An Interesting Case Study

Posted on June 18, 2013 by stankmeaner

Alternate titles for this post:

Trust Me, I’m Just as Confused as You Are…..or WTF Brain, You’re a Dick

***

I was gifted with a contradictory personality at birth. Strength and weakness. Violence and peace. Brains and brawn. I am an extroverted introvert.

Most people equate introverts with shyness, but that’s not the case. I’ve got no problem with public speaking, I’ll spaz out on the dance floor and I have a laugh loud enough to turn heads (especially in movie theaters when I’m laughing at bits that apparently no one else finds funny). The only time I really doubt myself is as a parent, and I kind of take it for granted that you can’t grow as one if you don’t.

It’s not that I think that everything that I do is the bees knees (I LOVE THIS RIDICULOUS SAYING), I just have a healthy sense of self.

Along with all of the good things in my stew o’ birth, I also ended up with a heaping helping of crazy pants stirred into the mix. Anxiety, mood swings, panic attacks, depression – every day is like a day at the amusement park in my head, but you never get to pick the ride and sometimes the amusement is less than its name would suggest. Some people add manic, but fuck those people. It’s not my fault they can’t keep up.

Stress obviously makes them ping pong a little faster, a little more erratically, the beer pong players getting progressively drunker and more careless. Apparently, when my anxiety and my mania collide in this yellow + blue = orange popsicles universe the resulting big bang is apathy. Not like hit the snooze a couple of extra times or skip washing the dishes for a night laziness, but full on eyes wide open duh, what…?? My brain just won’t work right, I can’t make decisions, I turn the sound on my phone off and the only people that I have any desire to be around are my kid, my guy, and my animals.

I definitely can’t write. I’ve tried, I still try, but it’s all shite. It’s because I’m empty, I can’t access my normal people feelings so the writing is just crap. Ha, I can’t even write in my journal. The letters won’t come out.

I disappoint people and I hurt their feelings. The people who are close to me get it; they know that if they say Hey Idiot, I Need You Right Now that I’d never not be there for whatever they wanted. But if they just wanted to go grab coffee and giggle, it ain’t gonna happen. It’s hard for me to make commitments because if this shit hits on a day when I’m supposed to go somewhere or have something finished? That’s a big funny on you, everyone else.

There are so many tools I have that help me work through most swings; yoga and meditation, writing reading dancing drawing scratching the cat’s stripey belly annoying the kid snuggling with the dude walking in the woods…but in this apathy mode, taking that first step to get through the fog in my brain and grab on to the tail end of an idea of starting to get up and do something is really hard.

So I have to bow out for a few days. I have to ditch interactive social media, get enough sleep, and consistently turn my thoughts away from anything internal. For a few days it’s all about observation of the world and breathing, until I start stepping back into my skin.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, or the hardest. It is, however, amazing how exhausting doing nothing for a few days can be. I’m hoping that by writing this out I can shake the last tattered remains of this episode off and wake up. It’s kind of fascinating to watch the things that go on inside my head from an outsider’s viewpoint, honestly. Incredibly frustrating and unproductive, but interesting nonetheless.

I didn’t particularly want to write this. I definitely don’t intend for my head poo to become the focus of what I write. But I wrote something (fairly) cohesive and I didn’t lose interest within the first few minutes of sitting down, so I’m gonna chalk it in the plus column.

Yay words :)

The cat gets it….

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Categories: Non-Fiction Nonsense | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

Momentum

Posted on June 9, 2013 by stankmeaner

Trifecta

 

 

 

 

 

For Trifextra, Week 71: tell an entire story in 3 sentences.

*****

She chose to fly away on her broken wing, even though they mocked her lopsided flight.

Their laughter rolled off her back like warm drops of soothing rain.

She figured that even if she was only flying in circles, at least she wasn’t standing still.

Categories: Fiction | Tags: , , , | 22 Comments

That Kind of a Day

Posted on June 8, 2013 by stankmeaner

Storch-Badge-Master

I woke up with a headache.  My brain engaged before my eyelids parted and it was the first thing that I consciously knew.  I felt the atmosphere like a leaded blanket, so close to the ground I could brush it with the top of my head like a low ceilinged room.  I didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon and I didn’t really give a shit; it was the kind of day where it didn’t matter anyway, seeing as when I opened my eyes it was grey and heavy like a picture bleached to a monochromatic blandness.  An invisible giant’s hands cradled my skull, exerting an inexorable pressure with gentle glee, squeezing slowly tighter.  An army of enthusiastic imps danced about, jabbing at the backs of my eyes with tiny pitchforks.

I bit back a groan, exhaled slowly through my nose, and vowed to not move an eyelash again for at least an hour.  What I would do, what I would do is I would lay here; I would lay here and try to stop my brain from spinning like an overwrought carousel so that it would tell me important things.  Things like, what the fuck happened last night; things like, why didn’t I feel the indent next to me in the bed that would tell me Melody was still here; things like what the hell gave me this forsaken headache on my day off.

As the merry go round began to slow and my mind stopped poking at me – Hey! You there!  Are you sure you know how bad your head hurts?  I can keep reminding you, lest you forget!  That’s what I’m here for! – pictures of last night began to emerge.  It was like watching someone shuffling through a slideshow without context, no professor announcing the topic of today’s lecture before jumping right into the lesson.

A bar.  A back room.  Melody walking through a door, looking hot enough to melt ice cream in Antarctica; me giving the evil eye to a guy at the end of the bar who stood to intercept her.  Smoking a cigarette in a back alley, strobe-like broken light flickering at the world’s worst rave and splayed feet on the ground sticking out from behind a dumpster. Flexing bloody knuckles. Melody murmuring thank you and planting sloppy kisses on my neck so I could feel the smile on her lips; the bar-back yelling in my face, telling me to go-go-go, NOW!  Slipping through a manhole cover, snicking down a slimy ladder into the sewer tunnels.  Throwing shoes that smelled of shit into the garbage can behind my house. Giggling like a drunken girl, leaning on Melody as she helped me to bed.  Did she stay?  I couldn’t remember that part.  Maybe the sex was just a dream.  Probably it was.  Son of a bitch.

Someone hammered on my back kitchen door.  “Saul!”, yelled a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize.  “Saul, sweetie, it’s time for you to get the fuck up!” The hammering continued unabated, until I heard my neighbor’s door open, his whiny voice complaining about the noise, the profanity.  I heard a laugh, footsteps, my back gate swinging open with a squeak.  There were heavy footsteps, one-two-three, up the neighbor’s porch steps, a hurried conversation carried on too low for me to hear much more than grumbles.  A door slamming after Bob the neighbor made a sound that sounded suspiciously like ‘eeek’.  The hammering resumed a moment later.

Shitfuckpissdamn.  I gritted teeth like fuzzy cinderblocks and propped myself up on my elbows.  A quick inventory told me that only my head and my hands hurt, so that wasn’t too bad.  As I swung my legs over the side of the bed my vision swam and the imps smoked some crystal meth before joyfully resuming their whirligig dance of pitchfork fun.

By the time I could open my eyes again, the hammering had stopped and there was a presence looming behind me in the doorway.  Lock picking criminal who isn’t afraid to walk into my house after calling me sweetie?  That this was someone that I should be worried about was an easy assumption to make.  People didn’t barge into my house.  I am the one that people are afraid of, the one known as Gladiator to the right kind of people, who most often were the wrong kind of people.

“Who the fuck is this guy,” I mumbled to myself, loud enough for the man to hear.  The looming loomed closer and as I turned my head to check out the man with the admirable set of brass balls, all I got was a glimpse of a Cheshire smile and a ham sized fist before the imps were silenced by a giant devil who took over their pain detail and knocked me the hell out.

*****

My head was lolling forward on a neck that felt like it was held on by limp spaghetti noodles.  This new pain was white hot and blinding, but they call me Gladiator because I’m a bad motherfucker, not because I cry every time shit doesn’t feel good.  My brain engaged before my eyes again; I smelled sewer rot.  What was with the sewer thing?  I had no idea why I had been in them last night and no clue why I was in them again, but the sickly smell was a sense memory that told me I most definitely was.

I tensed and flexed with as little movement as possible.  Minute tensions at wrists and ankles told me I was bound, but I couldn’t tell if it was to a thing or only to myself; a coppery taste and a quick dart of the tongue told me that the bastard had knocked out both my front teeth along with consciousness.

With an effort worthy of Atlas, I raised my head up and held it firmly in place with grit and orneriness.  I pretended that all was peachy keen with the world as I waited for the bright lights to stop spotting my vision and the waves in my stomach to slosh back to stillness.  I grimaced a smile that I hoped looked as awful as it felt.

“Thup?” I asked, and then grimaced for real.  My nonchalant ‘Sup was trumped by lack of front teeth.  Instead of sounding like a tough guy smart ass, I sounded like a second grader posturing on a playground.  I shrugged, hid the wince, and looked around.

A cavernous room of dirty brick, seeping walls and a pitted cement floor.  A couple of bare bulbs hung from chains here and there, casting fitful circles of light.  There was a man awkwardly slumped against one wall and I recognized the shoes on the splayed feet as the ones I saw sticking out from behind a dumpster in that memory flash alley.

I laughed and pointed with one finger, tugging just a bit, discovering that my hands were tied together behind me but not to the chair I sat on.  “Did I do that?  Right now I’m kind of hoping so.”  I turned and looked up, and up, and up into the face that I had seen right before I got sent to la-la-land.

I’m no shrimp but this guy was a giant, 6’6” at least.  He had to run around 300 pounds and it was solid muscle.  Not body-builder show off muscles, but muscles that someone is born to, leaving them the choice in childhood to lean towards gentle giant or enforcer.  I don’t think this one had to make a conscious decision.

He nodded his large, round head.  “Yup, Leo over there is your work, kid.  You broke his neck.”  He flexed his fingers open, closed, open.  “Did you mean to kill him?”

The surprise on my face must have registered as genuine.  “I don’t remember what happened.  I remember smoking a cigarette in an alley, and there was someone on the ground behind a dumpster.  All I could see was their feet.  How did I kill him?”

The man considered me for a long and silent moment.  “You hit him.  Once.”

I nodded.  That sounded right; if it was necessary I knew how to do that.  “Do you have any idea why I found it necessary to kill your friend?”

Another long and silent moment.  His shoulders strained the sleeves of his jacket as he shrugged.  “No.  I came around trying to find Leo.  There was a girl running to the other end of the alley, some blond in a black dress with killer legs, and you two squared off.  Leo said something I couldn’t hear and pow,” he mimed a straight armed jab, “his head snapped back like someone yoked it with a leash and he hit the ground.”  Again with the stare.  “I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.”

Melody.  Melody running.  But I remembered her helping me, I remembered her leading me through the sewers and lifting the lid so I could throw my shoes into the garbage can.  So, obviously she came back after she ran.  Shit.  Did I kill a man for a girl?  My head started to throb like a rotten melon the harder I strained to remember, and the ache in my face from my missing teeth became grating.

Sausage fingers snapped in front of my face.  “Hey, pal, stay on task here.  Who was the girl?”

“Yeah well, why don’t you tell me who the fuck you are first?  Not that I don’t appreciate your hospitality and impromptu dental work, I’d just like to know who it is that’s being so magnanimous.”

He chuckled like graveyard bones dancing through gravel.  “You’re Gladiator, right?  Well.  They call me Scrapper.”

*****

I intend for this to have a conclusion, cleverly titled That Kind of a Night, but I haven’t quite figured out whether or not the mysterious blond is gonna be a good guy or a bad guy yet.  Probably bad, because, you know, blond ;)   I’ve heard they’re always trouble…

Anyhoo, this is my submission for Master Class this week – the line was chosen by Prof SAM from Chosen, by Ted Dekker.  Check out the prompt, the other writers, and SAM’s other stuff at www.frommywriteside.wordpress.com because all of it is completely worthwhile.

I would definitely be interested to know how the ‘tone’ of this piece read.  I’m not sure if it vacillates between tough guy and verbosity too much, so I’d be glad to hear opinions.  Thank you as always for reading :)

Categories: Fiction | Tags: , , | 11 Comments

What the f@*k is Blog Tag?!

Posted on June 2, 2013 by stankmeaner

So what the fuck is Blog Tag anyway? Is it like TV Tag, where you have to yell out the name of who got you into blogging in the first place? The Bloggess! (www.thebloggess.com) Sinistral Scribblings! (www.sinistralscribblings.com) No? Oh. Is it like the one that all the new school pansy parents whine about, where the taggee must feel humiliated by being told neener-neener you’re ‘it’? No? Hmmmm….well, according to TwinDaddy, who was cool enough to tag me mostly because he hearts my Stankmeaner moniker, it’s a thing where you answer questions and talk about yourself. Narcissistic and nefarious, indeed. Seeing as I write mostly fiction on my blog this will be a departure for me. Seeing as how I am, in fact, narcissistic and nefarious, and the fact that I love Stuph Blog, the First Unshitty Blog on the Internet- http://stuphblog.wordpress.com/ (BEST TAG LINE EVER!) this should be a snap. Tag, I’m it! Links for some reason pretend they don’t exist on my laptop, so I’m just typing out all the internet addresses. Pfft technology….

So, firstly you have to repost these rules (my instinctual rebellious nature is already chafing at the idea of ‘rules’):

1. Post these rules.
2. Post a photo of yourself and eleven random facts about you.
3. Answer the questions given to you in the tagger’s post.
4. Create eleven new questions and tag new people to answer them.
5. Go to their blog/Twitter and let them know they’ve been tagged.

The picture of me will come at the end because if you make through it all the shit that is about to come, well, you get what you deserve.

Dah-Dah-Dah….And now, 11 random facts about me:

1.) When I was 5 I split my forehead open pretty much to the bone running full speed into the corner of a wall. Instead of calling my mom or taking me to the hospital, my Gramma called the 700 Club and had Pat Robertson pray for me on tv.

2.) When I was 12 I used to steal my mom’s Benson & Hedges Menthol Light 100′s and squirrel them away in my New Kids on the Block waterbottle

3.) My first pet was a guinea pig. I named her Daisy Duke.

4.) I currently have 6 tattoos and one non-naughty piercing

5.) I once bested a player in D&D so thoroughly that he hyperventilated and then threw up in the help-me-breathe bag his mom had given him. I was not invited back to that basement to play again. Rolling on the floor with laughter probably contributed to this.

6.) My son was about 10 seconds away from being named Waddy after the lead singer of The Exploited. Almost 16 years later he still thanks me for bowing to the pressure and changing my mind.

7.) I have a cat named Joker Frank and a Bearded Dragon named Princess Loki Mononoke.

8.) I was first introduced to the non-normal side of life when I saw The Red Hot Chili Peppers perform on Colin Quinn’s 2Hip4TV when I was in 4th grade – my relief was boundless

9.) If I had fuck you money to blow, I would pay someone to teach me how to drift, Tokyo style ;)

10.) In 6th grade I was called to the guidance office because I put ‘sniper’ as my future career choice. It took a lot of convincing to explain that I meant for the Navy Seals.

11.) I can trip the light fantastic like nobody’s business

Dah-Dah-Dah….And now the answers to TwinDaddy’s questions:

1.) If you were a super hero, what would your super power be? My superpower would be called ‘Derp’- anytime someone was being stupid, I would super-smack them on their block head and they would instantly ‘get it’

2.) You don’t like your name (if you do, pretend that you don’t). What do you change it to? I always thought it would be cool to have a boy’s name so people would be all ooh-la-la surprised when they met me, so probably Trevor. Or Charlie.

3.) Debbie leaves Cincinnati at 5PM and travels an average speed of 62mph. Triton (where did that name come from?) leaves Dayton at 4:47PM and travels at an average speed of 87mph. They head towards each other. At what point do you give a fuck about any of this? BONUS Question: How long until Triton gets arrested for reckless driving? The only thing these people would give a fuck about would be getting to the civilized northern half of Ohio. Triton is arrested because he had a sexy times blow-up doll in his passenger seat and also because his license plate says SHROOMS. Fuck Dayton :)

4.) Coffee gets me high and keeps me awake at work on most days. Do you have such an addiction? If so, what is it? MountainDew Live Wire – that shit gets me hopping. Fun fact – soda has the same effect on tooth enamel as methamphetamine or crack cocaine.

5.) I truly believe we are all broken in some way or another. What is your biggest defect? APATHY. Prolonged stress puts me into a waking zombie-like coma that makes it hard for me to get out of bed, let alone leave the house and/or be productive

6.) Conversely, we all have one thing we are extremely talented at. What is your best attribute? Honesty, with others and myself at all times. No lies, no subterfuge, no excuses. Caveat- some would say this is my worst quality. This is most likely because these are the people who are lying liars who lie.

7.) If you were like Pinocchio, but could choose which body part would get bigger with every lie you told, which body part would it be? HAHAHAHA! This is a ridiculous question. Uh, my torso, I guess…? I already have long legs and arms, my nose certainly doesn’t need any help. I guess some girls would say ‘boobs’ but those are 2 body parts and plus when I think of longer boobs I get a weird visual of something resembling fleshy colored bananas….

8.) You find an empty box on the floor of your office. What was in it? The heads of all the people whose work I had to finish because they fucked it up in the first place (don’t ask why it’s empty now, if no one can find them they can’t prove shit)

9.) You just walked into Starbucks. What do you order? Venti White Chocolate Mocha with an extra shot of espresso, one blast of whipped cream on the bottom and one on the top

10.) Do you read (besides blogs)? If so, what type of reading do you enjoy? I read incessantly. I subscribe to Yoga Journal, Shambala Sun, and GQ. Obsessed with Terry Pratchett (Going Postal) Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere) (or Good Omens, the fantastically hilarious collaboration between those 2) Clive Barker (Sacrament) and Douglas Adams (any damn thing the man ever wrote)

11.) If you could guest post on any blog, what blog would it be? Stuphblog (duh), because of curse words and honesty and community and I think I have some Unshitty things to say about life. Or The Bloggess, which would mostly be fan girl gushing, which is okay because really she changed my life and that ain’t even an exaggeration. Or As Long As I’m Singing, which I guess would be more of a collaboration than a guest post because it would be fun to write a poem with someone who plays with words the way that he does.

(Holy shit, longest post ever….I keep getting distracted by chirping birds, kids who want cinnamon rolls already damn it and freefloating thoughts about weird dreams I had a week ago)

OKAY!! Home stretch – I chose one person as my Taggee because I felt like he could get into the spirit of the game and be both hilarious and honest (which should a prerequisite in the Rules of this here game o’ tag). So, As Long As I’m Singing (insert your real name at your discretion ;) here are your 11 questions…

http://aslongasimsinging.wordpress.com/

UPDATE: my awesome friend Eric has now accepted the Blog Tag challenge: so http://www.sinistralscribblings.com- Tag, brother :)

UPDATE #2: my friend SAM would like to play the game as well, so: http://www.frommywriteside.wordpress.com – Tag, sister :)
1. What smell instantly takes you back to a moment from your childhood?

2. What song will make you headbang/car dance/waltz around your living room no matter what kind of a shitty mood you’re in?

3. If you had to pick having to smell roses everywhere you went all the time or never being able to see the color blue, which would you choose?

4. Would you be more afraid of a rhinoceros charging at you or a hippopotamus?

5. Which, to you, would be the most flattering way to finish this sentence: Your writing really reminds me of _______.

6. Is it hard for you to stay on task from beginning to end, or do you jump around and do a little of this and a little of that and eventually cross the finish line?

7. What is your biggest pet peeve about yourself?

8. Do you plan to write your own epitaph or let someone else do it? Or, I guess conversely, cremation or burial would need to be answered first. TWO-PARTER! So that’s 8 & 9, because I multi-task like a motherfucker

10. All time favorite curse word, either one you’ve heard or one you’ve made up in the heat of the moment?

11. What vanity license plate would put “YOU” out there for all other driver’s to know?

BAM! DONE.

Here’s one of my tattoos – it’s a take on the chapter break cartoons in the first copy of Good Omens I owned : )~

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Categories: Non-Fiction Nonsense | Tags: , , | 22 Comments

A True Confession

Posted on May 25, 2013 by stankmeaner

When the going gets tough,

I can get going with the best of them.

However, the difference would be I don’t intend to stop until I’m barefoot…swinging in a hammock…in Bali….

 

**** a true confession for Trifextra this weekend, in 33 words….ready to chuck it all to be a spelunker or something else that doesn’t always require wearing shoes to work****

Trifecta

Categories: Non-Fiction Nonsense | Tags: , , , | 24 Comments

Alluringly Alliterative

Posted on May 23, 2013 by stankmeaner

 

“Paul’s purporting to be pedantic,” Polly purred. She stretched a slinky arm, serviceably sinewy in its sheath of shiny satin.

Lazily, Lucas leaned in to the lady’s luscious locks, lamenting his lame leg. Purporting Paul purposely picked a piece of pie that Polly would peck a prevaricated pinch of.

Timothy was titillated by the tumultuous tension twanging in the tent.

 

***

 

some much needed nonsense for Trifecta this week :) : 33-333 words including the word pedantic, using its 3rd definition:

1 : of, relating to, or being a pedant(see pedant)
2 : narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned
Trifecta
Categories: Fiction | Tags: , , , | 14 Comments

Mort’s Graveyard Tour

Posted on May 16, 2013 by stankmeaner

This is my submission for this weeks Master Class.  It’s a continuation from Mort’s Tree, which explains how he ended up there in the first place.

Storch-Badge-Master

The dirt around the trunk of Mort’s tree began to shake.  He eyed it thoughtfully from his branch, looking down on clods jumping up and bouncing around, a pagan circle of soil in a ritualistic dance around his headstone.

He experimented with his new phantom molecules.  Instead of clambering from the tree, he imagined himself boneless, a liquidy bag of pictured skin.  He elongated and dripped to the ground in a puddle of Mort.  He imagined again and in a blink of non-existent eyelids he was standing upright.  An average sized fifteen year old boy, maybe a little on the skinny side.  Dusty brown hair flopped over one chocolate brown eye and he shook it off his face.

He watched as the dervish began to coalesce, chittering bits of flotsam from the air pulling together into barely discernible shapes.  Leaves whipped from Mort’s tree and joined the fray, filling in empty spaces, offering a leafy clarity to the outline of what was quickly becoming a rickshaw-like contraption, complete with ghostly driver, floating a few inches from the grass.

Mort felt the smile spread across his face and resisted the urge to clap like a pre-schooler at the circus.  Then he figured resistance was useless and clapped anyway, the sound a beat behind the action as spectral hands tried to remember what noise they should make.  “Hi,” he grinned.  “I’m Mort.”

Dust mote beginnings notwithstanding, the driver and his carriage were now as solid as they could get.  His top hat, a band of moldering leaves wrapped just above the brim, was cocked at a jaunty angle on top of what appeared to be half a head.  The other half was staved in, empty space where an eye socket should be.

“Aye, I know who you are son.  Mortimer Ramsey, just moved in today.  I’m what you might call the welcoming committee.”  He smiled a smile that would be disconcerting on a living man.  “My name’s Sneed.  I’ve been the real caretaker here for the past, oh, I guess we’re coming up on ninety years now.”  He pointed a finger at the concave side of his skull with a rueful shake of his head, a fine spray of dust floating from it.  “I got a tad sloppy with an ace up my sleeve.  Can’t say they took it too kindly around the table.”

Mort took a few steps closer.  “So what do you do, exactly, in your capacity as welcoming committee?  Make sure I’m comfortable, happy with my view?”

Sneed stared at him for a moment before roaring with laughter, the same half a beat behind sound as Mort’s clapping had been.  “Well, I gotta tell ya, son, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone take this in stride the way you are.  Most people go about moaning or acting all confused.  Oooo, what’s going on, why can I see through my hands, where am I?!?”  He swooned dramatically, the back of his hand to his forehead.  “What the hell, is what I say.  If you can see through yourself and you’re surrounded by headstones, give up the ghost (pardon the expression) and admit that you’re dead.”

Mort looked at his headstone.  There was a weight where his heart used to be when he saw his name on the stone; when he thought of his parents it got a little heavier, and when he thought of ice cream and kisses and scratching his cat into a purring ball of furry ecstasy it got a little heavier still.  He imagined that it always would.  He hoped that it would.

“I dunno,” he said, scuffing a toe in the dirt.  The disturbed particles immediately zoomed to Sneed and became a part of the flux that made up the man and his ride.  “I mean, it sucks.  I’d rather not be dead.  I’d rather be eating dinner at home with my mom and dad right now.  It’s not like I have a choice.”  For a moment the expression on his face was that of a much younger Mort, a child who wished for a band-aid for his boo boo and a warm blankie to snuggle under.

Sneed’s face fell.  He hadn’t meant to bring this on, he hadn’t wanted to make this laughing boy sad.  He started to reach out, but what was there to say?

Mort’s form shuddered and he offered Sneed a wan smile.  “I’m okay, really.  This is just a different adventure.  I’d never imagined it would be anything like this, I have to admit.  I don’t know what I thought it would be, heaven or hell or nothing or whatever.  But I definitely didn’t think that it would be like this.  Watch.”

He twisted himself around, turning his torso in tighter and tighter circles until his middle resembled a knotted rope.  His arms stretched out to either side, growing longer and thin as strands of spaghetti.  “I’m like Mr. Fantastic,” he laughed.  At Sneed’s blank look, he laughed harder.

“Anyway,” he said, slowly unraveling back to normal, “what do you do?  What’s this contraption?”  He patted the side of Sneed’s ride.

“Oh, well, this here is my carriage.”  Sneed was glad to be back on lighter ground and happily began to espouse the many uses he put his carriage to.  “I pick up the new ones and take ‘em around, introduce them to other ghosts they’d prolly get along with.  Show ‘em the boundaries and all.”

“Boundaries?  You mean I can’t leave the graveyard?”

“No, m’boy, I’m afraid that you can’t.  Don’t worry, after a while it kind of becomes, like, a whole world all on its own.  You won’t even notice.”  Before the kid had a chance to process this new limitation, he patted the seat behind him.  “Hop in.  We’ll be just in time for the sunset.”

Sunset had always been Mort’s favorite time of day.  His phone had been filled with pictures of them, ugly grey clouds sliding into darkness without fuss, brilliant explosions of pink and orange streaking the sky as if fighting the night with every color in their arsenal.  He wondered if it would look any different tonight.

“Sure, why not.”  He climbed in and settled onto the seat, which had somehow even produced the illusion of a spring popping through the ripped cushion.

Sneed noticed him looking and chuckled.  “Graveyard joke.  Can’t have things looking like they aren’t in ruins, it would wreck the ahhhmbience.”  They were flowing smoothly over the ground, hovering a few inches in the air.

Mort was watching the landscape so intently that he didn’t immediately realize that Sneed was no longer seated next to him.  He craned around and saw the funny little man standing a few feet away, falling farther behind every second.

“This moment’s just for you,” he called out.  “A minute to enjoy the quiet you won’t always be able to find around here.”

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the traveling carriage when it gained the hilltop, that its occupant was steeped in crimson.

The journey stopped with a thought.  Mort turned his face up towards the sky, face illuminated by an inner light that rivaled the show the sun put on.  He smiled and settled down to appreciate the calm, and an adventure begun.

*****

This weeks Master Class line was chosen by the inestimable David Wiley at Scholarly Scribe: http://scholarlyscribe.wordpress.com/ - check him out, this dude can write.  He chose his prompt line from one of my all time favorite books A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens:  The sunset struck so brilliantly into the traveling carriage when it gained the hilltop, that its occupant was steeped in crimson.

Prof SAM let the inmates rule the asylum and place the line wherever we wanted it in our story (CHAOS!!).  Thanks, teach ;)   Check her out, and the other writers who link up (because they’re all awesome, seriously) here: http://frommywriteside.wordpress.com/

Thanks for reading :)

Categories: Fiction, Mort's Graveyard Tales | Tags: , , , , | 20 Comments

Mort’s Tree

Posted on May 8, 2013 by stankmeaner

This is my entry for Trifecta Week 76. The word this week was blood, using its 3rd definition:

*****

The tree was still a baby on the day Mort’s mom shuffled across the soft carpet of grass in the cemetery, a broken bag of bones in sensible shoes. Its trunk was a hand span across, tendril-like roots just beginning to quest deeper into the soil.

Mrs. Ramsey stopped next to a fledgling branch and wrapped her fingers gently around it, swaying with it in a quiet private dance. “Right here,” she said, pointing at the unbroken ground. “Mort loved the woods; never saw a tree he didn’t want to climb. He was only fifteen, you know.” The official made appropriate noises, nodding. “Right here,” she repeated, with a watery laugh that was part sigh, part sob.

On the day of his funeral, Mort sat on the same branch his mother had danced with. He bounced on it experimentally; it never would have held his flesh and bone weight. A leaf fluttered to the ground. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know I could do that.”

Intermittent sunbeams dappled strange patterns on the silly looking casket that his parents had chosen. Mort had to laugh. As wonderful as they were, they sometimes showed a distinct lack of taste. Evidenced, he supposed, by naming their only son Mortimer. He laughed again, figuring that Mort had suited him just fine.

When the time came for his father to pull his mother from the grave site, she stared up at him as if surprised to find him there and stumbled awkwardly to her feet.

He crab walked next to her as they started away, glancing back again and again towards the tree that stood sentinel to his son’s headstone. There it was again – a branch moving on its own.

“Milly,” he whispered. “Look!” The silly grin on his face got through the haze her brain was surviving behind and she turned. Two leaves drifted towards the ground as the branch bobbed a goodbye.

“You take care of my boy,” she told the tree. “He’s your blood now.”

****

For the second time in a year, one of my son’s friends was killed in a hit and run accident. The first one I didn’t know; he was from a different city and it was a friend of a friend kind of thing. The second one he was closer to, played basketball with. I’d met him a few times, knew his name. He died right around the corner from where we live, last Thursday night. As if losing your child isn’t bad enough, to know that someone left them there, more worried about themselves than the one they left behind, has to be so crushing that I can’t even imagine the pain. I guess this is my way of trying to offer something back. That, who the hell knows, I’m really not even sure what I’m trying to say here. Regardless, this is for them, the only small thing that I’ve got to give. My soundtrack today? My kid in the background on his Xbox headset, because I’m incredibly lucky to have him sitting in the next room right now.

******

Categories: Fiction, Mort's Graveyard Tales | 25 Comments

The Gifted 4: Shmitty the Cat

Posted on May 4, 2013 by stankmeaner

Storch-Badge-Master

 

The fourth installment in The Gifted series.  Enjoy…

 

 

 

I woke up in bed with a man and a cat.  The man I would know even in the dark, by smell and taste and touch.  The cat, however, was an interloper.

The sun slanted through gauzy curtains hung over a cracked window.  A comfortably chilly draft floated lazily through the air as I stared down at the cat curled around my feet.  “Who the hell are you?  What are you doing in my bed?”

The cat’s whiskers danced as he chuffed like a tiger; the fur ball was laughing at me.  Still chuffing, it belly crawled up the bed between me and a sprawled out and snoring Dav.  It stopped and bumped a wet nose against my neck with a garbled, broken mrroowwr.    I grinned and scratched behind his tufted ears.  “Were you laughing at me?”

The cat lifted its head and bi-colored eyes looked placidly into mine.

“Are you a girl cat?”  Chuff.

“Are you a boy cat?”

“Rawr.”

“Uh huh.”

I had heard rumors about this over the past few years.  The story went that as human’s Gifts developed so too did animals; almost like their natural ‘animal instinct’ became super charged.  I also heard that their personification had gotten way out of hand in some circles.  While I had to agree that this certainly seemed to be a sentient creature, I wasn’t going to interpret a series of meows as the words of an Oracle.

Absentmindedly I continued to scratch and scrub at the cats orange fur, mulling things over while he stretched and purred and growled like a wind-up toy with a broken key.  His overzealous kneading caught Dav’s shoulder and he jerked upright with a yelp.

The cat and I laughed.

As grumpy and confused as a bear woken early from hibernation Dav craned around to look at the claw mark and glared at the furry stranger between him and his woman.  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.  The cat and I laughed again, a private joke between new friends.

“That’s what I asked him,” I said.  “He laughed at me, too.”

Dav fell back on the pillows with a grunt and turned on his side to face us.  He scratched under the cat’s chin.  “You got a name pal?”  The cat shook his head, ear twitching.  “Huh.  Okay.  Are you staying here?”  He snuggled back against me and grumbled a purr that sounded like a building’s foundation settling.  “Well then you need a name.  How about something dignified?  Something befitting a cat that would scratch a poor defenseless naked man in his sleep.  Mr. Sparkles.”  A gentle nip with razor sharp teeth made Dav laugh.

“Shmitty,” I offered.  Both the cat and Dav looked at me; I shrugged.  “It’s a shady guy who knows how to survive in the back alleys.  Shmitty.”

Shmitty inclined his head in my direction, presumably to agree with my assessment of his character.

“Alright, that’s done.  Now get the hell out of my bed so I can say good morning to my woman properly.”  Dav gave Shmitty a good natured shove to get him moving.  The cat took a moment to lick the fur Dav and I had ruffled back into place and stalked to the end of the mattress, looking over his shoulder once to make sure that we knew he was leaving of his own accord and not because he was ordered to.  There was a thump as his bulk hit the wooden floor.

My lips curled up as I looked into Dav’s chocolate brown eyes.  “Welcome back, you.”  He leaned closer, his mouth hovering beside my ear.  “What time did you guys….oh,” I trailed off as he bit the lobe, hard, and tugged.  A hand quested under the sheet and seemed pleased to find me as naked as he was.

“That saves some time,” he murmured, fingertips busily dancing feather light touches over my belly, my hips, back up to my neck.  His thumb pressed lightly into my windpipe as he held my head still and rolled over to pin me in place.  Kisses at each corner of my mouth, the hollows behind my ears, my forehead and finally back to my mouth, tongue darting, teeth scraping.

It was like this, every time.  Instant heat, an immediate connection between our skin that threatened to overwhelm if not tempered with a little levity.  I scissored my legs and flipped, hovering over him.  “See what I did there, tough guy?”  I giggled like an idiot when he tickled my ribs, gasped when he got down to more serious business.

“Watch,” he said.  I stared into his eyes, transfixed while the brown took on a golden sheen; he pushed me back gently until I was sitting upright.  His palms were hovering a hair’s breadth from my skin but I could still feel them on me.  My own eyes widened as I stared down at his working man’s hands, held still in the air before me; I felt their callouses against the tender skin under my breasts, felt rough cuts and individual fingers as these invisible extensions gripped my waist and raised me up just enough for him to scoot into place underneath me.

Fascinated and discomfited, I grasped his wrists and forced flesh and bone to replace phantoms.  “Nice trick, Maverick.  Can you feel what they’re doing?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, but it’s like second hand, not like I can feel this.”  He squeezed and my breath caught.  He used the momentary distraction to roll me over onto my back, planted a smacking kiss on my cheek.  “Good morning, Jilly.”

*****

There was always such a weird contradiction of feelings after shake the bed frame sex.  Languid and lazy, charged up and energized, all at the same time.  I shook my hands out and flexed my fingers, pointed my toes.

“Best good morning ever, thanks kid.”  Dav snorted a laugh and pulled me against his chest.  I looked back at him, perfectly content for just this one moment.  “So, now you have to tell me how our little recon ended up.  Why did you guys get back so late?”

“Seriously Jilly, you’re not going to believe these creeps.  We didn’t actually get back all that late, but we had to walk the whole way.  Too many security cams everywhere and it’s nobody’s fucking business where we go.”  He shook his head, scratched the dark stubble on his cheek.  He looked pissed, and a little spooked.  “They had this book, this Compendium.  We’re all in it, there’re hundreds of names.  All the Gifts attributed, last known whereabouts, known associates.  It was so fucking creepy.  It made me feel like a fugitive.”

I sat straight up, the sheet dropping to my lap.  “Well, what the fuck!  Who are these people, Dav?  Who the hell do they think they are?”  A horrifying thought, that someone is watching you, keeping tabs on you.  I don’t want to be a part of some weird secret file.  “Do they know where we are?”

“No, huh uh.  That’s one small bonus, I guess.  They don’t have all of us here as known companions or anything.  They know me and Damien are twins, but they don’t have all of our Gifts listed so I’m not sure how up to date their information is.  Or maybe they just haven’t added it yet.”

We were both sitting up now, leaning against the headboard.  He eyed me sideways and grinned.  “They don’t have much of anything on you though, just your first name and a basic description.  If worse comes to worst, you can be our secret weapon, infiltrate the enemy lines with your feminine wiles.”

We both laughed outright at that; feminine wiles would definitely not be listed as one of my super powers.  The first time Dav kissed me he was icing down my knuckles after I knocked a guy out for a being a little too insistent with his attention.

“They have Gifts too, though.  I mean, the Illusions that they had in that shop were serious business.  They were strong and damn near perfect.  If it wasn’t for our strength as a group, I’m not sure we would have broken through them.”

“I don’t like this, Dav.  I want to know exactly who these people are.  I want to start a little Compendium of my own.”

*****

This episode of The Gifted was brought to you by Florence and the Machine, because her voice rules through headphones and the line “drag my teeth across your chest and taste your beating heart’ always gives me a little tingle ;)

Check out the Master Class over at http://frommywriteside.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/master-class-2013-man-cat/ for some great writing prompt fun.  This week, Eric Storch got to pick the prompt line because he wrote a very intriguing installment to his Easy Money series the previous week (go read it, and you’ll want to read the ones leading up to it: http://sinistralscribblings.com/2013/04/27/the-last-one/).  Eric chose To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein:  I woke up in bed with a man and a cat

Categories: Fiction, The Gifted | Tags: , , , , , | 10 Comments

Fissures

Posted on April 25, 2013 by stankmeaner

Storch-Badge-Master

She was in a middling sized valley sitting on the bank of a river that was really more of a trickling stream. The sun bounced rays with abandon, off of amber lenses and scabby knees.

“I’m so pale,” she murmured. “I’m porcelain.”

She took off her glasses and squinted at the white hot sky, vaguely wondering if it was already on its way.

She looked back down at her naked self, dusted a palm down a long white leg. Fine fissures appeared, running from ankle to calf. She beamed at the trees. “I’m coming undone,” she told them proudly. The breeze blew, scooped up a leaf on a lazy draft and kissed her rounded cheek with its edges.

The tiny lips of flesh that were peeling back seeped a golden incandescence that drew glyphs on her body that she couldn’t decipher. It was a tale from a time before words were needed to tell a story; what leaked from her now was pure, and it was ecstasy.

The fissures played a merry game of chase across the expanse of nerve endings that had been her skin, was still her skin, but cracking open and sloughing off to the ground around her. She was a hatchling, her body the egg broken out of, useful but no longer necessary.

Something was staying behind to shape itself into a new figure altogether. Maybe this one will have wings, she laughed. The noise dripped into the air like liquid, stretched out and elongated, a melted candlewax of sound.

She slid, glided and schmoozed her way toward the water, a whirling dervish not quite in control of her dervish. Idly she wondered what life might be like as water nymph.

****

The soundtrack to this short story is Skrillex, because nothing is more life affirming than music that makes you want to move.

There was a moment of inspiration in the comments section of a favorite blog yesterday. The author isn’t having the best of times at the moment, and the commenter left a really thoughtful and insightful comment that ended with the question: “What color are your wings?” For some reason it really stuck with me.

I got to pick the Master Class prompt line this week, as I obviously bribed the teacher or she’s just a silly bugger, so I went with Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show: She took off her glasses and squinted at the white hot sky, vaguely wondering if it was already on its way. The prompt had to be used in the middle of the story this week, which was tricky but worked okay for me because my paragraphs are short as shit.

If there is anybody who happens to read this that isn’t already playing and wanted to jump in on the Master Class game, it really is a blast. Each week a different line from a different place in a different novel is picked by a different person to use in a different way. Just go check out SAM at www.frommywriteside.wordpress.com, we would love to have you.

Categories: Fiction | Tags: , , , | 12 Comments

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