Ladies and gentlemen... the WrongPlanet writing showcase

Post Reply New Topic

First chapter of a new historical novel that's set in prehistoric Africa and will be about the origins of the ancient Egyptian civilization.

Melodrama

There's wordless cries inside and out.
Your baby barely catches breath
on gossip people spread about
your choked-up life, predicted death.

They say he'll stab you, one fine day.
His hand's above your head right now.
There's too much wreckage in the way.
You want to live, you don't know how.

If all you ever did was drink,
then just your body would be ill.
You loved, despite what others think.
You gave your all and give it still.

It's not enough. You have to fight
to live as other humans might.

(An old fragment from an experimental memoir/novel I gave up writing a few years ago. The book didn't work the way I'd hoped, but I saved a few pieces of it that I liked.)

MY SORTA-ORWELLIAN BACKWOODS CHILDHOOD

There were cows. Of course there were cows, it was Indiana. And there was a small ramshackle barn, barely standing upright. That barn, it always leaned with the wind that charged across the low grassy fields. And the green grew tall in those fields during the summer. It enveloped and consumed the decrepit sides of the barn, tangling between the groaning gray boards. The wind would blow and that barn would shift itself, stretching its frail bulk in the sunshine. It was an undead construct of rotten planks and rusted nails.

My grandfather, perhaps being of questionable intelligence, kept his cattle in this barn. There weren’t many cows, never more than three or four at a time. Granddad wasn’t really a farmer, just a bored old man in need of chores to keep him occupied. He bought the cows when they were young, then fed and fattened them for months as if they were favored pets. And when he judged their girth to be sufficient, he would load the cows into a truck and haul them off to the slaughterhouse. Yes, well, everyone should have a hobby.

Sometimes I would accompany Granddad when he went to feed the cows. He would pick me up in front of my parents’ house and I would ride with him in his old brown pickup truck. The country road leading to the barn was rough and dusty, and the truck smelled of old man and burning motor oil. Granddad smoked his long thin cigarettes. The smoke rolled and tumbled its way across the inside of the filthy windshield, making fluid shapes in the sunlight.

The cows would be waiting. Impatiently. Utterly witless creatures, but they possessed flawless internal clocks: they always knew when it was feeding time. Even before Granddad shut off the truck’s engine, I could hear the cows inside the barn. Their pitiful, plaintive lowing echoed across the nearby hillsides. The snorting. The sound of their hooves stamping and sucking in the manure-drenched floor of the barn.

The stink. Like nothing else.

Carrying a metal bucket filled with grain, Granddad would walk to a small door at the side of the barn. He would slide the rusted old latch, allowing the door to wobble itself open. And the cows would be inside, huddled tightly together in the dark. Staring at us with their fly-caked eyeballs. Born bewildered and helpless to be anything else. Trying to draw some measure of comfort and security from their numbers.

I tried not to think about the cows in that barn, the situation they found themselves in. To ponder it caused me a kind of…discomfort. It was the vaguest of emotions, something inexact that I couldn’t give a name to. Perhaps I was too inexperienced and ignorant to grasp the parallels, the symbolism of those cows and their circumstances. But I knew there was something disturbing in it. My heart did not go out to the cows, I didn’t desire to save them from their future with the butcher’s blade. No, and in fact I craved the steaks and hamburgers they were fated to become. As best I could tell, cows were good for nothing else. But still, in my heart…something. What?

Even now I can’t find the name for it. Sigh. Inexperience and ignorance, they’re hard to grow out of.

Only once did I ever see a cow attempt escape. On that day Granddad opened the small door, toting his metal grain bucket as usual, and one of the cows—a dark red one, typically smeared with mud and manure—lowered its head and charged at him. Granddad barely flinched. As the cow came at him, he grabbed up an old pitchfork that was hanging on the wall and he swung it at the cow’s head with all his might.

“Motherf**ker!” he declared.

My grandfather was getting on in years, even then, but he was still a fairly large and powerful man. The pitchfork’s wooden handle disintegrated as he smashed it against the cow’s skull. The iron pitchfork head flew through the air. It bounced off the barn wall—clunk—and then splashed into the deep puddle of sh*t that made up the barn floor.

The cow roared—in pain? confusion? anger?—and came to a halt only inches away from Granddad. It shook its bloodied head, turned away, and wandered back over to the small herd. Pressing itself against its fellows, the red cow glared at us: Granddad and me. I met its sorrowful, confused eyes with my own and I felt something shift inside me. A slipping, a falling, a loss. Something you only lose once.

Normally, Granddad emptied the grain bucket into a wooden trough inside the barn. But that day, in his rage, he slung the full bucket at the red cow. It biffed off the cow’s bloated side and landed on the barn floor, spilling grain into the muddy manure.

“Sonsabitches!” he shouted. “You want your grain, you can eat your own sh*t with it!”

As he slammed the barn door closed, I saw them beginning to eat. I was repulsed. Disgusting creatures, cows. I knew I could never do such a thing.

Obviously, I did not yet understand the human condition.

I wasn't painting when I wrote this a while back. It is part of a longer piece of writing about a society where Virtual Reality is advanced enough can give people anything they want. Brian is he Dream Maker and like the lady has an empathetic abilty. The would be novel came to a grinding halt and I began to feel it wasn't as good as I first thought.

This is an extract from To a Silver City.

What could the dream achieve? Brian could not allow himself the indulgence often. Others had to test them and even then share the task. It was advanced Holography and each object or person in the dream nothing more than algorithms and polygons in a computer achieved the virtual reality. Yet the mind said they were reality. Techno hypnosis I suppose, perhaps the technology wouldn’t even be needed if the masses ha imagination. Perhaps they would have imagination if they didn’t have the dreams, but that was a risk the leaders had always preferred not take. So if the masses had imagination what would they do? Perhaps finding that if was the purpose of The Wall experiment.

Let me try another experiment, only this time not with real people. I’ll have to be very careful here, it could be dangerous. What do me want mostly? He asked himself every time and still came up with the same old answers, and for that matter the same questions. Men in general wanted awesome power, danger and the beautiful woman. What the beautiful woman would want was quite another thing. However, sumptuous luxury as history had often shown bought societies to another step near decay. War in History had often been the national sport and the winner took all.

It is plainly obvious our dreams have given the masses everything they could want, but that everything had been destructive. OK, I’ll give them the power and the woman, and maybe let the woman take her own part, but there will be restrictions. It will not be the ultimate do as you please scenario: if the restrictions are violated things will go terribly wrong, as if they haven’t already. There would be the moral law of right and wrong and religions have never been allowable, but let’s just play the game, this is a dream.

Brian found himself in a wooded countryside with no signs of human life. He had a solar rechargeable gun and a small bag round his waist. In the bag were a small amount of rations, a tiny computer and some medical supplies. Looking around he saw brilliant red berries, apples, but very small and hard, and acorns. That and the sun told him it was late summer.

A squirrel held a nut in its little paws munching contentedly, ignoring Brian’s presence. Then quite suddenly it looked up and ran up a tree. The wood had become quiet, only a gentle breeze causing a rustle in the green leaves. Brian listened, not only with his ears but that inner part of himself as he did everyday in Cyberworld. Fright he thought. Flight and Fright with pumping adrenaline. Somebody is running from danger and it’s from that direction, south. He hid behind a mass of foliage waiting, as the fear grew stronger. Almost without any sound to betray her, a woman appeared breathing heavily, stooping for a moment to quieten her gasping. She was tall, her long blonde hair tied behind her head. Strong athletic and no doubt with some intellect, she wore a robe, torn stained, but once beautiful. Her face muscles were too taught to see her looks properly, but finely boned enough. Her enemy must be formidable.

Rushing out into the glade to help her might have led him into a trap, so Brian decided to wait. The woman had sunk trembling with exhaustion to her knees, but her will was not broken for a moment. He was still listening. This time it was it adrenaline rush, excitement, aggression and violence. The shouting of an ancient language he couldn’t quite catch, now running feet falling heavily on the soft floor of the wood. Taking care to remain hidden Brian set his gun to stun and held it ready. Warriors armed with swords, knives, clubs plus a few spears, hideous, huge men as tall as his own six and a half feet, but massively built, and tending to be overweight. The woman had picked herself up ready to run again, but fell, her muscles too stiff even to walk. The cruel faces leered as they as she looked, waiting for their first move. A very courageous young woman she was.

Brian waited for the warriors to form a tight pack then fired a continuous stream of light. The bronze weapons seared into their bodies from the heat of the ray. He had not accounted for the build up of heat from his weapon from his weapon, intended to be for short bursts. He would have to control his anger. The woman watched mystified as the men fell. She had glimpsed a bright light and her enemy was vanquished. She was still not at ease, evidently expecting more pursuers. Some fruit caught her attention and she ate greedily, the sugar would restore her energy.

Brian had wondered why his natural instincts had not allowed him to rush in and play the hero. Perhaps for the same reason the brutal warriors clearly respected her self-defence abilities and the feeling she might not be grateful as he would have hoped. She might not trust anyone and stunning her with the gun was not exactly what he had in mind.

She was a beauty, a princess of the blood, a monarch’s daughter who her enemy must catch at any cost. She had stopped eating to watch the reappearance of the squirrel, her face now relaxed. Yet Brian sensed she was still listening, always alert. Was she aware of his presence? He thought she had a suspicion of it. He must find a way to win her trust, to find out more about her and more to the point her enemy, which needless to say would be his own.

Now the fear had subsided he began to sense more of her true nature. Indeed she had an inner beauty, something more like transparency, unsullied by the brute nature of selfishness. She was aware as Brian stepped out into the glade, gun placed in his belt. He stood a distance away from her, letting her watch him, allowing her to weigh him in the balance. Then he spoke with a gentle voice, “The warriors, are there more?” She thought for a moment then looked fearfully in the direction from which she came. “So, you have a language similar to mine princess. Then please understand they will be my enemies also, I have no doubt.”

She had a good measure of him, yet even so still did not completely trust his intentions. Brian looked a little hurt by this rejection. The she looked at him frowning a little and said, “You are good man, but not I think completely in reality.”

She has the measure of Cyberworld in me; it is more serious than I thought. He decided that to be truthful with such a discerning young woman was the only way. “I come from a place, perhaps in another time where reality is hard to know. My mission here is to find it.”

The young woman looked perplexed for a moment then replied, “Reality is all around you, what are you looking for?”

At that moment Brian looked to the south again. His awareness told him that the warriors had horses this time and there were more of them. There was no adrenaline rush, just a sense of power, greed and the hunter’s determination for the catch. His own adrenaline had begun to pump through his blood and the excitement caused by a possible coming conflict and the common cause with this beautiful young woman stirred up long buried feelings. “It’s time to go princess. They’ll be fast this time and not dull witted foot soldiers either.”

They ran through the trees, ducking under branches making it hard for any horsemen to follow to find a steep bank with protruding tree roots, which led to a stream. The woman stopped and smiled, “There must be a place to hide on the other side, there is a cliff farther down, I’m sure of it. The horsemen will not follow us.” They clambered down the bank and walked quickly downstream. A small waterfall prevented them from going further and the rock face next to it rose straight out of the rushing water. Fighting the current they held hands, supporting each other as they walked over the slippery rocks under the water until they were able to grip a hard outcrop of jutting granite. Covered by the tall trees of the wood climbed with renewed energy. The riders had entered to wood under the cover of trees, so they were still free from their sight. Brian continued to climb, but her strength had begun to fail her again. He pulled the young woman to the top and lifted her over the ledge.

“We’ve got away, aren’t you pleased,” she asked.

“Those men will recover soon enough with only burn scars. I set my weapon to stun, not kill. But that’s not my problem. The riders will know my weapon’s ability. They will not under estimate me. I would have preferred not to let the enemy know my strength.”

The woman looked at him carefully again. “You are not a warrior, how do you understand these things?”

“Where I come from we play power games with words and gestures. Nobody gets hurt, but we can limit each other lives at times. The tactics are the same.” Her suspicion had become more of an interest, but he was not ready to tell her about the dreams just yet.

“You are an artist, I think, a sensitive man too kind hearted to kill your enemy. Yet there is a ruthless streak in you, an enigma.” She stood up, “We must follow the sun.” They walked away from the site line of any warrior below. “I should like to see what you do. You are a private man, never saying much about yourself directly, always about your people, but your work would tell me everything.”

Brian turned away looking at the distant hills. The woman walked up close to face him. “What happened? You have courage, you were not afraid of the warriors, you have great strength of character, yet you live with a far deeper fear.”

Brian thought for a moment, “What is the deepest fear of mankind? Warriors are not afraid of death, yet they still have fear before battle. Sometimes death seems to be the easiest option fro many people.” He thought about the feelings of absolute terror the masses of Cyberworld suffered without dreams in the Punishment Block. “Perhaps man’s greatest fear is some kind of eternal madness. We look for happiness and fulfilment, we avoid problems if at all possible and then as a consequence have more fear within ourselves.”

“Are you avoiding something? The woman continued looking directly into his face.

Brian who had only been truly understood by one father figure found this deep questioning very difficult, and wondered why she didn’t talk about herself. Who was she? Perhaps it was easier to talk with somebody he didn’t know. “I have the responsibility to find answers for my people. Failure means something more terrible than I can understand.

She smiled slightly and said, the answer must be in yourself, but you avoid it.”

They had climbed a gentle slope, but the view at the top was outstanding with grass of the greenest hue, woods and distant hills. A hare stood up sniffing the air, the bounded down the hill. Brian was still listening, but the enemy was no longer nearby. They had stopped to catch their breath, Brian looking for signs of civilisation. “We have a story, nobody knows where from. It may never be spoken of, it may not be found in the records, yet somehow I know it has the answer for me, for all of us. There is a city far away, The Silver City where the people have discovered an answer to all these things. As you know we avoid our pain thinking that is happiness. As an artistic person I know that pain is part of the creative process. It is in some way necessary to life. Yet these people in the city have in some way passed through all of that and live without sorrow. The place is full of light and there are no shadows. The light seems to have no particular source it is everywhere.”

“Yes,” she replied, “pain is part of life. It is when we face the pain and take it into our lives rather than avoid it we find the way to true happiness. The Silver City, shouldn’t that be in each one of us?”

Brian immediately thought of Julie. “Yes, but how?”

“If you think it is such a wonderful thing then why forbid it?”

He answered, “It means stepping over the line where we lose control of our destiny.”

The woman smiled again then looked far out to the distant hills. It seems to me you have already done that. It seems to me that you are trying to find it. Do you know what your destiny really is?”

The rolling landscape had given Brian not the slightest hint of human habitation. There was no smoke, no hint of a straight line to indicate a building and no signs of agriculture. “Are there any people? It must have been settled at one time, surely?”

“Yes, they lived over those hills.”

“But this land waits for people to live in it. Where have they gone?”

“This is my home,” she answered, “I am the Keeper. The people will return one day.”

“So that is why the warriors wanted you. If they capture you then the land is theirs.”

“They want more, much more. Their greed is insatiable.

Brian carried on gazing at the landscape, watching the hills separate into layers as the sun lowered over them. Beautiful was simply not an adequate word for this land, or the woman.

The Wild Goose

The Wild Goose is coming
I listen for her low cries and wingbeat
She sees me, sees my longing heart
Swoops low then flies away again.

I know somehow she wants me to join her
To abandon all and jump into that sky
To trust her, holding me up
in the stream of air left by her wings

this is my blog that I had on the digital version of the local paper, I also copied the blogs to Livejournal and I am glad I did coz the newspaper closed down with no notice and I'd have lost everything. It's supposed to be my now deceased cat blogging, while thinking that he is teaching history to his human readers. Having a feline and not human brain he understood everything in a surreal way in comparison to how he was told it. So, it's supposed to be a comical blog. The first entry is on Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family.
http://twaddleandcat.livejournal.com/

Capable Hands

Truth in a pack of lies
Reason and logic completely lost
Explanation
I can give
If only for peace of mind

Sickness clouding judgement
Assumptions need not be spoken

Ask
And I shall tell
Brutal honesty
Is all I have to offer

In the end
It does not matter
The mirror broke
Cracked in two
Long before you gazed longingly
In my direction
It was over
Before you ever had a chance

Isolation my constant companion
Loneliness so palpable
It’s become suffocating
Emotion twirls too fast to comprehend
And in the end
A lesson learned
Will not be easily forgotten

I’ve been here
I’m still here
The question I ask myself
Should I stay
It all comes down
To you
And the desire you hold
The needs I left
Unfulfilled
For these hands
Are not
And never have been
As capable as another

Thank you. This one actually is going to be a song. I just have to work out the melody and see how it fits together.

I find your interpretations of the cracked mirror interesting.

A ruthless pretense of kindness tricks me into believing,
That this is not an enforced intervention.
Wheeled along the polished floors,
A smothering sense of familiarity,
Embraces even the decay of poverty.
Images that warp our understanding of decency,
A silent propulsion of knowledge thrust into being,
The skin of a dream that breaks with embodiment,
Try to divert the knife even though it has already lascerated,
Discipline only sensitizes the pain we must inflict upon ourselves,
To seize the only power we are allowed to wield,
Simultaneous revolt and enslavement,
A delicate futility, both enchanting and deadly.

Vapor

A lone spiral of vapor
Making its slow, silent journey through the sky.
Drifting unnoticed past countless people and buildings.
The people hurry in and out of the buildings, each one more particle in an endless tide of human motion,
Not one stops to acknowledge the spiral of vapor in their midst.
Is there so much as a single person who sees that spiral,
Anyone who knows its there?
Will the subtle changes that vapor brings to its atmosphere one day be felt by others?
Or will it simply spread itself thinner and thinner, losing density until its existence ceases entirely?

Is anyone here interested in helping workshop a trilogy of urban fantasy novels?

Temptation

A bed of roses
Left to wilt
Springs to life

The thorns sharp and plentiful
As if seeking vengeance
The petals so vibrant
Soft and inviting

I am lured
Captivated
Temptation swells

Reaching out I am pricked
But do not pull away

A fire burns
Hot and heavy
Impossible to ignore

Here is the intro from the story I am writing:


Introduction: Dreams


Mormal, a female Jabbernak, who are one of the tallest humaniods of the surface that are not either monsters or immortals, was dreaming about herself walking through a sea of black mist as spiky spires stuck out like dark obelisks of evil gods of old. Rivers of blood flowed hideously from an evil stony mountain. Dead bodies hung in the air as if they were suspended by invisible ropes from invisible trees. Barbed wire was wrapped around their heads and the eyes replaced with glass ones. They made the land smell worse than even the sewers and felt like rough gravel.
Before we get any further into the description of what is about to happen in his dream-scape, we will describe how Jabbernaks look like. They are, on average, around six feet tall. Most have almost completely black eyes with a dot of color, but Mormal has almost completely blue eyes and only a dot of black. They have flat, tiny lips which are always the same color of their skin, rendering them completely invisible to the naked eye. Their skin color ranges from a pale blue to a maroon, and then to a pale gold. They have hoofed feet and long, pointed ears that are parral to the ground. Hair does not cover their body anywhere except for four whiskers, which are long and slightly thick. They have only three fingers, but one of those fingers is an opposable thumb, allowing them to grasp objects and use the same weapons as humans.Instead of nose they have twin nostrils set into the skin half of an inch above their lips.
Now they have been described, we can continue on to what Mormal is doing right now.
She then noticed a man in a conservative black suit with a grizzled face and red bandanna wrapped around his head standing next to her. He is armed with a katana of titanium. By her side as well is her fire druid friend Jalkat ,who is of the same race as her and had a nice dark red skin tone as well as green eye dots, carrying his staff of bronze and brownish red robes. A gaseous entity appeared. Then a figure arose from the mist; a woman wearing a black dress, with no hair and eyes aglow with yellow light. Four long tendrils sprouted from her back.
Then the others attacked with claw, magic, and sword. She herself took out her crossbow. The being seemed to glance off the attacks to her torso as if they did nothing and kept on fighting until Mormal got the courage to take out her crossbow and aim for the head of the evil being. She succeeded with the task but looked at the corpse in sudden horror. It fell with great vibrating tumors sprouting from it. Then the thing exploded in a mess of yellow, sulfuric ichor.
Then Mormal woke with a start. She looked around and then looked at the clock, a modern digital one. It was 3:00 am. She then relaxed. It was extremely early. She felt a pounding headache.
Her room was made of hazel wood and her bed had blue silk covers with yellow blankets of wool underneath. She has a dresser without doors, and lives on the second floor of a country house nearby the town she works in.
Her dress is green and has two rings that connect the front to the back that are below the neck. It is simple and pretty for daily wear. She chose it because it looked nice with her pale gold skin. Right now it was in the dresser.
Mormal then went back to sleep. It was not the right time to be awake anyway. Nobody wants to wake up that early in the morning. Especially someone who was her age, which is 18 years and half a seasons old. The date is November the twenty-sixth and her life is about to change.


What do you think? Good?

(BTW, is any one a good artist? I would love for some one to draw this dream as a comic.)

pond sparkles
ducks glide all day through
shards of sun