Hey, writer-type folks. AND PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT TO PLAY BUT DON'T IDENTIFY AS 'WRITERS' - all are welcome here! Every Friday, we do a fun free-write. For fun. And Freedom!
Write whatever you want in the 'comments' section on this blog post. Play as many times as you like. #breaktheblog! You have two minutes (give or take a few seconds ... no pressure!). Have fun. The more people who play, the more fun it is. So, tell a friend. Then send 'em here to read your 'two' and encourage them to play.
It's wrapped around your neck. It's in the center of your teeth. It's in the trials and tribulations of your poor mind as you sleep. Fuck your conscience, utter nonsense, this squalid business of catharsis? I find it laughable. Cut another line and cue the tape, I'm ready for my solo.
Your eyes were empty sockets, and I smiled by it, smiled too white because of the fucking black light. What the fuck is up with that? Now? That's some freak show shit. And if you scare me with the strobe again, I'll cut your heart out and eat it.
Goddamn, the walls.
Why is everything you say soaked in bullshit and misery? Why am I even reaching for some meaningless approbation? Epiphany. Look at the bald monkeys dance.
Humanity? Insanity.
We never had a chance.
You judge your neighbors' oddities and indulge yours spasmodically. You get magazines in stacks, but only read them periodically. They're decoration. Like red death-fruit. If that's even true.
Look at me, so cute. So astute.
Now excuse me. I have ceased to amuse me. And I'm going to use this claw-hammer to fix the way the world's abused me.
Hammered. Sanguine.
Watch while I drive the first nail in.
#2minutesgo Tweet it! Share it! Shout it from the top of the shack you live in! I will be out most of the day, but I'll be back...
"We must act now! The enemy is fortifying their positions as we speak, and we haven't even begun collecting the sofa cushions!"
ReplyDeleteSofia crossed her arms over her chest and glared at Robbie, her bottom lip pushed out.
“I’m not a soldier. I’m a princess!”
“You can be both,” Robbie told his little cousin, yanking the cushions off his aunt’ sofa. “Help me with this fort.”
“A princess can’t be a soldier!” Sofia argued. She kicked an accent pillow toward Robbie’s pile of cushions.
“What about Princess Leia?” Robbie asked.
“Princess Who?”
Robbie dropped his sofa cushion and turned to stare at his cousin, his mouth open in an O of surprise.
“What did you just say?”
“I said, who is Princess Leia?”
Robbie slapped both hands over his face. When he finally found the strength to drop them again, he moved to the doorway and stuck his head out.
“Time out, guys! We have a major problem here!”
Robbie’s brother and sister stuck their heads out into the hallway a moment later.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sofie doesn’t know who Princess Leia is.”
The twins wore identical expressions of shock.
“Peace treaty?” Robbie asked.
“Oh yeah,” his sister, Railey, agreed. “Some things are bigger than world domination.”
“Cool. Come help me put the cushions back on the couch. Kaden, go ask Aunt Kiki if we can make popcorn and tell her we have a movie emergency.”
Kaden saluted his big brother and darted off in search of Aunt Kiki.
Railey and Robbie put the living room back in order while Sofia watched, and then Robbie sat Sofia down.
“You asked who Princess Leia is? She’s a soldier. And the best princess ever.”
“Better than Anna?”
“Way better. She’s smart and strong and doesn’t crap off anyone. But she’s also really nice.” He paused to consider. “She’s a lot like Aunt Kiki, really.”
Sofia took a moment to think about this.
“Aunt Kiki would be a good princess,” she decided. “I think I like Princess Leia.”
“You think you like her now,” Aunt Kiki said as she came in with Kaden and a huge bowl of popcorn, “just wait, kid. You’ll like her more after the movies, and you’ll love her when you’re old enough to really appreciate her.”
Well this is just flat out adorable... and it made me smile. Thank God for the aunts (and uncles) like Kiki... and for Peace Treaties.
DeleteI agree. You did a great job of capturing imagination and innocence.
DeleteThis is what they found when they emptied his pockets.
ReplyDelete$2.73 in coins, notable only because none were minted after 1958. A Swiss army knife in well-worn condition. A tuft of what appeared to be dog hair, tied together with red thread. An old Zippo lighter that had neither flint nor lighter fluid. A clear blue marble.
What they didn’t find were the dreams his pocket once held.
They didn’t find any identification, either.
The coroner was no help. The body was mummified. Dry desert air does that. And it was unmolested. Why had the animals left it alone?
The body’s head was bald. So no hair color. Estimated height, 5’10”. No guess on weight.
No teeth, either, so dental records wouldn’t help. How did he eat? Even false teeth would have helped with the identification.
Detective Matt Mader had almost succeeded in putting the case out of his mind when two months later the DNA results came in. “Unable to ID.” That’s how the note started. “Unusual in that the subject appears to have been a chimera,” it continued. Matt tried to remember what that was. He couldn’t, so he googled.
Wikipedia to the rescue. “An animal chimera is a single organism that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes involved in sexual reproduction. Chimeras are formed from at least four parent cells (two fertilised eggs or early embryos fused together). Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues.”
Interesting. But it still didn’t help ID the body.
“Still working on cross-referencing the human DNA. The other set is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
Matt called the DNA lab. After waiting on hold and listening to Monster Mash about fifteen times, the research assistant picked up the call.
“Nothing we’ve ever seen before?”
“Oh, hi, Matt. Yeah, it’s very unusual. Unique, even. It doesn’t match any of the models we have for any primate.”
“You’re kidding, right? You’re playing a practical joke on an innocent old detective for Halloween, right?”
There was a pause on the line. “No joke, Matt.”
Then the assistant dropped the bomb. “I’m not even sure it’s from Earth.”
“Let me know if you have any luck with the human part of it. You know how to get ahold of me.”
Matt hung up, and then put his head in his hands. Another year and he could retire. Why couldn’t he ever get a normal murder case?
I like this one a lot. And not just because of the excellent taste in surnames. ;) I want to know more!
DeletePart 1. I'll post the rest on my blog later.
ReplyDelete_______________________________________
We thought we'd finished the job. Ten of us, all from town, got liquored up one night and headed out to the Donnelly farm, while the wind bayed like a pack of coonhounds and covered for our graceless staggerings.
We took out the two elder Donnellys easily, with quick machete flurries in their foul bed, but in that ruckus we alerted the eldest of their brood after Ma wouldn't stop gurgling like a butchered hog while she drowned in her own blood, and Pa managed to squawk out something akin to a "help" 'fore I cleaved his malformed skull once and for all, sending them squinty eyes even further apart.
The rest was a scarlet mist, some kinda abstract rendition of blood, stink, shrieks, and motion. The pursuit of the doomed under filthy ceilings and cast-iron skies. We almost literally chased them across hell's half acre. We lost Jody but put an end to those hellbound twins, Danny and Donnie; their half-faced freak of a sister, Janey-Jean; and at least two more of that infernal spawn. Yeah, not much more than toddlers, those last two, but in a war mercy's for chuckleheads.
The screams of the damned still echoing, we buried their pieces in crates within graves we dug ourselves in the soft earth of their own field, under a waning moon oft cloaked by fast rags of cloud, and we brought Jody home.
You no doubt judge us as monsters at this point. But wait a damn second. Y'all seen them chainsaw massacre films, slashers and the like? Well, these folks was long overdue. More'n rumors told how they'd been doin' hellacious things to mostly strangers but also some townsfolk—burying folks who still breathed, tearing out pieces of their body while keeping them alive for weeks, and worse. For too long we'd lived with their predacious ways.
Anyways. After the dust settled, we waited to hear if some even bigger shoe would drop, but nothing. Local law knew already, but not a peep from out of town. Certainly no feds, but not even state police. We felt we might could breathe again.
Then one night soon after, my wife went missing.
A link to the rest, although no one seems to be around at all.
DeleteJust read and commented over at The Migrant Type, David. Shivers and ewwwws! 😱🤯😉
DeleteOh, thanks, Joe. I'll go look. Yeah, this is an unpleasant one, isn't it?
DeleteWhoa... inspiration from the passing of Manson? and the last line is a twist to the heart and the plot. I'll try to make it over to The Migrant Type to read the rest!
DeleteI'll catch up on the rest. Gotta wrap my head around this one. Dark and brutal. I love this line: "The rest was a scarlet mist, some kinda abstract rendition of blood, stink, shrieks, and motion."
DeletePart 1
ReplyDeleteThe lab smelled of dirt and plaster. It reminded Dr. Jacqueline Bird of the houses around the Akwesasne Reservation her father would help renovate to help pay for her education.
Jacquie smiled at the memory of her dad coming to the door covered in plaster dust save for his hands and eye sockets when she’d arrive with his lunch and a beer. Later, she’d spot the empties tossed in the haul-away dumpster. Their brown glass cast an amber glow onto the broken wall lath within, like browned ribs of the long-dead man arrayed before her on her work table.
“Daydreaming, Dr. Bird?” Jacquie’s boss Dr. Raoul Dumont said as he popped up behind her in the archeology/anthropology department lab in Syracuse. Her reverie disappeared like a puff of white dust from the protective plaster covering she blew off the remains of this soldier. She’d unearthed them herself from the dig site on the western shore of Lake George.
“Not exactly, Dr. Dumont. And I wish you wouldn’t jump up behind me like that while I’m cleaning and examining these remains. This man suffered enough without me further torturing his bones,” Jacquie said as she removed her safety glasses and appeared as the dusty echo of her father.
Dumont moved closer to Jacquie and reached out to move his finger down the page of her notes. As he did so, his hand once again brushed against Jacquie’s. His head floated just behind her right ear.
“So you believe this subject was scalped, Dr. Bird? You yourself have said that even postmortem head wounds can leave behind signs of hemorrhaging in the cranial etching. I do not see any signs of such hemorrhaging here. What proof do you have he experienced such torture? Couldn’t these just as easily be postmortem predation caused by scavenging…,” he paused and breathed “animals?” into Jacquie’s ear.
Jacquie recalled a conversation with her bachelor’s school friend Edie Blaine in the instant the hairs on her neck assumed an upright and locked positions.
Edie, a professor of anthropology at Dumont’s previous university, had warned her of Dumont’s reputation for harassing female students and colleagues alike.
“He gets away with so much because of his connections in the World Archeological Conference and the Society for American Archeology,” Edie told her. “Plus his uncle’s a ranking member of the Senate Education Committee. Connections and direct access to the money tree make him a tough little bastard to cut off for any university. Yours has more shine, so he jumped at the chance for more professional prestige and fresh sweater meat.”
“My report will prove my theory, Dr. Dumont. But let me show you how I believe my subject suffered at the hands of people may have been some of my ancestors on the shores of Lake George,” Jacquie said.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteSliding from her stool, Jacquie looked Dumont in the eyes as she held a pointed probe in one hand and a scalpel in the other.
“I believe the man was a French Marine or Canadian like your forebears, sent down to stir up distrust among the Mohawk and English settlers on the southern end of the lake. I’ve seen wounds like this before and read documentation of their sources,” she said.
“And what, pray tell, was that, Dr. Bird?” Dumont said with an amused grin.
“In the documented case, the raiders kidnapped, raped or killed both white and native girls. My Mohawk ancestors captured one of them. As you know, theirs was a matriarchy of sorts and such crimes were often handled by the women of the clan. In this case,” Jacquie jabbed at Dumont’s crotch with her probe, “repeatedly piercing his pelvis with sewing needles, before removing his genitals. Very effective deterrent, don’t you think?”
Dumont recoiled from the probe poking at his crotch.
“Excuse me?" he said.
“They let him bleed out, hung from a rack like a deer. Before he expired, though, they removed the scalp from his exsanguinated skull, sewing it to his crotch, like a merkin. Hence, more pelvic scratches. Total demasculination. Like to see the method?” Jacquie said, putting down her probe and reaching for Dumont’s toupee with scalpel still in hand.
“No! Thank you, Dr, Bird. I'll leave you to your work,” Dumont said, looking like he’d seen a ghost. He scurried from the lab with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
Jacquie returned to her work with a small smile. She saw the reflection of her dust-covered face on her blank computer screen and wiped the plaster from her cheeks.
“Have to call Daddy later to tell him how Granny’s stories of her grannies’ grannies’ grannies cut off another white dick today like they did in the old days,” Jacquie said to herself. Then she blew more dust off the bones of another man who didn’t recognize who he was dealing with.
How do you do that? use all that medical lingo, and still I understand? A well-told story of revenge, or is it justice? And I like Jacquie... she could use a book about her, I think!
DeleteI agree with Leland. You always nail the authenticity. Which lets us sink into the story.
DeleteWow, Dan, that piece is filled with righteous rage... and the trademark MaderRap™. I also really dig the color references... well in!
ReplyDelete