started to ask, but realized that he was probably in trouble. He’d been a bit naughty lately. He chafed at the word “naughty” in his mind but couldn’t help thinking it anyway. This was Santa. He clammed up.

Santa seemed to sense his disquiet. He offered Bucky a plate from the side table, mounded high with the most aromatic chocolate chip cookies he’d ever smelled. “Help yourself, son.”

Gratefully, Bucky stuffed a cookie in his mouth and chewed. It tasted even better than it smelled, and his teeth grew sticky with chocolate.

With a grandfatherly smile, Santa sat back and folded his hands across his belly. “Now, then. I imagine by now you’ve done some thinking, and you must know that you’re on the naughty list.”

Bucky’s eyes darted around the room. The cookie felt like it had turned to cement in his mouth; he swallowed it down like a pill and gave a somber nod, his head inclined toward the floor.

Santa huffed out his mustache and removed his spectacles, folding them in one gloved hand. “I see everything, you know. Got it all up here.” With his other hand he tapped at his temple, just below the fuzzy band of his hat. “Mind like a trap, even after all these years.”

Bucky grinned a little, the corners of his freckly cheeks pulling up, even though he felt stupid and ashamed. Santa was real, really real, and he’d been bad. Worse than bad. He’d been awful.

A tear squeezed itself out of Bucky’s evil little eyes, and in a flash Santa popped up from the chair, knelt by the boy, and caught it on a gloved finger. “Hey, there. Listen to me, son. I know you’ve had a rough time of it. Your mother and father have been on my list for years, and, well, they’ll probably stay that way. And you, just a kid. Mom’s drunk herself half to death upstairs and your dad’s… well. He’s not here, is he? And you didn’t know what to do about it, and you lashed out. Isn’t that right?”

Bucky was choking back sobs now, tears staining his cheeks. He nodded, mute.

The old man clucked his tongue, stood, and taking Bucky by the shoulders, straightened him up to look him in the eye. “Let’s go for a ride, eh?” And, wrapping his arm around Bucky, walked him toward the fireplace. Bucky gave Santa one nervous look, but Santa just chuckled, ducked into the fireplace, and with a whoosh they were standing on the roof, surrounded by a gaggle of reindeer, lazily pawing at the uneven shingles.

And the sleigh. Oh, the sleigh. Fire-engine red and almost glowing in the moonlight, Bucky couldn’t help but run toward it. He stopped, laying one hand upon its edge, and cast a glance back at Santa, who gave him that grandfatherly grin again and motioned with his hand. Go ahead. It was all the encouragement Bucky needed. He clambered into the smooth, leathery seat. The sleigh seemed to purr as he did so, as if it had been waiting for him. The reindeer whickered nervously, and Santa hopped in beside him, taking the reins in his hand.

“Your house was my last stop in town,” Santa explained with a twinkle in his eye. “We’re off. Hyah!” And with a crack of the reins, the reindeer soared off into the night, tugging the sleigh along in their wake. The cold wind whistled in Bucky’s hair, and the lights of town dwindled to pinpricks in the dark.

For a while, Santa said nothing. Billy thought he saw the old man’s eyes watering, but thought it must have been the wind.

“Santa, can I ask you something?”

Santa looked at the boy and wiped at his eyes. “Sure, son. We have some time.”

“How do you visit all the houses in the world, all in one night?”

Santa exhaled heavily, and fixed his gaze on the bouncing flanks of the reindeer.

“It’s magic, right?”

At that, Santa chuckled. “Of a sort, Bucky. Magic of a sort.”

“Is it the reindeer?”

The old man shook his head. “The reindeer are very dear to me, and they have a magic of their own. And the elves have magic, too. Even I have a bit of magic. Flying, seeing into the hearts of children… those are neat little magic tricks. But to visit every house in the world in just one night?” Santa stared at Bucky now, his eyes suddenly cold and far away. “No, that’s outside the bounds of the laws of this world. That requires another kind of magic altogether.”

Santa got quiet again, and Bucky felt himself growing nervous. If Santa was uneasy about something, shouldn’t he be worried?

Almost to himself, Santa began to mumble. “…hate it when they do this. Why do they have to ask…” Then with frightening urgency, Santa grabbed Bucky by the arm. “Look. I want you to know something. It’s not your fault you’re on the naughty list. Your parents gave you a raw deal, and nobody in your life has thought twice about you for a long, long time. But I’m not here to save you.”

Bucky yanked his arm away, and Santa let him go, but there was nothing else Bucky could do, nowhere for him to go. All around them was the emptiness of the endless night, and the ground, thousands of feet below. “I’m sorry, Bucky,” Santa continued, and now there were definitely tears creeping into his eyes. “I really am. But magic has a price, and this sleigh is driven by the worst magic I’ve ever known.”

The wind seemed to go quiet, then, as Santa pulled on a lever set in the floor of the sleigh. A trapdoor opened under Bucky’s feet: a gap through which Bucky felt he should have seen the lights of land far below, but which only contained a blackness blacker than the inside of his eyelids. A horrid chorus of disembodied, agonized voices issued from the hole. For an instant, Bucky thought about jumping out of the sleigh and taking his chances with the fall, but before he could move, a thick, grasping tentacle lanced out of the void within the sleigh and entangled his ankle in a death grip. He screamed and grabbed onto Santa’s arm.

“I’m sorry, Bucky,” Santa cried. “It takes one every year. I give toys to all the rest of the children in the world to make up for it.”

Bucky’s fingernails sought purchase on Santa’s red velveteen sleeve, snarling and snagging the fabric. He’d have to have his wife mend it again. But the beast had the boy now, dragging him slowly into the void in the heart of the sleigh. With a howl, the boy disappeared and the hatch hissed shut, and all was silence in the stratosphere but for the tinkling of the sleigh bells on the reindeer harness.

Santa dabbed at his eyes and ground his teeth as time and space twisted themselves around the sleigh. “On, Dasher!” he called, as the sleigh streaked through the night.

No Time Like the Present

Pavowski10 Comments

We live in the past.

socs-badge

Not just in the retrospective, nostalgic, times-were-better-when sense of the past. Literally, we can’t escape the past. Because information can only travel as fast as the speed of light, less the resistance of our crude organic matter, what we perceive as the present is a moment that is already a dim memory of the cosmos.

Of course, we’re not that far in the past. Only milliseconds, really. But the phenomenon stretches out into infinity the farther away the observed thing is from the observer. In fact, astronomers have recently concluded that their telescopes are looking at some objects so distant that the light from those objects was literally born in the same instant that our universe was. Which baffles the mind, really. Because here we are, the result of billions of years of senseless collisions of quarks and particles hurtling through the void, and we can simultaneously perceive the (almost) present and the beginning of knowable time.

Knowable for now, anyway.

The cool thing about science (and, incidentally, why I long ago decided that I much prefer science to religion) is that science can change its mind about things. Can, and does, actually. The scientific community is willing to reverse any number of preconceived notions the moment they learn a thing that disagrees with those notions. Which is just one reason among many that nerds around the world were (and still are) so excited about the work going on with the Large Hadron Collider. Every day, scientists are pushing the boundaries of the things we know. Sometimes, they learn what they expect to learn. Sometimes, their discoveries force them to virtually rewrite history. But what science doesn’t do is disagree with what’s staring it in the face. Science doesn’t sit there–as humans are wont to do–and say, “no, we don’t like what we’ve discovered here, that doesn’t jive with what we believe… let’s ignore it until it goes away.”

But I got off topic. Most animals are creatures that live in the present. They act on instinct. A wolf in the wild doesn’t ponder what its dad was thinking when it chomped him in the neck that one time as a child. The wolf goes for the kill because the kill is there, NOW. Humans, on the other hand, reach ceaselessly for the past. We romanticize. Reminisce. But the fact is, we don’t know what now looks like.

Not only can we not process information that fast–literally barring us from ever existing in the real, crackling cutting edge of the now–but everything we see and learn and experience gets filtered through the lens of the past, because we can’t help remembering it.

I feel like I’m drifting again. I’ve got a wicked cold setting in and it’s clouding what’s already a pretty murky train of thought. I think my point is this:

What would our world be like if we could experience the present? The wicked, razor-sharp edge of perception, the collisions of all the being and nothingness that drives everything in the universe? All thought takes time. Reacting takes time. Speaking to a friend takes time. If we could make perception and communication truly instantaneous, where would that put us?

I was going to try to answer my own question, but I don’t know if my disease-addled brain can manage it, so I’m going to leave it there. Maybe I’ll read this in the morning and realize that this entire ramble was just a tailspin down a condemned rabbit hole.

Or maybe it’s one I’ve fallen down before.

oooOOOOOOooo no, probably not.

See, this is what happens when pressure on my brain from an accumulation of mucus mixes with a cocktail of pseudoephedrine and wine. The safeguards shut down and the Id-Writer breaks loose and trashes the place.

Sigh. The prompt was “present.” Christmas is coming. Presents are awesome. The end.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Glitter Pills

PavowskiLeave a comment

This one’s gonna be brief.

Because wow. I’m a pretty open-minded guy, and I always try real hard to empathize even when the opposing view doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that I don’t think I can be convinced on this one.

Apparently, they make these things called “glitter pills.” Now, I’m going to be brutally honest and admit that I’ve not done a lot of research. Nor am I going to. The thought of this research frightens me, and I’m sure it leads down dark corridors of the internet that I would rather not know about.

Because poop is a thing best left alone. Parents, I’ll grant, should be concerned with their kids’ poop. I’ve certainly been guilty of that here at the blarg (sorry about that). Doctors, nurses if you have a gastrointestinal issue, perhaps, might be clinically interested in your samples. Aside from that… ugh, why?

Why am I even talking about it? Because apparently if you take these pills your poop will sparkle.

A cursory glance at a Google search tells me is that the manufacturers of said pills claim that their product is not designed to, uh, enhance your poop. But what a further final glance through the crack in the door before I slam it shut and run in the other direction tells me is that that’s exactly what these pills are used for in most cases. SH!T GOLD, they proudly proclaim.

So, pop a pill and your insides will sparkle. Sparkly poop, sparkly pee. This will show my age, but when I read that, all I’m thinking about are kidney infections and intestinal obstructions, and a costly trip to the emergency room. But that’s a small price to pay, I suppose, for living our your fantasy of becoming a magical unicorn that literally craps rainbows.

Okay, that’s all I can stand even thinking about it. This has been a public service announcement. I just wanted you to know these things are out there. Do with that information what you will. I feel filthy even having googled the subject. I’m off for a thirty-minute, skin-searing shower. Now if I could only scrub down the inside of my brain…

 

Quarantine Zone

Pavowski2 Comments

It’s a well-established fact that children are essentially walking germ repositories. You combine an uncontrollable urge to grab and play with any- and everything that drifts in front of their maniacal little eyes with an inability to remain upright for more than thirty seconds at a time that results in a lot of contact with the ground and top it off with the mental lack of development to know that hand-washing is a good thing, and it’s no surprise that germs stick to them like lint on my nice pants. (Seriously, I have never had pants that attract lint like these navy slacks. I feel like a candy cane on the lawn and the ants are swarming.)

This time, though, it was my wife who brought the bug home. One of those feels-like-a-cold-but-it’s-not-really-a-full-blown-cold things, with the stuffiness and the sore throat and the general feeling of weakness and impending doom that these things bring. Regularly I ask what I can do to help, and regularly she responds, “kill me.”

She’s been miserable for almost a week, and when you couple that with the fact that the babies are regressing and waking up in the middle of the night, well… let’s just say it adds up not to be fun times in the house of Pav. Trouble is, my lovely wife wakes up if a mouse farts in the house, whereas I can sleep through crying kids, howling wind in the trees… hell, I could probably sleep through a shootout in the cul-de-sac. So naturally, she wakes up way before I can hope to when the kids wake up in the night, so I have virtually no chance to beat her to the punch on handling the kids. In short, she’s been not only miserable but also exhausted, and there is precious little I can do to alleviate the trouble.

Contagion was a horrifying film that came out a few years ago about one of those super-bugs that comes out of nowhere and wipes out the better part of the population in the space of a few months. Fantastic viewing for times like these in its own right, but it taught me a word that I wish I could unlearn: Fomites. A fomite is any otherwise inanimate or harmless object which is tainted with the infectious microorganisms from a doomed person, and the film brilliantly illustrates the concept by showing closeups of fingers touching elevator buttons, lips sipping from cups of coffee, hands passing cash back and forth, shoulders brushing through revolving doors. In short, GERMS ARE EVERYWHERE AND YOU’RE DOOMED.

Somehow, strangely, I was laying low and avoiding the disease. But when you’re a jerk like me you can only avoid fate for so long. Also, my wife and I share a lot of the same hoodies when we lounge around the house (yes, we can afford heat, but no, that doesn’t mean we use it all the time, do I look like I’m made of money). She used one of my favorites for an entire day the other day, coughing and spewing her dread spray into its shoulders and elbows and didn’t tell me, then I wore said hoodie while doing laundry this weekend. Essentially I was wearing the Queen Bee of the fomite colony in the house.

So now I have it.

And my wife is a lovely woman, but she takes a disconcerting pleasure in the fact that I have succumbed to this plague after she’s suffered with it for a week. I don’t know, I’d think there would be a little bit of sympathy or something given that she knows both the drear dankness I’m feeling and the creeping death in my future. But no. With poorly-masked glee she asks me how I’m feeling. Trying not to grumble too much, I mention the goopy drip in the back of my throat. She grins and claps with delight and tells me that the stuffy, my-head-is-full-of-slime feeling is coming next, and I wake up the next morning and there it is: my head feels like it weighs an extra five pounds with all the snot I’m piling up. And I look to her for pity as we wake up and she only laughs.

To her credit, I usually resist these things and she usually doesn’t, so I guess I can excuse a bit of schadenfreude. But that doesn’t make things any easier to swallow when my throat feels like garden gnomes have been going after it with a potato peeler and my skull feels like it’s crammed with cottage cheese.

The only hope at this point is that the kids don’t catch it. If the kids catch this bug, abandon all hope.

There’s Productivity, and then there’s Productivity

Pavowski8 Comments

Momentum matters.

The things you’ve been doing are the things you are going to keep doing until you make a concerted effort to stop doing them. The things you haven’t been doing are the things you will continue to not do until you force yourself to do them.

That being said, I am having doubts lately as to the quality of the things I’m doing in regards to my writing.

I’m guest-posting at LindaGHill’s blog, which is kind of a cool thing … not entirely unlike giving a fifteen-year-old the keys to a… god, I was going to say a Lamborghini but that’s not the hotness in cars anymore, is it? (God, it sucks getting older. Did you know that Friends is now showing reruns on Nick at Nite?) Anyway, I made a post there introducing myself and I mentioned all the writing I’ve gotten done this year and it got me thinking.

Because for all this capital-W “Writing” I’ve been doing this year, I’ve done more than my fair share of drooling nonsense onto the virtual pages of this blarg. At a rough estimate, I’ve probably got almost half as many words again here on the blarg as I’ve committed to the novel. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — word count on the novel has slowed necessarily from almost 1200 words daily to about 100 (I’m editing, so some in, some out), and I can probably say that my active time working on the novel has declined from roughly an hour daily to more like thirty or forty-five minutes (editing feels so much more mentally taxing than drafting). I could be way off, but it feels like I’m not working on it nearly as much as when I was drafting. Meanwhile, the word vomit I’ve done here on the blarg has remained more or less constant.

Which is okay. I’m not complaining, because even when I’m not working on the novel, I’m kicking ideas around in my head, thinking about how changes would play out, about passages that need moving and restructuring, and dreaming up ways to break the story even more than I already have (and currently, it’s in more pieces than the wineglass I dropped the other night… not that that particular incident is in any way related to my novel, I promise).

But there’s the rub. Can I qualify “thinking time” as “working” with my novel? Can I justify a day wherein I didn’t actually sit down in front of my manuscript at all? If I wrote a blarg post on a day that I didn’t Write, was I still productive?

I want to say yes, because I’ve thought from the beginning that this blarg was as much an active piece of my Writing as a distraction from it: equal parts sharpening stone and shunting circuit (heh heh… shunt). From the beginning I’ve used my drivel in this space to puzzle through problems with characters, plot holes, scenarios and obstacles, and in a fair few of those situations I’ve actually found some new inspiration just from talking to myself for a while. But I’d be lying if I said that this page didn’t serve the equally important function of distracting me from The Project. Blarging about tv shows or books or shiny new things or toddlers or running or whatever else is front-of-mind on a given day is the pressure release valve on my overtaxed water heater. It’s low-stakes (if not no-stakes) relaxed musing that takes me away from the self-imposed pressure to produce quality work for the novel.

But is it productive?

On the one hand, I’m of a similar mind on writing as I am on running. Some runners who run exceptionally long distances or blistering fast paces refer to practice runs without a specific distance or pace goal as “junk miles”: miles that you get in just because you need to, because your training plan calls for them. But even when I was running more than 20 miles a week I couldn’t think of my runs that way. Every day I get out there feels like a victory, even if I’m hobbled and can only run a quarter of a mile from the house before I limp back. Every run is a good run. Likewise, every word written is a good word, even if it’s a horrible word, like “moist”. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every detour into excessively long lists to pad my word count sharpens the knife that little bit more. It’s all practice. Every step on the path teaches me how to step properly in the future, and every misstep reminds me to watch out for wonky rocks and tangling roots.

Then again, there’s the inescapable truth that time spent writing on the blarg is time not spent working on the novel, and time not spent working on the novel feels a little bit like wasted time. I waited long enough in my life to even leave the station on this little excursion; it feels sacrilegious to put it off any more than I have to.

Often at the end of one of these rambles, I come to find out that I really felt a certain way about the issue in question, I simply didn’t know it before I put it in words. That’s not the case here. I really enjoy the writing I do on the blarg–I’m even proud of it at times–but it’s a poor substitute for working on the novel. Then again, the unemotional side of my brain says, better junk writing than no writing at all. All that considered, there’s no denying that I do feel a sort of accomplishment after writing anything including a pointless blarg rumination, even if that something is just a rant about baby poop.

If anything, then, I guess it comes down to two kinds of productivity. Productive productivity (genuinely gets something done that needs doing) and Hedonistic productivity (feels productive but isn’t, or gets something done that doesn’t necessarily need doing). I used to read a lot of articles on Lifehacker, which is a sort of mecca for all things productivity- and efficiency-related, and there is a tendency for some of the techniques and products discussed over there to be more about cleverness than actual usefulness, placing them squarely in the latter category: the Hedonistically productive. There comes a point where the things we do become more about feeling clever, good, productive, or useful than actually being clever, good, productive, or useful. I think this blarg toes the line. One way or another, though, it’s hard to picture my writing process without the blarg, so I guess I’m stuck with it.

And so are you, if you’ve stuck with me this far.