Ten Minute Stories

[Guest]

thank yuo cindy. less litrel...yeh...

 

ths goes on to th last thng abot the child:

 

The child wore a deep scowl, an expression better adapted to his ugliness, his unhappiness, a twisting to his inhuman mouth he wore perpetually when not alone or with Sister. He was in the room he shared with Sister, bare, earthen walls with the supporting timbers visible for all to see – the one by his bed he liked to draw on with charcoal from the kitchen hearth, whether now, in the waning light of evening, or early morning when the light, was strengthening and he was not yet bidden to rise, fanciful shapes of twisting serpents and ill-shaped lizards, his favourite creative model. Spirals too, always spirals. He lay on his bed now, which was placed directly on the floor, unlike Sister’s  -  Father had favoured her enough to build a simple wooden frame elevated a little above the hard-packed soil. His bed was filthy, the woollen blankets smudged with the dirt of the floor, the pillow stained with the grease that almost always slicked his hair, and it smelled as pungent as his own rarely-washed body. Mother was usually tired – she did not have the energy to wash his bedding for him, just as she did not normally have the energy to ready the bath for him, a thing he could not do on his own, manoeuvre the heavy basin out and then heat all the water he needed for it. Usually Sister would have to help him, though her assistance was rare – she was tired too, because from what he saw and what she said, Sister did much of weary Mother’s work for her in the house.

 

It did not bother the boy, his soiled clothes and his offensive stench – he could not remember a time when he was consistently cleanly. It was normal to wear breeches that smelled of the manure he worked with daily and his sour-smelling loins, it was normal to wear shirts stained with the food and fluid that fell from his incomplete mouth at each meal and was perfumed by old sweat and body odour, it was normal to be constantly scratching and tearing at the filthy rashes that manifested in various regions over his body, it was normal for his red curls to be plastered into twisted thorns by dried sweat and mud. He did like it better when he washed, when the tub had at last been filled with hot water and Sister helped him into the basin, into the heated, embracing liquid – something primordially comforting in it, an echo of the painless aquatic world that was the belly of Mother - and she rubbed his body all over gently, and for a while, the odd cuts he received in working or playing and the inflamed rashes and the split skin Father inflicted on him was relieved. But that was not normal. This was normal – as Father said, the cows were better-groomed and more clean than he, because Father liked the cows more than him.

 

He was alone – Sister was cleaning the dishes as she normally did before she was allowed to settle for the evening. Yet not truly alone, and it was what generated his unpleasant expression. Somewhere, in the distance beyond his internal silence, Brother was crying – his newest Brother, lately sprung out of Mother, and the sound intruded in his solitude. He hated that noise, a senseless, keening screech over imperceptible disturbances – he hated that whenever the tiny, unintelligent creature made that sound, Father or Mother rushed to it, and spoke so softly that he could not hear what they said, but their smooth and relaxed expressions – something he almost never saw on Father – and how they picked up the creature and stroked it and embraced it…It was something he never received from Father and only sparingly from Mother, that thing he yearned for but rarely was given except through Sister. Love. The same was true for other Brother, the one that had come out of Mother whilst milk-eyed Brother was still awake. That Brother was more shaped like a person now, and he spoke a little – and doubtlessly, either Mother or Father, the one who was not tending the shrieking, helpless Brother, was with that Brother now, smiling and petting him for every deed he performed. Father kept him away from the Brothers with a snarled warning or a kick or slap that sent him fleeing, but he did not try to go near them anyways. He hated them both, these Brothers. Their gods loved them, as they had never loved sightless Brother and scarcely loved him. They belonged to Father in the way he had never been accepted and possessed by Father, and so he loathed them. Not mine and he shall never be.

 

He began to bite himself in the failing light, adding to the multiple other little tooth marks.

[Ryrin]

I agree with Cindy,  this is really good book material.

[AesSedaiGuy]

Talt, this is my favorite so far.

 

I am writing a book ... Or working on it anyway. You do so great! I wish I could be as prolific as you were with narrative set-up and execution. Will keep working.

 

I'm better with poetry, and used to be very good at prose as well, but have had a bit of writer's block for a while. :(

 

Anyway ... You and this writing inspires me. :)

[Ryrin]

It is fantastic writing, Taltos.

[Wren of the Brown]

This is a piece I'm working on for class. The names aren't based off of any particular historical parallel but are instead meant for the meter itself. The only exception to that is "gamol of geardum" which is taken from Beowulf and used with great license. Six stanzas following a loose rhyme scheme, two lines dedicated to similar ideas for three sets of paired lines each stanza. Heavy alliteration and an attempt to weed out "waste words", blah blah blah.

 

 

 

So.

 

Our lives are not bound-up in ring gifts and gold giving,

meaning is not found in playful words of unseemly keening

but the wise live in deeds done and words scriven.

Two deeds are named in act and breath, fateful emerging -

the infant drawn forth screaming from the blooded cauldron

and the silent dead ushered to dusted ash returning.

 

The earth-bound kings are found in ethel-warding,

and the age-warped know the Lord and seek for Him;

Gedwic the Winterlong, fallen in the frost of border reaving,

Caldwig the Ox-driven, his blood soothed by elf-sheen, and forgiven;

the loyal shield-men of Kernig's Turning, river-washed in wet lands

and the homesick child, swayed by sweet lies, grasped His Father yearning.

 

But I am Gamul of Geardum and I am none of these fine things.

I have squandered tender hours, wasted tinder while fields fell fallow,

wandered until morning among mounds and barrows, found gibbering,

burnt with sable fever, desire-rapt in maddened fervor.

Wonder-wracked with poison-bit passion, I drank from a cup of shadow

and the wise saw fit to take measure of my life and send me to Yc Gerdwin.

 

 

[Wren of the Brown]

Taltos, I haven't had much time to critique your work (I'm involved in a writing workshop at school this semester and sometimes I have six pieces to proof each week O_o;;) but I am glad to see you writing.

[Wren of the Brown]

Ok!

 

A mostly completed version behind the spoiler!

 

 

 

The field behind my house is owned by a church but, until recently, they have never taken much interest in developing the land. They tore up the sun-grayed sapling poles that stood in the evening like broken fingers and carted off the rusted tangles of barb wire. In the center of this field, they raised a cross, crudely made out of greasy rail road ties and pinned into the earth on a galvanized pipe. They fenced in this spectacle and an acre of dusty land behind freshly manufactured steel poles painted bean green. I suppose they intended to cordon this little piece of the world off as a rustic station of the cross or a walking labyrinth but the few evenings I've gone out there to work something out in my head, the cross always looked as though it was bleeding pitch. I'm certain any inclination I had to experience the holy on those nights was so startled by the sight of a cross bleeding black tar that it ran off with a girl named Nemesis and they set up shop in a casino town.

 

I am standing in this field long before any of that arrived and this is not the waking world.

-

As a kid, I had one recurring dream I would never wish upon any other living soul. It came with the sound of a silent bell as the substance of perception sharpened like a fresh sheet settling over a newly made bed, drifting languidly in the air. Time slowed and the walls of the world cracked open, spilling out a flood of oddly shaped insects. Pill bugs and porcelain white centipedes with thumbtack legs. Black four-legged spiders and worms shaped like forks. Flap-lung butterflies. Chatter-bugs. Cog-wheel cockroaches. I wrote a poem about these creatures once; I'm using that same language now. More often than not I was naked in those dreams and these creatures of clutter would scurry up my legs and over my torso, biting and jabbing along the way until they reached my mouth and eyes.

 

I am standing naked in the field behind my house, the sky is a purpled bruise and a silent bell has rung.

 

-

Like I said, the church had no interest in maintaining their property and it overgrew into a fallow, angry pit of scorched thorns and tumbleweed. But, beneath the neglected property, the field had become home to a singularity of cotton rats. Jogging along the dirt road which circled the field's perimeter, I could watch as the rocks came alive, scurrying unconcerned in the new spring. After night had settled, the coyotes leaped and shrieked in joy, gobbling rats as they please, calling the collared dogs of the human world to the feast.

 

-

 

I never once felt I was alone in these dreams and, in time, I began to suspect that I was put on display. The sense that the dream had solidified into something inescapable and everything marched in procession according to preordained design didn't help. I thought I was going mad and it never occurred to me to approach my parents. I continued down this path of uncertainty, fully aware that something was profoundly wrong while taking delight in a secret I hid even from myself. All of that changed one foggy morning when I awoke with her name on my tongue.

 

You, dear reader, are probably thinking to yourself that this preoccupation became a complicated game of cause and effect – attempting to solve the riddle of the dream only fueled its veracity. I also propose that you are now aware of breathing manually.

 

-

It was upon one fine June morning that I awoke to the sound of my neighbor shrieking. This was not her first outburst nor would it be her last. I lay still while I reassured myself that the commotion wasn't something heard in a dream. The racket next door persists and I'm too annoyed to go back to sleep so I peel off the covers, trying not to disturb the black cat lounging on the edge of the bed. Something about the way the cat's ears seem to follow sound tell me he isn't sleeping. I pull on yesterday's pants and, on the way to the door, I make my hair as disheveled as possible. If I have learned anything slumming around goth clubs, it is that people pay attention when your hair stands on end. Call it the Sandman Factor – your majesty increases in direct proportion to the height of your hair.

 

I opened the door and stepped into the world of morning.

 

-

 

The question I present to members of the jury is this: what is the madness of a sleeping boy? Simple: a thing unnamed. You learn to recognize her work. The bed-side presence. Eater of stolen breath. The looking-glass consort. The voice of the silent bell. The mannequin's gaze, the hesitation before the deluge, the sky fracturing into an array of mirror shards underfoot. The tarred hand around your ankle; the hesitant dance of the leaf and the bonfire; the chrysalis world hanging in a tear-drop.

 

You have been summoned.

 

-

 

Even if I had stayed in bed that morning, I wouldn't have avoided the events that followed. My neighbor's backyard was over-run with cotton rats. They slipped under the rust red planks of her fence and found a fertile valley there. They built nests beneath her tool-shed. They devoured the small garden she tended. They ate up her boxes of things she might need eventually. They chewed a hole through the thin veneer of privacy and order she carved out of the world behind that fence. That afternoon, she bought a pellet rifle and enough ammunition to equip Lewis and Clark twice over. In the evenings, I could hear her shooting at the rats and scorching the air with hellfire and damnation upon their furry carcasses. She bought buckets of poison and strategically lined the perimeter of her property with caches of toxic-pellets. By the end of the week, she had filled a trash bag with the fruits of her labors. She even offered to show it to me. I declined.

 

Rats are generally communal creatures and the cotton rat is no different. Where you find one, there are sure to be others and my yard was not safe from their advances. I discovered eight different nests in a week, three of them in the garage. I found them in boxes, filled with dander and pill-shaped turds, the oily-slick stench of a dead rat wafting up from the ruined box like Pandora's Fart. I tore apart the wood pile and changed the terms of my cat's lease. After I get home from work in the afternoon, I would plink cotton rats with my old air rifle until the light had faded. I apologized to the rodents before throwing their limp forms back onto the church's empty property.

 

In the evening, I watched snakes gorge themselves in the field.

 

-

 

A thought forms itself, unbidden. Light is different here. The world is grayed, a muted tangle of shifting forms and half-remembered sillouettes. Color struggles in its fevered demand to come into being, a creature starved, stiffled with a howl of thwarted desire. I am standing in a garden stripped of all possession. Vines have grown around my ankles and up around my legs. I have stood here for centuries, watching the moon pass through stone arches a thousand times and a thousand times again. The air shimmers as the robed and fair pass in procession, contrails of light left in their wake.

 

Willow wisps. Breath. Silk-thin fingers walk delicately along my spine, a touch filled with adoration and malice. She is standing before me and her face splits to kiss me. The sky has turned into a purple bruise. A silent bell has rang. The tracing fingers spill over my shoulders, mossy and six-legged, filled with the hunger of years.

 

-

 

The engines beneath the world had burst forth uninhibited and we were being swept away.

 

Someone eventually contacted the church about the field. The parish made a reasonable effort to tend the overgrowth for a few days but their contractor had another obligation later in the week. He never returned. My neighbor bought pellet rifles for her three grandsons. They propped chairs against the fence and stood watch over the field, their faces grim and heroic beneath boonie caps. After firing a salvo of lead at the dusty brown rats trundling out of their nests, the gate would be flung open and the boys spilled out like wildcats, crouched around their rifles. They pointed and waved, bristling with adolescent ferocity as they flanked the wounded creatures, bringing syncopated death their plastic rifles. The trio of dispatchers sauntered back into the fenced yard now the grim deed done.

 

The stench was horrific. Coyotes would normally eat the carcasses but they learned early on that the small meals were poisoned. I began shoveling dirt over the rats the boys left behind or kicked them into the ditch that separated our properties from the field.

 

The cat proved to be the most industrious of all but, like any feline, he maintained a fickle air of murderous intent. One afternoon, I found where he kept his trophies. Scooping them up with the shovel, I watched one lurch, the motion originating from inside. Its chest heaved and white pods tumbled from behind the yellowed incisors, crawling away as they were belched into the sunlight. I doused it with bleach, scorching the air with damnation upon all things great and small. This is the price one must pay for learning the secrets of a cat.

 

-

 

His eyes are two black marbles which wither the vines bound round my neck. A crown of seven candles adorns his brow, his hair a tangle of ferns spilling down his naked back. Where he steps, the ground bursts with purple and white flowers blossoming into song. A wood thrush huddle in his cupped palms and he tells me that he is looking for his daughter. He came to me because I have known her under the secret paths of the moon.

 

I nod and point to the east. The sky has turned purple and a silent bell has rang. The horizon shudders and a shadow scurries over the flat field. The hills echo with the tapping of steel pipes. He smiles, his face lit in ecstatic contemplation. Behind him, the tumbling throng draws closer, shrill and angry. The wood thrust launches herself into the sky as the clutter-bugs rush past us, split on the needle wedge of an invisible sword.

 

I lay in bed that night, listening to the earth as it hurtled to its unknown destination. Something had begun.

 

-

 

A few days after the news crew left, a bulldozer razed the field in checker-board stitches. Not a single salt-brush or tumbleweed was spared. Three volunteers with the rural fire department came out, marching over the field in pine green trousers with tanks of kerosene strapped to their backs. They started a small fire on the easter edge and slowly worked their way across. The sun-burnt plants burnt quickly into full brilliance, thick black smoke lingering in the air like an unspoken question. By evening, the field lay soot-blackened and the long summer night was stained acrid with sage. I walked barefoot in the ash, watching a bull snake make its way west. The rocks, now naked and still, had settled beneath the blanket of ash and the engines beneath the earth had fallen silent.

 

Rain came with the dawn.

 

 

[Ryrin]

Nice!

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

.... ok that was...

 

carry on

[Ryrin]

I love coming here and reading the original words from one's heart and soul.

[Guest]

i wnt to coment on othres but righ now its hard doin anythin buut vomitin up things i alredy kno, so analysin is difficulty.

 

ths is crap but i tried:

What remains to me is but a shell. There is no honour in illness.

No honour in the vomit forced irresistibly through the lips, thick with despoiled food, or clear and frothy from a sorely empty belly. No honour in the weakness of limbs, besieged by neurotic flames. No honour in the bed of disease, an eternal cradle in hours stretched to torturous length on a truculent rack. No honour in the rotten mind, physically decaying whilst the mental fabric thins to cheese cloth. No honour in the chaos of the failing mind, wits skittering dangerously across the porous membrane, falling through in a sudden upheaval of sanity induced by psychic or physical torment. No honour in these meagre words, a bare mockery of the mind’s past genius. Disease shucks the mind of substance and scatters the body’s strength to the wind in a meaningless, harrowing struggle.

There is no honour in illness. What remains to me is but a shell.

[AesSedaiGuy]

Talt. That is tragic, I know, yet your talent is beautiful. Your gift for words and poetry is simply beautiful. I am sorry for the pain and torment you are enduring, but your mind is beautiful.

[Ryrin]

Tal, you are absolutely gifted.  You have put words to your pain.  Not many can do that so eloquently.  I am sorry for what you are going through right now but I am touched that you are sharing with us.

[Guest]

i wsnt to hapey of it, it ws hard findin words whn i kno at best of iems it shuld be easy. ths is another oen i trid, jus basicly a mind dump:

Sweetly broken, savagely broken – what and who am I? Shattered by the angry hands of the creators against a harsh, stony earth, fragments corroded by the drops of acidic vitriol which the creators blessed that earth with – beyond repair, the growth of humanity arrested, insupportable by the damaged limbs, a crooked beast wearing the guise of a man, that is what I am.

 

Sweetly broken, says my family, stock of my creators – sweet his utter, childish naivety, sweet his deep sorrow when he displeases us, sweet his unbridled playfulness, rivalling even the standard of undying youthfulness that is ours, sweet his vulnerability, sweet the tragedy of his malformation.

 

Savagely broken, says the others, blood of Mólg – savage his base ignorance, savage his mindless rage and violence over slights, savage his errant mannerisms, reveling unbridled in pain and affliction, unbefitting to adulthood of our kind, savage his iron resistance to our rule, savage the grotesqueries of his misshapen form and misshapen soul.

 

I am the lost child, obedient to a fault, who sings for the trees – I am the rabid monster, who cries out to the moon for relief. Am I both? Is it possible to be both? I am broken all the same.

[AesSedaiGuy]

My God Talt! This is genius. I cannot express the beauty of these words of pain. This is astounding. I am not just saying that. This is more than just good poetry and verse. This is giftedness. I am speechless.

[Ryrin]

ASG is right,Tal. Amazing writing.

[nicana]

Absolutely beautiful Tal. Your writing always amazes me.

[Guest]

thankks guys.

 

i wrot ths half aslep so mabe it dosnt maek sens but there it is natyways.

He reached out to her, slowly and with trembling fingers, excited by the reward of the moment, the explosive warmth of living, fleeting flesh that would soon flood through his hand. Cold, nails unpleasantly thick, deathly long, patches of dark, living rot – fungi – embedded in the course skin of the fingers and palm – the hand of one of the forgotten, the ones who come from the west, they who are bound by blood-saturated oaths and pierced agonisingly and inescapably by magicks. His kind, the living dead, the happy dead, the animated loam and decay and moulds of the earth.

He reached out to her, as he had done many times before, pleasured by the mere anticipation of the loving touch to her cheek, she, of the living, of the unbound, of the burning, enchanting, irresistible flesh. Pleasured by the knowledge that she would not flinch away from the horrifying nature of his being, that of corruption blessed with motion, with will, with a mind so diverse from the souls that the living asserted they possessed. It was bliss to touch that soul, that intangible mystery he was apparently not endowed with, to merely feel that overwhelming heat searing into his gelid skin in a greedy, loving, yet chaste touch, lusting only for the heat of life and the secrets and complexities of her spirit and the acceptance she had for the shell of rime and earth and death’s leavings that he was.

He laid his monstrous fingers against her face at last, and for one moment, when the familiar but treasured heat surged into him through his roughened fingertips and cascaded throughout his entire body in deliciously-scalding chills, he knew some happiness greater than the monotonous ease of the undead, the joy of knowing human life in him, even if it was not and could not ever be his own, of having her tolerant soul filling the vacant husk that he was for the brief but precious time they would be together. But then he looked upon her face as his sight stopped reeling briefly from the ecstasy of the beloved pain, and for a damning second, before her face adopted its usual composure, he saw the look in her eyes that he received from many others of the living who discovered him. Loathing. Perhaps it had been a heady illusion caused by the displacement of his senses – perhaps it had been a real occurrence, a slip in a façade she maintained for her own purposes – but all he knew then was rage, as powerful and as deep and as instinctual, commanding, in him as the magicks that held together, that animated his unlovely body. A slave to wrath’s bidding, he let the long-taloned hand fall to her neck, and then the other, as hard and as cold and as twisted by fungal abscesses as the other, joined it there, and he did as he had done many times before by anger’s command, and he watched the soul he loved and craved leave her.

Then there was no more anger. There was despair. And she joined the loam and the mould that invigorated his kind.

[Ryrin]

Thank you for sharing this.  

[AesSedaiGuy]

Moving. Talt, this is moving. Sad, poignant, sharp and moving. Beautiful again, beautiful.