Counting Sheep Never Really Works

This week my Indie Ink Challenge comes from wMe. The Challenge:

I fear its a dream

But I can feel its real

Please don’t wake me up

This is easily the strangest post that I have ever written. My goal in writing for this challenge was to create something in writing that could successfully match what it felt like to be in a dream. What I mean by that is that linearity and cohesion are two things that went out the window for this story. I did put in italics as a last minute addition to help with the reading of the story, without them it was too impossible to follow what was happening, rather than just confusing.

I challenged Tereasa Trevor with the prompt “Realize, Nobody Cares.” You can view here response here.

I hope you enjoy!

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What was once a beautiful blue sky has changed into a fiery hellstorm of black and green. Resulting from a huge thermonuclear mass extinction. There are very few of us left, even less who avoided any injury from the incident. It was over in an instant. Mutilated bodies filled the streets; meat, not really bodies. I escaped without a scratch, so I travel. I travel to save those who cannot save themselves.

I am in my bed. Always in my bed. The world is back to normal, no disaster, no apocalypse. With a sword in my hand I fight against the forces of evil. I can fly. The wind in your hair is an experience that you- well, you have to feel it for yourself to understand it.

Asleep, always asleep. There is a state of mind, they call it lucid dreaming. It’s when you are able to control your dreams. I am a millionaire. Like you are aware that you are dreaming, so therefore since your brain understands that what is happening is not actually reality but your own imagination you can control the events of the dream. It’s kind of like becoming aware that you are living in the Matrix I am Neo.

The Chosen One, it feels great to be the Chosen One. I can fly again, I always seem to pick flying no longer Neo. Typically there are two ways in which one can experience a lucid dream; the first is that you go to bed with the intention of having a lucid dream the Matrix is boring and though you can flying again train yourself into having those types of lucid dreams, it is very difficult to do.

Where am I this time? The second type of lucid dream is that you fall asleep and start dreaming A tropical island? but eventually you realize that this reality I wanted to be in a plane crash you’re in is false stranded. It’s like, I don’t know, having an awakening in your sleep. And once you have need to build a hut that realization, you can do anything.

I am the in the category of the latter, I go to sleep normally but than I realize that I am dreaming. It’s been that way ever since a boat! I was a kid. Rescue I’m saved! It happens every single night, whether I want it to or not. I can’t control it.

Now I am touching the Sun.

The real problem with lucid dreaming, at least when I it’s beautiful the sun have them, is that it’s like my brain keeps trying to trick me into dreaming againeed to wake up need to wake up by changing the scenario of the dream. It’s like a smash cut in a film, and each smash cut resets my mind, I’m just simply dreaming, blissfully unaware, at least briefly. I “waken” every time, but I can only control what is going on for a short time before my brain in class in my underwear resets the dream again.

It’s like a nightmarish game of cat and mouse, between me and my brain. When I am awake, I am constantly afraid. I’m afraid that I am still asleep, that my mind just did another smash cut but I’ll never become aware, that I’ll just become trapped in a prison made by my own fucking mind. Maybe it’s already happened.

What was once a beautiful blue sky has changed into a fiery hellstorm of black and green.

I need to wake up wake up need to wake up please let me wake up. But then you can’t control anything, here I am God. The Chosen One. Neo. Wake up wake up need to wake up.

At least for a time…

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For the Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week, wMe challenged me with “I fear its a dream, but I can feel its real, please don’t wake me up” and I challenged Tereasa Trevor with “Realize, nobody cares.”

Light Shines Through the Cracks of Darkness

My Indie Ink Challenge this week comes from Niqui. The challenge:

Violin music in the dark

This weeks challenge was really hard for me to get done. Not so much because of the prompt (though it did give me some trouble) but because I’m working 50 hour weeks right now and it’s been really hard to find time to sit and write. Anyways, I managed to get enough time to lock myself in my office and come up with this story. I hope you like it.

My challenge actually went to Niqui as well. You can read the response to my prompt, “Falling from a mountain of broken bodies,” here.

Enjoy!

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A set of headlights trails behind me way too close and blinds me through the mirror. I always have an inner debate with myself about whether or not I should just slam on the breaks with both my feet and teach that tailgater a lesson. I have never been in a car crash, I wonder what it feels like.

I can never bring myself to actually do it. What a shame; it would make the night much more interesting. No matter, the car has already passed me and driven into the nighttime oblivion.

There. Over there. In that house I just passed to the left, are two lovers embracing. The moon is full, and its light shines through vertical cracks of closed curtains. It creates bars of moonlight and darkness. It is exceedingly beautiful; as the man looks into his lovers eyes, through the bars, he finds himself trapped in a prison of beauty.

I know this because I have seen it. I have looked through the walls. I can see Everything.

Unfortunately, what the man does not know is that the woman- in about three hours time- is going to smother the man to death with a pillow. She’s been sleeping with his best friend. She is in love with him. And the two decided that the only way that they could be together is if they took the man out of the picture. As it were.

It sounds like the plot of a lazy soap opera, I know. But you would be surprised by how often real life emulates TV. Not vice versa, though. It has never ever been vice versa. Trust me. I can See.

The house is behind me and into oblivion now. Oh but this house. This house here up the road. It’s a sad story.

There is a boy, no more than seven or eight years old. Young, real young. He can hear the sounds of his mother and father fighting. Fighting and screaming and throwing and then fucking and moaning. This poor boy, he has had to endure the sound of it every night for as long as he can remember.

The boy, he is actually a musical genius. A prodigy; that’s the common term. His parents don’t know about it though, about his gift. See, one day as his parents were fighting he ran into the basement. He hoped that he could escape the noise. But he couldn’t.

Luckily, he found something in that basement. A violin. It belonged to his grandfather. The boy was maybe five years old. He didn’t even know what the thing was, sitting in its case collecting dust. All that he knew was that the thing made noise. Enough noise to drown out the sound of his parents.

Every night he makes the pilgrimage to the basement with a flashlight and picks up the violin. The boy has played every night since he found it. No longer is it simply about making noise. He uses the flashlight to shine a beam on sheet music- which he taught himself how to read, while teaching himself how to play- and plays beautiful music in the dark. The light is off so that his parents do not see what he is doing. He doesn’t need to worry about them hearing the music. Not ever.

I can hear the music. It is haunting. It is beautiful. The house has passed into oblivion.

Everything, I can see Everything. I can’t control it. It’s a blessing, but more so it is a curse. A fucking nightmare. You can not keep your secrets from me. When we’re introduced, I can see all of your triumphs. But I also see your Sins.

There, over there. That is my house. I stop and pull over. I get out of my car and walk to the door. I look up.

On the roof I can see Me. I am looking down to myself, looking up to myself. I am on the roof and I want to jump. I’m going to jump, head first. I don’t want to walk away from this one. Break free from this curse, this fucking curse.

No, that’s the easy way out and you’re not one for taking the easy way out, are you? No I’m not. You’re better than this, it’s a blessing too, never forget that. How so? What about that boy? From tonight? He has had it way worse, and you know what he does, he creates beauty from tragedy and you were able to see that. I guess you’re right. Good, now calm down.

I look up again and see myself. Playing the violin in the moonlight.

I can never bring myself to actually do it.

Maybe We All Just Want to be Ghosts, in the End

Well, hey now, looks who’s back on the Indie Ink Writing Challenge!

I took some time off mainly out of pure writing exhaustion, with my reporter job kinda taking all the creative juices out of my head. Writers block sucks. But the last month or so I found myself really wanting to write some fiction again. So here I am.

My first challenge out of exile comes from Karla. The prompt:

You are given the opportunity to be invisible for one day. What do you do? How is the world different without your presence?

In retrospect, I just now realized that I forgot about the ‘one day’ part. Oops. Other than that this turned out to be really easy for me to write. I sat down at the computer with no direction, the first sentence came to my head as I was going for a walk today, as it was drizzling. Other than that I just wrote as it came to my head.

It feels good to be back. Enjoy!

You can read my prompt to Heather O. hopefully soon. Look forward to that, because I gave her a doozy:

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There, over there, in the rain you can see something. Just barely. Something vaguely humanlike, an outline. In that rain. The outline of someone or, god forbid something that should be there but isn’t. Nothing more than a ghost. A trick of the eye.

Chances are you wont even see it anyways. Will pass over it, not noticing, not looking Close Enough. Distracted by the kids, or the bills or your fears or what have you. Life. Failing to see what is right in front of your face the whole damn time. Not that it matters anyways.

Being a ghost isn’t really about being dead or the after-life or that bullshit cliché I-Need-to-Be-at-Peace-Before-I-Can-Finally-Rest crap. No, being a ghost is a hell of a lot more simple than that. A good word for it might be something along the lines of primal. Maybe. It’s really hard to define properly, is all.

Actually it’s not. Being a ghost is about one thing, and one thing only. Voyeurism. Something that we all wish for at least once in our lives. Probably a lot more than that, much more. Probably at least once a day, for most people. That desire to See but not Be Seen. To watch without being watched.

That ghost, standing in the rain, is a person. Just your regular 9-5 person. Cookie-cutter. Oh, and they’re not dead. It’s a temporary thing.

But see the thing is, anyone can become a ghost. Anyone at all. You just need to want it hard enough. To have the desire to be invisible. Not because you want to hide (you can’t become a ghost if all you want to do is hide, that’s too easy, and a little lame) but because you want to see, unrestricted. Have no fear of being caught.

We all act differently, depending on who we’re with and who we’re talking to. That’s just a basic fact of life, anybody could tell you that. It’s simple social conditioning; you simply do not act the same way with your college drinking buddies as you do with your, say, mother-in-law and they don’t act the same as they do with you in other situation.

The ghost is obsessed with this fact. To them it becomes an obsession. Being a ghost isn’t about becoming disconnected with people, it’s about connecting with them. In a way that you could never connect in a fleshy, physical and visible body.

Become a ghost and trail your lover. Don’t say anything (you can still be heard as a ghost) just Listen. Listen and Watch. See how they act, talk and behave in any and every situation. Every day. Only when you follow a person, unrestricted, will you ever be able to truly know a person. Who do you really know?

That outline in the rain, the one that you probably don’t see, even though it is starting you right in the face. That ghost has been trailing you for days. Weeks even. You don’t know it, and you can’t know it but that phantom is someone you know. Are you creeped out? Don’t be.

See, the thing is, being a ghost is about voyeurism. To see someone when they can’t see you. But it’s not about stalking. No. No stalkers can become ghosts. It doesn’t work that way. See, the ghost follows you out of love. Like, capital L, Love. They are not out to get their rocks off, there is nothing perverted in what they do. They just want to know you; to understand you, in all possible ways.

It’s a beautiful thing, to be trailed by a ghost. Because that ghost can only be a ghost to one person. You’re only given that gift when you want to Love. When you want to Love a person as completely and utterly as possible. It’s beautiful when you become a ghost to a person too. That means you are Loved by them as well.

There is this weird psychic aura between two people, or something. You can only become a ghost when you want to Love a person, but are only allowed to become one when that person wants to be Loved by you. It’s not uncommon for both to become ghosts to each other.

Soul Mates, it’s something like that.

So that shadow in the rain. Do not be afraid. Be happy, be welcoming. But most importantly. You need to Be Yourself. Completely.

Turn around, we are everywhere.

Look at that shadow, but don’t look. There is just one thing to know.

You Love and you are Loved.

And He Will Have Stars Forever

After a week hiatus, I’m back with the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. My challenge comes from Brad MacDonald. The challenge:

Forgiveness, reluctantly given.

I really liked this prompt, but unfortunately I was still busy getting settled into my new apartment (and cleaning my old one before the lease expired) that I probably didn’t give the piece the time it deserved.

This piece ended up becoming a sort of sequel to the first story (and probably most popular) I ever wrote for the Indie Ink Challenge, called Stars are Cool.

(The response to my challenge should be up sometime soon here.)

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I am a murderer.

Everyone tells me that that is not true. That it was an accident. That I didn’t mean to do it. And I didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have killed a person. A human being. For God’s sake, I killed a child.

It’s true that it was an accident. I was driving in my car, and someone started calling me. I reached for my phone, looked down for just half a second. It was too late for me to stop by the time I noticed him running into the street. I should have seen the soccer ball roll in front of me, knew that he was going to run after it. He was just a kid after all. No more than five or six years old.

I went to the funeral. It just felt like it was something I needed to do. I needed to walk through that fire. I needed everyone there to see me, to know it was my fault and to hate me for it. I deserve to be hated.

The funeral was short. My feeling is that the parents wanted to keep it that way. They didn’t want to keep the pain going on any longer. It was a closed casket as well, thanks to me.

They put up pictures of the boy. And trinkets. I remember seeing the father walk in with a pair of bronzed shoes. The casket, it was covered with stars.

I made the decision to stay in the back of the church. Though I wanted everyone to know I was there, I didn’t have it in me to sit there, front and center for all to see. I was physically unable to talk to anyone there. My guess is that they didn’t want to anyways.

Actually that’s not entirely true. There was one person who came up to talk to me. The boy’s father.

He pulled me aside after the burial, as everyone began to leave. It is difficult to describe the way that he had carried himself at the funeral and when he spoke to me. The best I can do is say that it looked like, it looked like life was just a little too heavy for him. Like life wanted to squash his face in the mud and he was trying to stay standing.

The father told me that at first he wanted to be mad at me. That he wanted to hate me. But he couldn’t. He said that he had to actively try hating me but it never happened. He said to me that he knew that no one could possibly be more upset with me than me. There was no point for him to be mad, he said.

He said that there were no hard feelings and that he forgave me. Then he walked away.

But as he walked away he looked back and said, “The real hardship is going to be learning to forgive yourself. But don’t give up.”

I’ll try.

Certainly the End of Something or Another

And it’s time for another round of the Indie Ink Writing Challenge.

This week I am actually going to put what my prompt was after the story. The reason for this is because I fear that knowing the prompt might spoil what I have now dubbed “The Something or Another Trilogy.” (Part I and Part II) I will say that the story came together in my head almost instantly after reading my prompt.

It’s funny, I never intended to make this into a series. It basically started because I liked the sound of the title. My prompts for the past two weeks just worked as perfect continuations of a story that I didn’t plan to continue.

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Police came to the door of The Mother the morning after the jump. The pounding at the door woke her up, hungover to the point where she wanted to perform a lobotomy on herself with a corkscrew. They told her that her son had died. Jumped off a building. When she asked if she was needed to go to the hospital to confirm that it was indeed her son’s body they told her no, there wasn’t any real body left to be identified that they had to go off the dental records and DNA found on the scene and that they were truly sorry for her loss. It was the first of The Man that The Mother had heard since the social worker took him away, all those years ago.

Preparations for the funeral began the next day. There was no coffin; there wasn’t enough of a body left to even be put into one. The Mother was forced to get The Man cremated, though she didn’t want her son to be burned. She wanted him to be buried next to The Father. Body by body.

The funeral itself had few guests. Three, to be precise. There was The Mother, of course, and she had a hidden flask full of vodka with her. The other guests were an older woman with a young child. A girl, crying uncontrollably. The Mother did not recognize either of them.

And the death of The Man is not to say that he actually had nothing to live for. He did. In the most important way imaginable, he still had something to live for. It caused him to delay the inevitable for as long as he did. A daughter. She is currently five years old.

The Man was barely out of the foster home by the time that he met The Wife. He was in the early stages of his alcoholic depression, and she was happy to oblige The Man. Drugs too, there were a lot of drugs at this point in The Man’s life. After The Daughter arrived, The Wife ran away, leaving The Man to raise the child on his own. There is still no trace of The Wife, she is believed to be on the run from the authorities.

After the funeral had completed the woman at the funeral walked up to The Mother and began speaking to her. She told The Mother that the young girl there across the room was The Man’s daughter, The Wife is not around and that she, The Mother, is The Daughter’s closest living relative. The Mother took a long drink from her flask as the woman continued. But given her ‘history’ the state has deemed The Mother unfit to care for The Daughter and that she would be placed into foster care.

She didn’t care, The Mother. The Man had run away years ago, called the social worker. It was he who severed all the ties between the two, not her. That girl is not her problem. Besides, with every single person she is close to, that person’s life turns to shit. The Father died in the snow after years of fighting, and now The Man…well, she didn’t even want to think about that. She was unfit to care for The Daughter and she knew it.

The Mother started drinking more. A lot more.

On the night of his suicide The Man had written two notes. The first note was held in an envelope and remained in his apartment. It stated that it was to be read by The Daughter when she was older. In it he wanted to explain himself. And he wanted to say he was sorry. Pain had won out against love. The second note was mailed and addressed to The Mother. It arrived about a week after the funeral.

When the letter arrived, The Mother was in a rare sober state. In truth it was early afternoon and she was nursing a massive hangover from the night before. She was surprised to see handwritten mail addressed to her, and it took her a few minutes before she realized who had written it. The letter sat on the kitchen table for quite some time, The Mother was afraid to read what was in it. She was sure that The Man was going to blame her for his suicide. She killed him. Even in death, he was going to find a way to ruin her life more.

The Mother took a shot before finally reaching for the letter with trembling hands. She found that it only contained one sentence:

Please take care of her, I know that you can do it.

For the first time since The Boy had been taken away all those years ago, The Mother cried. She cried for the fighting she and the Father did and how it affected The Boy. She cried for the day he tried to drain her vodka. She cried for the day he ran away and the day he was taken. She cried for the fact that she couldn’t have been there in The Man’s final days. She couldn’t save him. But what she cried the most for was that even though she had been such a horrible mother to him, he forgave her.

It has been 15 years since the sink in the bathroom smelled like fat black markers and the drain tasted vodka. Only this time it was The Mother, not The Boy, pouring it into oblivion. She finally decided she needed to make some changes to her life.

After all, she had a granddaughter to meet.

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My prompt this week came from Bran and it was this:

Tell me something bitter, but then turn it sweet.

I took this prompt to mean “The Something or Another Trilogy” as a whole.