Year: 2014

Clank

Pavowski2 Comments

Chuck’s challenge for the week: Write the middle of a story.  Our goal:  Take the 500-word story begun by another author, and continue it.

I hijacked the story started by one Clay Ashby, Clank.  It’s got some of my favorite stuff: Sci-Fi, mystery, robots, a sense of desperation and lostness.  In short, it would be right at home here in my Flash Fiction collection.

Clay’s bit begins the story.  My bit follows the asterisk.

 

Clank

My eyes opened with a metallic clatter. A single dim lamp reflected its yellow hue on the ceiling above. Instinctually I was able to sit up and balance myself on the table. At least I think it was instinct because I certainly don’t remember ever doing it before. My legs dangled over the edge and my feet didn’t quite touch the floor. The thought of lifting myself off the table and falling, even just that little bit, worried me, but I did it. My feet clanked on the rusty floor as I stumbled, trying to find my balance. With my feet spread wide I was able to stabilize, so I lifted my head to look around.

Large gears turned inside the walls, visible through crumbled sheets of wood and iron. My head began to whistle, beginning at a high pitch and increasing until it was nearly impossible to hear. The sound was terrifying and at first quite annoying, but the mild vibration was soothing, and it seemed to help me keep my balance. I took my first step, a step that was a little too big, but my foot landed on the floor and held firm. The vibration inside my head was helping me. I was sure of it, so I took several more steps. No problem at all! The vibration in my head made it almost easy.

There was only one exit from the room, a dark hallway. I decided to go. I didn’t really have any other choice. Every step I took was loud. It made me uncomfortable, like I was being watched. I tried to step softly, but it was no use. Metal contacting metal simply could not be made quiet. The hallway continued on without ending and my deliberate steps made progress slow. The glow of lamps from the room behind me began to fade. With every step it faded more. I wasn’t sure how much further I could go, so I stopped, unsure if another step forward would be wise. I was able to turn my head all the way around and look at where I had come from, a faint yellow spot now. There didn’t seem to be any reason to return, except fear. The room was vacant and square, with nothing useful inside. My only option was to move onward into the darkness.

I took only one more step, no clank. Imagine if I had turned back at that moment. I was only one step away from a new type of ground, but I would have never known it. With my arms slowly flailing, in search of obstacles, I continued into the pitch black. Still no clank from my feet. The silence combined with the dark made me feel like I was walking into nothingness, but that eerie feeling was certainly better than the creepy clank from before. At least I felt hidden now.

When my face met a solid steel door I thought I had finally made it to the end. I leaned into it and pushed. The metal moaned from stress and a few rivets popped, but it gave way easily enough. Unfortunately this door, my supposed salvation, revealed almost certain doom.

*

As the door creaked open, antiseptic white light spilled out from the room. Beneath my feet, muffling my footsteps, was a lush carpet covered in cascading geometric designs.  It led into a room that, not unlike the first, was small and square.  Unlike my room, this room was furnished with the soft carpet, and a single bed in the center of the far wall.  In the bed was a human shape, its head propped up on a ponderous stack of dingy pillows, its body bundled beneath a thick sheet.

I didn’t know how I knew the word “human”, but the shape made sense to me the moment I saw it, and the word for the shape sprung into my circuits unbidden.  It was a male human, spotted and wrinkled with age, a wisp of white hair fluttering above its head.  I hadn’t noticed the tower of wires next to the bed, but the human grabbed this tower and wheeled it next to him as it advanced toward me on steps as shaky as my first ones.  The wires snaked from a contraption set atop the tower, dangled by the human’s knees, and ended at an interface in the human’s arm.  No, not wires.  Tubes, delivering a cocktail of silvery liquids into its bloodstream.  It stared at me, this human, its eyes wide and red-rimmed and disbelieving.  It reached out a withered hand to touch my shoulder, my fingers, my face.  Then it squinted, appraising me, measuring me.  Finally, it spoke.

“Identify yourself.”

The command surged through me, irresistible and pervasive.  I would have answered if I could, but my circuits did not contain any information to identify me, no matter how much my processors spun and whirred.  A bit of loose machinery in my torso wrenched itself loose with the effort and a resounding “Clank” echoed through the room.

He frowned.  “Report status.”

Again, I felt compelled to answer, and again, my drives buzzed and hummed, but I could not respond.  It began to dawn on me that there were gaps and rusted connections all throughout my cognitive circuits, whatever those were.  I blinked at the man, my eyelids clicking softly.  He blinked back, his mouth tightening into a frown.

A familiar frown.

“Do you know who I am?”

The compulsion overtook me again, but this time, my neural network lit up and my consciousness flooded with images: a classroom full of people, a dark lab after hours, a chalkboard covered with equations, the soft face of a beautiful woman, the grave face of a doctor, a medical chart covered with indecipherable figures, and hours and hours of treatment and tubes and injections and suffering.   The heavy clunk of ancient clockwork intensified within the walls.  The high-pitched hum in my head was causing my entire body to resonate.

The old man whacked me in the head, a thin “clunk” reverberating through my metal skull.  The images departed.

“Do you know who I am?“

There are Things in the Well

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I’m in just under the wire for this week’s flash fiction challenge.

Chuck’s challenge for the week:  The beginning of a story.  With no further guidance than that, I foundered for a while before settling on this.  I can only imagine that the challenge for this week will be to complete the story started by another writer, so I wanted to make sure there’s lots of room for interpretation while still setting a mood, should anybody end up finishing this one.  This beginning certainly makes me uncomfortable, so I guess it’s a success, at that.

 

There Are Things in the Well

“Here she comes, Elvy.”

Elvert crunched on a handful of candy and shaded his eyes against the sun.  “New girl?”

Trom kicked at a snail and nodded toward the twig of a girl walking down the dirt road about fifty yards distant.  “Leza, I think.”

The stones of the well were cool against his back, and in the sweltering humidity he was reluctant to leave them behind.  Still, she’d only be new in town for so long.  He stood and stretched and spit his lime candy into the well, and jogged off to intercept her, with Trom following like a hungry cat in his wake.

“Leez!” Elvert called when he was close enough to make out the pattern on her backpack.  The new girl said nothing, just quickened her pace.

“Hey, Leez!”  Trom shouted.

She folded her arms and bowed her head, stringy blond hair falling in a curtain across her face.  The boys fell into step beside her while she did her best to ignore them.  They dogged her steps, staring at her, until she felt uncomfortable enough to speak.  “It’s Leza.”

“You’re new here, ain’t ya?”  Elvert spit a pink gob on the grass next to the road.

Leza gave the tiniest of nods.  Trom stepped in front of her and she had to pull up short, hugging her notebook to her chest.  He folded his arms and laughed.  “You don’t know about the initiation, do you?”

She rolled her eyes and tried to step around Trom, but Elvert cut her off.  “Of course she don’t know, Trom.  We gotta show her.”

“I’m gonna be late for dinner,” Leza protested uselessly.

“Won’t take long.  It’s right over there,” Elvert said, pointing over her shoulder.

“What is?”

“The well,” Trom said, drawing his lips into a silent “ooh” after he said it.

Leza turned to look.  There was nothing in the field but the squat, dingy-looking well sticking up like a tombstone in the tall grass.  Her stomach felt heavy looking at it.  She thought to run, but Elvert’s sweaty arm wrapped around her shoulder and she felt herself being pulled toward the well.

“I can’t,” she wailed, but in a few seconds the boys pressed her belly against the grimy stones and she felt them leaning with her over the lip to peer down into the depths.  Strands of hair wafted into her eyes and mouth in the sudden breeze that issued from the dark. The bottom of the well was eclipsed in blackness, but silvery reflections twisted and writhed far below.  The faraway hissing she’d thought was the sound of water now seemed alive and excited at the three heads peeking over the edge.

But her head was the only one peeking over.  The boys had disappeared behind her back.  She lifted herself to find them, but just as she moved she felt strong hands on her back and then she was tumbling through space, the cold stones racing past her, the hissing growing louder.

 

Launching the Edit Express

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It’s underway.

I’ve read about three hundred blog posts and articles and comments on editing your novel and come to the conclusion that it’s just time to jump in the deep end and get on with it.  No sense in beleaguering the issue and putting it off — I had a secret goal to complete this novel within the span of a year, and if that’s going to happen, it’s time to get on the stick.  Leading up to it, I was terrified.  Sure I’d be unable to identify the errors or that I would wrongly let the crappy stuff slide through or worse, that I’d stomp out the good bits.

Well, I’m three days in.  The water was a shock at first, but I’m acclimating fast.  I’ve no idea if I’m doing it properly or not.  Basically I’m reading the first draft, jotting notes on a to-do list, and trying to track the major developments to make sure they make sense.  I’m also tidying up the copy as I go, fixing the finicky bits and cleaning up obvious errors and boring prose.

Some of the stuff that needs attention jumps out at me.  I overused the HELL out of the “sigh”, be it the exasperated sigh, the relieved sigh, the boy-that-turned-out-exactly-the-way-I-expected sigh.  So a lot of those sighs are in serious need of makeovers.  If there’s a better, cleaner, more interesting solution that comes ready to mind, I fix it.  If not, I highlight it for attention on the next pass.  There’s also some occasional redundancy that I wouldn’t have necessarily expected from myself — hey, everybody thinks he writes pretty decently and clearly the first time through, right? — which is easy enough to fix.  Like, I encountered a sentence today that said something along the lines of, “He picked up the glass and took a sip as he picked up the glass.”  Past me, in full-on Id-Writer mode, wrote that, thinking it was, you know, not total nonsense.  I guess the flow of the first draft isn’t always so clear and collected.

Then there’s other stuff that hides in the weeds, hoping I’ll glide past without noticing it.  I parsed a sentence wherein my hero “sat down at his desk, clutching her note in his hand,” and was about to keep on reading when I realized there had been no mention of a note in previous pages.  I asked the Id-Writer about it and he produced some vague snarls and growls that might have communicated something about a note and how it ended up in the hero’s possession, but it was about as easy to decipher as a bunch of feathers and teeth cast on a scrying table.  There are portions of the draft where Past Me left a trail of breadcrumbs for Future Me (now, I guess, Present Me) to follow: “go back and write in a scene where he cuts off the finger of his greatest rival,” for instance.  This was not one of those times.  So I’m in the dark about whatever brilliant idea I thought I had at the moment I was having it, and now I get to go prowling through the woods after it with the dim flashlight of my dubious memory.

The upshot of the process so far (and I know, I know, I’m a whopping three days in, what do I know yet about upshots — the sharknado hasn’t even speculated about the eventuality of getting real yet) is that I feel like I’m doing a pretty solid job of stomping out the charred, overcooked bits of prose where I was obviously buzzing the tower.  There haven’t been a lot of them — yet — but there are passages that stick out like a thumb that was hit with a hammer, treated with salve, became infected when the salve entered the bloodstream through a papercut, and then got hit with a hammer again.  Obviously out of character for the story or even for me.  There have literally been moments when I sat at the desk wondering if it was really possible that I wrote the words on the page in front of me, even though to think otherwise is ludicrous.  But then I think about that Id-Writer on his chain in the unlit basement and I recall those days when I’d churn out a thousand, or twelve hundred, or sixteen hundred words without even realizing the passage of time…

Not to make light of a serious mental condition, but I am starting to wonder, are writers in general as schizophrenic as I feel?  I honestly feel that the first draft of this novel was a conglomeration whacked together by not just me, but by three or four different versions of me, each with a different sense of humor, sense of timing, sense of language.  Then I wonder if that fragmented perception is a strike against the novel intrinsically (the story itself is fraught with problems that make it feel fragmented) or against the Me that wrote it in the first place (I’m fragmented as a writer because I don’t know myself or my voice or how to even tell a fargoing story yet).  Then I wonder if I’m not overthinking the whole thing (not that I’d ever be guilty of that) or even using parentheses too much (as if that were even possible).

All this, and I’m all of, oh, about six thousand words into the draft.  It feels like the start of a long road trip in a car with a gaggle of mildly psychotic socially inept know-it-alls.  Except in this metaphor, the radio is busted so we’ve got nothing to do but listen to each other kvell about the various problems with the blah blah blah and what each of us would do to fix the yada yada yada and what we really like about the et cetera.  And it’s a long fargoing way to Vegas.

Not sure why we’re headed to Vegas in this metaphor, but it felt right.  What happens in the editing mobile stays in the editing mobile, unless somebody dies or vomits.  Then we stop for air fresheners.

That Time I Gave My Son an Enema

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Nope, never mind.  I can’t blarg about this.  It’s too gross even for me.  There’s nothing funny about violating the butthole of a two-year-old with a tiny plastic tube.

Okay, on second thought, maybe there is.  Just not perhaps the kind of funny you want.

But there’s definitely nothing funny about the boy walking around with a look on his face like he’s just been told that Popsicles are made out of horses as he squeezes off tiny little duck-quack farts with every step.

…Again, perhaps it’s not the right kind of funny.

Look, there was definitely a scene.  There were towels on the floor and a lot of screaming.  There was talk of breaking out the puppy housebreaking pads.  I can’t remember if it was the boy screaming or my wife or myself, but it was high-pitched and plaintive.  I was really concerned about the state of the tub at one point.  There may or may not have been comparisons to Georgia red clay and mud-hut bricks.

But it was too gross to write about, so this is me not writing about it.

Day two of editing is underway.  Like jumping into a freezing cold pool, it’s not so bad once you actually get in the water.  More to come later.

It’s hard to focus with all this poop I’m not writing about.

Quantum Entangled Toddlers

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There’s a positive feedback loop with staggering implications building in our house.

The kids sense each other.  They pretend to ignore each other, but they’re keenly aware of each other.  Like two quantum-entangled photons carving a helix around one another as they rocket through the cosmos, each sprout picking up the psychic vibrations that the other gives off.

In a lot of ways it’s cool.  Big brother will watch little sister, mimicking her faces and giving her little coos and pokes and kisses.  It’s adorable, really.  He’ll even, properly motivated, allow her to sit in his lap on the couch and snuggle with her like a mother wolf coiling around her cub.  And she, of course, is entranced and enchanted with the idea of another human in the house who’s within a foot of her size.  She watches him with the steely eyes of a hawk tracking a mouse through tall grass from hundreds of feet up, flailing her marshmallow arms and kicking her lizard-skin feet like she’s riding a tiny invisible bike.  It’s enough entertainment to watch for hours, if only it would last that long.

Phase 1 -- distract the adults by looking adorable and harmless.
Phase 1 — distract the adults by looking adorable and harmless.

But it doesn’t.  Not even close.

No, they can feed off one another’s positive energy only so far until one of them will shed an electron, causing the happiness in the system to shift out of phase and become unstable.  From instability it’s only a matter of time — and not much time, at that — until the entire system collapses and one of them starts crying.  Usually, it’s the infant.  Her clementine-sized brain just isn’t capable of holding on to an emotion for longer than a few minutes, and when she doesn’t know what to feel, that’s when the tears come.

Now, big brother can deal with her crying.  He can deal with her screaming.  It doesn’t upset him in any appreciable way.  What he has a problem with is not being the loudest thing in the room.  She’s bawling in terror and apprehension because she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t actually have her mother in her line of vision, and he’s howling gleefully in answer because he’s two and a half and making noise with his mouth is one of his favorite things.

Before you ask, mom and dad are sitting exhausted on the couch, because we, too, can endure the noise to a point.  There’s a threshold of upset noise from the kids below which it simply isn’t energy-effective to respond.  We can’t be hauling ourselves up to see to the sprouts’ every need every two or three minutes, we’d be crazy people.  (Just look at our parents — we are each the oldest of 4.  How they ever managed having four children in the house at one time and not getting carted off to the asylum is a feat which astounds me more every day I pass with our two bundles of joy.)

The noise builds.  If left unchecked, the binary star system will collapse entirely; the infant’s screams becoming more plaintive and actually reaching out to rattle the flesh of our adult eardrums, the toddler, feeding on her unrest, beginning to scream in earnest, upset perhaps because he hasn’t been stopped yet or because he’s afraid that if he stops making noise the Silence will descend forever.  Seriously, I think the boy is terrified of quiet.  If he’s not shouting or babbling or singing as he stomps, runs and crashes around the house, he’s smashing toys/cups/tiny-things-he-should-never-have-gotten-ahold-of into other toys/other cups/tabletops/daddy’s head.  They get louder and louder, the binary stars spiraling faster and more violently around one another until we scoop them up and take them into opposite rooms, thus saving the universe from obliteration and our inner ears from violent decompression.

And they wake each other up.

Sprout #1’s bedtime routine is so finicky, he launched into a bloodcurdling tirade the other night when I tried to bring the wrong blanket into the room.  I wasn’t even going to cover him with it.  It was for ME, and he would not abide its presence in the room.  After his four bedtime stories and four bedtime songs, we leave and he goes into the five stages of grief, coming to rest about eleven minutes later, usually, passed out like a raggedy drunk clutching a Winnie the Pooh plush figurine in his tiny hand instead of a 40.  Meanwhile, Sprout #2 goes to sleep across the hall.  Her routine is simpler if no less demanding — she merely has to suck at the fountain called Mommy for anywhere from seventeen to forty-seven minutes before she goes into a milk coma.

The next ten minutes are critical.  The walls in our house were, let’s say, not designed with kids in mind.  There is no aural insulation.  Every sound carries and the floors upstairs creak like the rusty hinge on the barn in an old horror movie.  Step wrong exiting Sprout #2’s room and Sprout #1 will hear it and start his five stages all over again, adding another stage — blind, frantic screaming — at the beginning of the chain.  This screaming fit will wake Sprout #2 and then the whole cycle must begin again.  Alternatively, if, say, Daddy, after putting his pajamas on upon leaving Sprout #1’s room, finds that he’s for example left his phone upstairs and goes to retrieve it, Sprout #1 is about 80% likely to hear Daddy creeping past his room for up to an hour after bedtime and here come the five stages again, except now it’s more like seven stages and they all sound like I’ve told him Santa Claus is not real and popsicles are actually made of vegetables.

Then, there’s the early morning.  Sprout #2 wakes up anytime from 5AM to 6AM needing more Mommy Fountain, and apparently Sprout #1 sleeps like a secret agent being pursued by the intelligentsia of five different countries, because he wakes up and flies into action at the drop of a hat: banging on the door, howling to be let out, babbling in terror of the scary bugs.  Of course after more than a few hours of sleep there is no consoling him back into dreamland, so 5AM is just when he gets up these days, which means 5AM is just when I get up these days, because there is no sleep for anybody while Mom is with the infant and the toddler is screaming to wake the dead.

Is it any wonder that my wife and I have never felt more exhausted in our lives?  She’s a stay-at-home mom these days, and I work at the school then come home, and we get a scant hour to ourselves after the kids sack out to look at each other and wearily lament the loss of the days when we could, I don’t know, function like actual human beings in a world where said human beings are not held hostage to the whims of tiny despots.

But we love our kids.  Really, we do.  They are miraculous and wondrous and inspiring and incredible and they bring to our lives joy beyond words.

 

Help.