story

Move [Part III]

Marianne was awakened, as always, by the rattling of the dumbwaiter as it clattered to a halt at the level of this room. She stretched her aching limbs, which were sore both from lack of movement and from the constant clenching they underwent when Marianne tried to move objects with her mind.

She got up off the thin mattress and went into the tiny steel-covered bathroom that was connected to the room by a sliding, metal door. There was no mirror in there of course, and Marianne wondered, for the hundredth time, what she looked like. She wondered if she looked gaunt and pale from lack of sunlight or just haggard from lack of sleep. In truth, she looked neither gaunt, nor pale, nor haggard. She didn’t know this, but the lights in the steel room were special – they imitated the light that the sun gave off and filled her skin with vitamin D. The food she ate every day was also altered, and was full of strengthening nutrients. Marianne didn’t know this either, but she was allowed to sleep more than eight hours every night, and so she actually got quite enough sleep. She was being cared for more carefully than she could ever imagine – but even if she knew this, she wouldn’t have been any less resentful towards her situation.

Marianne closed the steel bathroom door behind her and headed for the dumbwaiter, eager for her food. She quickly ate the eggs and toast and butter with the plastic utensils, and put the tray back in the dumbwaiter. She then turned and walked to the middle of the room and waited for the voice to come. She knew the routine – after breakfast every morning, a new day would start and she’d need to begin concentrating on moving things once more.

Sure enough, the dumbwaiter, which had clattered up and then back down again, came to a halt and opened automatically. Inside was a block of lead as large as a crate. This was heavier than anything Marianne had moved for days. The voice in the loudspeaker told her to concentrate and begin.

Marianne shut her eyes and imagined her mother’s face once more. She decided today to think about her memories of her mother when she was small. She then opened her eyes, the vision of her mother pushing her on the swings fixed in her mind, and then began to concentrate on moving the heavy thing.

In a room far above her, were a man and a woman, both staring at a large TV screen. They could see the girl, subject number 824, begin to move the lead block out of the dumbwaiter with her mind. They looked at each other with a rough determination in their eyes.

“How the HELL is she doing that?” The man asked.

“I think,” The woman replied slowly. “That next week we should take her out. It’s time to put on the electrodes. It’s time to see what that damned girl is thinking.”

Move [Part II]

“Annie! Annie, honey, look what you got in the mail!”

“What? Mom? What is it? Come on, give it to me!”

“It’s… The big envelope! You got in! Sweetie, look, you got in! Oh, love, I’m so proud of you.”

“Oh my god! I got in! I can’t believe this! YES! Oh- oh, Mom, don’t cry, please don’t cry. I’ll be back from there every weekend, you know I will.”

“I know, I know. But the house will be so lonely without you. I still don’t love the idea, you know that. I mean, I know it’s a great honor to be able to join this experimental group that the Set have started, and I know it’ll be an amazing thing to put on your college applications in a year, but still…”

“Mom, you know how bored I am at school. You know that I would start college right now if I could. The Set are offering kids like me the opportunity of a lifetime! I can’t pass this up. Mom, tell me you’ll be ok without me…”

“Of course I will, honey. I’m just going to miss you, that’s all. As long as I’ll get to see you once a week, I’ll be alright.”

“I’ll be home every weekend, Mom. Promise.”

Marianne stared blankly at the boulder in front of her. It was still hovering. She moved her eyes, and her concentration, to the right. The boulder moved with her mind. The loudspeaker made a gurgling cackle and the ever-present voice told her that that will do. Marianne let the memory fade away as she shook her head and rubbed her aching, tired eyes. The boulder fell to the floor with a crash as Marianne threw herself on the thin mattress that lay on the floor in the corner. She felt herself crashing into unconsciousness just like the boulder and then knew no more.

Move [Part I]

“Again!”

Frowning in concentration, Marianne wiped the sweat from her brow, took a deep breath and tried once more. The grain of rice on the table in front of her was her challange, her goal, and she had to conquer it. She had to master it. She couldn’t let her thoughts wander at all. She tried once more to believe, with all her mind and heart, that the grain was rising from the table, that the grain, lighter than a feather, could easily defy gravity. Marianne’s upper lip and forhead began seeping with wetness again as she gazed fiercly at the tiny grain of rice and tried with all her might to make it rise.

She almost had it, she felt, so close – but then her thoughts began to wander again, despite her best efforts, and she thought sullenly Why am I even doing this? Why am I doing what they tell me? In a moment, she collapsed in a heap on the floor, exhausted, and felt as if she had been wrung out like a sponge. She sat there, on the cold, metal floor, and tried to organize her thoughts again. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know how long it had been, but she knew it must have been some weeks – it seemed so endless. She fingered the white hospital-type bracelet circling her left wrist. It read “NOVICE  #824: MARIANNE” in big block letters, with no more indication than that.

“Again! Try again!” Came the cold voice over the loudspeaker. Marianne didn’t even see where the speaker was in the room, but she’d learned to hate the crackle of it, that little “Ffff…” before the person, who she couldn’t recognize as male or female, spoke. The voice was as present in her current situation as the sweat on her brow. It was the voice that awoke her from her restless sleep, the voice that commanded her to take the food from the odd, metallic dumbwaiter and eat it, the voice that told her relentlessly, over and over “AGAIN!”

As she had nothing else better to do, and she’d almost been convinced that maybe something would come of this, and also because she had learned what happened when she refused, Marianne rose to her feet, walked to the table with the grain of rice on it, and tried again. For a moment, for no reason at all, her mother’s face flashed before her eyes as she was concentrating on the grain. Blinking away the vision, Marianne stared at the reality in front of her. The grain of rice was hovering a full foot off the table. She coughed, and the grain clattered onto the metal table.

“Finally.” Said the voice over the loudspeaker. Marianne looked up at the wall, as metal and unadorned as the rest of the room, and tears filled her eyes.

Forgetting Spring

Imagine a great, big tree. Grand and majestic, an old soul, it carries thousands of small leaves, leaves that fall each winter to the ground and scatter in the wind. Each fall, as the leaves begin to change colors and one by one fall from the branches, the tree begins to feel lonely. It knows that soon it will be bereft of all its cover and will be alone. So every fall, the tree grows sadder and sadder until, as the first frost kisses the branches, the tree feels dead and alone.

The months of winter whip the tree into a fierce skeleton of its former glory. All leaves gone, the tree is left without support, without cover, without anything to shelter if from the winds and snows and the rains and the frosts. If the tree could have a voice it would be howling with pain as the wind beats through it, screaming as the cold drops of rain hit its branches or moaning softly as the snow buries it under a cold blanket of wet white flakes.

The tree never remembers during the winter what it feels like to wake up in spring. But nevertheless, every year, there comes a morning when the tree feels the warm glint of the sunlight on its branches. It drinks up the water from the wet ground through its roots and seems to stretch out as the warmth thaws it. Soon enough, the new leaves start budding, one by one, and the tree would be smiling if it could, greeting every new bud with a drop of water to sustain and nourish it.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that spring will come, but come it will, whether we know it or not.

Rosy Thoughts [Part II]

“Damn wind-chimes,” muttered Matt as he closed the door softly on his daughter’s sleeping form. She was genuinely asleep, finally, and Matt didn’t want the “chink-chink” of the dishes clinking against each other in the kitchen sink to wake her. He stood outside the closed door for a moment and sighed, then braced himself and walked into the kitchen.
A dark-haired woman, Laura, was standing at the sink, soap running through her fingers and steam fogging up part of her glasses as she bent over the sink and washed the few dishes that were in there. She heard Matt walk in, and her shoulders stiffened slightly. She wished he would move out already. Even though he slept on the couch, his presence in the house seemed to fill her every waking moment with an itch she couldn’t scratch without making it bleed.
“Coffee?” Matt offered quietly as switched on the electric kettle. Something in Laura seemed to break, and she turned off the water-tap.
“Yes, please.”
Matt reached into the cupboard and took out two mugs as Laura dried her hands on the dishtowel and sat down at the kitchen table, burying her face in her hands. They smelled lemony from the soap. She hated the smell of lemon. Stupid grocery store, she thought, why do they always run out of the good smelling soap?
“What are we going to do about her, Lor’?” Matt set a steaming mug of coffee in front of Laura and took the seat across from her, taking a long sip from his own, equally steaming mug. Laura’s shoulders stiffened and then slumped again as she picked up her mug. Her shoulders were aching, she was making that move so many times each day.
“I don’t know…” she murmured. “Do you think there’s something seriously wrong with her?”
“Um. Yes?! She’s been in bed for a week, goddammit! She’s hardly eating, she hardly responds to us! How can you be so calm about it?” Matt spoke barely above a whisper, still afraid to wake his daughter, but his tone was clearly one of a man who very much wanted to shout.
“Oh Matt, give me a break – she’s upset! It’s natural! She’s drawing attention to herself. I love her so much, and I’m worried about her too, you know, but I’m worried about how she’s going to be when the divorce is final more than I’m worried about her now.” Laura couldn’t bear to look at Matt. She felt somehow that his worry was an insult, as if he cared more for Rosy than she did. She knew the thought was ridiculous, and also knew that Matt was being disgustingly naïve, believing Rosy was really sick when Rosy was obviously sick at heart but not in body.
“I don’t want to leave while she’s like this. I can’t do it, Lor’,” Matt voice broke on the word ‘leave.’ He seemed on the verge of tears for a moment, but then he pulled himself together and looked at his still-wife-soon-to-be-ex-wife defiantly. “I won’t leave her. It’s not fair to her. It’s not fair to me. I don’t want to divorce her.”
“Matt!” Laura’s face turned red and she seemed to be close to yelling. Her voice was getting louder with every word. “We had an agreement! We cannot, I repeat, CANNOT keep living in the same house. All we’re doing is making Rosy more and more upset. She can hear us fighting, she can hear us talking to the lawyer, she can hear every damn word and THAT is why she’s hiding in her bed. We need to have some time apart or we will not be able to work this out for her!”
The two adults glared at each other for a moment. It was Matt who looked away first, taking another angry sip from his mug. This conversation would continue for a while, and he had no idea who would win the argument. Laura usually won, but Matt was determined in this. He could not leave Rosy when she was lying in bed like a little ghost of the bubbly twelve-year old girl he remembered from just a few weeks ago, before she had gotten wind of the divorce.

Rosy lay in bed all this time, truly asleep for the first time in days. Her hand was curled around the pillow and her dreams were of her childhood, when there weren’t any worries past which stuffed animal was missing an eye and how much the bruise from falling over hurt.

Insert-Thriller-Novel-Name-Here: Preface

Most stories begin with a person. Some stories begin with an object – an enchanted ring, a lone chair in a meadow, strange stuff like that.

This here story begins with nothing. Not an object, and not a person. It begins with absolutely nothing, that is to say, just a vast, empty space, all contained inside a small test tube. The test tube is full of nothing. Vacuum. The absence of matter – all matter, liquid or solid or gas.

I sat there watching that emptiness and I tried to understand it. Tried to comprehend the meaning of total, utter emptiness. I couldn’t really understand it, no matter how hard I stared at it. This was when I was a young boy, seeing  vacuum in the science lab for the first time.

Now, I feel as if I am facing an uncomprehensible loss, and now, as it was then, I’m staring at what is in front of my eyes and I cannot understand this emptiness, this lack that I’m facing.

How could I have gotten myself into this situation? How have I screwed myself over like this? Not for the first time, I wish I could turn back the clock…

I spend all my time between calls at work scribbling in my notebook. I was going to try to write some dialogue because I must practice that, and instead I wrote a weird preface to a cheap thriller novel about someone who’s lost everything due to something or other. Ah well, the creative mind takes us odd places, I suppose.

Princess Without A Name [A Short Story]

Once upon a time, there was a princess who didn’t have a name. She lived locked up in a tower, like all princesses do, and had a jolly life there. She got plenty of exercise in the big swimming pool at the bottom of the tower, and read plenty of books in the big library on the first floor of the tower, and had plenty of food in the pantry on the second floor and got plenty of time to gaze outside wistfully from the one window that was on the third floor of the tower. It was a very good tower, as towers went.

The princess without a name was very happy there. She lived her life all alone, except for the girls that came to restock the pantry, and only read about other people in books. She had all the different stories of princesses in the library, and she knew how her story would go. She knew exactly what would happen with her life.

She felt lucky, knowing exactly what was to be. She felt glad to think that one day, her eighteenth birthday probably, or somewhere around that age, a prince would come riding on a white, or maybe black, horse. He would save her from the tower by breaking into it or climbing up it – or doing something else that was very athletic. Then he’d pledge his true love to her, and they would ride off together into the sunset and live happily ever after. The princess without a name liked the sound of happily ever after. It sounded like a nice way to live, though rather vague.

As her eighteenth birthday started drawing near, the princess without a name started worrying about two things. The first was that all the maidens and princesses in the stories had names. Not very good ones, no – for what sort of a name is Cinderella? Or Snow White for that matter? Stupid names really – but they still had names. The princess without a name had no name at all. She never really thought about it. She knew who she was, and that was that. She never felt she needed a name.

The second thing she worried about was that she would have to leave her tower. She really liked her tower, being stocked as it was with good things to do and to eat and to read. She even had a few friends, if she thought about it – the girls from the village who opened the tiny window in the pantry and gave her food every week. The window was much too small to escape from of course, but the girls liked having nice chats and the princess without a name rather liked hearing about their lives, unprincess-like as they might be.

Mind filled with worries, one of which being the creases in her brow from being so worried, the princess without a name’s birthday came and went and no prince or horse came near the tower. As the days passed, she started to forget a little about it. She kept about her routine, and even had the village girls find a few dozen new books to add to the library.

Still, fate is fate, and the day before the princesses nineteenth birthday, a prince appeared. He came riding – of course he did – but on quite an odd black and white horse that looked rather like a tall cow. His face looked very sweaty and his chain-mail wasn’t very shiny, but rather caked with mud. The princess without a name looked down at him from her window at the top of the tower and waited.

“O, fairest of maidens! Princess of these lands! I am Pip, and I have come to rescue you!” He shouted up at her, rather as if declaiming, badly, from a page. The princess stifled a giggle. Pip?!

“O lovely lady, will you tell me your name?” He shouted then, his voice breaking on the high pitch he put on the word “name.”

“I don’t have a name,” called down the princess. The prince blinked a few times. He looked like he was thinking very hard, and not managing well with it.

“Well, then after I rescue you, I’ll give you one, O star of mine!” He eventually yelled, sounding, and looking, rather pleased with himself at the solution he found for this unexpected development. The princess thought to herself. She looked back into the comfy tower room, her bedroom, and sighed a bit. She looked out at the prince and sighed once more.

“Maybe once you break in, we can live here?” She asked the prince a moment later. She really did like the tower. She heard the prince laugh an odd, trilling little laugh.

“Why, lady, I have a castle waiting for us far away from here,” The prince called back, still giggling. “That is where we shall live, get married and have our children! Why, this little place is scarcely enough to hold one little princess, how could it hold a family and servants and courtiers?” The princess without a name cringed at his words. A family? Servants? Courtiers? She wasn’t even nineteen. She wasn’t ready for all that. Happily ever after had always been vague, true, but never had she heard about the happy couples having babies and servants and courtiers straight off. Also, the princes has always been sweet, not annoying and fake like this one/. And they were never called Pip. And their horses looked nice.

The princess thought the matter over for a few more minutes while Pip, who had assumed that she wanted to be rescued already, toiled away at the door of the tower, trying to hack at it with his sword and muttering things like “Have at you!” and “Open sesame!”

“Pip! Hey, Pip!” She called, trying to get his attention away from her faithful door that was solid oak and seemed quite unwilling to let him in. Once Pip looked up at her, wiping sweat from his brow with his hand, she continued.

“Pip, your offer is so kind. But, you see, the thing is,” and she giggled with pleasure at the cliché from all the romance novels that she was about to use, “I’m not really willing to settle for less than the perfect one for me. And you’re not him, Pip. I’m sorry, but you can stop trying to break in. I don’t want to leave.” With those words, the princess who didn’t want a name given to her turned, walked into the depths of the tower and went for a long, aggressive swim in her pool.

She never saw Pip staring in shock at the tower. Nor did she see him hacking hopelessly at the door a few times. Nor did she see the big brass key that hung next to the door on the inside of the tower, just like she hadn’t ever seen it. She would see that key one day, when she wanted to. She would see the key and she would open the door for the knight she wanted and until then she had no need to know that she had the key all along. Her tower was enough for her and would be enough for her until the day she would choose that it wasn’t.

Mistress Murder

Tick tock, tick tock,
Went the big red clock.
Tick tock, tick tock,
Went her heels on the dock.

Hush now, everyone,
Mistress Murder’s on the run,
Careful there, little ones,
If she sees you then you’re done.

Mistress Murder, eyes so red,
A thousand deaths upon her head.
On their souls she surely fed,
Bodies filled with bullets of lead.

They locked her up and sealed her tight,
But then she vanished in the night,
Leaving guards there dead of fright,
Mistress Murder’s out, alright!

Now Mistress Murder’s left the town,
But surely she’ll be back around.
Tonight though we will sleep so sound,
We’ve run her out, she’s gone to ground!

Little Dramas

It’s so strange how, as the time goes by, I learn more and more about my co-workers and their dramatic little lives. I feel rather privleged that I’m considered trustworthy enough to become privy to their lives. Then again, I also know that they know as well as I do that we’re not really friends, and we’ll never really be friends. We’re just people who are stuck together for a few hours a day and we better try to make conversation and get along or we’ll turn those hours into hell. But now, onto some of the dramas!

A. lives with her husband and her twenty month-old daughter in a small apartment with her mother-in-law. She is the mother-in-law from hell, the real classic kind, and A’s life is a misery. She’s trying to raise money to be able to move out of their already, and she seems to be blossoming in her job, having something of her own for the first time in years.

I. was religious. She met a boy, fell in love, and slept with him. She had iregularities with her period after that, and fainted from loss of blood. She was hospitalized and through this her mother learned somehow that I. lost her virginty. I. was then shunned completely, and at twenty, she already lives alone and completely supports herself out of necessity.

Last but not least, we have S. who is in love with a man who probably won’t be able to ever give her what she wants, which is commitment. At her birthday party a few days ago, her friends surprised her by bringing him, after they hadn’t seen each other for months. They slept together, and then she realized he’s the same as he always was, cannot commit and doesn’t realize that he’s with someone who’s willing to give her all. And so, mere days after her hope was egnited, it was cruely extinguished again.

Ho Hum Pen

‘Ho hum, ho hum,’
Went the little pen.
‘What shall I write for my mistress today?’
Went the little pen.

‘Shall I write a romantic ballad,
To break the hearts of all?
Or maybe a clever haiku,
That speaks of spring and fall?
Then again, mayhap an epic poem,
Of battle and love and loss,
And a little princess who waits in a tower,
With nothing to do but floss.

Perhaps a novel with chapters aplenty,
Should be my next project today!
Or instead, a political satire of those
Who promise, but then go out and play.’

So the pen mused for hours on end,
And could not make up his mind,
For he knew he would KNOW it
Whenever at last the perfect idea he’d find.

But just like every other day,
The pen gave up so soon,
Because a hand was now upon him,
And a voice too, begging a boon.
‘Oh write with me, please,
My dearest of pens.
We’ll create and muse,
And let us be friends!’

So just like every day,
The poor pen – he gave in,
And in the hand of his mistress,
He wrote, and he grinned.

Can you say ‘lack of structure’? I know it doesn’t flow all that well, but it’s late, and I’m tired, and darn it, I wanted to write a poem about a pen!