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Category: Fiction

Untitled Project from 2010: Chapter Two Excerpt

In 2010, I had a lot of free time in my hands. I had no kids, was newly engaged, and worked a slightly more than part-time job.  So, in November of that year, I took an half-baked idea and turned it into a half-baked novel. That’s right folks. I did NaNoWriMo. And I won. If, by won, you mean I hit the fifty-thousand word mark. I never finished the novel (and never will).  Reading back over it, there are parts that don’t suck, so I’m going to polish them up and post them here.  This is the second excerpt.  You can find them all, as they are posted, by searching the tag #NANO2010  and each will be individually tagged by order, so this one will be tagged #2010ExcerptTwo, and the next will be tagged #2010Excerpt Three and so on and so forth.

 

It had been a back and forth summer, the kind where one day the air was dry and static and so crackly it made the hair on her arm stand on end. Then, the next day, violent gray clouds would roll up out of the hills on a hot wind so quickly that she’d barely get the last window shut before fat raindrops would begin to rattle and sizzle their way across the roof and rumble down the spouts.

Just before lunch on an August Monday, another of these storms sped in hard, and Adrienne had a feeling it would end by mid-afternoon the way they always did, with a cool mist creeping out of the woods and the temperature of the whole house dropping a few degrees, making a perfect afternoon for working in her attic studio. With a few hours to wait before that, she decided a BLT and a book in the corner of the library was a good way to waste a few hours. Taking her sandwich and a glass of milk, she curled up in her favorite spot, an old wing chair with cracked brown leather and an ottoman to match. It had it’s back to the room and it’s face to the front of the house,
so Adrienne could read and watch as the storm crept back down the hills much moreslowly than it had come. With a hardcover edition of a giant Tad Willimas tome open on her lap, she fell into the story like it was the first time she’d read it, rather than the seventh. Within moments, nothing but crumbs of the sandwich remained and engulfed by familiar words, a fully belly and the sound of the rain,
Adrienne started to drowse as Yogurt crept on to the open pages of the book and settled himself in, a warm, purring mass.

* * *

Schhhhppppt. Adrienne startled awake to the familiar sound of one sheet of paper sliding against another, just behind her. She jumped up from the chair, letting the book slide from the lap to the ground with a solid thump. She hoped it would be worth it to catch Yogurt messing around on the bookshelves, a place the cat knew he wasn’t supposed to be. However, when she stood and turned, there was nothing, not a
movement, not a breath, not a whisper. She had expected to see the cat flying downfrom one of the tall library shelves, to at least see his pitch-black tail darting out the library door like a shadow, but there was not even the sound of paws beating a fast retreat down the hall. There was nothing but the stillness of an empty house. Adrienne realized she must have been dreaming of paper as she had so many times before and immediately felt a bit silly that her mind had automatically jumped to the cat, who’d never bothered with the library shelves before.

Still, as she picked up and closed the book, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the library was just a millimeter different than it had been before. When you lived alone for a long time and nothing ever moved without your guidance, you became familiar with rooms like they were parts of your body. Adrienne knew something had changed, something  subtle, like a single hair going gray overnight. She put the book down on the table beside her plate and half-empty glass and began to pace around the room, glancing over the bookshelves and all the paper sculptures upon them.

Nothing jumped out at her. Every book was on the shelf exactly where itshould be and so was every paper creation. She’d hoped for a trail of cat fur or telltale paw prints in the thin layer of dust on every shelf, but there were no such clues. Finishing a lap of the room, Adrienne picked up the dirty dishes and, smiling a little at her own silliness, she made her way toward the door. Stopping to pull it open with her
foot, she paused, something catching the corner of her eye.

On the last shelf beside the door sat the entirety of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and there was that brown paper wardrobe she had made a few years before, but the legs were no longer visible beneath the wardrobe’s door. It was as though, after standing still and
silent for so long, the little paper Lucy had finally decided to crawl over to the land oof the lamppost.

 

A Walk in the Dark

This is the first fiction I’m posting to my website. I don’t know if I’d call it a story; it’s more a vignette or a slice of life served fantasy-style.  This was inspired by my fear of going out to the mailbox after dark. I don’t know why, but it always feel like something is following me. Anyway, enjoy. 


Alex shivered as she stepped out onto her porch. The only light came from the bulb dangling above her, causing her shadow to slink into a small circle around her feet. The air was thin and dry, silent except for the mile-away hum of cars out on the main road. The brick mailbox at the curb seemed farther than mere yards, a boxy shadow out in the gloam. She loathed walking down to the street after dark, but with night falling early this time of year, Alex didn’t have much choice. Pulling her thick cardigan tight around her shoulders, she took the handful of steps down to the path, her heels clopping on the stone.

No sooner had she moved out of the glow of the porch light and into the dark of the yard than a noise shook free in the shadows around her, an echo of soft steps.

“Hello?” Alex turned and peered into the dark between her house and the neighbors. The frame of the brick ranch and the shapes of shrubbery stood outlined in shades of gray. Nothing moved or breathed or shifted. It’s too quiet, her mind whispered. Nothing is that quiet.

Alex started walking again, her boots clapping the cement. A sound echoed behind her, just out of rhythm with her own steps.

She spun around again. Nothing. Putting a hand to her forehead, she peered at the darkness, as if blocking out what little light there was would somehow make the shadows sharper. Alex glanced up at the sky, coated in a blue-black shroud of wooly clouds.

She folded her body inward, against the icy air, and whatever was creeping after her. It was probably nothing, but her mind whispered about all the things that came out at night. Werewolves in the bushes. Alex glanced at the neighbor’s boxwoods, as still as everything else. Witches up the street. Her eyes flicked up the cul-de-sac, to the darkened windows of a single house. Ghosts don’t have to haunt houses, you know. She shuddered and ran.

Alex darted across the lawn, her footsteps soggy sounding on the damp, mossy grass. More wet steps bounced around her, first to the left, then to the right. This time she didn’t bother to turn but kept her eyes on the stone box at the curb, and counted in her mind how far she had to go. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Witches. Now, ten. Werewolves. Just five to go. The sounds moved behind her, and Alex prayed it was just a trick of the air, so thin and cold, that maybe it had nothing better to do than mimic her every sound.

At the mailbox, she stopped with one hand on the metal door and all her breath held inside her. Nothing on the lawn, nothing in the street, but the blurred and overlapping shadows of bushes and cars and trees and shrubs. Alex listened. Only her heartbeat and the low hum of the suburbs came back to her ears, the faint buzz of streetlights and far-off cars and electricity that were only ever noticed when it was taken away by power outages. She let her breath gush out, a white ghost drifting up into the dark.

There was no one. Just your fear. And witches. And werewolves. Ghosts, too, probably. In this silence, she would have heard something. Alex opened the mailbox, and took out a slim pile of white envelopes, their paper a bright spot in the gloom.

Then, she sprinted back across the lawn, the terrified voice in her head, and her panting breath drowning out her own footsteps and anything else that might be padding along behind her.

Only as she scrambled back up the stairs and into the glow of the porch light did she let herself slow down. Her shadow resolved itself behind her as she moved out of the darkness.

Alex noticed it then, solidifying below her on the patterned brick of the porch, as it formed itself back into the simple shape of her and reattached itself to her feet. She opened the front door, the warm foyer light throwing the shadow into stark relief. It flinched at the brightness. Looking down at it, she sighed.

“You promised me you would stay inside while I got the mail.”

The shadow shrugged, innocently.

“You know you scared me half to death following me across the lawn like that.”

It nodded, too enthusiastically for Alex’s liking.

“Do it again,” she scolded. “And I’ll get the witch five houses down to sew you on so you can’t escape.” The shadow shrunk down, head-shape hung sheepishly.

“Okay. Promise me you won’t do it again?” A curt nod. “Alright, let’s go in and watch TV with the lights low so you can wander around. I know you’ve barely stretched yourself today.” The shadow fell in stride with Alex as she stepped into the bright light of the foyer and shut the door.

 

END

Coming Soon…

Believe it or not, I plan to post stories here that I write.  You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. I most certainly can’t make you.  But if you DO read them, I hope you like them. If you don’t like them, please don’t tell me.  Like most writers, my ego is very, very fragile.

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