Day 65: Almost done with this thing

             I can't believe I'll get to start writing about something different.  Of course, proofreading is going to be a major pain.  I bet I'll learn a lot from it.  Let's get to work.
            PS:  When you just focus and write, you can get 2,000 words done pretty quick.  And it doesn't always feel like you're bullshitting.  You can just slow down and relax.

             

            The old man pointed at him from inside, Charles noticed as he stared up from the gas pump.  The attendant looked out at him with a furrowed unibrow.  Coming around to the back of the car, he checked the trunk with his eyes, it was closed, there was no visual evidence convicted him.  Was his guilt so tangible?

            Charles pushed through the front door after replacing the pump on its station.  His hands were freezing cold although it was warm outside, the whoosh of ocean air blowing past his face in a crippling full lunged blast.  He thought of when he moved his stuff into his new apartment; the first time he had realized he was all on his own.  The cold seemed colder han, the darkness was more absolute. 

            The seagulls followed him everywhere, now perched on the gas station billboard advertising $4.00 car washes.  The old man was having a curiously long conversation with the attendant inside, now they were laughing as the old man held a newspaper sideways so they both could look on.  Charles went in and paid for 3$0.00 on pump 17 and revved the engine again.

            He swore something was rising off of the rearview mirror, out in the mirrored distance behind him, but the reassuring realization that he was all alone soon swept over him.  He started to notice details that weren’t there before; the tiny cracks in his windshield, the antennae that bent over backwards in the wind, the Gilbert and Sullivan idol bobblehead on the dashboard.  A starting realization came over him that identity isn’t something you construct for yourself, it’s happenstance and the way life settles over you.  You can misrepresent yourself, but that’s a frivolous selfish activity, since the majority of people don’t care anyway.  Everyone only thinks of themselves.

            A red sedan on the side of the road had run out of gas, or overheated, or the battery had died.  He contemplated pulling over to help the young woman out, but two men sat in the back seat and no one up front in the passenger side. 

            “Gas station is a couple miles back that way,”  He called out with a pointing thumb, slowing down enough to aggravate the sole driver behind him.  The blue jeep went around him, shooting him a scowl and raised hands.

            Charles pulled up to a craggy area overlooking the water, the waves rushing over the rocks like they were eager to swallow up whatever he had to offer to it.  He parked sidelong under three trees that made a giant M, his Honda Civic’s white hue clashing beautifully with the green brown leaves.  He popped the trunk and pulled out the bags, balancing himself with one arm on the trunk.  Lugging them along with difficulty to keep them from ripping open on the rocks, he let out a sigh of relief, keeping the furtive subconscious thought that this was all too easy as far back in his mind as possible.

            He threw the first bag into the water, it resting on top of the sand with a thud.  The water swept over it, rustling the bag and pulling it taught over its contents, making first a hand visible, then the curve of an elbow or leg.  Charles through the second and third bags a little further out, carefully tying each tighter as he cast them away.  The beach was visible for miles on each side, the rocks disappearing further down and swallowed into the eroded beach head.

            He checked his watch, eight fifteen.  He didn’t have a presentation ready, either way, as much as Mr. Pulp had loved anything he did until this point.  They’d send a couple more paychecks either way, his worries were nothing compared to PTSD, he rationalized.  I should probably take my next job more seriously, or maybe I did take it seriously, I can’t remember the details.

            Leaving the scene of the crime, Charles thought about those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Elmer Fudd would think he had escaped, and Bugs would be standing by the nearest door in drag.  The kind of logic of a nightmare type of cartoon where you would almost feel bad for the guy if the absurdity wasn’t so fast moving, the wit so quick.  He was mentally prepared for the bags to magically be back in his trunk, or show up at the office, or maybe get delivered by the garbage men back into the dumpsters at the back of his apartment.  He had a foolish feeling like forensic evidence would tie him to the bags, maybe Big Brother kept track of who bought what, extending all the way to garbage bags.  He’d seen those CSI episodes where a hair incriminates a guy who had an otherwise foolproof plan.

            He clung to the idea that Dave was a figment of his imagination, someone he had invented to hurt himself.  I can plead the insanity defense, either way, he thought as he adjusted the seatbelt to it wouldn’t chaffe his neck.  He drove past his new offices on the way back, spotting antlike people from a distance flying through the offices at top speed.  He felt like he had planted a bomb there and they were running to diffuse it. 

            Charles stopped by Sal’s for a couple more hotdogs, Sal making note of the fact that he “didn’t look too good”

            “You look like shit, Charles.  The bags under your eyes look like they’re going to drag your eyes in with them pretty soon.”

            Charles was aware of extra weight pulling his eyelids down, but was pretty sure that was just a side effect of lack of sleep.  What he became more concerned about when he started to think about it was the twitch he had acquired on the left side of his body, an involuntary full body shiver that quaked him each time he resolved to resist it.

            “It’s been a long night Sal, I should probably go home.”  Sal wasn’t sympathetic, there was no hint of a caring person in his eyes, he was just telling it like it is.  He was happy in his little hotdog shack, probably because he got to watch TV and tell it like it is.

            “The fucking guy from the lamp store says every one of his lamps is starting to smell like my dogs.  He is threatening to get a civil suit against me.”

            Charles hadn’t even noticed the lamp store, even though it was spacially involved with Sal’s place. 

            “What kind of nut starts a lamp store next to a hot dog place, anyway?  I think it’s got something to do with the ventilation, but I’m not going to get high on hot dog fumes by closing off the ducts.  It’s bad enough everything I own reeks of pured beef.”

            An old guy in the seat down the hall by the window looked up from his American History book for a second, bugged by the noise and not interested in the conversation.

            “This is my fucking place, I’ll be as loud as I want to be.”  Sal slammed a hamfisted fist on the counter. 

            Charles took a bag of dogs to go ($5.50 plus tax), and whisked himself away back to his apartment.  The light hurt his eyes, it would keep getting brighter until his head exploded he was sure.  He thought of himself as a prematurely birthed larva, his queen sized bed as a cocoon.  Everyone was in a good mood today, it shouldn’t have been that hard for him to get back.

            He had to circle around the block and park in the alley, all the angle parking was full.  He wasn’t used to being home at this time of day, but there must have been some sort of businesses in this area that he had been unaware of.  It all looked residential to him, maybe people maintained home offices.  But then what did they do at night?  He didn’t worry about it, his brain was indisposed.  He could feel it stiffening like leaving bread in the oven too long, next thing it’d start oozing out of his ears.

            His apartment door opened too easily, that’s gotta be a security issue he thought.  He looked down the hallway with suspicion, trying to identify someone who may have been screwing with it.  The measured the thickness of the door by putting his hand around it, and decided it look easily be kicked in.  He should have noticed these things before.

            The eyes on Dave’s Spinal Sword glowed red under the couch like a spooky halloween mask.  He removed it from under the couch, holding it up and staring into its eyes with little ability to resist.  The redness soon enveloped him again, and he just laughed, I should have known better this time. 

The next thing he knew, it felt like he was asleep but there was no way to tell for sure.  He reached down to pinch himself, and the skin stretched and then didn’t fit back together perfectly.  If I could use my other hand I could reconstruct this, he thought, and suddenly he had a third hand, jutting out from the elbow on his left arm.

Charles closed his eyes and attempted to sleep, but it failed because he was already asleep.  A red circle with a line through it flashed through his head on repeated attempts, along with the noise you get on Family Feud for a wrong answer.  His eyes wouldn’ perceive what was around him, his feet fixed into the ground like tree roots.  The colors flew by in full spectral manifestation, like when the Millenium Falcon would go into warp mode.

He was roused awake by three hard slaps.  It was the man from across the hall, the old man.  “Even when you dream you make too much noise.  What business does a young guy like you have not working at this time of the day, anyway?”

“If you don’t mind me asking,”  Charles said, wiping his eyes.  “What was I talking about?”

“You kept yelling about some pink pyramid, purple stairs, something like that, some fruity business.”  He recoiled into the stairwell when he saw what Charles was carrying, the staffs eyes no longer glowing red, but in the daylight it looked like a tribal war prize. 

“Is that a… that’s a…”  The old man gasped, tried to turn to run, and spit up a sac of green pus onto the carpet by Charles’s door.

          
            My best one yet, I think.

Day 64: The World

Hi guys.  I put this up on my facebook now.  I'm getting brave in the face of criticism.  Or, mostly, I expect most of the "general public" to tear me a new one.  Being able to take criticism in stride is probably one of the best skills my future self should tell me to learn.

One of the keys to succeeding in "business" is to be prepared for failure and to fail a lot.  Taking this advice in mind, I'm randomly adding everyone I can find on Linkedin. 

Note to recent college graduates!  Don't go back, Peter Thiel says.  I do know I for one have learned a lot more since graduating than I ever did at school.  You get to pick what you learn.  I think maybe what makes the majority of college students (myself included) so direction-less is the fact that they're told what to learn, even if it's in a field they are interested in.  Also, you don't improve technical skills most of the time (honors college excepted), and you don't earnestly want to learn, just get your homework done.  The concept of getting homework done so you can get back to doing "what you want to do", which is presumably leisurely activities, just about cements the fact that you won't continue working hard once school is over.  Or, you'll feel like you had the carpet pulled out from under you unless you had some sort of internship that leads immediately to another job.

I'm going to try to keep the personal stuff about myself on here to a minimum and approach this more professionally from now on, and we'll see what happens.  Unless it's a particularly funny observation from personal life, obviously.  My fiction is personal enough.



            The building creaked, the auxilliary ducts produced poots and puffs of air.  The sound of the furnace in the basement sounded like their was someone down there, walking around with a stick testing weather or not anything was hollow.  Insects buzzed in his kitchen lights, they had somehow managed to wiggle their way into that membranous layer between the ceiling and the next level.  Charles imagined one of them was a snakelike centipede, ramming its head into the upholstery until it would break through.

            The complex had opened itself up to him, it felt like he was wearing it as a glove that wouldn’t come off.  He felt the apartment wrap its way around him like winter clothing, the scarf constantly getting caught in his mouth giving him the dry staticy taste of linen.  He saw his car out front, he’d stair between the blinds at it for minutes and cross his arms.  The red light on his answering machine flickered endlessly, there were people somewhere trying to reach him but all that was left of their innocuous pleas were ghost journal entries in this recorder box. 

            Charles questioned his sanity, even though everything seemed to be clear and direct in his thought process.  A sane person wouldn’t go out and buy a sharp knife, he conceited to himself.  A sane person wouldn’t stay up all night fixating on every noise coming from above.  But then again, a sane person wouldn’t have a dead body laying in the middle of their floor next to the loveseat and a picture of dad.

            He expected the body to smell, but it got a late start on this process.  The skin didn’t decay, either, most of the physical changes Dave was making seemed to be a process of metamorphosis.  The eyes continued to become more milky and white, like bubbles on jelly fish that washed up onto the beach.  Charles turned his body so the eyes no longer gave the illusion of focus, and now approaching it from the side he had produced the nerve to test it’s pliability. 

            The arms bent and fell off like clay, his blood dripping out in thin red lines as if it were licorice.  He felt like he was dismantling a rotten pinata.  Each arm still resisted popping from its socket, Charles thought to himself it was no worse than eating chicken, however disgusting he knew the cracks were.  The torso crumbled when the arms were removed, insides falling out like mummified entrails.  The heart, or spleen, or some internal organ made a popping noise when the air escaped the cavity, Charles slouching backwards with his hand in front of his face in case a little man jumped out of Dave’s control room stomach.

            He emptied the pieces into black garbage bags, securing their yellow drawstrings and piling them by the door.  Like carving a pumpkin, he thought.  The spine and the head formed a pole like a walking stick, his eyes extending out from behind his skull like antennaes.  The spine removed from his lower torso like a sword in a stone, the jeaned legs falling in a heap like a samurai had chopped him into two pieces.  The legs were too tall to fit in a garbage bag; the boots sticking out of the top and flexibility almost completely gone.  Charles thought better of removing the jeans, he’d rather go to jail than deal with a dead man’s genitals, and just threw a second garbage bag over it.

            He eyeballed the trunk of his car from the window, looking back at the body and back at the bags.  The head and spine sat propped against the couch, like Skeletor had been made into a walking stick. He couldn’t resist picking it up and swinging it around like a sword, he had a hunch that was what Dave was intended for, Dave was a weapon.  He handled it two handed, drawing it close to his eyeballs to inspect and getting a whiff of the pungent septic smell.  The mouth had a full set of teeth still, beautifully white pegs that contrasted with the pure black rod.  He dropped it and it rolled under the couch.

            Charles hung around near his door, listening to people shuffle in and out.  It was seven, he had to be at work in an hour.  He picked up the phone, removed a business card the company had made for him out of his wallet and dialed the HR Service Line. 

            “Thank you for calling HR Services,”  The voice echoed through Charles ears like a pinball machine. 

            “Could you direct me to the home office?”  He couldn’t remember what his secretaries last name was.  “If there’s a Nancy there, I’m looking for Nancy, my secretary Nancy.”

            “Who’s calling please?”  The voice asked after a pause, in a nasally monotone. 

Charles had never called in sick to work before.  Normally, work was the most important part of his life.  He’d be in bed by ten most nights, done with schoolwork the week it was due, but with no real reason other than to get it done.  He closed his eyes as he gathered a response.

“This is Charles Lattimore, I’m a worker in Mr. Pulp’s division.  I was there before the explosion.  I was born in 1984.  I’m a Scorpio.”

“Please hold.”  The voice accepted this response.  Charles dug under the couch for his sweet skull sword while pressing the phone against his ear with his shoulder.  He waited through 5 minutes of “That’s What Love is All About” by Michael Bolton concentrated into a thick muzaky mucus.  Charles hummed along and he was taken back to a day when everything was sterile and inoffensive, his nerves twitched and clung like cats to the top of curtains when it snapped back to the main line.

“Where are you, Lattimore?!”  A voice screamed into the phone as soon as the line switched over.  Charles had never felt so wanted in his life, like he belonged somewhere.  Unfortunately, he could not be what he was supposed to be to these people.

“I’m at home, I can’t make it in today.  My throat is…”

“This better be fucking good, Lattimore.”  It didn’t sound like Mr. Pulp, or any boss Charles was familiar with.  This guy was serious.  Beads of sweat formed around Charles’ brow.

“Well, I couldn’t sleep last night, I was up with a… throat ache.  It’s getting worse, my adams apple is turning red on the outside.  I think I caught it at the zoo yesterday.”

“We have foreign dignitaries in.  Mr. Pulp is very nervous.  Your presentation is due at 10, and if you miss it you can consider your job forfeit.  Sort out whatever you have to do by then and get your ass in here.”

He heard the phone slam on the other end and let out a sigh of sweet relief.  He looked at the garbage bags, saw the spine sword in his hand, and decided he had better take care of this body first.  Once he got that done with, he could decide whether or not to quit and find a new job.

An abundance of birds flew around outside as he pushed the doors open, dragging three garbage bags behind him through the vestibule.  He was hardly worried about looking conspicuous, he had went over it in his mind a million times.  The quickest way was to get to the car, get the body in the trunk, go throw it in the ocean.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the air tasted like a summer morning.  Cars whizzed by, the drivers attentive of the road because of the weird curved street Charles lived on.  Charles remembered seeing accidents on the street, hearing random motorists swearing in the middle of the night.  If you didn’t make the turn, you drove right into angle parking spots, and if it was a Black SUV it was almost impossible to see it at night.

He stuffed the bag, feeling the sticky bones on the inside.  The bags would felt like they were full of dead cats.  He sat down in the front seat, the bags safely procured in the trunk. 

The roads seemed especially quiet, on a day like this one most people would be asleep until atleast nine or ten.  His mind played tricks on him on the road, trees seemed to wave, grass wavered in between shades of green, dust seemed visible through the mirror.  When he was going downhill, it felt like his breath had completely left him.  He found himself at the site of the explosion, inadvertantly and suddenly appearing there in spite of the lawes of physics.

It was a little damper, a little darker, the red clay mud of the ground contrasting greatly to the nearby wooded area.  A group of unhappy looking men collected mud samples from around the outer edge of the precipice, a man with a small magnifying glass fixed onto his face crawling slowly in a straight line along the outer ledge.  Charles jerked the car back around in an eight, the tires squeeling and tossing red dust into the air. 

Charles felt like he was on the run.  The gas tank was getting close to empty.  He swerved past a fire hydrant that he swore had popped out of nowhere.  A group of construction workers yanked tree stumps out of the median of a busy intersection.  The bags still sat in the trunk.

He stopped at the gas station, taking a second to wash the windshield with the squiggee.  An old man with a polo shirt and high plaid pants crossed the parking lot, smiling over at Charles and raising a pointed finger to his waist.

Johnny forced a tragic smile.  “What?”  He asked after the man had passed, turning back to the car.  He thought for a second he might have pulled in on the wrong side for his gas valve, then he worried he hadn’t paid his credit card.  He wanted more than anything to go home and take a long nap.

Day 63: I Heard it Through the Grape Vine (Active Voice)

Basketball is back and I can't think of anything else again.  I'm going to drive myself crazy.  Reading examples of Active Vs Passive Voice is more fun than it should be.

Trying to get through this whole big red book called "Warriners Composition and Grammar."  It feels like taking a course with a nun.  They try to make it seem fun, but it just isn't.  There's nothing fun about grammar or sentence construction; grammar is bad but sentence structure is even worse.  I'm actually already getting a ton out of this book.  It's good stuff.

I'm going to go run on a treadmill like a rodent for awhile and get my head big.  This cold will not go away.

41,367 words in.  Then I read this thing and learn from my mistakes while simultaneously reading this nerdy grammar thing and learn from what I'm supposed to do.  No one should think this is fun!  Yeah, it is fun, actually.  Having a project rules.

Other note to self:  make joke about obscurity and irrelevance of female athletes

            The dead red bodies appeared outside of his dreams.  He walked the street at night, scared back into the nearest building by the brightness seering out from above each street light.  He questioned his identity and the dying man flashed into his mind as he stood outside of Sal’s old timey hot dog hot spot.

            Sal was crouched behind the desk in front of an adding machine with white paper flowing out of it, a calculator on the other side, and a stapler in between.  His attention was focused on a boxing match on the little TV hanging perilously from a bolt or two on the far window.  A tabby cat pestered him, walking across the counter and rubing its ass into his burly Popeye arms; it’s food dish was empty.

            A latino youth with oversized cauliflower ears took a drubbing on the right side of his stomach at the hands of a man who should have been in prison.

            “Now that man’s a killer!”  Sal said with conviction.  “Hey, kid!  Ever seen a guy like that?  Looks like he’s trying to kill that other dude.”

            Charles responded with a sheepish laugh.  “I didn’t know people even watched boxing.  I haven’t seen it since Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear off.”

            Sal nodded and went back to the fight.  The latino guys pit crew wiped matted sweat off of his bulbous dome.  They yelled at him in an inaudible foreign language.  The smell of hot dogs drove Charles crazy, and he devoured four of them like a last meal.  Sal looked upset that Charles made the order and gave him ones that had been sitting out.

            Charles had lost track of time again.  His universe had shifted off of its axis, he pictured the dead man sitting in the middle of his room.  Maybe he should get a trunk to keep him in, and spray him down with formaldehyde or shove his body into a metal trunk.  He’d then roll the trunk down a hill, similar to the way Chucky gets killed in one of those Child’s Play movies.

            But he didn’t do this.  He stayed with Sal, they watched the fight, he found himself rooting for the guy who’s head kept changing shape.  It was like trying to iron out a protruding fiber in a air mattress, that hole would just manifest itself in some way on the other side.  Or, like giving someone a lobotomy, when that would just create all sorts of different problems.

            “Say I just killed a guy, hypothetically.”  Charles turned around on his barstool after witnessing a particularly vicious punch turning the latin fighters head to scar tissue.  “Say I… punched a guy so hard that his head came loose.  What do they do with that guys body?”

            “You talking about boxing?”  Sal asked.  “I think they carry him out on the stretcher, drive him straight to the morge.”

            “What if they can’t take him to the morge?  And isn’t that murder?”

            “Yeah, that’s murder alright.”  Sal stared up blankly at the screen.  The referee was trying to separate the fighters, like a child trying to separate a domestic dispute between his parents.  He could make him swing in less direct routes, but he’d keep swinging.

            “Why’s he hate that guy so much?  He looks like he’s for sure trying to kill him.”

            The streets were empty and a series of taraxacum seeds floated by in the air, like somewhere a beautiful girl stood blowing them into the wind.  That’s what Charles thought of, anyway, as he spun his stool completely around and stared out Sal’s front glass window into the street.  He suddenly felt captive, stir crazy, and paranoid.  Dropping a couple of singles on Sal’s counter out of his Spongebob Squarepants wallet, he rushed out the front door.

            A red car drove by, and a block further it went past again.  Charles felt like he was being watched.  He thought of his high school sweetheart that drove the Red Volkswagon Beatle; he thought of her every time he saw one since.  It wasn’t a Mazda, so that was ok. 

            He found the Mazda dealership downtown.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to find.  All it took was a phonebook.  He asked if a guy named Dave had bought a car, and the guy at the desk insisted he be more specific.  Then, he said on second thought the records were confidential and that he wouldn’t tell him even if he knew Dave’s last name.

            Charles rode the bus home, sitting between a guy with a radio coming out of his head and a man with an interesting story about yogurt.

            “It’s the same as icecream!”  He insisted, speaking of yogurt like he was a gold rush era miner going to California.  “Yessir, I’m going to get off of this bus, I’m going to get some of that yogurt, man, I’ve never had yogurt like that.”

            Charles listened to his continuing diatribe and watched the decadent ruins of the inner city pass.  Everything was cold and grey, like a colorbling artists dystopian vision.  The bus driver wheezed like a broken vaccuum cleaner.  A tired mother with her brightly dressed children read an article out of the newspaper to them.

            The bus passed the site where the previous Pulp Enterprises was, before the explosion.  The media hadn’t given it the coverage he had expected, but nobody had died, and there was only distant blurry satellite footage of the building going up.  Now, it looked like a caldera.  He stood up on the seat cushion to get a better view, the driver letting out an irksome squeel of annoyance.  A fox ran out of the hole and looked both ways at the height of the precipice before continuing in a hurried, guilty fashion onto the street.  The bus hit a bump and Charles sat back down, the yogurt man saying, “OK, where did I leave off?”

            The yogurt man departed when they reached the outskirts of the city.  A little yogurt shop at the end of suburbia.  He held his backpack over his shoulder with one hand, not letting the strap come down to rest.  He looked like he’d collapse and kiss the concrete.

            Charles’s Sunday was coming to an end.  The sun was setting and he was walking down the streets like a lonesome bum.  A couple was sitting on the bus stop, the spiky haired girlfriend staring up at the overtired big nosed chap in the hooded sweatshirt.  Their feet weren’t touching the ground, like they were floating on a piece of debris in the ocean.

            Charles sighed and removed a cigarette from his inner coat pocket.  He let it while he continued to walk with difficult, eventually stopping and using his hand to shield the wind.  He bit his lip and it started to bleed, then almost instantly got fat.

            He went through the building a different way again, attempting to change perspectives.  Passing the laundry room, Charles noticed the fluorescent lights flickering and the endless drubbing cycles of the washers and dryers.  A tenant who looked unfamiliar to him emptied garbage bags of clothes into the washer and then transferred the contents of the washer next to it into the dryer.

            Back at home, Charles was hoping Dave’s body had just somehow disappeared.  It wasn’t that easy.  His eyes had become wider, locked open like he was being forced to stare at the ceiling.  The phone rang, Charles didn’t answer it.  He turned on the TV but paid no attention to it, tracing a circular path around his apartment.  A pile of papers sat next to his computer on his desk, the calendar insisted he had a presentation due.  He ate a bowl of Cinammon Toast Crunch for dinner, avoiding his reflection on the different shiny surfaces in the kitchen.

            He laid in bed that night, throwing a tennis ball off the ceiling and catching it.  The rhythmic bouncing was able to keep his mind off of his damnation for awhile.  When he stopped throwing the ball, a darkness would fill the void the ball left.  He debated whether he liked the door better open or closed as he laid looking straight up at the ceiling, deciding to compromise for halfway open. 

            The middle of the night is a great time to take care of small chores.  He finally unloaded all the boxes in his closet, crushing the boxes flat and taking them out to recycling.

            “You’re procrastinating.”  He said said to himself in the mirror.  “Everyone else is out there doing something, you’re doing nothing.  This doesn’t count as being productive.”  He wondered how long life would take to go back to feeling normal.  Or how long it’d take him to get used to his new job.  A couple of months, give or take.  But would it really be normal?  Or would he be a different person altogether.

            He drank some vodka and made some phonecalls.  His buddy Thomas got promoted to a better security guard job at a more prestigous organization and was moving away for good.  That’s alright, thanks for your time, he thought of saying.  He might have said it, it didn’t matter.

            When he got drunk enough, he figured he’d do something about the body.  Just get really drunk, let that take over.  It sat like an effigy in the middle of the floor.  It kept getting bigger, more prominent, each time he’d look over.  He continued to drink alone, a televangelist on TV asked what he was doing to save himself.  He waved the bottle at the guy, unappreciative.

            It was four in the morning, he was still drunk, time was passing quickly because he didn’t want it to.  He checked his closets and kitchen for the sharpest knife he could find, some were sharp but weren’t very big, others were big but not very sharp.  He started to ask google what the best way to dispose of a body was, but stopped in mid sentence.

          Note from future self to me:  Next month, do each day as a chapter, or at most every two or three days as a chapter.  You have noticed retroactively from reading "The Dead Zone" that this seems to be the way Stephen King does it.  Also, pick more general themes and create bigger conflicts.  Have characters that have to disappear for awhile to do other stuff, or have other obligations, or whatnot.  Have people get into positions where they have a lot of responsibility, and do the research involved about the jobs you assign to these people.  Other note to self:  Get better job

Day 62: 62nd Episode Extravaganza

First thing, my monitor is breaking.  So I'm going to have to buy a new computer.  On the days I have off, writing takes a lot longer.  I dream of a day where I'm actually done before noon.  But I didn't sleep at all yesterday so that doesn't hurt.

Now that that's out of the way!  Reading a lot of psychology stuff.  Apparently memory and imagination are the same thing.  I probably shouldn't give this information away for free, but if you try to imagine things through the faculty of memory instead of imagination, it seems more concrete.  You can still make it all up as you go along, it's just more real.  Pretend it really happened.  Or, at least, that's the strategy for the next couple of weeks.

Other news of more note than that!  Found some writers group thing in Milwaukee with some old quack writer lady.  Or maybe she's not a quack I still have to meet the lady.  My apologies for calling you that, lady.


Oh, also, pretty sure I either had a heart attack or slept on my arm weird.  but I had this huge extended lucid dream type of sequence afterwards that could have been on par with my "life flashing before my eyes".  Except there was no epiphany contained in it.  In it, my friend Henry was buying a new house because he had just finished his PhD and was now making $120,000 a year (figure he stated in the dream), and I ended up having to deliver a bunch of money for pizza to an asian man with a million children.  The kids climbed all over me when I tried to go up the stairs and yelled at me for being hairy.

This dream made me think about plot immediately, because first I went and did one thing, and later I had a package I was supposed to deliver as a favor.  The fact I was doing it as a favor just added another element to plot.  I'm sure for someone out there that concept is simple, but for me that was the revelation if there was one.

Next months nonfiction book title ala Ruthy Michals:  "How to talk to people so they end up thinking you'll have sex with them"

Quote from me in the future for the day:  "I've never read a book I can't put down.  The trick is not putting it down."  I'm picturing myself with a giant grey beard, a Confederate officer uniform and Teddy Roosevelt glasses.

Alright another tirade.  Napoleon Hill's other trick is picturing yourself as the person that you want to be.  So, by osmosis, if you create that person by imagining a future version of yourself you're helping the process along.  Or, I'll get a lot of words out of it.  The point of writing is still to produce writing.

Oh!  One other point.  I don't care if you know me, or if you even remember who I am, if you don't delete me from your facebook I'm going to comment on your stasuses.


             The line at the Shop For Sales! 20 items or more checkout spread beyond the lottery ticket machines.  No one looked happy to be there, parents and kids tacitly agreeing not to bother each other with trivialities.  An inane Thanksgiving gobbling commercial played on repeat over the stores loud speakers, separating Hall and Oates from Luther Vandross. He rushed back to bandages aisle, filling a basket with different kinds of gauze. He took the time to glance at each package first, compression bandages, gauze bandages, those little triangular ones that look like they wouldn’t stick.  I’ll come right back, he had said.  I’ll be there in twenty minutes.

 Fat black T-shirted teens in the toy aisle eyeballed him interestedly.  A plump toddler tried to sneak shortbread cookies into her moms cart.

            “Did you like, you know, is there like, a dead body or something?”  The one with the red knit cap asked, scuffing his black bondage pants on the linoleum floor.  The one with the skull T-shirt watched from in between a shelf divider.

            “Look, kid, this is a private country, I don’t have to tell you what I’m here buying.  But, if you must know, it’s for science.”  Charles was content with his vague answer, as he pushed his way back to the front of the store, passing ladies hygiene products in Aisle Eight.

            The bleeps were taking too long, he thought in the checkout line.  The express lane was congested as well.  A white afroed old lady in a floral print dress argued how much 15% off of rice pudding was.

            “Lady, it says it right on there, it says 3.25 after discount”  She insisted he call a manager, he said he was the manager, and finally the manager said that he was not to say he was the manager anymore.  They gave the rice pudding to her for free, and Charles watched with eagerness from behind a mother of four with two carts. 

            “These ones look rotten, hold on, I’m gone go grab a different one!”  The lady removed her bananas from the cashiers hands and stormed off back towards produce. 

            Charles looked at his watch as he walked out, plastic bag full of bandages in his left hand.  Extra twenty minutes, can’t lose that much blood in an extra twenty minutes.  A man with a facial tattoo wrestled a cart into the back of a row of them.

            OK I technically stabbed him, Charles thought, heart racing.  He took long strides but never broke a jogging pace, checking the police car across the lot in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the spot.  He thought of removing his sunglasses from the glove compartment and tossing them on, but didn’t want to illicit any suspicions.

            The car wound through a series of one way roads and down his alley.  He shuttered with a sudden shiver when he got out the car, taking the bag leaning in on one hand.  The fire escape was dangling, unleashed from its sheath.  He didn’t often enter the building this way, suddenly realizing this was more suspicious than he had planned.  He removed the sunglasses, put them in his pocket, and forced a smile across his face.

            The building manager passed him in the glass vestibule, and in his nervousness he forced conversation. 

            “How’s the… uh… building doing today?”

            “Charles, is it?  Yes, Charles.”  He reached out and shook Charles’s hand, confused.  “Any problems with your apartment?”

            “No, window got fixed, new locks on doors, everything is great.”

            They both continued walking, smiling and nodding simultaneously.

Charles pushed his door open, twisting the key and shaking it to get it back out. 

“I got the bandages.”  He called out.  An empty house greeted him.  The blood stain was still on the carpet, a hank of hair and flesh matted into it beyond removal.  He kicked at it with the sole of his shoe, and it stuck to the front of his shoe.  He rolled up the edge of the carpet and looked over at the telephone which was flashing. 

He pulled the blinds to his veranda, they were sitting open widely for some reason.  He checked the locks on the sliding doors, yanking at it a few times to make sure it wouldn’t budge.  The refridgerator kicked in and purred, his novelty Felix The Cat clock ticking away on the wall.  He flicked on the TV and cranked the volume up to eight green bars, sighing to himself and looking over his shoulder at the pantry. 

As he stepped toward the pantry door, he could smell the faint odor of bleach.  I left him in there, stabbed but tied up.  He was out, the horse tranquilizer should have knocked him out for days.  He expected to swing the door open, and see the body of the Red Robed Man laying there, slumped over in the chair, lifeless with his shoulders propped up against the wall.  All of his snacks and canned goods were probably laying around him in a pile, his eyes bulging and his paper thin mask lifeless.

He picked himself up, he was the new Charles, New Casual Charles.  He’d do what he had to do, take care of business, if he could handle this he could handle anything.  Anything.  And it’s just a murdered menace, it was self defense, in the privacy of his own home.

“Get the phone!”  A voice from behind the door boomed.  Sure enough, the phone was ringing, he couldn’t hear it underneath the TV.

“Doing all right in there?  I’ll be back in a minute.”  Charles trailed off.  He threw the bag of bandages down by the door, pulled his hair back in a pony tail and let it loose.

“Hello, this is Charles,”  He picked it up.  He heard a series of clicks on the other end, a wobbily noise like a piece of metal being shook.

“Hello, Charles Lattimore here.”  He paused a few more seconds and hung up the phone.

“Huh, no one there, Dave!”  He called out across the apartment, turning the TV back up.   He poured two glasses of water, one for himself and one for Dave, and pushed the pantry door with his foot.  It slid open.

Dave sat there, martini in hand, transfixed look in his eyes.  The ropes were removed, but the gash in his right arm still dripped blood.  The floor looked like a crimson carpet.  He let the right arm dangle, his left holding the glass.

“I didn’t even have the fixings for that.  There’s no way you made martinis.”

Charles applied the bandages in a slow and deliberate method.  He bent over like a field doctor, taking the martini out of Dave’s hand and carefully placing it on the chip shelves above which were still intact.  Dave didn’t resist, only breathed deeper when Charles tugged the bandages tighter around the wound.  He wrapped it with gauze, realized he forgot to apply the antiseptic first and had to reapply them.

Dave yelled without moving his lips.  His teeth serated the words that poured through.

“You can’t keep me here.  Maybe you don’t need me anymore, ok, I get it.  But I gotta get going.  I’ve gotta get to Anne.  Gotta save Anne!”

He laughed and let out a demure croak, his head tilting back and eyes going white.  Great, Charles thought.  The chair fell back and the shelves collapsed, a can of peas striking charles across the temple. 

Dave was as light as he had looked, almost literally a bag of bones.  It felt like heaving a giant vaccuum bag around when he crabbed him by the legs and wrenched him over his shoulders.  Charles saw himself in the bathroom mirror when he walked past it, Daves compliant dead body draped over his shoulder.  He didn’t look like himself for a moment, it occurred to him that he could have been a robber that broke into the apartment to steal all of Charles’s dead bodies.

He set him out on the couch and ran to the underground garage to retrieve a garbage bag.  The garage door was closed and only a thin slit of light cut through from underneath it, a barrell full of shovels in the far corner and an old broken down Volkswagon with a faded peace sign on the windshield sitting front and center.  Charles grabbed a garbage bag from next to the industrial oversized garbagecan and went back upstairs.

“Stay in your room, old man!”  Charles pushed the door closed on the rickety old man, who was undoubtedly storming out of his apartment to see what “all the ruckus was about”.  Luckily for Charles, it always seemed like the old man was the only person home other than him.

He stomped through the door at the fiercest pace he had ever mustered.  Dave wouldn’t just break in half like a twig, no matter how much he wished it’d be that easy.  Rigamortis had set in, and he couldn’t even bend the man anymore.  Dave’s body had become transfixed, and Charles could swear it was getting lighter as he placed it in a spiderwalk pose under the mantle. 

Charles let a day pass where he attempted to ignore the presence of the body.  He remembered their being an Anne at the office but couldn’t remember when she went missing, or why.  He tried to put together the situation he had stabbed Dave in back together in his mind.

He saw him get out of the car, come up the stairs.  He vaguely remembered looking down at his hand, a wooden handled curved knife was in his hand, then it wasn’t, and then it was.  Not a material object, just sensory memory.  That moment of passion when the knife came down in his shoulder blade, splaying him out over the dining room table, Charles thought for sure the knife would just go right through him. 

Dave had become irate after being stabbed, talking with his hands like a Frenchman and pointing at the wound with his other hand.  Things had suddenly become serious for him and Dave, he had got his hands on the steering wheel.

Day 61!: Motherhood

           I called it Motherhood for no reason.  Being truly random.  Even though the more I read about psychology and philosophy and freewill and whatnot, apparently true randomness is impossible.  Like Stephen King writing The Shining, I won't realize my character I'm writing about is just myself.  But that's how you can build up a head of steam and get the words out, to believe it's coming from nowhere, your illogical life provides the "in between the lines".  Ok that's all I have for this stupid tirade.  Now read my stupid story.  I've noticed that my blog hits keep going up even though I have no new fans or comments, this is an interesting development.  Illogical, right?  If I keep doing this maybe I can "monetize" eventually.
           Other thing, I plan on becoming a late bloomer.  I'm "autosuggesting" this, even though from my reading of legitimate science shit I know "autosuggestion" is a load of hooey lewis.  I still have to believe that you can make your brain believe anything you want, because that's why it's a brain.  And that's why I'm still going on Day 61, suckers.
 

            The witch stood and removed a black leather suitcase out of thin air.  She grabbed it as if it were an invisible particle traveling through the air that only she could see. 

            Chief watched eagerly from his chair.  He shifted and shut one eye, the leathery creak underneath him with every movement.  When their eyes made contact he went cold, an imaginary storm cloud forming over his head.  He thought about some of his favorite witches from popular culture, the wicked witch of the west, the warty green nosed generic halloween witches, the witches in Macbeth.  They weren’t normally this active, this lucid.  Although, hanging in front of him suspended at boot in the face height, she refrained from cackling, and the Chief thought this was good because then he didn’t have to go running out of the room.

            “Well if you know who I am already, you should know I’m just here to rescue that… kid.”  Charles stammered, leaning forward on his hands.

            “Sign!”  The witch demanded, with intangible force.  Chief felt sweat starting to build beneath his arms, his forehead going cold.  He slumped forward, suddenly losing the strength in his torso.

            The witch peeled the black leather case open with her long disgusting fingernail and removed the paper from inside with the ring and index finger of the same hand.  She breathed a heavy contiminated clear fume out with a gurgle, not human breathing. Her arms swung over her head and she lunged forward with a strip of parchment, it rolling at the end like a long string of register tape.  It made sense why they had the sticks normally on the top of ancient decrees. 

            Chief started, like he just woke from a bad dream.  He regained his posture and rose to the balls of his feet, his arms dead weight at his side.  He felt like the room was filling with feral bathwater, it creeping up beyond his neck.  He looked down, the leather wasn’t leather, he was sitting on a dishevelled spring mattress, the pointy rusty springs prodding like barbs into his legs.  He couldn’t feel them prodding, although the wetness of blood started to creep into his system.  He thought if he could open his eyes again, like an eagle switching its cornea beyond cloud level, that he might wake up indisposed in a hotel room bathtub.

            He fought the urge to transfer control of his own arms to this witch, although the thought soothed and comforted him.  He could almost see the angel on one shoulder and the rational minded angel on the other, like the stories he had saw on TV of near-death experiences.  He pressed his neck forward like a patient attempting to demonstrate his motor skills to a skeptical doctor, and suddenly snapped back awake, it was still the castle, the witch was still a witch, the creaky mattress was still leather.

            “If you want me to sign that, I’m going to have to read over it first.”  He said, matter of factly, hoping to speed the process up as to not fall for any of her Jedi mind tricks again.  As if put in rewind, the witch dropped the paper into Chief’s lap and retracted to her perch, after seconds she remained there a static image, like she had been there all along.  She resumed her drubbing, humming “God Bless America”.

            Chief knew better than to sign over his soul, but none of this is real, he thought.  Maybe if I sign it over, this whole business will end.

            Pretty run of the mill paperwork, a bunch of boring legal mumbo jumbo followed by revisions, clauses, smaller type, bolded text, red letterings.  He’d signed many of these in the divorce hearings, relinquished his rights to being the primary caretaker, signing alimony checks, all but losing his identity completely.

            He signed and rose, it’s just my name, he thought.  Let’s get this over with.  He didn’t know what prevented his violent urges to just kick this witch into the wall, pound her face into oblivion and destroy this whole imagination.  He somehow knew it wouldn’t fix anything, much less change anything.  Somewhere inside he believed this was the continuation of a dream, where the logic stops making sense when you identify the strings holding he shabby world together.  Everything freezes and you are suddenly the only thing moving in a frozen world. 

            He pried his body up a limb at a time.  The ornamentations in the room stared into his soul, the mirror called for attention, the chairs spoke his name.  The witch wasn’t a witch, she was just resembled a human more than anything else in the room.  He suddenly came to the actualization that maybe he had wandered directly into Charles, this wasn’t really the presence of dark matter.

            He wondered if he had fed the meter, if he had left the stove on.  He suddenly remembered his awful apartment, the broken fireplace which now might as well not have been there, the closet which was jus ta door over a broken section of the wall.  He tore out the carpet in a halfassed attempt to replace it, then halfassedly decided he liked the hardwood floor underneath it enough not to replace it.    He was jealous of Charles suddenly, if this castle here was Charles, he had never reached the point of disconnectivity where his own false world became real.  It had all just become depressing, pathetic, and hyperreal.  He shut it out because he could, the means to the end had been enough.

            He leaned on the wall as he followed it out of the room, suddenly off balance and drunk.  Everything started to feel two dimensional, his eyes were becoming useless, he kept bumping into hidden digits that were surreptitiously hidden like Christmas presents.  He stumbled back into the dark hall, there it was, now the cackle was beginning.  The room with the bookcase was back, but the staircase was gone, the outside world was covered in the bright lights of constant fireworks.  The History book had transformed into a book about Lemons, he couldn’t tell whether this was what it was all along.  Chief began to cackle along with the witch, sticking his head out of the window and pulling his weightless body up at an 180 degree angle with little effort.  He was suddenly underwater, no concept of where he really was.

            An arm reached out and tugged at his coat.  “Buddy!”  A tall mousey girl wearing glasses stared down at him with a friendly, albeit glib expression.  He pushed himself back up onto his feet, and here he was, a hallway extending like a pennant, him at the needle shaped end.  His legs were his again, his facial muscles functioning as well. 

           

            The explosion woke Charles up.  The crisping of the tree branches, crescendo of the flames outward push, he was back to his senses.  He returned to his desk, spinning the pen between his fingers between spending minutes attempting to let his best ideas come to him. 

            “Just think,”  Mr. Pulp said.  “If you just let your mind think, you sit in that chair, think about what you want to create, it creates itself.”

            He understood the man had to reinforce his worldview on others to be succesful.  His mission in these lab experiments was to create new versions of himself through immersion therapy, it was like learning a new language.  He wasn’t all that crazy, anyway, just faciliating the creative inventions of these young scientists.  I’m here to discover how to get good at anything, he thought.  I’m not here because I’m already good at anything.

            Nancy dropped off the paper wth his thermos and lunchbox.  She rolled her eyes, she was getting sick of him forgetting it on the hood of his car every day.  She didn’t understand how a young up-and-comer, someone who’s job she envied, could make such thoughtless mistakes on a daily basis.  He paged through his rolodex, leaning back in his padded office chair.  The calendar said it was the twenty first, it was his two month anniversary at this place.  The time flew by, between his constant anxiety and difficulty in learning how to cook for himself his time had all but sucked itself up.  His life was now part of a vaccuum, he was inside of it, no longer struggling on the outside trying to force his way in.  He finally relaxed, let the tides of time take over, the rhythm of life ease him in, baby step after baby step.

            He opened the door to his office and peaked down the hall.  Cubicles were a thing of the past, Mr. Pulp had said, we paid the extra money to get you your own offices because you need to make your own place here.  He had emphasized this fact ad nauseum, we want you to be comfortable.  Still, at the end of his calendar he saw a deadline approaching, he would have to present a general concept of what his research would be.  Something about memory, he thought.  The way it’s connected to imagination.  It’s an intrinsic study, you just come up with a test and you learn from the results, not the concept.

            He shook his coat loose from the deep mirrored closet, seeing the reflection of the second floor secretary on the sliding doors mirror as he closed it.  “Hold my calls,”  He said with self indulgent delight.  “It’s funny I get to tell someone to hold my calls.”  Nancy scoffed after the elevator shut behind him.

            Mr. Pulp was showing blue blazered men the facilities, the state of the art, clandestine immaculate working conditions.  His enthusiasm was easily translated into any language, the men followed him with their eyes tiredely, it was hard to tell whether they were investors or donors.  Charles passed through the heavy glass door, pulling his keys out of his windbreaker.  The smell of outside made him sneeze, the pollen getting to him quickly.  He got in the car and left the windows up, readjusting his seatbelt and mirror and turning the radio on.

            *urges it forward*

Day 60: Escape from my Parents House

              Don't blame the parents at all, blame myself, on and on and on.  Trying to take responsibility for things and whatnot.  Agoraphobia/other fears have gotten into my system but if I self-diagnose I'm going to start acting like I have problems I don't have, so...   Cognitive dissonance theory!  My story here needs to hurry up and go somewhere I only have about a third of it left to write.  Woke up early and reading more psychology stuff.  This blog shows up when you google my name, finally.  So, let's continue to be as honest as possible in order to reach that apex of creativity that I keep hearing about.
             The rules in a lot of these business-types-of-books always boil down to "strengths, not weaknesses", and the only thing I'm good at is making an ass out of myself as the loveable scoundrel character.  Well, I do this writing thing and I play the bongos and read spoken word poetry.  I'm good at the guitar, like pretty awesome good, and I'm ok at this persistence thing.  So why am I writing?  Because I don't want to quit anything.  And it's sort of giving me an identity so far, as much as I'd love to have that magic moment where I just move out and everything clicks together and I meet people that I like.  I'm still pretty temperamental and impatient, let's work on that one huh?  Anyway, here's my dumbass story that keeps on going and going.  Next months novel will have actual characters in it, I swear.
           PS:  I know this is all self indulgent BS and I'm trying to only talk about things I think people might care about, (but I'm failing).  While on the topic of being self indulgent, I have an ex girlfriend that's a model now.  She wasn't a model when I dated her, but she doesn't look any different.  Beauty "truly is in the eye of the beholder".
           PPS:  My story is pretty bad, but it could be a LOT worse.  Atleast it's sort of funny sometimes.  Of course, it's always accidental when it is.  My fourth or fifth novel should be a lot less useless.

            He tallied the items in his inventory, emptying his pockets after walking up to the third flight of stairs.  He could hear the creature thrashing, its haunches scraping against the enclosed stairwell, it’s bellowing sounding to him more sad than hurt.  It was a clever ruse for a monstrous creature to pull, he thought, there was no way that thing was so winded.  It’s probably not even real, the inkling came to him in the back of his mind.  It was like a curtain had been pulled over his eyes.

            “Come back down, come back down to me.”  A womans voice called from down the stairwell.  He knew he couldn’t go back, but it was pathetic.  Now it didn’t even sound like his ex-wife, even if the thing somehow knew what she sounded like, it should have known she never showed her injured pride to him.  She had lacked all emotion after the drawn out divorce proceedings, he hadn’t wanted to be divorced, marriage was something he had earned.  And now this creature was doing a poor imitation, it was laughable.  Earned was a harsh way to think of it, maybe he deserved it, he definitely put the hard work in.

            Chief proceeded up the stairs with newfound vigor.  These monsters weren’t something Charles could easily deal with because Charles had never dealt with monsters before.  It would be easy to save this kid, he thought.  Of course, his victory was accomplished because the monster had become stuck in a doorway that it couldn’t fit through, but whoever was pulling the strings must have known that.  His antagonists just didn’t have much of an idea what Chief was capable of, they were testing him.  It’s best not to give anything away, maybe I should pretend to have a gun, he thought.

            As he hurriedly climbed the stairs, he kept an eye out for weapons on the path.  There was nothing to grab, the stairway was bare.  He stopped a moment and watched the fireworks going on out of a narrow window where a bench sat welded into the stone floor, the loud jocular blasts from below like a distant echo.  The face of Daryl sprung into his mind, his eagerness to relinquish the equipment for Chief.  Why had he so readily given it away, and why had Chief taken it so easily?  Chief shook it off, he couldn’t start thinking about conspiracy theories now, he was on a mission.  He was going to get that boy out alive, get out of here, and go back to the East Coast to live near his wife and son.  The haze lifted over his eyes, he had worked at the mental hospital long enough, saved up enough money.  He was lost here, he spent his life in this small town, he wasn’t ready for the culture shock at the time. 

            He could see into the room at the top of the tower five stairs before he finished the stairs.  A chandelier covered in dust and cobwebs was suspended from a velvet red ceiling, the candles in its grasp dripping wax in spite of themselves.  They looked like little islands trying to avoid being swallowed up by the ocean. After a moment of trepidation, he pushed the door open, with no idea what he was going to see on the other side.  This can’t be real, this is some strange dream.

            This was the proverbial closet full of skeletons.  The room was covered wall to wall in book cases, each one filled to the brim.  A thick volume of US history stood out like a sore thumb, it was sitting on an angle and the rest of the books were straight.  Chief removed it from the case, settled down in the spinny leather chair behind the desk and peeled it open.  There was a loud click from where the book had been in the case and the wall swung open.  Not unlike every other episode of Wild Wild West, he thought to himself.  He had just got to the part about Stonewall Jackson, too.  A favorite of his.

            Chief left the book open on the desk and decided when in Rome you should check out the passage that just opened.  He pulled his Jesus necklace out from his bosom and kissed it, although he wasn’t normally a religious man and would have forgot that he was wearing the thing in the first place if this situation hadn’t sprung up.  He tucked it back in, feeling foolish, you’re not Van Helsing.

            He walked with his ear leading the way into the darkness.  Shadows danced over the damp corridor, a wooden Rumpel Stiltskin alchemy wheel at the end of the hall. It had been dismantled and was sitting with its pieces each set against the wall. A doorway stood straight away, how a tunnel could exist inside of a tower was beyond Chief’s reasoning.  A candle flickered through the complete darkness. 

A constant tapping came from the end of the hallway, like someone was wrapping a long pair of fingernails on a desk.  Chief couldn’t tell if it was actually fingernails, or what would make a sound like this, but so far it hadn’t reacted to him. He walked back to the staircase, stared down it, and stomped in place like a child for a second.  He should have called the police, he knew now.  He could have got aerial shots of this maze, invited reporters to investigate it, be at the festival tossing horseshoes with the hospital staff.  As a matter of fact, he hadn’t had any inclination at all to do anything but climb to the top of this thing. 

            “Well, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place here, that’s no doubt.”  He said aloud to himself and slumped back on the chair, kicking his feet up onto the desk and grabbing the history book.  “What would old Stonewall Jackson do? Well, first thing’s first he wouldn’t have came up here at all.  Or he atleast would have brought his trusty revolver.”

He read a segment on Stonewall Jackson out of the book.  Apparently, Stonewall loved lemons.  He ate them to prevent his dyslepsia, but even Richard Taylor, son of Zachary Taylor, had no idea where he’d get these lemons from.  The irony struck the Chief that he was stuck in his own moment of action, and here he was reading about a man of action’s unactiony side.

The rattling from the bottom of the hall had ceased, the creature must have freed itself and looked for an alternate route.  He ran from the stairway back to the secret passage way, centering his attention in his ears, the hand kept scraping away at the desk, and the monster was gone.  If it were something that wanted to kill him, it would have killed him by now.  But, that’s probably a lot of peoples last words right before they get maimed in seemingly innocuous circumstances.

He crept back down the stairway, let’s let that thing at the end of the hall eat itself alive he thought.  The castle halls looked pristine and unchanging, the type of hall where if you were walking in boots you could hear each heel to toe sequence clearly.  The tail of the monster reached around the corner to a pantry like a lit wick.  He rushed past it into a wide kitchen area, hanging cabinets as tall as he was ran along the walls, a shiny wooden rectangle table surrounded by chairs covered the middle of the room.  This is a dead end, he thought.  What the hell am I doing in the kitchen?

He crept back past the tail, it twitching spasmodically like it were asleep.  He peered past it, the creature must have gotten into something edible in the pantry.  The smell of mothballs and eggs ran past him.

The opposite end of the hallway showed no sign of prisoners either.  As far as he could see this was just a normal, average castle.  He caught himself off guard about the monster, he knew it could turn its attention back toward him at any moment, but as he continued to search through the vast emptiness of the castle a wave of calmness swept over him.

In the center hall, a mantelpiece hung over a fireplace full of ashen logs.  The room still glowed a golden color, the mounted heads of deer and elk enveloped in a yellow hue.  The mantelpiece shined with reflected moonlight, it seemed to be directed in a beam straight through the skylight.  A number of columns separated the inside from the outside world only superficially, and a staircase descended up to a floor above. 

It killed him inside, but he knew he had to go back to room at the top of the spire.  He could stall for as long as he wanted exploring this fictitious castle, but what he was supposed to find was in that room.  He was going to have to face the witch.  He retrieved a fire poker from in front of the burning pit, tapping ashen cinder off of it into the fireplace.

When he returned to the main hallway, the monster had disappeared again.  He ran into the spiral staircase as quickly as he could manage, and found his way back to the top undeterred. 

“Hey, witchlady, where’s the kid?”  He shouted before he entered the far room, with a feigned bravery that could have easily been mistaken for actually bravery.

The witch sat surrounded by antique dolls, porcelein skin and beady eyes looking more living than some people.  She rocked in a chair behind a spinning wheel, clicking her long nails against the shitty wood like a perpetual motion machine.  She stirred slightly, turning far enough to ascertain Chief’s presence in her peripheral vision, scoffing under her breath and turning back towards the wheel.

Chief closed the door behind him as he entered and took a seat in an overstuffed leather chair facing diagonally away from a window.  He stared at the old witch, her hypnotic movements like the opening scene of a Russian resistance play.  Her body was cloaked with a mane of long white hair, her face a ceramic mask of evil. 

From behind the closed door, he could hear a frenzied scurry of a million little feet.  The witch suddenly rose, her thick fingers still gripping the side of the wheel. 

“What business have you here, Chief?!”  She said as she floated inches from the ground.  Her voice stunk up the room, a noxious gas like a tube had been disconnected.