Staggered, Into the Dark

(This story is probably not suitable for a young audience.)

He had given up struggling. The sackcloth covering his face was damp from his own spit and the air around his head was so warm and thick with his own breath that he could no longer talk without growing dizzy of his own voice.

The hands that held onto him were too numerous to count. They gripped him everywhere–his arms, his legs, his shoulders, at one point his neck, his feet, his hands. Tighter than vices they held onto him, swinging him and dragging him. He had given up struggling.

A Sword-Torn Hand

or, SHARDS of the SHATTERED

Cody shuddered when the wind blew a few drops of rain onto the page: They splattered there like little drops of blood, the yellowing paper instantly discolored like Rorschach blots waiting to be analyzed. He wiped the tips of his fingers over the spots, judging their wetness and if they needed any special treatment, and then decided it was safest to close his book: The spots might leave small scars, but nothing else could be done. Sometimes the Wyrd went that way.

Cody stuffed the book into his pocket and stood up. The grey clouds, thick in places but breath-thin in others, tumbled over the skies in every direction he looked. Over the trees and bulging boulders before him he gazed at the dance of dragons in the sky promising winds beat from leathery wings and electric breath that would incinerate all it touched. Cody’s lips curled into a smile.

Awry We Go

For PC.

McKenzie waved to her parents outside the window as the train grumbled to a shaky start. She stood on her seat and pressed her face into the glass as they moved sideways out of her vision. At last she could just barely see them still waving, her mother running after them with her scarf blowing in the wind and her hat wobbling, and then they were gone. McKenzie stayed frozen to the window until the train rounded a bend and she plopped back into her seat.

“Well,” she said to herself, “that was fun.”

The small girl crossed her arms and stared across the small compartment at her younger brother, Ezra. He was bundled up so tightly that he looked more like a pile of coats and mittens than an actual person. McKenzie just blew a tuft of hair out of her eyes and shook her head.

On the Road with Azazel

The lots were cast and Hain ben Zedekiah was chosen amongst the many to lead the goat of expiation into the wilderness. His family huddled unto each other and could not face him; the others in his tribe cried out wailing and averted their eyes as he passed. Only the high priest caught his eye, and then only for a moment as he passed the tether into into Hain’s trembling hand.

The Scenic Route

Once in my lifetime I attempted screenwriting, but it was no pleasure of mine. I tolerated it. I might have minimally enjoyed it. But I did not love it and I vowed never to force myself to do it again.

Yet it’s the nature of my personal vows and the irony of the universe that if I say “never,” it returns “how soon.” So can you guess what the first topic is in my creative writing class. Yep, screenwriting.

Since I am now obligated to write a screenplay, if not many of them, I am determined to not only do it well, but to enjoy it marginally, and heaven forbid, maybe even love it! Since the formatting and style of screenwriting and fiction are so drastically different (a divide that I believe hinders my ability to love it more wholly), I’m going to adapt various scenes from my stories to the screen as a way of bringing together what I love with something I would like to love more.

It is as in learning: To master anything, you must associate it with something that you already know.

Alphabet Soup

Once upon a time I began using this website called Plinky that gives you daily writing prompts. Longtime readers might even recall some of my Plinky posts; they always had a little lightbulb at the bottom, indicative of the fact that I had posted them through Plinky.

In any case, one of the prompts I didn’t find very lengthy, so I never posted it here: The challenge was to write a piece of poetry using only words that began with the letter S. It was a fun exercise. I enjoyed it.

The idea, however, never left me, and I decided someday I would write a slew of new poems, each of them directed by a single letter only. (I suspect X, Z, and Q will be challenging.) I’ve written a few more of these, and now that’s I’ve got a small number of poems amassed, I figured I’d share them here–and I encourage you to do the same!

Some day I’ll have all twenty-six poems written. Perhaps you’ll beat me there? Either way, I hope you enjoy these.

Sela Dor

For MS and DD.

Lightning strikes behind me. I waver at the sound of thunder, the vibrations that pulse through my veins and throb against me like giant hands shaking me backwards and fore. I teeter upon this edge I stand. I struggle to maintain my balance when all the world is chaos in my midst.

There is a pool beneath me. It is an enchanted pool, one of wonders too deep to be probed by man’s mind, too profound to be made sense of by philosophers or astrologers. What resides within it is beyond all belief.

They call it Sela Dor. And when they speak of it, they tell this tale.

The Time Before Time

At the dawn of the world, there was no world. There was nothing, no thing at all. There was. What this existence can be called, there is no word, for words only came after it was no more. But whatever it was, it was. Some since its time have given it names–called it God, or the Whole, or the One. Others have called it the All, for in its time, there was nothing else.

This existence was lonesome, but as there was nothing such as companionship in this world, there was no loneliness either. However, the All knew it was alone, for the All could think of itself but could know nothing else. Limitless, the All sought to create something to exist alongside.

But no matter where the All turned its eyes, the only thing it saw was itself. The All searched to find every edge in existence; but the All was infinite without edge. Every breath of space was filled by nothing else, and nowhere in the world did anything else reside.

White Noise / Death in Silence

This will be a simple story, spawned from a simple prompt of a simple word called snow.

I set my pen down, turn to the window.

Snow is falling.

Is falling.

Fallen.

I open the windows, the white-framed blocks of glass spreading like angel wings into the cold air, and step into the silent storm beyond. The wind catches me from nowhere as holly drips onto the snow beneath me. I remember: glass is not solid. Glass is liquid. Over centuries the windows cry, sagging and wilting in the sunlight, holding out the snow, keeping warm a house uninhabited except for ghosts and phantoms long since remembered by anyone.

Blood and Bone and Beautiful

There I was, sitting lakeside, when I first heard the rustle of leaves from the nearby trees. We had been warned dangerous things lurked in the dark forest, had been told many times that it was far worse than forbidden, so I was rather taken aback to have heard something so close to the edge. After all, a wise friend of mine had once made it plainly clear that anything inside the forest was as likely afraid of what was outside of it as we were of what was inside, and it was precisely for this fear that it was so dangerous to trespass.

On the contrary, I’d only ever heard a single fascinating story of this forest in my life: A man had entered on the night before his wedding, and when he emerged, he had vanished, entered a world in which he had gone missing forever, and no matter who he spoke with, no one knew who he was. He’d even met his brother at a pub, one version of the story said, but even he had no idea who this stranger was! So he returned to the forest where he would live forever until all the trees had gone.

So I looked up, bending my knees at an angle beneath me in case I had to spring up and run away, but right when I moved, a twig snapped and I looked to my right–and there I saw him, standing twixt two trees, half bathed in shadows, statuesque, but soft and supple: The torso of a man, barely fledgling with the hair beginning to bristle over his heart region, his neck long and sturdy, his face curious and marked with broad bones and framed by dark black locks. He caught my gaze with his pearlescent blue eyes and then darted back into the forest at once.