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beginning of a short story *not long*

pennywise

pennywise

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 6, 2005
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*Updated*continuing short story by me

It was cold. The wind hit him like tiny bullets where his clothing was thin.He hustled down the steps away from the recovery house where he lived while he went to school. It was the heroin that got him. He had been clean for a while now, at least what he thought of as a while. He lived in the �recovery house� because he was now �in recovery�, although he was unsure exactly what it was that he was supposed to be recovering. His life? If he ever had a life, it had never belonged to him. He couldn�t remember ever really owning anything�maybe a pair of boots once. They were old, covered in stains from blood and road salt, and the treads were nearly worn through in the heels, exposing the rubber checkerboard ribs of the heel supports. They were battered and almost useless now, no one would want them, and he guessed that�s what made them his. He figured the only way something was really yours was if nobody else wanted it but you. The boots, they were his, but he couldn�t think of much else.

There was snow covering the ground. It crunched under his feet as he followed the easing curve of the road on his way to the bus stop. He lit a cigarette, but it felt hot and dry in his throat, and he threw it away before it was half smoked. There were a few girls sitting on the bus stop bench behind him, staring disdainfully at nothing through sunglasses. He wondered why they were wearing sunglasses. The sky was a sunless January gray, and it wasn�t likely to change as the day progressed. It might snow again, actually. They continued to stare straight ahead, looking hateful. �What gives them the right to look so fucking upset? What the fuck is their problem?� he thought. Then it occurred to him that he probably looked the same way. He spit in the snow. January was full of shit, no matter who you were.

The bus pulled up to the curb, splashing black water up onto the sidewalk. It was one of those slinky busses, the ones that were really two busses connected in the middle. He got on. It was warm inside. He walked down the aisle to an empty seat, ignoring faces that turned to stare at him. That was something he had realized about college: you couldn�t walk through a fucking doorway anywhere without everyone on the other side of the door turning to gawk at you. It didn�t matter who you were. He had thought of dying his hair neon green just to give people an excuse to stare at him when he walked through doorways. He ignored them, and put on his headphones.

Play. A plodding hip-hop beat droned in the headphones and he drifted, not really listening. Two girls sitting across from each other laughed loudly at something. He was sure he could guess at what their conversation was about, and he would probably be right. He had heard the same conversation over and over with any number of girls. They were either talking about how drunk they got, or this boy or that boy, or do you have the physics notes I slept in HAHAHA. Eventually he had wised up and started bringing the headphones. His eyes scanned the bus looking at all the people. He didn�t like them, but he didn�t hate them either. He just wondered where so many of them had come from. Where they slept at night, and where they had grown up, why they were sitting where they were sitting, and why some of them liked asparagus and some of them didn�t. He also wondered how he could be one of them. He knew he was sitting there on the bus like them. He was looking at them or at least images of them, and they were all breathing and exchanging carbon-dioxide for oxygen, but there was something off about it. He looked around and he saw things slide across his vision, and he thought what it might be like if he was one of those other people. What would it be like to see what they were seeing? He imagined it. He was sitting across from himself on the bus and staring at himself, but he wasn�t himself, he was that other person staring at him. It made his head spin. Then he tried it with someone else, and he saw a notebook and a pair of black boots covered with melting snow. He tried it again with someone else, and again, and again. He tried it with the black guy in the corner and the asian girl with the brown coat. He tried it with the people in front of him whose faces he couldn�t see and he tried it with the bus driver and the people outside and even the fuckin birds that flew south, low over the bus�s roof. He wondered what it would be like to jump from one view to the next, to do it again and again but all in the same moment, and then to see them all at once like a fluid snapshot in time. He wondered all that, and it began to snow outside.


It pretty much just goes like that. I think he's going to skip his class and just ride on the bus and think about shit, maybe remember shit in his past, like how he got to where he was right then. I have this very cerebral epic outpouring envisioned, but in short story form. Idk, its been burning me up to write it, i just wanted to cast a line out and see what was up.
 
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That's fucking excellent!

You've captured that sense of isolation and 'otherness' that we all feel from time to time perfectly... outsider looking in.

I would like your character to get more real and gritty though, we get his thought pattern now. Tell us about his heroin addiction, throw in some memories of the hard times he's been through, the guts and horror of what he's seen to get some background, then come back to the present... it would give some context. just a suggestion.

You could tie in the snow, somewhere there perhaps. Maybe the snow is the trigger for this current state of contemplation?

I really, really like your style. :)
 
He looked out the window. The stark fluorescent lights inside the bus reflected his face back at him off the glass. He studied himself. His reflection looked alien to him. His eyes had subtle dark circles under them that never really went away, and his nose bent slightly to the right from having been broken too many times. Tiny scars were scattered about his face. A car accident had left a small cluster of broken blood vessels that created a permanent red mark below his right eye. That’s me, he thought. He almost didn’t believe it. He looked tired. He didn’t think he looked old exactly, although he couldn’t really tell. One thing was for sure: life hadn’t been perfect, and it showed. He smiled at this thought. He had never wanted to be one of the beautiful people anyway. He wanted to breathe fire. And he had earned those scars, for whatever it was worth. His smile faded a little then, but only a little.

Pause.

He thought about the accident. He had been 17 at the time, and he had far fewer scars. A police investigation after the accident concluded that he had been traveling at seventy miles an hour when he hit the stone wall at the bottom of the hill. The vehicle struck the wall, broke through, and went briefly airborne as it plummeted 15 feet down to the icy waters of the swollen creek beneath.

Play.

He vaguely remembered turning up the radio to keep himself awake before he dropped off to sleep behind the wheel. When he woke up, the first thing he saw was the enormous crystalline spiderweb of his broken windshield. Shit. Something’s wrong. He opened the door and tried to step out. His foot plunged into something cold, and when he put his weight down he screamed with pain and tumbled out of the car. The frigid water swirled around him, stifling his scream. It shocked his body. It felt like death. The swift current began to drag him downstream. Panicked and wild-eyed, he clawed at the air, searching for something to hold onto. At last, he grabbed the open car door and hauled himself half inside the vehicle, dripping and shuddering and gasping for breath. He couldn’t feel his legs except for the throbbing dull ache in his left ankle, and couldn’t move them enough to even pull them out of the water. He curled his upper body into a ball, huddling against the advancing hypothermia. It was cold. Blood dripped from his head onto the floormat, and he watched the vaporous steam of his exhalations. I’m going to die, he thought, I’m going to die and I don’t even know what happened.
Then he saw it, not six inches from his head. His mind had been devoid of all conscious thought up until then, but now he saw it, and he knew what it meant. Help. It was his cell phone lying there beneath the brake pedal. He didn’t know who to call. He hit redial, and the phone began to ring. His father answered.

“Dad, help me I’m in a river. I crashed and now I’m in a river. I can’t get out, help me.”

“Where are you?! Are you ok?!”

“No. I’m hurt. Help me. I’m hurt.”

“Where are you?!”

“I don’t know. In a river. In some fucking river! I’m close to home….close to home…”

He started screaming then. He didn’t remember much after that. His father had called for help, then gone out looking for him. His father found him not much more than a mile away, when he saw the big hole in the wall, and the taillights of the car still burning down in the water. His father said he was lying on the blood-smeared roof of the car, talking to himself, saying over and over: “gotta get out of here….gotta get out of here….”

Pause.
 
They barely saved his leg. The ambulance had arrived soon enough for that. The cop who arrived on scene first hadn't wanted to get his shoes wet, so they had to wait for the fire department to get him to shore. Later, the cop issued him 4 traffic tickets for the accident, claiming that he could have hit a pedestrian even though it was after midnight on a deserted country road. Fucking bastard, he thought. He knew there was a reason he had always hated those pigs.

He was in the ambulance when they gave him the morphine. He smiled. His leg was shattered and he had a concussion and his face was all smashed up, but he smiled. He couldn't help but smile. Then he slept.

Pause.

He reached down and rubbed his ankle. The two screws that held it together were still there. One stuck out and was clearly visible beneath the skin and scar tissue. If you rubbed it you could still feel the phillips-head depression on the face of the screw. He grimaced at the thought. Then he laughed, although he was unsure what he was laughing at. Maybe himself.

More people had crowded onto the bus, and they filled the aisles. They stood and waited. A thin film of moisture had begun to condense on the windows as people breathed hot air in and out, in and out. Cellular phones beeped obnoxiously, and peopled talked quietly or not at all. Being this close in a tight space made people nervous. How many here will ever really wake up before they die?, he thought. So many die never having sculpted the fire of the world. He didn't know where these thoughts came from. They sounded so strange and.....well.....lost. But they burned him up inside. Sometimes he lay awake at night and the thoughts spoke to him. He was the thoughts. He spoke to himself. He spoke to himself and he couldn't sleep.

Play.
 
He put the tiny blue squares on his tongue. They had a slightly bitter taste. He felt a jolt of energy that he thought was probably exitement. It had to be only excitement and anticipation. The LSD wasn't supposed to start working for a few minutes at least.

It began with movement at the edge of his vision. He would turn his head to look and there would be nothing. Then the colors on the wallpaper began to swim. A deep ethereal rumbling began in his chest and at the base of his skull. Things began to hum. His mind and the world became liquid, and reality unfolded like a stack of paper dolls. We have ignition , he thought. He was alive, and it was incredible.

12 hours passed like a film played at high speed, but every second was endless. Time didn't so much stop as it ceased to exist. He saw his body in silohette, outlined by flame that did not burn. The negative space of his form was a window into an eternity of stars and space that swirled and pulsed.

How could I have known?

He laughed. He couldn't stop laughing. It was wonderful.
 
Pause.

He realized he was staring at his hands. They were long and thin. Scars showed on the knuckles where he had pounded them to pieces on brick walls. Tendons and veins snaked through them and up his arms. Conversation around him had fallen silent. He looked up and saw that the bus was nearly empty. He had missed his stop. The bus had already begun its slow crawl through the snow back to the beginning of its route. He would miss his class. Fuck it. There was nothing he could do about it now. He didn't think it made much of a difference anyway. The snow would give people an excuse to miss class, and he figured that most of the class would take advantage of it. The class was depressing anyway. The professor was an english woman who looked young from a distance, but when you got up close she looked like she belonged in a liverpool opium den. She had the pale skin and sunken eyes of the walking dead. And she could never remember his name, no matter how many times he raised his hand to answer questions in class. She'd squint her eyes and purse her lips into a kind of strained grimace trying to remember his name then he'd just tell her without being prompted. It happened at least once every class. He wished she would just give up trying to remember, or at least stop making that face.

He didn't care. He'd finish the class and then he'd never see her again, and it wouldn't matter if she had ever learned his name. He stopped thinking about it and just stared out the window at the falling snow. People were driving slow now. It was hard to make out where the road stopped and the sidewalk began. All the dirty slush and footprints had been covered by pristine white. It was pretty. He liked snow because it shut everything down, it stopped the machinery of the city or at least slowed it down to a trickle. It made things different, and different was good. Different didn't kill you inside. He touched his finger to the window and drew a little face in the frost.
 
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The steady thrum-thrum-thrum of the bus engine soothed him, and he relaxed in his seat. The tension flowed out of him. It was warm inside the bus. He slept.

Play

He was in a field full of tiny wildflowers. A warm breeze blew against his face and made the flowers sway gently. Soft grass cushioned his feet as the sky burned all pale oranges and yellows.

His mind flashed on a panel of giant machinery, gears and cogs whirring and making a terrible heat, poisoning the air with the acrid smell of burnt oil and plastic. It looked like the machine was eating itself.

Then he was back in the field again and there was a blinding white flash. Then it was all gone. He heard mens' voices rise in a cry of savage triumph, exulting the machine, and the field was charred midnight black and the flowers were gone, gone, gone.

He screamed, and....

Pause.

He screamed. He had had that dream for the first time when he was 5 years old. It had come to him many times since. What did it mean? What did any of it mean? He was there and there were more like him and there were before and there would be after. They were there and there were things around them, all just things, and sometimes the things collided with each other and made other things move, and those made others move and so on. And thats all there was, just stuff and other stuff, none of it really different. He rose up from the dust and he'd move around and then he'd die and something else would rise and die, and again over time, things living and dying out of nothing like the ebb and flow of some mindless tide. They would have experience and that would fade even quicker like a wisp of smoke, all color and aroma in the time it took you to snap your finger and then gone. What did it mean? He didn't know, god, he didn't know.

Play.
 
All I can really say is, wow. That's an awsome story, I look forward to being able to finish reading it. If you get a chance please send the entire story to my e-mail when it's finished. I'd love to read the final draft.
 
He walked the streets in the dirty white light of a heroin haze.

"Do you smoke crack?" the man asked him. The man was huge, 7ft tall and all of 250lbs, a black man with a flowing black coat.

"Maybe" he said.

"You want a hit?" said the black man. The man in black.

He looked at the man through slitted eyelids, suspicious and with desperate need. They walked to an abandoned schoolyard edged with chain-link fence, and the man did give him a hit, no strings attatched.

"See?" said the black man. The man in black. "I just want someone to smoke with, I have more."

"Okay" he said, "Let go."

They set out into the night, the black man in his black coat flowing in the abysmal wind of the city.

They walked the streets and the alleyways with broken glass underfoot, hiding in lots and abandoned buildings, filling the void with the violent hiss and crackle of flame on steel wool and melting cocaine dreams.

A police car cruised by, like a shark prowling for a meal, and they waited for it to pass before they broke cover. They moved like that all night, eating acrid smoke from the pipe in timeless concrete urban sanctuaries and then roaming the sidewalks, listening to the bells toll in their heads and looking for a good place for the next hit.

Madness, men on a streetcorner, flickering streetlamps and a crack/heroin snow-blindness. He vomited somewhere around 4am. Steam rose from the bile and acid into the frigid air of winter. It was cold.

Around dawn the crack ran out, and the black man wanted him to try and sell his heroin so that they could buy more crack. He said no.

"Alright, man" said the black man.

The man in black.

"Well shit, I dont know anyone around here, I just moved in with my sister. You gotta phone number so I can call you later, so we can smoke again?" the black man said, pleading.

"Tell you what," he said "Ill get a pen, and Ill leave my number on the back of that stop sign right there, so you can come back and write it down."

"For real?" said the black man.

"Yeah, that stop sign right there, just come back later and write it down." he said.

"Ok, man" said the black man. "I'd let you crash, but my sister wouldnt be down wit dat".

"Its cool. Ill right down my number on the stop sign. And thanks." he said.

"Later."

They parted then, each going their seperate ways. When he saw that the black man was gone he dug into his pocket and found a pen. Then he stood up on a trash can and leaned over to write on the stop sign. He wrote in scrawling black letters on the back of the sign:

I WILL NOT BE BACK.

He capped the pen and walked away.

He managed to beg his way onto the train. The train was almost empty, except for an old woman all wrapped up in rags against the cold and a dirty latino junkie, nodding silently. He sat down and took out his works. He took a bag of heroin out of its concealed pocket inside the waistband of his pants. "Iceberg" was printed in bold black ink on the baby blue wax paper of the bag. He dumped the contents into a bottlecap and mixed it with some water. He stirred the mixture with the plunger of his hypodermic, looking over his shoulder at the old woman. She didnt look at him, just stared out the window at the dark gray morning. He drew the solution up into the needle and found the scarred spot on his forearm. He didnt feel the needle go in because he was still a little spun from all the crack. He felt the subtle pressure change though as the needle broke the skin, and then felt it again when it puntured the vein with a silent *pop*. Carefully, he thumbed back the plunger, and a fountain of blood sprung up inside the needle. He pushed it home. He sat back and felt the first spike of the drug bloom deep within his chest, blossoming to fill his whole body with the warmth of that dirty white glow. Then he sat back and let the smooth motion of the train rock him gently as it carried him home.

Pause.

He remembered it. The overwelling of bliss that killed him a little bit more each time. Hell, even remembering it killed him a little bit more. He remembered the words: I WILL NOT BE BACK. that he had scrawled on the stop sign that morning. He had been back so many times, and he had never seen the black man again (the man in black). But he wouldnt go back. The city still hummed its siren song but he was done. All the chemicals and all the self made brutality was its own artwork, and he had painted it thickly on a white canvass. It was a masterpiece of blunt reality, hard and heavy like a slegehammer. He had painted till the last stroke was done, and then it was simply that: done. No more or less meaningless than it ever could be. Had he learned something from all of it? Just this: Sometimes the world was flat, and sometimes it was all stone and semen and butterfly wings. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
 
All I can say is Wow! You are an awsome fucking writer. At first I thought your story was going to be some big junky cliche, but... Wow! The ending was fucking great. Must have been very therapeutic to write, autobiographical or not.

Keep writing man. You've got some talent there.
 
The bus ground its way through the snow, which was falling now in thick, heavy flakes, obliterating the landscape. It came to rest at his stop, and the doors hissed open letting in a blast of cold air. He pulled his coat tight around him and stepped out into the white haze. The bus slid away behind him with a gentle hum, leaving him in silence. He plodded through the snowdrifts back to his house, and the wind wailed against him, plastering his coat hard against his body. It was cold. He came to the house and went inside, closing the door quietly behind him. He liked the quiet. He didn't want to be the one to shatter it. It was warm inside the house as he climbed the stairs to his room, and the snow on his boots began to melt, leaving watery footprints on the stairwell carpet. He went into his room, and took off his boots. A single lamp burned there, casting a quiet light on a quiet room as the snow fell outside. It looked like the snow would fall for a while now. Things would be quiet for a while now. He climbed into bed. "Good", he thought "let it fall." He closed his eyes. He slept.

Pause.

Record and File.

Play.
 
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