Uncategorized

Gage Chapter 12 ‘Passover’

Hello hello again,

Greetings on this fine tuesday coming from my shack in the middle of murky nowhere to bring you more weird stories and general musings on life (or the lack thereof).

Been getting on with some decent writing and a lot of slacking off, still trying to get back into the swing of things with the 2k a day word count, not quite managing it but saying that the stuff I’ve been putting out imo isn’t too bad. It’s taking shape, it’s getting there.
Is it as good as the start, I don’t but I’m reaching the tipping point now, the story is peaking and I like the way it’s shaping up.

And tbh I’m looking forward to doing something more silly and fun again, so as soon as I’m done here gonna get straight back into 3 ring for the next instalment of that and then maybe start thinking about a sequel to Diana after dark if the time is ready for that. Been wanting to write that one for a while.

But the moon and the stars have to be aligned for that, it has to be perfect and if you’ve read the book you’d know that is pretty topical haha.

Not that I don’t love writing serious stuff and intense stuff, it’s just a little draining being in that head space constantly, you have no idea how worked up I have to get to write stuff like this. It’s like I meditate but not to get calm and serene but to get the complete opposite. I get so worked up it’s like I’m trying to rip the keys out of my laptop haha.

It just takes up a lot of energy to run that hot, I’m literally trying to make myself feel like I’m in battle flinging a battleaxe into someone’s face haha.

Talking about battleaxes in the faces I haven’t been reading or listening to the witcher much, I just don’t care enough to follow the story honestly, the characters are boring and unlikable and I feel like I was cheated out of the witcher series I should’ve have gotten. I keep lamenting to my polish buddy at work that if the series had been like the first story it would have been perfect. If Sapkowksi had kept it a tight almost pulpy action packed terse tense fantasy thriller it would have been my favourite fantasy series hands down.

But it just gets lost in the weeds with this generic crap and shitty characters I just lost interest. I mean most of the books are just about Ciri and completely unrelated stuff honestly. For a series about a monster slayer it just uses his monster slaying as like a character trait, it’s not what the story is about at all and plays no part in the narrative whatsoever.

Geralt being a witcher is just something he likes to tell people like he’s on a speed date but he never actually does any ‘witching’. It’s just astounding that CD projekt red can get it so right with the games but the creator of the character can get it so wrong. It’s weird because it’s usually the opposite for adaptations like it’s the total reverse with Dexter. Sure they hired a great actor to play Dexter but they completely fluffed the story and the character after season one. If the show had followed the books religiously it would have been amazing.

But it’s equally amazing that CD projekt red (jesus I sound like I’m doing marketing for these guys haha) could turn a cool shorty story (which could be a rip off of elric, I need to read elric) and turn it into one of the biggest game franchises in history.

I also finished that Parker book it was taking me ages to get through and yeah it kinda goes nowhere like I thought it might. They kill the only interesting villain off halfway through and replace him with an old guy on a golf cart who doesn’t do anything except shout at people. And the whole book is about Parker trying to escape this amusement park while getting besieged by this criminal organisation and spoilers yeah at the end he escapes and then goes home and makes himself a sandwich. That’s literally the end, I’m not making that up. The last line is him eating the sandwich and then thinking about getting the money he left there.

He doesn’t even get the money, or even try for it there’s no tension at all. He just escapes and thats it, no epic show down because the person he would have had the showdown with he already killed, he was literally the first guy he killed, it was pathetic. I mean why the fuck couldn’t you just have killed off the guys buddy and continued the story with the interesting villain instead?

That tiny change would have changed the entire plot and made it ten times more interesting and it would have been so easy to do. You just have the other guy walk into the hall of mirrors. Why would this smart villain be the first to walk into a trap like that? It made no sense and basically destroyed all the tension in the book.

I complained that the last book was kind of small and uninteresting and the heist was a little boring because everything went right. But that still had tension and interesting characters and a more dynamic story, it had legs. This book is just lazy and hacky honestly.

But still this is like I dunno the 14th book in the series and it’s the first real stinker, so that’s amazing. I’ve been burning through these books and loving each one more than the last. I just hope the next one returns to form a little.
Oh and I’m really excited because I just found out that someone turned all Stark’s books into graphic novels so that’ll give me a reason to read them all again which is great. I can’t wait for that.

I didn’t think the book was shit, I think if it had a few tweaks it would have been decent. Just have that interesting villain you spent all that time building up live til the end and have this awesome battle of wits of which I expected. And maybe have a little more set up to the actual job and the park itself. Just to give the story a little more breathing room and not be this claustrophobic almost like stage play set in one room.

Yeah so that’s my rant for the day probably be back for a poem tomorrow, I don’t know yet, been feeling a little up and down about that. I definitely have material let’s leave it at that.

Oh that reminds me I finally got to the part of the story where my bardic poem is used in Cur, so that’s cool. It is kind of a pivotal point in the story and the lore, the celtic mythology. Bards are held in high regard in that culture, their power to influence people is quite literally seen as a form of powerful magic and curses.

Anyway gotta go and do some proof reading as usual, finished the Diana pitch chapters but I’m gonna start working on the whole book soon enough. But I will put out another Cur chapter soon enough.

See you…

–

They came for us at night.

Me and my friends watched from our rooftops as they snaked through the back alleys. That bookish one with the moustache behind them fiddling with a tiny pencil and paper trying to write in some kind of journal.

They crept quickly and quietly to the centre of town. The town was so quiet you could hear the sand moving in their boots. A ghost town silently watching as they worked their way closer to the saloon they hoped Gage was sleeping in.

I could see on the hill where they set up camp, those weird pods were still there closed up and not moving, just sitting there like warts on a frogs ass.

They had strange weaponry and stalked the alleys ways watching every corner as they went. Feeling the eyes on them, slits of boarded windows following them as they passed holding their breath.

They must have felt us watching, the big one with the beard looked up at us but we ducked too quickly for him to see. They hurried along passing us off as curious birds.

He was waiting for them.

Just standing so tall, alone in the centre of main street, a cold wind blowing. His shotgun hanging loose at his side.

The men fanned out in formation and surrounded Gage in a semi circle in front of the saloon.

The man with the moustache shouted and tried to push past the men.

“Ryan, we have to take him alive.” He shouted as he approached the man with the white hair.

The man at the front said nothing, he just spun around and hit the pudgy moustache guy in the guts dropping him flat to his knees. Then he turned back to Gage and shrugged his shoulders.

The man on his knees tried to get up as the other men attempted to keep him down.

“If you kill him and others hear about it, he’ll become a martyr”

The man with the white hair, he must have been the leader turned to each of his men and he pointed, first at the woman. He said “Are you gonna tell anyone about this?”

She shook her head.

Then to the large man with the beard “You?”

“Not a soul.”

Then to the mexican.

“De nada”

“You?” He said to the younger man.

“No sir” he grinned.

“Well that’s everyone.” He said looking at the man with the mustache and quickly shooting him in the head with his strange alien weapon. There was just a quick flash of light and a strange noise and the man’s head was gone and his body became dead weight in the arms of the men carrying. Stained as they were with a light dusting of pink mist.

Disgusted, they threw his body down like a sack of potatoes in the dry loose top soil.

Gage watched the dust settle around it as it stopped being a person and just became scenery.

Ryan stopped and looked Gage up and down and scoffed. “We travelled all this way for this” He sniffed and spat on the dirt next to the mustache man’s body and said “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do that.” He smirked and put his e-cigar in his mouth and sucked on it looking at Gage. “I know you” He said.

Gage tossed his gun out in front of him on the ground. It landed with a heavy thudding noise.

Ryan let out a laugh and said “Well that was easy.”

Gage didn’t move or say a word, his one eye burning staring through Ryan who tried too hard to hide a boiling fear in his gut. Destiny staring him right in the face, looking at the bare pit where his soul was supposed to reside.

Gage took his duster off of his shoulders revealing a mountain of man in a stained grey longsleeved under shirt that was once white. Ripped and torn and bitten and stretched with the sinewy muscles underneath forged through nothing but hard work and sweat and toil. The work horse bitten and turned sour and vicious and lame biting back at the hand of his master and running madly and wild and free to it’s own doom.

He took his suspenders off his shoulders and clenched his fists.

Ryan scoffed again “Oh so you wanna do it the old fashioned way.” He took another suck on his e-cigar and put it back in his pocket. He took his gun out of it’s holster and lifted it over his shoulder at which point the younger guy with the shaved head took it off of him.

He was wearing some kind of weird skeleton suit over his body that went over his arms and legs and connected at the hips. Under it he was just wearing a fitted shirt and a pair of pants.

Ryan didn’t take a stance he just smiled with his cocky smile and said “Well what are you waiting for?”

He let out a mocking breathy laughter and said “Ok, I guess I’ll be the one to lead”

He moved so fast I thought I was dreaming at first. I’d never seen a human move like that, it was like he was there one minute and then there was just dust and dirt and he was barrelling at Gage. He didn’t throw a punch he just launched himself right into him like a cannonball and swept him off his feet with enough force to kill a horse.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. He couldn’t have been more than six foot nothing this guy but one minute he was standing there the next he was on top of Gage. He toppled the gigantic man in two seconds flat, felled him like a great oak tree in a single strike.

–

Check out the rest of the chapter on inkitt.

Passover

–

August 14, 2018 0

Diana After Dark Chapter 2 ‘Do you see what I see?’

Yeah more of these lazy stalling tactics haha. Well is it laziness or do I just want to take my time and make sure the proofreading of Cur is perfect before I put out another chapter, no you’re right it’s laziness.

But I felt like I’ve been putting off proofreading this pitch stuff, which is arguably more important. And I was for a good reason, I think it’s good to let something sit for awhile and then come back to it with fresh eyes. You find a lot more of the mistakes that way.

Still happily can say I’ve read no witcher in a couple of days and my polish friend who got me into the witcher told me the next book is the most boring of all so I can’t wait to slog through this to get to that… yay.

I dunno, I just feel like I have to do something to escape inevitable depression, I have to keep moving forward, to stop or slow is death.

I’m still rocking Cur, I’m about over the hump now working my way into the home stretch and into the real meat of the story, which I think is fucking epic but I’m biased haha.

Because up to this point it’s been pretty apocryphal, building my own story around a character that was meant to die in the original literature that I revived sort of creating an alternate timeline. So this is when we’re about to start getting into my dramatisation or interpretation of the actual mythology and it’s pretty awesome. I actually already started writing it awhile ago because I was gonna slot it in right at the start.

But then my buddy said I should move it to the end as like a reveal and a part of me thought it would be better at the part because it’s a little bit of an obvious twist in my opinion and I thought it might be cheesier than it would be epic. But now as I’ve built up to it in the story I think it will be really cool. If readers feel half as pumped as I did writing it it’ll hit the mark.

Yeah so here’s the next edited and double proof read chapter of Diana after dark, this should be what professional agents will read so if there are still mistakes I’m pretty much fucked. But I’m being a lot more patient and conscientious this time around. The last couple of times I jumped the gun a little bit and my content really wasn’t as good as this so I have high hopes for it. I mean fuck me it’s better than twilight.

Anyway gotta do something actually productive today, I’m back on facebook so I’m gonna do some spamming with this lovely little chapter people can’t complain about being unedited. Despite the fact people will just to be dicks haha.

Yeah so here’s that, now I have to get to proofreading and spamming and all that good stuff.

See you…

–

Paul drove his dad’s car when he was out in some Middle-Eastern hell hole doing what I could only dream about, literally. But in an altogether less neat and ritualistic way at the behest of his Uncle Sam.

That’s a level of trust you can’t kill for. His dad was obviously very confident in the offspring he’d carefully chiseled out of clay. That, or he was indelibly dim-witted, allowing his only child to drive around in his top-of-the-line vehicle. Having only met him a handful of times, I couldn’t say which was the case.

It was an older model olive drab Hummer, with leather interiors that smelled like discipline and spearmint gum. The thing ran like it was brand new, the old man kept it in peak condition, and his son took it just as seriously.

I opened a bag of chips in her once on the way to an Ariana Grande concert and he made me get out and finish them on the side of the freeway. That was fun.

Another thing I loved about Paul Alan Junior was, he rarely talked. There’s the strong silent types. Then there’s this type, the type that’s conditioned to ‘being seen and not heard,’ on levels that teeter on ‘culty’, if that’s a word. His father taught him well; sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t as damaged as I was. Instead of breaking the mold, he’d been hammered perfectly into it. A living Ken doll with no visible cracks or creases.

Thankfully, unlike a Ken Doll, they’d seen fit to leave the important places ‘unsmoothed,’—not that that really mattered to me.

Unlike most people, I’m a big fan of comfortable silence; sadly in Orange County, near the coast, it’s in short supply. Inside the sealed air conditioned mobile command center that was Paul’s dad’s car, it was preserved. Like some kind of orchid, hermetically sealed for freshness. I could almost taste it as I watched the anemic palm trees and midafternoon roller-skaters go by. Baking and cracking in the sun while I felt like a lizard on a cool dry rock; bliss.

With a full stomach, it was even better. He took me to this little taco place we like near the beach because it’s quiet and he knows that’s why I like it.

I had the vegan taco; not vegan but I like their food and for some strange reason I like animals. Not really people or kids. Of course, people are kids but there needed to be a distinction. Although, I don’t hate them.

I just have a callous indifference for everything that doesn’t walk on four legs. There’s something about them I like, their raw natures, their lack of pretense, lack of a filter. Their natural instincts just accepted, not sanded away by school or television.

Sadly, the feeling is not mutual. Every cat or dog my aunt ever brought back would rather jump under a semi than let me pet them. I won a gold fish at a fair once, got it a bowl and a little castle, the whole bit. As soon as we put it in the bowl, it climbed those castle steps and was never seen again. It chose a life of solitude like some hunchback. It starved to death rather than see me for all of the five seconds it took for me to sprinkle food on the surface of the water.

Paul paid for the tacos, of course, perfect gentleman.

Feminism, what’s that?

“Are you mad at me?” he asked, as he kept his eyes straight, hands at ten and two.

I looked at him and sighed, and smiled with the corners of my mouth like a snake. “No.” suggesting it could’ve gone either way.

He looked good in profile, a strong chin, long straight nose, light dusting of designer stubble. The aviator sunglasses were probably also his dad’s. His hair was tight at the sides with a bit of gel assisted lift at the front.

“Is that a real ‘no’ or a woman’s ‘no’?” he asked, without taking his eyes off the road, just smiled out at nothing.

“No as in no.” I just couldn’t get those dreams out of my head. Picturing the city under the blanket of night and me stalking its street like some carrion bird picking off the weak and strong alike. It was a mix of horror and sheer splendor mixing in my chest. A feeling so unexplainable, to try seemed like blasphemy.

“You just seem—” The leather squeaked under him; his eyes remained forward, he poked his tongue into his cheek, as if looking for the right word. “Different”.

Should I tell him about my dream, maybe just to shut him up? I don’t have to tell him about the good bits, I can keep those to myself, locked away in Dear Diana’s vault of diabolical deeds.

I make a bit of a show of it, lick my lips so he can hear, maybe not over the air-conditioning. “I had this weird dream.” I shrugged and smiled again.

Paul readjusted the rearview mirror, still he wore that dumb smile. “What kind of dream?”

Two questions in one day. Aren’t we the inquisitive type today?

“I was walking…walking, at night.” I tapped my front teeth together anxiously. A creeping odd feeling of cold hit me and I rubbed my bare pale arms to warm them but my hands were just as cold.

“Like a vampire?”

I scoffed.

“You really shouldn’t be walking alone at night Di—even in your dreams.” He made a hawing laugh sound in his throat, and turned that smile directly on me.

“Cute.”

Paul unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it into his mouth, somehow without taking his hands off the wheel. “You haven’t heard?” He poked the gum packet in my general direction.

“Apparently not,” I said, losing a sliver of patience, as I politely batted away the offer of gum.

He lifted his aviators and looked into the rearview mirror, as he chewed loudly. “You haven’t been watching the news?”

“Not if I don’t have to, boring show.” There goes another one.

Paul took in a deep breath and continued to chew. “They found a couple’ a bodies washed up on Huntington Beach.” He said.

“Bodies?” Happens every other day here. Some fat tourist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania goes belly up in a rubber dingy and we have to pretend to care.

“Headless bodies.” He made a chopping motion at his neck, like I didn’t know what headless meant. “They think it’s a serial killer or something.”

Or something, something like a chip of ice broken off, a cold laughter in the dark, a tinny voice spoke a language only I could understand. Those words set my teeth on edge, my skin to a cool burn.

“Really?” I tried to sound like I wasn’t chomping at the bit to Google this on my phone right in front of him. I swallowed, trying to pretend it didn’t faze me at all; like it wasn’t the most rapturous news I’d heard in my life.

Like there weren’t alarm bells ringing all through Diana’s dark deep depths. Like a light didn’t go off in my head, telling me somewhere, somehow, this is what I’d been waiting for.

But what else? Of course I need to feign some sort of fear, some kind of concern, for the victims for their family’s maybe.

I realized suddenly, a whole minute had passed since I last spoke. I just threw out a stock, “That’s horrible, those poor people.” For effect. No tears, no screams? Too much.

“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” Paul smiled.

“Did they find them?”

“Did they find what?” he asked, tipping his sunglasses down.

“The heads.” I asked quietly, as I tried to restrain myself from biting my lip.

He started chewing out of the other side of his mouth. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think they said.”

“Oh, terrible, I’m so scared!” I muttered almost shaking with excitement. What could it mean, why take the heads? Was it just a gang thing? Maybe the cartel. They love murdering random people and scattering them all over the place. Maybe some kind of Santeria voodoo hoodoo thing. But what happened to the heads?

Maybe they washed away and became a house for a family of California Dungeness crabs.

But not to find one, that stood out to me. It could’ve just been Paul forgot, but it seemed to strike a chord with Diana’s Dark Double. A shrill laughter, a tingle, a shiver up my spine, electricity on my fingertips. Every hair on the back of my neck stood up to salute the day, I had to check my lip to make sure I wasn’t drooling. Something seemed so right about it, something I had no idea I was waiting for.

I had to find out.

The moment he stopped the car, I bound out of the door like a dog seeing another passing car full of burning cats. I tossed back a feeble kissing noise and something like “Bye, babe, see you tomorrow!”

He said something equally as vapid back and swung a wide U-turn around the tiny roundabout at the end of the cul-de-sac I lived in, and drove off in a cloud of diesel smoke. The maneuver was something akin to the Titanic trying to do a Mexican Hat Dance around the iceberg.

Paul almost always just drove over it, leaving muddy tire tracks and crushed flowers in his wake, which seemed to really piss off my neighbors for some reason.

Oh well.

I quickstepped to the door of our ‘reasonably’ priced Orange County bungalow that looked like a little beach hut. Complete with beach towels drying on a spinner in the tiny front yard.

I was trying not to break into a full-scale sprint. I managed to keep my hand loose enough so I didn’t break the key off in the lock. Just to avoid any unnecessary time wasting conversations with my aunt. I wanted to be free to sit down at my computer as quick as humanly possible.

The keys on my chain rattled and it took me too long to find the right one and keep it still long enough to get it to go in the lock.

I turned the key, flinging the door open, closed it behind me and strode through the hall. I passed the living room, which I followed with my eyes.

The TV was on, the news, something about the killings. What a coincidence, but something in me told me this had to be a private moment, shared with no one.

Not even my own flesh and blood, and I also didn’t want any spoilers, no fluff, or padding. Just raw stark reality, no artist’s impression for Diana of the Dark.

I hurried past, slurring my words. “Hey, I’m home, had a great day, not hungry, kinda tired, going to my room, kthanksbye!”

Bustled past what felt like a crowd in a train station, but was just a bunch of squash equipment occupying the hall for some reason. I got in my room, pulled the door shut and had a fight with a wooden hat rack I’d thought was cute on Amazon, but had yet to buy a hat for.

My room was a hovel. Clothes, clean and dirty in piles throughout the room and on my bed. Posters of bands I didn’t listen to anymore, if I ever did in the first place, peeled off the walls and ceiling. Containers of soft drinks and burgers—I’m not a vegetarian. I like animals, big difference. They could have been vegie burgers, I don’t remember.

The curtains were drawn and the room was dark and humid. I put on the fan, and it started to cough and move warm air around my small room.

My laptop sat atop a throne of dirty clothes on my bed, half open like a clamshell.

I snatched it up and almost tossed it onto my dresser/desk/landfill. I turned it on and found a swivel chair with a sock wrapped tightly around one of the wheels. Its swiveling days were over, as the sock had lodged itself deep in one of the wheels. I parked my butt down and waited for my laptop to boot up, which seemed to be taking much longer than usual.

Punching it wouldn’t make it go any faster. So I didn’t do that.

Patience Diana.

It finally booted up, and I quickly logged in. My fingers almost tripped over themselves to type in my password, Dahmer7.

I opened a browser and typed, “Headless bodies, Huntington beach.”

There were a lot of results, but the top results seemed to be the most recent.

The Beachcomber had the juiciest title. The bodies had been found on the beach after all. So it seemed fitting.

‘Is there a head-hunter in Orange County?’ Jess Wode of The Beachcomber asked

I hope so Jess, I do hope so.

It was apparent from the outset, this person had no idea what was actually going on. They were reading a police report, and adding their own ‘unique spin’. Or more likely, recycling a headline from another newspaper that also knew nothing.

Nothing more than headless bodies were found on the beach. That sells newspapers.

I was grinding my teeth, considering the prospects of a journalism degree. How much easier it would be to get access to all the morbid tripe I could get my hands on, if only I were a cop or a forensic tech or something.

The article was trite speculation and useless filler and what’s more, no pictures. What a waste of time.

I went through a few more sites. before I realized the police must be keeping a really tight lid on this one. No leaks, no cracks, no crevices, not even a video on someone’s phone, a selfie of a morbid dog walker, nothing.

Well that was disappointing. Even more so realizing that I would have to do the exact same thing as in my blog.

I opened another window and clicked on the bookmark tab for my blog. It wasn’t very fancy, I’m okay with computers, what kid born post y2k isn’t?

A super script kiddy hacker, I am not, but I’m getting there. The blog was just a standard WordPress blog dolled up with emo fonts and cheesy blood spatter effects as a background.

Mostly a serial killer fansite, where I documented murders and weird goings-on in the world at large. I ran it anonymously, obviously for the same reason I didn’t collect knives or listen to death metal.

Not that there’s anything right with that, but the connotations are the problem. People’s impressions really are everything.

If I do go on a killing spree out of the blue, I’d make it way too easy on them. They could blame reality TV, or Marilyn Manson or videogames instead of the harsh reality they’re hiding from.

Which is, Diana of the Dark Descent?

A shiver up my spine and that mocking chortle; the word I’m looking for is banal at best. ‘Evil’ doesn’t really cover it.

When I think evil, it’s more twirling moustaches and girls tied to train tracks. Some brawny hero coming to the rescue. This wasn’t so simple, it was never truly that simple.

Besides, how selfish would I have to be to let my ‘appetites’ harm the good name of videogames and death metal?

I logged in and tried to compose something, anything.

No pictures, maybe I should’ve just Googled ‘headless bodies’ in images. What kind of ‘leet’ hacker would I be if I didn’t figure out how to turn off my aunt’s safe search—in the fourth grade no less?

I felt dumb and dithering, as I looked at that blank text box I was about to fill with smoke, definitively from my ass. This must be what it feels like to be a real journalist.

My eyes wandered from the blank text box to my notifications. There was one. I clicked it, pretending I wasn’t mildly excited. Almost an addiction, checking notifications, expecting some great revelation. Some invisible backslap from a stranger or shit slung from some obtuse basement dweller, or maybe even a picture of a dick.

Other women complain about this constantly, I don’t get the fuss. It’s just a dick. I get the distinct feeling they’d be more miserable if the conveyer belt of phallic imagery would ebb. Maybe around their mid to late thirties.

It was a comment from one of the handfuls of subs to this small corner of the internet I call my own.

Spoopyshadowguy666 writes, ‘Check your inbox’.

This guy again, he subbed to me maybe a month or two ago, and he’s always sending me these weird cryptic emails. Like puzzles or riddles, games, and no pictures of his penis, woe is me.

Okay, I’ll bite.

I opened my inbox and it was empty, funny, my room looked like a homeless shelter, but I like to keep a tidy inbox.

I check the spam folder and waded through all the phishing emails and things trying to sell me Viagra and dildos and wart remover. A combination I can’t recommend.

His emails in the past didn’t really seem all that interesting. Mostly pictures of people, their names and addresses. Odd things, like their habits and work schedules, where they like to hang out.

It was weird but it didn’t cross the boundaries of being really strange. Seemed like the random fixations of a professional stalker. The standard fare for any fan of a serial killer page.

None of the people in the pictures seemed to be connected in anyway, different races, ages, jobs, sexes. If there was a pattern I didn’t pick it up, so into the spam folder it went.

Today I was feeling ready for a distraction. Anything that would save me from the blank text box, and raking the bottom of my own skull for inane bullshit.

There it was, the subject of the email read ‘Do you see what I see?’ There were some attachments.

Here we go, finally the validation of seeing a nice hard cock of a stranger, can’t wait.

Clicking on the email revealed that it was pretty much the same as before. Pictures of seemingly random people, with little to no correlation in the way they looked.

I scrolled through them aimlessly, feeling silly for wasting my time. Then I saw a face that sent a little sliver of ice into the dark well. I felt it stir.

A small flap of leathery wings, a tail uncoiling.

The face seemed oddly familiar. It was a Hispanic guy, maybe in his late twenties-early thirties, curly brown hair, small almond eyes, a flat nose and wide lips. The name on the image was Antoine Ruiz.

Ruiz, that name also seems familiar but it’s a Hispanic name and I go to a school that has a sizeable population. I think I sat behind a Ruiz in calculus.

I decided I was being silly, it was meaningless. I was making a big deal over nothing. I could have seen this guy while I was eating tacos an hour ago. He could have been staring right at me while he was grating vegan cheese and I wouldn’t have noticed.

There was something odd about these photos, though. They seemed different. The ones before were almost stock images pulled straight from Facebook or Twitter. Selfies, pictures taken by friends of them standing with surf board or in front of lobster dinners or on vacation.

These pictures seemed more intrusive, and increasingly so, as I cycled through them. Pictures from a distance, with their faces turned away from the camera, as if they had no idea they were being taken.

There were no smirks of the impending picture taking, no glib grins of people trying to show themselves at their bests. Instead it was the harsh glare of the camera’s eye revealing them in their natural state, completely unaware.

The first pictures of this Ruiz character made it obvious he was some kind of small time drug pusher or pimp. At night, with girls. Clandestine exchanges with people in cars with tinted windows. Moving his gun around the waistband of his Jordans.

Quite a character. Another small tingle was conjured as the next image was that of a small single story house, not mine. That would have been really ‘spoopy’.

No, it was a lot more ‘low-key’. Wider but with an unkempt, dried out lawn, and some desert plants in front. He’s really going to be hearing from the homeowners’ society.

The pictures got closer, looking through the windows at Ruiz. There was some kind of party going on, armed bouncers at the doors, people going in and out at all hours. The time stamps said as much.

Girls of the paid variety hanging around.

Quite the operation he has going on there.

Then more, after the party was over and people were leaving. It could have been just my imagination, but on a headcount it seemed like they were one girl short.

Then the next morning. Ruiz appeared, pulling heavy duty black trash bags to the boot of his car.

I clicked back and forth through the pictures like I was watching a video. Trying to separate reality from some daytime TV show with a cheesy title. ‘Appointment for murder’. Waiting for the other shoe to truly drop.

Was this a joke? A prank? Was someone playing a trick on poor delusional Diana? A trap? It didn’t seem to want to go in my brain, make the jump from pictures on a screen to actual things happening in real living color.

Something inside told me it was very real, hyper real, and right in front of my eyes. My teeth clenched, wishing there were some pictures inside the trash bags but that’s where the pictures ended.

What a tease.

I didn’t get it, who was this guy? A cop? Was it some kind of message? A warning? Was I being investigated? It looked like surveillance footage, and it looked like Antoine Ruiz was the type that needed to be ‘surveilled’.

Why send these pictures to Dainty Diana? Was it a mistake? It made no sense, and the more sense I tried to make out of it, I realized there was no sense to be made.

There was a puzzle piece missing, deliberately so and there was no way I was going to find it here.

The email itself was blank, but I scrolled down to the bottom.

If I sent a response, what do I say?

‘Do you see what I see?’ I see it, I think I do.

If ‘it’ was what I thought it was. I see it like no one else can see it.

There was something more than that, something deeper. Something that spoke directly to that part no one else should know about. What was it saying?

What would I want to say? What would I want?

To feel in control, to feel a step ahead of the person getting the email. To let them know I know them and they know nothing about me and I’m watching and waiting for what, for me?

To do what? Who am I? I’m no one, less than no one.

A high school senior with a tiny blog and a love for comfortable silences and Mexican food and occasionally living vicariously through famous serial killers.

Now I’m rolling my eyes back in my skull, looking into that pure clear darkness. The blackboard where truth is written by my dark professor.

It laughed, a cold mirthless laughter that shakes flecks of cool sea water off its irreverent scales.

What was it teaching me? What does he want from me? What does he want me to do with Antoine Ruiz?

What would I want it to say, not just, ‘Do you see what I see?’ But; ‘I see you.’

He sees me.

August 9, 2018 0

Avengers infinity war review

…. it was alright.

END

Ok well I’m not one of these people who went to see it in the cinema because I lost my hype for marvel movies sometime around ironman 2. I just saw them going downhill, the quality of the films has degraded as they’ve gone on and become less films in their own right and just stepping stones to the next cash grab, with the odd blip in the radar like antman and doctor strange and deadpool (fox I think?) which were a little better.
It’s a good system and marvel has mastered the universe concept in a way literally no one can replicate despite numerous attempts from other film companies. They fail time and time again to do what marvel has done because marvel knew what they were doing and had a plan and took their time whereas DC and every other group has just barrelled ahead, tripped over their own shoelaces and landed face first in a pile of bantha poodoo (you know what I’m talking about).

But even so not being a big fanboy, being someone more critical and more objective I can step back and look at the longest running and highest grossing series of bargain bucket movies of all time.

Despite the money and fame and broken records of black panther it doesn’t change the fact it’s just easily consumable garbage, movie chewing gum that will live forever in the three for ten quid movie bin of CEX.

And even this movie, the ultimate culmination of all those movies, all those years, all that money and sweat and tears really only elicits a mildly surprised ‘huh’ from me. Because the villain is pretty interesting and believable, the structure of the movie is pretty good, the character interactions and set pieces were fun and it didn’t feel overly long or overly fanservicy.

I think this is the first time in any of these superhero movies where I thought the villain was actually relate-able and had more dimensions to his personality. Because he’s less uber evil villain more conflicted pragmatist doing what he sees as the ultimate greater good for all life in the universe. Despite looking like a cross between Homer Simpson and Ivan Ooze.

The twist ending wasn’t much of that because it had been spoiled by everyone on the internet by the time I got around to seeing it. It’s not really a twist I guess.

Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the film but I can’t help looking at these movies and thinking about how no one will remember them in a couple of years. I can’t help looking at a society that used to make ground breaking and risky amazing movies now just churning out comic adaptations so geeksploitators can buy the newest superhero t-shirt or toy for their collection, desperately seeking to be relevant.

I Just pray that after the next infinity war movie they’ll just stop making comic book movies, but that’s never going to happen, they make way too much money so we’ll probably be dealing with this crap when we’re all in our eighties too medicated to kill ourselves our grandkids jumping all over us screaming that they’re squirrelgirl.

Ok well that’s enough of envisioning that hellscape, just felt like a change from the poems that everyone like to do an outdated review no one will read. Just sort of running out of emotional energy, feel a little indistinct recently.

See you…

August 8, 2018 0

GS2 Chaper 21 ‘Some girls are bigger than others’

Hey there,

Not much to say today, mostly been working and being boring haha. Not much writing or wackiness happening right and I haven’t really had time to be bored by the witcher. I watched avengers infinity war yesterday and it was ok I guess. I have no strong feelings about it.

Getting to the end of this Parker book, it’s pretty short but I’m taking my time haha. I dunno I’m not rushing to finish it, as I said before it’s just sort of smaller with less in depth characters than the other books so I’m not like dying to read the next chapters like I usually am.
It’s pathetic, I look forward to bus journeys and waiting for stuff just so I can read but this one is just a little meh. It’s just not as big in scope, it’s all set in one place and although its an interesting place it just sort of kills the pacing. I kinda thought this one would be like home alone but really bloody but it sort of let me down. His traps were kind of short lived and didn’t do much.

I was hoping the story would actually follow the main villain who I thought Stark had built up quite well and then you’d get to experience the fear of running into Parker’s traps from his perspective a little like the fourth book and how terrified the villain in that book is of Parker *spoilers* so much so he chews a cyanide capsule just seeing his face again.

But they killed off that cool villain character like in the first encounter and then bring in this sort of generic mob boss character who hasn’t been built up at all really and he’s not really doing anything except riding around in a golf cart barking orders at people. I mean yeah it’s realistic that he got killed just by fate but it’s just so anti-climactic because I’d actually grown to like that guy and I wanted to see him and Parker go at in the ring of intelligence and to have him go down at the first hurdle made all that time spent with him seem pointless.

I mean it’s sort of that divide you get between subverted expectations and actually being good. I don’t care if a story is predictable as long as it’s good. I don’t care if my expectations are subverted if I’m disappointed. It’s like last jedi all over again, they spent too much time trying to subvert expectations and do something unexpected than they did actually crafting a decent narrative that made sense and good characters people could identify with.

It’s not a bad book, it’s just not great. Parker, you’re getting soft my old pal, you need to get back in shape, oh yeah also one of my favourite characters gets arrested right at the start so that sucked. Probably never see him again now.

Anyway enough bitching about that, time is getting away from me and it’s too damn hot today, need to attempt some real work today and maybe some spamming since I’m back on facebook, but for how long who knows? I seem to have report snowflakes on my friends list who like to flag me and get me banned for saying only the least edgy things haha.

So we’ll see how that goes.

See you…

–

TJ froze making a stupid face. Trying to flip through ten seconds of footage of his pathetic life flashing before his eyes. Lots of him just sitting in his underpants watching anime and jacking it to anime porn. His mom’s smile, and a man he thought he recognised but couldn’t place. A skinny guy with short dark hair in a buttoned shirt with a pocket protector. ‘Who is that guy?’ He said to himself as he stood dumbstruck. Staring into the those glowing spider eyes rolling towards him through the threshing blades.

“TJ!” A faraway voice called out to him and he turned in a dreamy haze before getting knocked hard on his ass. The eyes following him in slow motion as the buzzing of blades moved like a cloud of wasps shredding up the top ice as they passed.

Sunday knocked TJ out of the way. She pushed her bat out in front of her. The force of the movement of this thing wrenching it twisting out of her hands and sending it into the air. It landed with a thudding clink. Lodging a heavy circular saw blade into the ice like it was put there by the lady in the lake herself.

The rolled to a stop and started to come together. A picture was forming as the rounded gauging blades slowed, white hot. Cooling and steaming on the ice. The frame of the thing heaving with unnatural laboured breathing. Which moved mechanically like bellows making a harsh wheezing noise.

It was big, atleast seven foot tall but hunched like it was on all fours. Twelve foot long with a whipping barbed metallic tail. No backlegs, just the tail and the front pronged metallic claws like a birds. It’s head was a squat thing with no neck, some kind of helmet covered in sharp barbed spikes. The entire length of it’s body was covered in these holes with gauged rounded blades like a “Fucking cheesegrater cyborg?” TJ said as he peeled himself over his fat gut to get a good look at that thing. “Seriously?!” He spat as he got to his knee.

–

For the rest of the chapter head on over to inkitt.

Some girls are bigger than others

August 7, 2018 0

Cur Chapter 5 ‘Storm King’

Hey again humanoid creatures,

Back again and this time significantly less lazy, I actually have a chapter of Cur, one I’ve been promising for ages and it’s probably one of my least favourite chapters so far. I mean it’s not bad it’s just not as good as either the chapter before it or after it. It’s sort of a connective tissue chapter, a set up to something else. Just like this spiel is just a set up to an inevitable rant about the witcher haha.
I feel like there’s more I can do with this chapter and I most certainly will in the near future when it comes time to revisit it for editing and what not.

I was thinking of going in to a doctor to get a referral to see if I have aspergers but I’ve been putting it off because I just hate the idea of being a victim or being probed in any way just to have someone write it on a piece of paper. I want to know but I just don’t want to go outside haha. If only it could be done indoors and I could just print my “I’m a retard” certificate and hang it on my wall.

I dunno it’s kind of depessing, feels like I’ve been lying to myself this whole time, promising myself a normal happy life I was never equipped to have. Living like a character from a Lovecraft story (or even Lovecraft himself) and telling myself “One day” maybe eventually I’ll have the things these normal happy people have. I watched a documentary on the plane on the way back about it and it just made me miserable knowing that was out of reach for me.

But in a way it made me feel thankful that I have some good things in my life, even if it’s just the tiny spec of happiness and a future, it’s better than nothing and I can keep living another day.

Well that got heavy fast, quick pivot to the witcher.

The thing I hate most about the witcher is that I love the witcher.

I love the premise of the witcher that was sold to me in the game and also in the very first short story in the book.

It was basically a pulp detective story but fantasy, a little like Solomon Kane. There was very little dialogue, it was stark, gritty, great action. All about a monster hunter tracking down and killing monsters and all the story surrounding it. This is what I thought the books were going to be like.

As a premise that really worked but as a premise it was dropped like a ten tonne weight in the subsequent books. In four books he might have killed maybe three monsters. A book series about a monster slayer who seems completely disinterested in hunting monsters.

The books basically toss the fact he’s a witcher around as a backstory fill like you would if someone was a vietnam vet, simply to signify he’s tough and can handle himself. But he never engages in slaying monsters.

Instead the books are mostly about really boring politics of a really boring war and how disinterested Geralt is about getting involved in said war.

And then it pivots again into being a story about Ciri having prepubescent lesbian sex with an elf. The story just has no grounding, it’s boring and wordy and convoluted and just seems to be going nowhere.

It astonishes me how well CD projekt red took the mantle of the premise and really ran with it. They relegated the boring war into the background where it belongs just to focus on Geralt hunting monsters and then interlaced a plot around it. And also they made the characters more likeable and relate-able on the whole. I can’t say I like or care about any of the characters in the book. Even so Geralt even in the game is sort of a generic bad ass, he’s more fun than he is in the books.
In the books he’s supposed to be like this brooding serous guy but it makes him come off as a weird whiner.
I just think it’s amazing that they took such a dull uninspired series which I’ve come to believe is actually a rip off of the elric series because apparently the guy who wrote the witcher series worked on the marketing for the polish translation of Elric. They took this sort of go nowhere series and they turned it into this conqueror of the games industry.

And I’m just really hoping they can do the same magic with Cyberpunk when they finally release it. I’m hearing really good things about it.

That’s about all.

If you’re on my mailing list the free copies of my stuff went out today so you should have them already, if not, let me know.

See you…

–

The dying embers of the fire fizzled and cracked and resonated through the cave. The sounds of birds chirping arrogantly outside petered in and rang in the druidess’ pained ears as she lay flat on the cave floor.

She forced one eye open and moved her face off the ground, rocks and debris sticking to it. Her face covered in red indentations from the rubble she lay prone on all night. The light that came through the tunnel was unwelcome and unkind and drove sharp slivers of pain to her head and neck.

Something dawned on her suddenly; she clutched at her side and felt it wanting. The sword was gone, what little money she had, her wrist too was bare, her magical torque swindled by that damn shape shifter and the ogreous dead man.

She rose to a sitting position and thanked the goddess that she was at least still dressed and felt undisturbed. Having thankfully not been violated in her sleep by those vile miscreants she had the bad luck to encounter.

The druidess sitting rubbed all the parts of her head that pained her which seemed like all of them. Her head feeling like a pig’s stomach full of broken clay pot that someone had violently shaken.

Her senses returned and she could smell the fire and hear a distant soft humming, her feet scraping on the cave floor as she labored to her feet.

The old man was still there pottering about, he blinked as he saw the young girl and smiled, she couldn’t tell if that meant he remembered her or not.

“Those men that were here?”

“Men?” He aped absentmindedly as if the word were foreign to him and lacked all meaning.

“The shape shifter and the dead man.”

“Dead man?”

“The Firbolg” She felt silly even saying it, as if she was playing in to some sort of delusion, the firbolg didn’t exist anymore.

“Oh yes” The old man nodded “I remember them; things were peaceful for a time after they were done killing each other.” He laughed. “But that was a long time ago, I’m three thousand years old, did I mention that?” He said ditheringly.

She brushed it off again having no time for his fantasy “Do you remember the sword I had?”

“Yes, the singing sword of the lesser demon”

“Lesser demon what are you talking about?”

“Tethra, I think his name was” The old man mused.

The girl shook her head sick of playing the old man’s silly games. “Do you know where they went?” She motioned with her hands as she described them. “The tall man and the man with the red hair”

He squinted.

“The man who can turn into a dog”

“Oh the young lad, he came later, his people didn’t last long but they were before even the Firbolg. I was the first on this island though, me and my wife, until I turned into a fish” He waffled on.

“Do you know where they went?” She said through tight lips.

“Aren’t you some kind of a witch or something? You don’t have a magic potion you can use to find him” The old man laughed.

“Hmm I could try scrying for them if I had something of theirs and I knew where I was on a map.” She pinched her chin.

“That can be arranged” The old man laughed.

–

“I greet you noble assassin, you may know me. Gwenton assistant of Abartach of Slaverghty, Abertach is very sorry he couldn’t meet you in person, but I have been sent in his stead.

Cur and the messenger met at a traveller’s camp off the road to Banagher near Lough Derg. A heavily wooded area that sung with the sickly sweet sound of birds chirping and woodpeckers pecking. They sat across from each other, an unkindled fire pit black with the warm ashes of the previous night and stinking with the smell of rotten game.

The messenger was a young looking half-blood elf with a ridiculous haircut. The sides of his head shaved but for a floppy quaff of hair that fell in front of his face. His features more rounded than an elf’s but he was taller than that of a dwarf. Thin but trying to compensate by wearing the thick leather armor of a thief weighed down with pockets. He carried the vomitus arrogance of a noble dabbling at thuggery.

“I’m no assassin” Cur spat “Assassins kill for pay, I would kill an elf for a hot meal” He grinned wickedly staring at the half elf hungrily.

The elf gulped loudly and shrunk behind his leather armor. “Quite” He said trying to laugh it off. “I bring you your reward in silver” He said hoping it would cool tensions that suddenly flared. He reached out his hand with which a large hide pouch dangling from it. The dog at Cur’s side barked at him and Cur ground his teeth.

“The woman” Cur growled not looking at the purse.

“Ah yes well, Abartach needs you to do one last jo-!” Cur caught him by the wrist and yanked him off his feet and through the fire pit, the bag of silver split and poured out all over the ground. Cur stepped on his chest and pulled his arm up uncomfortably as if he might rip it out of its socket. The last embers of the night before felt through his leathers.

The elf completely overpowered groaned vacantly as he lay dazed his head swimming. Silver coins marked with the ulster symbol of the hand on the shield as his pillow, the dog by his ear growling a steady heat rising at his back.

“The one before and the one before that were also ‘the last’.” Cur applied more pressure with his foot and the half elf groaned. “I played your games because they amused me, I grow weary of them.”

“Abartach!” The half elf gasped as he tried to get more air in his lungs than Cur’s heavy foot would allow “He lied- to you!”

“I know” Cur laughed. “What do dwarves do but lie and count coin? And now he sends a boy to meet me.” He held the young man’s hand to his face. “But there’s more?”

“Yes, there’s someone who might know!”

“Speak!”

“There’s a woman who lives in the woods of Tallaght, it might be her.” Cur pressed harder on his chest, the heat at his back now slowly searing and a smell like overcooked beef filled his nostrils. “-Or else she might know where your woman is”

“Tallaght?” Cur said it as if he’d said it before.

The dog barked and growled at hearing the name.

“It’s not far from here, a half a day’s walk no further. You don’t remember it, Abertach sent you there before now. Damn near slaughtered half the village, a plague gripped it after you left and narry a soul remains. As if overnight, only bones now. Some say it’s some bloodsucker’s curse but its utter nonsense. A single monster couldn’t devour a whole village, with no one to tell the tale, it’s not possible. Maybe you did it” The elf spat defiantly.

Cur grinned.

Cur pressed his back harder into the hot ash and he cried out like a branded calf and foamed at the mouth.

“Is that all? Cur asked, the dog teeth flashed in his vision

“Yes I swear it!”

Cur pulled him still clutching jealously at the envoys hand pulling him closer and breathing heavily into his face. Smiling that malevolent smile.

“You are a messenger yes?”

“Yes” the messenger replied reticent.

“You will take a message back to your master.” Cur grinned wide.

“What message?”

Cur opened his mouth wide and with a vicious speed he bit off all the messengers’ fingers on one hand.

He screamed as jets of white blood sprayed out of the sides of Curs grinning devil mouth.

–

Read the full chapter on Inkiit

Storm King

August 2, 2018 0

Coming waves

How can I go on?

So long since I’ve seen her face.

I’m floating away.

The waves gently lap,

I hear your voice in my head.

Then it’s gone again.

Your smile is the sun,

I can’t look at it too long.

I know I shouldn’t.

August 1, 2018 0

Gage chapter 11 ‘Heel on the shovel

Good morrow fine folks,

You know I actually got up and started writing this morning haha. Forgetting it’s a blogging day. See I cycle between the two to try and keep them both in regularity, so I do tues/wed/thur blogging and then the other four days writing. Because before I would just write everyday and I would sort of get burnt out and depressed because I felt insular, I felt like it was all for nothing because no one was reading it. But then blogging and spamming and promoting made me feel hollow because I wasn’t creating.

So I thought this system would balance the two, nice regular creation with sometime to check my head space and see if anyone was picking up what I was putting down to mixed reviews haha.

But it was a happy accident because the last few days I’ve felt like I’m getting back in the swing of things, the first two days weren’t so good, second two were stellar. I think a lot due to the heat abating haha. Also part of me wasn’t feeling that part of the story, not that it was bad it was just a lull from the pulse pounding action haha. Now I’m safely back in that and feeling good. I was feeling like it was getting away from me a bit now I feel like I have a handle on it again. It’s coming into shape a little better, I don’t feel like it’s perfect or I’m putting enough world building in.
One thing I actually like about the witcher series is it has a lot of nice ‘fluff’ like stuff that’s irrelevant to the story but adds just a little something. But obviously in my estimation the whole series so far is nothing but fluff.

And not it’s time for another rant about the witcher, I just got done listening to the audiobook for time of contempt and I don’t if I just wasn’t interested enough to hold my attention. Because I listen to audiobooks all the time and do other stuff and I can still be fully absorbed and never miss anything but I feel like it was just a convoluted mess. As apposed to the other books where nothing happens that’s all this book is, a bunch of stuff happening. It’s not really a story.

The story can be summed up as an evil mage sides with the baddies and then they take over and everyone fights. That’s the plot, just add in a metric tonne of pointless dialogue and some mediocre fights in this one actually. And the book just sort of ends after a cringey lesbian sex scene between a fourteen year old girl and an elf.

I know what this author looks like, he’s a fat old polish guy and just imagining him writing this scene makes my skin crawl haha. It was bad, this elf girl like saves her from being raped by a boy only to rape her ‘nicely’???
It was disturbing to say the least, is it as disturbing as child gang bangs in the sewer a la Stephen King? Not really but I’m not in a hurry to read it again.

Short and sweet that rant, I kind of feel obligated to listen to the other books just so I can moan about them now so I might have to subject myself to that. I mean it’s good just for the writing style, I really think as a writer you should read everyday in some way. I usually listen to those books in breaks and then read before bed and when I get up. Almost finished the Parker novels, I’m not getting the stories crossed with the witcher because both their stories are very simple.

A little behind today so I’m gonna do some proofreading and hopefully get another damn chapter of Cur out because I’m running out of shit to post haha.

See you…

–

I figured Gage wouldn’t travel too far if he was with that old man and all, I mean where could he go? There wasn’t anything for miles, it was just open untamed country. He couldn’t go back to McCrory. If he didn’t just die of thirst or hunger and get covered over by the sand or get carried away by carrion. He would have stopped at this brothel and someone would remember him, how could they forget such a face?

We left the old man barely alive but he was certainly breathing when went on our way. There was no use in killing him I gathered, if he didn’t indeed die of his injuries he was of no great threat to our operation. I wondered as we left him in that state if it would have been more humane to just end his suffering.

The thought troubled me all the way to the brothel. The sun was just coming down by the time we got there but there wasn’t a single lamp lit in the building which seemed unusual.

The edifice was cold and dark but we could hear an odd rummaging sound. And see a little light bobbing in the darkness like an angler fish’s light in the deep darkness. We approached with caution and I called out like a fool before thinking.

“Hello, is anyone there?”

Ryan and the others shushed me angrily as they got off their vehicles and got low and still in the twilight and I saw the spark of a knife leaving it’s sheathe.

There was a long pause, a moment of unbearable silence. The rummaging noise stopped and the lamplight went out and I swallowed standing in the open. Just like in front of the barn awaiting another flash and a roll of thunder but instead I heard a small stuttering voice.

“HHh-hello? Who’s there?”

“Erm, I’m just looking for some service – A place to sleep and some food perhaps”

There was another deathly silence where nothing moved.

“O-ok” The man’s voice said as the lamp came back on. A few moments later a portly middle aged man wearing a smock came out to greet us in the dusk. “Hh-how you are ya?” The man asked.

“Erm we’re just looking for a place to bed down.”

“Ww-we? There’s more of you?”

Ryan and the others rose out of the falling darkness and stood in front of the porch at my back.

“I see” The man said as he moved the lamp around trying to get a good look at the strangers. “Well I hope you like beans, s’all I could find.” He said.

We sat around a table in the dimly lit brothel over meagre plates of luke warm beans not talking a great deal. I looked over in disgust watching Stein sop up bean juice with stale bread, not so much at the sight of it, but the sound. The slurping sopping suckling noise as he bit into the wet bread.

The man who greeted us came over with his lantern and said “How are you folks finding it?”

A few grunts were sent back in answer.

“Fine I said, I was wondering if you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

“Questions?”

“Yes, I was wondering how you came upon this place, how long have you owned it?”

“Oh I don’t own it” The man said shaking the loose skin on his neck. “I stumbled on it just like you did, the place was empty when I got here so I thought there was no harm in camping out here til I move on.”

“I see” I paused feeling a bit of unease creep in but I went on. “Do you know what happened to the people who ran it?”

“I have no idea mister. I used to run the bank over in town until the other day now I’m a wanderer now, trying to find a way out of the valley and this god forsaken nightmare.”

“You said something about a bank?

“You haven’t heard about it? The whole town is going up in smoke!” He sputtered.

“You’re the first person we’ve talked to”

“You mean” He stopped and put his hand on his head and looked shocked and then swallowed. “I was the only one that got out.” He said in a horrifying realisation.

“What in god’s name are you talking about man?”

He swallowed and he said almost like he was reading from an old folk tale. “A great evil has come to Tupelo, the devil himself has come to town with a red right hand and driven the people from their homes. Swept up in a murderous rage. They chased down all the sane people and killed them and maybe more got away but I ran.” He swallowed, his throat sounded dry and sore. “But I looked back and I saw him, the man with the scarred face, he looked at me and I felt the evil in his heart and I knew the end was upon us.”

“The end?”

–

Read the rest of the chapter here.

Heel on the shovel

July 31, 2018 0

Diana After Dark Chapter one ‘Darkly Dreaming’ *remurdered edition.

(posted late because there was a freak storm here that knocked out my internet for a day haha)
Yes I’m this lazy, rather than proof reading and posting another chapter of Cur (of which I have lots of) I’m re-using Diana chapters haha. Ok well they have been fully edited and now I’m going over them again for the final proof read before I submit them so it’s a little different.

This is essentially the final version so it’s a much more polished version than I give the plebs on inkitt haha. And honestly looking at it, it has changed a lot, it’s really grown up with the help of my new editor and I’m really proud of it and really glad I went over it again because some of the formatting was fucking broken from the editing software haha.

I’m just posting the whole chapter because this is not going up on inkitt, this is just a sample. You gotta pay for this haha. Or maybe I’ll give it away for free next year who knows. I really hope I don’t have to.

Feel really shitty today because I missed another day of work and I really really need the money right now. I just fucked up and I feel really fucking frazzled trying to reset my body clock coming back from the holiday. I feel like a zombie only getting the 4/5 hours again so it’ll be a couple of days before it becomes normal again and this fucking heat is not helping. I feel like I’m fucking melting, two fans on me and I feel like a polar bear in an oven.

Maybe I should switch to drinking cold green tea.

Actually fuck it, I’m gonna do that right now brb haha.

*30 minutes later

Well that took longer than I expected.

Not much to report beyond that. I like this Parker book but it’s not really delivering on characters and suspense in the usual way. I like it when Parker is just this unstoppable force like in the first books he’s going against the whole mob and they can’t touch him. Because he’s this one guy who can dissapear and reappear wherever and he has a network of people just like him who’ll help him and the mob is this stalwart force with names and faces and addresses he can find. The third book is when it hits home that really the mob can’t touch him because he’s not a real person with a real name or even a real face by that point he’s already had facial surgery.

Parker basically lives like a ghost and they’re vulnerable because they have houses and families and cars in their names and he can just roll up to their front door and kill them which is exactly what he does. Because nomatter how rich or powerful you are you can still be gotten to if someone knows where you are and wants you bad enough and has the balls to do it.

It’s such a good book, the first three books are so solid. They really inspired me. In regards to Diana and especially LCYE and TOTCB. Just tight tense terse stories with great action.

This one is a little more loose and it’s good but it’s scope is a little small so far and I just feel like Parker is whining and being kind of a bitch. I just feel like he’s getting softer and I don’t like that. I mean in some of the books it’s almost like he’s the bad guy because he’s like this unstoppable monster and most of the books swap to his quarry and they’re fucking terrified of him and you really feel like they’re being stalked by the devil.

In this he’s like a little lost sheep hiding in a barn. It’s different but I like the stories that are about the job, I think this book and the last Stark got a little tired of the same formula and wanted to switch it up but in my opinion if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I want to read a book about a hard as nails master thief planning the ultimate job, it just seems a little bit like Stark is running out of ideas for cool heists so he sets all the book after the heist to get around doing the same things. Which is a good idea to stop the books from getting stale but it’s just a little underwhelming and there isn’t any direct interaction Parker has with another character so there doesn’t really feel like there’s progression or structure or pacing because he’s in this one place the whole book trying to do the same thing.

In the other books he’s moving all over the place talking to different people and doing stuff, this book is just small in it’s scope and I don’t mind that, its fresh for a Parker book but I really hope it goes back to classic Parker in the next book. And the next book is called ‘Plunder squad’ so that sounds promising haha. A cool cast of characters and lots of loot.

It’s literally taken me all day to write this because there was a lovely little storm knocking out my net and power and since I live in the middle of nowhere I just have to wait.

Anyway I’ve waffled enough, must dash.

See you…

–

My high heels tapped on the wet concrete like anxious teeth clacking. It’s dark, I’m alone. Scared.

It’s a good kind of scared.

A fear of coming waves of something unexplainable, something inevitable.

I’ve felt it building for so long, and now as I walked the street, alone in the dark, it’s all around me like the tropical heat.

I picked up the pace, it’s a neighborhood I didn’t recognize, low slung houses, high fences with glass teeth. Dogs barking in the arid heat of the night. Salsa music played in the distance, muffled shouting in Spanish.

I swam through its want, waded through its need.

It called to me, it’s hunger passed down through what feel like eons. An insatiable hunger. Teeth strain against gums. I tasted blood, and it felt good.

I heard a splash, and it’s my feet hitting a puddle, it watched, and it waited, the hunger growing.

The moon reflected in the puddle, its smile so wide and manic. Those white teeth, sharp and ready, it’s just right. Projected on my back, it filled me with that white pure light. Filled every corner, carried me like I was on strings.

My steps were weightless and without agency, carried by a wave of lustful righteous anger.

His eyes landed on me before I heard his silent voice.

I heard a fluttering of dark angel wings. A leathery tightening inside, as it whispered and laughed, it told me to keep going.

Told me to be patient even though that’s not a word it understands at all.

A cool breeze blew through the little hairs on my neck.

He called to me, and I’m out of it for a second.

A man—but I couldn’t see his face reflected in the glass of a bus stop because of a huge hairline crack down the middle. He walked down the street on my side, toward me.

I saw myself, dressed in my best impression of a hooker from a nineties cop movie in a car window. The fishnets might’ve been a little too on the nose but it seemed to have worked.

I caught a big fish after all.

Just the one I wanted.

He called to me again, but I can’t respond now.

My tongue is somewhere far removed, and words seem like pointless frail things.

I kept going with my arms folded like I was cold, when nothing but cool clear clarity and vicious joy washed over me. Faster now, the puddles and the car windows revealed he was following.

He looked around and kept pace, how far will he go?

I went along a pink stucco wall that seems to stretch on for miles, passing houses all with their curtains drawn tightly, small dirty lawns cluttered with broken children’s toys, dry dying grass.

The shadow inside shifted and wriggled, like a kid in a bean bag chair. So excited, it hissed and tossed, just where it wanted to be, so close.

The man called to me, something crude in Spanish, but I couldn’t react, not yet.

A little further.

My heels clicked louder and faster, almost breaking out into a run, and what do dogs do when someone runs?

They chase of course, and predictably, he’s caught the scent of something he likes.

Me.

I knew him, his name escaped me, and his face seemed familiar but unimportant right now. No eyes, no nose, no mouth, just a blank pale face not unlike the face of the moon.

Maybe I’m giving him too much credit.

Who’s hunting whom after all?

His need is palpable; I’ve watched him. A small petty monster, a dog chasing cars, not sure what he wants until he gets his hands on them. A bottom feeder, a wanton monster with no attempt to hide it, no need. How free he must have felt, not like me at all.

Something inside me called to him but he can’t hear it, he’s just along for the ride.

I moved faster but I’m not out of breath, it’s a humid night with a cool ocean breeze and I felt brisk and tight. I quickly checked in another car window. He still shadowed me.

Good, almost there now. One more block, follow me little rat.

The thing inside shifted like an eel in a glass vial. Happy, tensing and releasing like a balled fist, electric, with terse excitement.

Impending release just over the horizon.

The man is still following, muttering to himself, looking around, he put his hood up..

The streets are dark and desolate, and lined with houses full of people that don’t talk to cops about strange goings on in the dead of night.

That’s why he picked this place, that’s why I picked it too.

A perfect playground for Diana the Dark Dabbler.

The pink stucco wall ended abruptly, and I rounded the corner fast down the back alley of a Chinese restaurant with bars on the windows, breaking line of sight.

Hidden in the shadow of the large smooth square building. The clear black sky overhead.

He made some sort of noise in his throat that somehow I heard.

I kicked off my heels already and tossed them into the open dumpster. It was neatly tucked away, behind a chained metal fence until I came by earlier and freed it.

That dull thudding sound sent the rats circling.

I ducked behind the spot I picked. A pile of cardboard fortune cookie boxes was all I needed.

The odor sent shivers up my spine. Old shell fish, the smell of the ocean, the spray, maggots—refreshing—like smelling salts.

He rounded the corner fast and confused, like he’s the only kid that doesn’t get the magic act at the birthday party.

My lips parted and curved up; my heart beat hard in my chest, can he hear it? Can he hear the wings beating, can he hear the moon’s teeth clacking, feel it’s beaming maniacal smile?

I hope so. He will.

The man looked around, pulled his hood down tighter. All those chemicals rushing, he felt it too, the chase, the thing inside of him that fed on my fear. Got high off that night air, stumbled into my trap.

I took my cellphone out of my purse and dialed the number of the burner I put in the dumpster.

It rang with a mocking eight-bit Mariachi band song.

He heard it, and swung around taking offense at everything.

Stired up that rabbit in head lights feeling. Trapped in a beam of ambivalent bone white moonlight.

It carried me, gave me goose bumps- goose bumps. Teeth chattered, but I’m not cold, not even close, I felt nothing but pure icy potential. The thing inside purred and waited.

He poked open the dumpster with the barrel of a Glock and looked inside.

We waited until he reaches in for the phone. It took the wheel and we fell out of our hiding spot, lithe and ready in a sliver of moonlight. Invisible, invincible, stun gun in hand, as we moved low and slow and sleek toward his back.

I shouldn’t look..

He turned but it’s too late; It pressed the stun gun to his neck and his legs went limp.

We caught him, took the gun out of his hands like a child with a squirt gun. “You’re mine now,” I whispered and heard not my voice but another vibrating just below the surface.

He heard it too, that eternal voice that speaks to both of us.

His heart beat faster but he couldn’t move. I hiked him up and leveraged him into the open dumpster.

The gun held in my hand, my heart sped up, pumped all those good chemicals hard. The Glock bounced and scraped into the gutter from my toss. Can’t risk some little kid picking it up and blowing his face off—that would be tragic.

I climbed into the dumpster.

Diana the Dumpster Diver, c’est moi?

Afraid not.

A dumpster is just a big metal coffin. It can be cleaned and prepped like any other space. Prepared it I have; it didn’t take that long, a little tape, a little clear plastic. A battery lamp hooked on a loop of duct tape.

Then there was light.

It still didn’t smell great, cramped and hot, with a faint smell of soy sauce. It wasn’t a room at the Cali Hilton but it’d do fine for about the four hours this would take.

Then home and a lot of showers later would let all those good vibrations course through my muscles. Loosening and straightening out all that bad juju that’d been building. Making me tense and not quite myself.

Set up another light, I blocked out a lot of it in that tight space. Made quick work of taping his hands and feet, cutting his clothes away with garden shears. Shaved and buffed out the areas I wanted to work in.

He didn’t know, couldn’t know or feel what was about to happen. What was about to happen?

My tongue touched all of my teeth; I let out a little laugh.

Just had to have gotten the most powerful stun gun they had; he was out like a light, complete reboot.

A quick slap to his face and he made a noise like someone finding a hair in their lingquini and muttered something in Spanish that might’ve have been, “Ten more minutes, Mama.” I suck at Spanish.

Found the bag I’d stashed there. A small black overnight duffel, and I plan to stay the night. Inside, a sharp fillet knife, a scalpel, a razor and a framing hammer. The gangs all here!

The dumpster was cramped but I could move, as well as lay him out flat. The restaurant it was attached to was closed today. So I’d had all the time I needed to make it ready. Then leave my own trash behind in neatly wrapped packages ready to garnish the local landfill.

We slapped my friend again and his eyes opened wide. I taped his mouth shut.

He couldn’t scream muffled Spanish slurs.

We showed him the knife and his eyes darted back to absorb his surroundings.

He may have well been buried six feet under already.

He had to know he was ours.

The man didn’t seem too impressed with the knife, so the framing hammer was the next item in show and tell day. He didn’t like that, not one bit, his eyes got wider, his pupils shrinking.

It seemed like he was getting it.

We breathed out a cool controlled breath and we watched him shrink, his muscles tightened feebly against the tape, his veins popped, we breathed in his fear.

The pretty girl thing might’ve thrown him at first, or maybe it was a prank.

I heard the mirthless tinny laughter inside and I think he heard it, too.

There was no turning back, one step on the dark path was enough.

There would be blood, a lot of blood.

I could almost hear it rushing inside him, that disgusting hot sticky stuff, waiting to come out.

He was mumbling something; I could feel his panic rising. His longing for release reaching up and touching mine. His eyes were talking, he was drooling, his mouth moving.

There was something really important he had to tell me.

I was hungry for anything. I’d been watching him. What he liked, young girls with wide scared eyes looking up at a knife or a gun or a framing hammer. Feeling him on top of them heaving and sweating, then nothing.

He’d killed four in the last month, and it was nothing to sniff at. Mostly prostitutes, because he was an amateur, no procedure, just pure bare need.

A pathetic creature, but I didn’t hate him.

How could I? We were the same, sort of, but more than that, I loved him; he was a brother.

He sputtered.

His eyes tried frantically to reach inside of me and find some small tear. Like some buried motherly instinct would battle the forces of darkness in the dungeons of my deep dreadfulness. Seeing fit to spare him and maybe take him out to lunch..

I was curious, bad form for a cat.

Didn’t like begging, but was ready to hear anything.

He looked up at me after the tape was ripped off. “Diana, you’re gonna be late for school.”

“School?”

“Yes, school.” I heard my aunt’s indignant voice break through the cozy wall of the pillow over my head.

A dream?

How you tease me. I can still hear the laughing, it’s taunts. Me, Dark Dreamless Diana.

I don’t dream, I never dream, it’s just serene blackness every other night, or I don’t remember. I miss the cool crisp void of sleep, the nothingness. What happened to my nothingness? Bring back the void.

Not to say the dream wasn’t, stimulating.

I moved the pillow off my face and started to rend myself of my sopping sheets. I was drenched in a layer of thick cold sweat.

It isn’t the first time, different people, men, women, different places, times.

It seemed like the dreams were getting more frequent and they always end the same way.

Unsatisfying, they always end just before…

Murderus interruptus.

“Didn’t you say you had a test or something today?”

“There’s always a test or a final or a quiz,” I tell my aunt Mary-anne, a fat girl’s name, but she wasn’t fat, not yet anyway.

A soft and pretty woman, not much older than myself. Kind of a hippy dippy sort but a good soul, raised me from an egg to the velociraptor I picture myself as now.

She had that ‘good hair.’ The type that’s long and straight, a deep chocolatey brown she nevertheless always tied back in a tight ponytail for work. Delicate straight features TV pretty people had, but she never really liked to flaunt it with make-up or fancy clothes; I guess it runs in the family.

I’m Diana, the poor orphan, boohoo. My parents died when I was just an innocent tot. Oh woe is me, the poor child, parents taken so young.

Is this a superheroes backstory? Afraid not.

Were they slain by a wicked murderer or super villain? No, not unless the truck that hit them was a Decepticon. A petty car accident robbed me of any parental love I was owed and cast me as the martyr in my own passion piece.

“Well, that’s school for ya,” she said, she smiled with her hands on her hips as she waited for me to fully ascend my damp throne.

It’s not that I don’t like school; in fact, I love school. All those plastic minds clinging to some form of identity or another. Forming their own sense of self, all those people pretending to be human hoping the shape would stick. I fit right in.

Maybe I’m not very good at this, I feel like I skipped a step. I’m completely hollow inside. It sounds like teen angst, which is an easy way to pigeon-hole it since I am a senior in high school.

But it’s been this way since before I can remember. Since before I could think, I’ve felt nothing.

My aunt tells me, even as a baby I wouldn’t cry or laugh or smile, nothing. Every emotion I fake is for other people. I’ve been forced to become the perfect mirror of every person I’ve ever known, but I’m good at it.

I’m the best.

I trudged my way to the shower, down the hall from my modest bedroom. It’s hot today, it’s always hot in Cali. That’s why I keep my hair short, easy to clean, easy to dry and it looks cute.

What does anyone else’s opinion matter anyway? Only, that’s a lie people tell themselves on occasion. I don’t, I’m not people. Other people’s opinions are all that matters. It’s the glue that binds this world together. Without it, the world would be the perfect clean chaos of my dreams.

The world where that mocking laughter I hear comes from.

Lies we tell others, and the lies we tell ourselves, are what stops this world from falling apart and it’s what keeps me out of a sanatorium. Are there any sanatoriums in Long Beach? Probably some rich kid day spa with Vicodin vending machines that take hundred dollar bills. So Miley Cyrus can clean up for the next time she needs to squeeze her ass inside a rubber glove.

Rubber gloves, was I even wearing gloves in my dream? Need to write that down.

The things that you remember in the shower. Running water stimulates creativity, or some such other new age nonsense. Massages the chakras or stimulates the karma flow, vibrates the mediclorians. I toweled off and wiped the mirror with my hand. Empty blue-green eyes stared back. I made a toothy fake grin, showed those pearly whites. Such a practiced grin, straight out of the Sears catalogue, 1997.

It’s easier for girls I guess, people don’t look too closely at a girls’ smile. As long as it’s there, it’s good enough, a perfect disguise.

The mirror steamed up again, and I’m gone, poof.

The test was easy, done and gone and I was already forgetting what it was about. The dream was growing stronger and taking up more space in my head. All I could think about was that night and the ripple of the plastic wrap.

I looked outside; it was nice day. Every day was a nice day in California, starts to get boring after a while.

University High was the number one ranked public school in Orange County, go Trojans. It looked like a cross between a prison and a high end motel on the outside. Monstrous palm trees swaying behind sturdy chain-link fences. A backdrop of concrete covered in coral white stucco.

It was a standard mix. An even smattering of Hispanic, caucasian and black kids, the motto, ‘Unity through Diversity,’ as supercilious a statement as the American flag outside.

This wasn’t America, this was some place all new, a fantasy island floating in the clouds where all the beautiful people and one or two monsters lived. Every day, I was rubbing elbows with the future career criminals and politicians of the greater California area. Was there a distinction? I felt blessed walking through the halls. A real rainbow family of love and diversity.

I had no idea how my aunt got the money to put me here on a rookie cop’s salary, but we have a don’t ask don’t tell relationship that seemed to be working for us even better as I got older.

She chose the school because the campus tour video gave off a distinct ‘cult vibe’ and the teachers were nice enough. They really went out of their way to pretend they cared, despite fading into the background in Dark Diana’s World.

I wasn’t bad at school, I was too good at it. It’s amazing the pointless facts and figures you can memorize when you don’t have all that teen angst or hormones or any emotions whatsoever clouding your mind. Pure emptiness to fill with whatever the school board wanted. The perfect clean slate.

I made my way to my locker before I realized I forgot to eat breakfast, a common occurrence. But that’s not to say I’m anorexic. I love to eat, but I could never put on much weight, compliments of a super-fast metabolism, must be genetic, or maybe I was a sleep jogger.

Sleep walking?

I hovered in front of my open locker.

Nah.

As soon as I slammed the door shut

Whom was standing behind it? None other than the notorious Wendy Vargas. How cliché.

Another cliché would be that the most popular girl in the school and I would be bitter rivals.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Morning, bestie,” she crooned in her best vocal fry valley girl as she opened her locker.

It might have something to do with my painfully cringe-inducing habit of flattering everyone. A trait I polished like the turd it is. I say things most people with any sense of dignity wouldn’t dare.

Happily, I lack any of those mortal inhibitions; my gag reflex was never there. When your goal is to blend in and make people like you, lacking any shame is pivotal. So I can tell everyone everything they want to hear and keep a straight face while I do it.

Funny, it’s not even that hard. I can usually tell at first meeting someone what they want to hear. No one even bothers to hide it, they might as well write it on a sign around their necks.

Wendy’s locker being next to mine also tipped the scales of fate. I can’t remember exactly how we met or became friends but I assume proximity is what allowed me to use my powers of butt-kissing to full effect.

Maybe I just complimented her on how she opened her locker. How she applied her lip-gloss in the mirror she had inside the door, or some other banal little detail I’d felt wasn’t worth the storage in my head.

“Looking sexy as always, my love. Wendy Vargas, when will you marry me?” I say in a perfect mocking impression of her voice; she will of course ignore that, and only hear the compliment.

“Thank you, my dear but you know as well as I do, I’m taken and I am a one-woman man,” she said, as she pursed her snake-bitten lips.

She was a beautiful golden goddess one might expect to see in some Spanish soap opera, with a set of expressions just as fake. Heir to a fortune in Cuban sandwich shops. Head of the cheerleading squad, of course, but also a strange passion for ‘nerdy stuff,’ as she called it. Mostly kitsch nerdsploitation, like The Big Bang Theory. Big lens less glasses, wearing comic book superhero T-shirts and pretending to like the new Star Wars movies.

It was all an act so she could rule over a hoard of thirsty geeks in the AV club who’d do whatever she said.

I still have no idea why she likes me. I really could’ve slipped right through the cracks right where I wanted to, if it wasn’t for her.

It might be because I’m the only one in the state that knows she poisoned her stepfather with anti-freeze, and framed her mother.

Did she tell me? Not in so many words. I wasn’t an accomplice or anything, either. Poison’s not my style.

That’s such a ‘girly’ way to kill someone, and I’d never stoop so low as to kill for money. No, a passion is best left free, like all the good things in life.

She didn’t confess to me, but something did. That little voice, that little clawing thing that rolled around deep inside the dark depths of Diana.

It could smell it on her, not her guilt, not her shame, her complete indifference. She had a monster too, a dark secret, but it was a small and covetous thing, a greedy opportunistic monster.

“Where’s that handsome new beau of yours?” I enquired.

Wendy’s new boyfriend was some chad from out of state, what was his name? Bradie? Brodie? Brodo?

She tends to go through them quickly, but this new one had peaked her interest. He was a transplant from Miami, very exotic.

“He’s off collecting that order of red cups and plates for prom.”

“I sense, we’re about get down to business.” I winked.

“You’re senses are keen, as always, my young padawan,” Wendy bowed with her hands pressed together, like she was going to Kung-fu me.

“I learned from the best, master.” I dipped my head.

“I need you to print off some fliers for me.” She smiled, like she was doing me a favor, her arms swaying at her sides, as her voice rose at the end.

Wendy was head of the prom committee, they put on the senior prom every year, and this time it was our turn.

I, Diana, sweetness and light, am on the prom committee, too. All because it would’ve been too strange for me not to, being best friends with the head of the committee. Oh, sweet nepotism.

Part of the practice of being normal was doing things ‘normal’ girls do. I’m not a cheerleader, that was too much for even me to stomach, some things truly are beyond even me. I can’t remember how I got out of that one, must’ve made up something about having one leg longer than the other or something, extreme corns perhaps.

Cheerleading is also surprisingly time consuming, all those pep rallies and practices and incessant parties. Which could prove a problem for my other ‘interests’. I looked around at the fliers already up around the hall. They were on almost every locker, and bulletin board and classroom door. I cast sparring glances at people who don’t need to make conscious efforts to be normal. What blissful cow-like expressions they all had.

“What’s wrong with the old fliers?” I asked in a robotic fashion, but I already knew exactly what she was going to say.

“They’re old,” Wendy shook her head like it was obvious; which it was.

“Okay,” I said without argument, because, what a waste of time and energy that would be.

She sucked her lips like she was tasting her cherry lip gloss and she liked it, then looked over my head. “Oh, there’s a sight for sour eyes.”

I looked over my shoulder, and stage left appeared my stalwart boyfriend Paul.

An ordinary name for an ever so ordinary boyfriend. He was practically perfect in every way, the male Mary Poppins of University high. Tall, but not too tall, smart, but not too smart, conventionally handsome but not too conventionally handsome.

He was into sports, basketball mostly. An army brat through and through, his dad was almost always away on maneuvers.

If I was painfully honest, I mainly liked him for his car, and for the places he was willing to take me in said motor vehicle. I had my license already, but no car of my own.

My aunt was sort of an eco-nut, forcing me to take the bus when possible and if she did buy me a car, with the no money she had saved. It would end up being one just like her work car. One of those terrible eco-bubble little hair dryers powered by happy thoughts and bunny farts.

Did I mention his dad was deployed most of the time? So if I ever did go visit we had the run of the house, and from time to time, his gun cabinet.

His mom was a mystery I didn’t care to explore. Seemed like a sore subject I had no interest in. Sobs stories are no fun, unless they’re your own.

Most of all, I liked him because he was normal. Painfully normal, bone achingly, teeth rattlingly normal. So much so, just being around him made me feel normal by osmosis. Like he absorbed some of my weird into himself and excreted it as a form of non-toxic handsome. He was kryptonite to my superman. Paul is the perfect disguise.

His upbringing, one of strict discipline had forced him to become the perfect gentleman. Thus, his urges were dutifully restrained, not unlike my own.

I really have no interest in sex. I have no hang ups about it either, we’ve had sex.

Honestly didn’t much care for it, a sweaty messy thing, waste of time and sheets. The smell of it was enough to keep him by my side, and to drive me where I wanted to go and do most of anything I wanted.

Being a woman is pretty easy when you have no shame. Anyone that says different is a liar.

Men will put up with almost any shit from a woman if he thinks sex may possibly happen at some point in the near future.

Paul was presentable, neat and clean and always smelled good, never a blond hair out of place, or a blue eye in the wrong direction. A stern solid posture always maintained for some hidden watcher like someone stuck a broom up his ass without any KY and expected him to clean the ceiling.

The perfect scarecrow he was, scaring off all those hangers-on and beta orbiters that like to cling to pretty girls who don’t carry mace on a key chain.

The bell rang, and Wendy looked up, as if to make sure. “Shit, gotta get back to class, see you guys later.” She said as she vocal fried her way down the hall. Swished and swayed spreading a sweet fake scent as she floated away.

“Hey, baby, what’s up?” Paul said.

He speaks! He Leaned in for a hello peck, his arms wrapped around me.

I dutifully resisted, pushed back against him. “Hunger,” I said, without a hint of irony.

July 27, 2018 0

Well I wonder…

When you close your eyes.

Do you hear me when you sleep?

I know that can’t be.

Am I even real.

Do you see me when we pass?

Please keep me in mind.

I hoarsely cry, why?

Gasping, dying but somehow,

Still alive, but why?

July 25, 2018 0

	Ryk Brink on Review of the Benchmade Harley…
	Upashna on Alabama
	Jillianne howard on Review of the Benchmade Harley…
	The Awesome Dad on Rain drops
	Ryk Brink on Us – Movie review

	Ryk Brink on Review of the Benchmade Harley…
	Upashna on Alabama
	Jillianne howard on Review of the Benchmade Harley…
	The Awesome Dad on Rain drops
	Ryk Brink on Us – Movie review

Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Where weird shit hits bizarre fans.

Category

Gage Chapter 12 ‘Passover’

Diana After Dark Chapter 2 ‘Do you see what I see?’

Avengers infinity war review

GS2 Chaper 21 ‘Some girls are bigger than others’

Cur Chapter 5 ‘Storm King’

Coming waves

Gage chapter 11 ‘Heel on the shovel

Diana After Dark Chapter one ‘Darkly Dreaming’ *remurdered edition.

Well I wonder…

Find me on the book of many faces.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Meta

Follow me on Twitter and I’ll kill you last

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Meta

Follow Blog via Email