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| Bandito's Story Time, P. 1 | ||
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| b4ndito |
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b4ndito
Registered Member #958
Joined: Fri Jan 04 2008, 06:59AMPosts: 3385 |
A little while back Skittles and I were talking and he asked me to post some of the fiction I've been working on. So, I'm going to more regularly share my stuff with all of you (with the inevitable knowledge that very few of you will read it). This piece is a little modular story I worked on for class. I am going to be adding to it extensively for my portfolio which is due in a couple weeks, so I'll try to remember to post updated versions. This is obviously not completed but I'm really happy with how it started. I guess you could call its style Midwestern Gothic or something. Driftwood Jesus He found the table while driving. It was crafted of Western Red Cedar and was intricately routed on every corner and a beautiful trim fencing followed the rectangular perimeter of the surface. One of its legs had snapped off and it laid alongside the table. He lifted it delicately into his truckbed and set off home immediately to repair it. The face of Jesus was carved into a tiny block of driftwood and it sat on a shelf in the cabinet alongside a rusted coffee can full of nails and a package of wooden dowel pins. It had been gifted to him by his maternal grandmother, whom he detested. Being a faithful man, he found it hard to discard the statue, but the false piety with which it was gifted split him. She was no woman of faith and had called the Savior a “medicine man” at his nephew's baptism. She knew, he thought, the dilemma it would cause him, pitting his spirituality against his contempt. He grabbed the dowel pins and closed the cabinet door. He drilled the broken pin from the detached leg and injected wood glue into the hole, then placed a new dowel pin and set the leg to dry. He wondered how hard someone must have imagined this process to be. The table was nothing short of astonishing. After Sunday Mass he loaded the table into his truck and drove to the house he'd collected it from. It was a three story gray Victorian-era home with a grim spire and a wide, half-circle front porch whose railings were reminiscent of fanged teeth. He intended to leave the table by the door with no note but a ghastly woman with a severe nose came to the door and crowed at him in her shrieking voice: guilt claims any man by Sunday. She was comically old, her skin was dry and spotted with melanomas and her eyelids sagged so dramatically over her lashes that he wondered if she could see anything above shoulder level. Her hair was the same gray color of slush that gathered around his tires and she was bone thin. Her wrists exposed themselves from the cuff of her black sweater and in contrast he could see that she was purely white, there was no pigment left to her skin. “No, ma'am, I'm not guilty. I fixed your table.” She glared. He turned to leave but then was called back by the melodious voice of a young woman. She pushed herself beyond the old woman in the doorway and smiled. “It was her husband's. She doesn't know thankfulness.” She was blonde and tall and insisted to buy him coffee. She chose a place nearby. One of those dingy shops where the coffee always tastes burnt. “I don't know how I feel about God,” she said. It had been a long winter by that point and he was ecstatic to see the return of birds to the gray sky. He saw her at the supermarket and he skipped several necessary aisles but she appeared behind him suddenly as he belabored his choice in peanut butter. He felt his silence being wrongly interpreted as awkwardness, which she laughed at. “Please call sometime,” she said. He and his brother celebrated the final death of snow by building fire. They talked very little to each other but each spoke to the dog often. Late in the dark night he walked to his truck and felt the insecurity of cold wind blowing through leafless trees and he looked behind himself frequently. There was a message left on the recorder when he arrived home. She had said, “My worthy lord, your noble friends do lack you.” He finally called. The old woman was not dead yet, and she said “Is this the table thief?” “Yes ma'am.” “Melissa isn't home.” “Okay.” Her grandmother would patrol the porch each time he picked Melissa up. She didn't acknowledge him with a wave or say goodbye to her, she simply watched. She hovered over the porch even upon their late returns. “Why don't you get your own place?” he asked. “She can't take care of herself.” “You don't have to take her to the bathroom, do you?” “What?” “Can she step into the tub? Do you have to bathe her?” She slammed the door behind her. He visited his mother. She smoked cigarettes one after another in her tiny linoleum kitchen. The scent of dog was stronger this time than last, and he asked her if she took in any more. She told him no, but he didn't believe her. She had hung a rosary from a plastic hook on the refrigerator door. It rattled whenever the door was opened. “Keeps my snacking honest,” she said. “Tell me about this girl.” “I don't know if we're still together.” “Maybe if you got rid of the beard, nice girls would come along.” His closet door was open when he woke in the early morning and in the folds and shadows of a towel he saw, or imagined, what looked like a demonic face with fangs and a horn. He grabbed blindly for his glasses as he stared at the face but knocked them off his nightstand. He broke his attention from the face to find the glasses on the floor and when he put them on the towel's face was gone. He made the sign of the cross and said, “Dear God, give me strength to deny evil.” On her machine he said, “Life is a tale, told by an idiot on a stage, and I am that idiot, who is very sorry.” She said she didn't know what was wrong with him, or much less what was wrong with herself and then they ate hamburgers. When they returned, her weird grandmother was under the porch light again and she paid no mind to the swarm of moths that flew around her face. She watched them kiss. His mother called the next day and said that Melissa was probably a nice girl and that he should apologize to her for whatever he did. He said okay, I'll do that. Melissa had an old plastic cylindrical shower head that barely spit water out. She asked him if he knew how to replace it. When he grabbed his toolbag from the living room closet he saw the driftwood Jesus's sad face staring at him again and he squawked at it mockingly in the sharp shriek of a baby's crying. He slammed the door and drove to the Melissa's fanged house. He wrapped the fitting with a towel to protect it and braced the pipe shoulder with his free hand then loosened the head with a pair of channel locks. He scrubbed off the remaining teflon tape and reapplied new, then screwed the shiny metallic head on. A steady stream of water rained from it as he turned the handle. Melissa smiled. In the dead of night he woke and felt his bed shaking violently and wondered if it were an earthquake but everything on his desk and shelf were perfectly still. When he woke in the morning he wondered if it had been simply a vivid dream but he thought it wasn't. He prayed for protection from evil things. For her birthday he painted him kissing her under the green glow of a streetlight and faintly in the background her grandmother watched from the porch. The shape of a woman shrouded by an aura of red slowly grabbed the jut of the half-open closet door. She pushed it forward. Her entirety was a mist, blood red and nearly opaque and her face was outlined by shadows of crimson only. The door did not creak as she pushed it. Her leg stepped out, itself only another shadow in the red mist. The sunlight struck her as she stepped forward alongside the window but she remained shadowed and only the aura grew brighter and she spoke, but only a dense thumping sounded in his ears. He was lying on his right side and the thudding in his ears frightened him. He could only think of blood. She was approaching him and speaking in her thudding voice and he attempted to turn away but had no motion. His fingers felt hollow and weak and the red mist was overcoming him and the veins of his thigh twitched and pulsed. She extended her right arm as if commanding him and the very blood in his veins was pulled towards her magnetically and he knew he was going to die at that moment, the red mist woman was turning his marrow and blood to acid and it paralyzed him fully but the thudding turned to a song and he woke up in the same paralyzed position, facing the open closet door and the feeling of blood returned to his hands and beads of sweat icicled on his face. Edited Sat Nov 28 2015, 02:23PM |
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| emerican |
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Registered Member #164
Joined: Tue Mar 07 2006, 12:07PMPosts: 3146 |
The only appropriate way for this story to end is if it's revealed the main character is a grown man who looks and dresses like Jesus and goes around carving driftwood. | ||
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| amishburrito |
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amishburrito
Registered Member #1185
Joined: Fri Oct 30 2009, 09:53AMPosts: 352 |
eDIT this with indentations or I won't read. THIS GOES FOR ALL OF YOU. PUT IT IN THE RULES K_R_E_M_I_T. I will not be forced to read unindented paragraphs. Edited Mon Nov 30 2015, 03:34PM |
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| b4ndito |
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b4ndito
Registered Member #958
Joined: Fri Jan 04 2008, 06:59AM Posts: 3385 |
amishburrito wrote ... eDIT this with indentations or I won't read. THIS GOES FOR ALL OF YOU. PUT IT IN THE RULES K_R_E_M_I_T. I will not be forced to read unindented paragraphs. I don't really care about your opinions anyway |
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| V3cT0rMan |
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v3ct0rman
Registered Member #1160
Joined: Tue Jun 30 2009, 09:42PMPosts: 608 |
I'm curious to know what kind of story this is intended to be (short story, novel, novella, etc....). Was it intentional to have the story constantly change so abruptly? Just seemed to move very quickly (purely constructive) but it's a good story so far. Edit: nvm I'm an idiot. Didn't see you mention it's a modular story Edited Tue Dec 01 2015, 02:38AM |
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| b4ndito |
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b4ndito
Registered Member #958
Joined: Fri Jan 04 2008, 06:59AM Posts: 3385 |
V3cT0rMan wrote ... I'm curious to know what kind of story this is intended to be (short story, novel, novella, etc....). Was it intentional to have the story constantly change so abruptly? Just seemed to move very quickly (purely constructive) but it's a good story so far. Edit: nvm I'm an idiot. Didn't see you mention it's a modular story Yes, plus it is less than half finished |
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| amishburrito |
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amishburrito
Registered Member #1185
Joined: Fri Oct 30 2009, 09:53AM Posts: 352 |
They ain't my rules, man; they the Modern Language Association's rules. Edited Tue Dec 15 2015, 05:21AM |
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| b4ndito |
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b4ndito
Registered Member #958
Joined: Fri Jan 04 2008, 06:59AM Posts: 3385 |
amishburrito wrote ... They ain't my rules, man; they the Modern Language Association's rules. I ain't writing a term paper |
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| peacebypeice |
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peacebypeice
Registered Member #925
Joined: Mon Nov 26 2007, 05:23AMPosts: 1452 |
Sorry, meant to post after reading but spaced it off. Very interesting. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. When do we get an update? 
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| b4ndito |
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b4ndito
Registered Member #958
Joined: Fri Jan 04 2008, 06:59AM Posts: 3385 |
peacebypeice wrote ... Sorry, meant to post after reading but spaced it off. Very interesting. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. When do we get an update? I'm going to post another story that is more complete right now and another a week or so later, whenever I log on again. I didn't like the changes I made to this, I need to revisit it pretty heavily. |
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