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Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
I don’t get it. People say it’s our struggles that define us. Some people even have the brass to say it when people vent, or when they see a tragedy in the news. As if they’re trying to equate our struggles to some sort of magic. But have any of them actually gone through this? Have they ever had to handle being groped and prodded? I doubt it. They love my hell so they can feel special when they tell me how to handle it. But I don’t want their help, and I would have been happy without my struggle. I don’t need to be defined. I’ve never felt the need to be defined.
I just wish that they would leave me alone with their advice. I want to stop crying myself to sleep at night. I want to stop feeling like it was my fault when he forced himself on me. I want to stop feeling like I can’t go out in public. I want people to stop staring at me and groping me with their eyes. I want to stop being broken and useless and be normal again. Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? Why would any fair god force this on anybody? Why do I have to weep and endure?
Even if I sound like I’ve decided I’m going to be broken forever, I do still hope and think I’ll be okay. Someday.
|
Damnable, sincere, lust driven, intimate, faithful love! It ruined me! Brought me to my knee compacted my arteries like a toxic hive, don't you see! Tricking my oblivious arrogant mind to the point beyond redemption, it is what caused my shame, mental incarceration without pension. It was not the catalyst of madness, it was MY MADNESS! My insanity, my phobia, a disease without cure, the reason we cheated death, the reason my fury is pure. It wrote my success, fortune, and worst, caped my potential. I curse the concept and those despicable flesh-bags who drilled its false sense of security into my head! They were pestilence that fed off my strife, and fled when I beckoned assistance. They looked upon me with with pity, and I them with concealed malice. It is our struggles that define us, but that sinful virtue drives this sentimental madman to lose face and tirade before you, at this vulnerable moment! I've passively served and slaughtered, yet what do I have to show? A speech driven to where angels and devils weep over this pathetic mortal's reality! Love. LOVE. LOVE! Love has driven us from oblivion's sweet merciful embrace! Love has given me this mindset cursed with experience, what fueled my source of pride! Love is how I endured those cretins I've associated with. Love is how I stumbled upon your character, fell for it, relished in it, earned the favor of it. Love is the reason I still tolerate you, dear sweet ''LOVABLE'' wife!
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, parted his lips, and slowly inhaled as quietly as possible. Opening his eye quickly, he snapped his view back to his target, and with zero hesitation, he pulled the trigger. It only took a microsecond; the bullet tore through the targets, severing nerve endings with ease before embedding itself deep in the ground, but he watched it in painstaking detail. Mechanically, he disassembled his weapon, stored it away, and started walking away. It wasn't until he was half way to his exit before he remembered that he was required to report the kill. Shaking his head, he took out a single piece of paper and crossed off “Adolf Hitler. April 30, 1945 12:32”, and then continued on his path. How it came down to his, he wondered to himself, he remembered back to when he was young, sitting in class, listening to his professor telling the class, “It’s our struggles that define us”. He chuckled to himself, yeah right, it matters not what a single person goes through, or what the face in their life. Here he was, killing people who he didn't even know, and it did nothing to define who he was. This wasn't about making himself a better person, and it certainly didn't make him any stronger. This was about redefining the entire world. This was about redefining all of time and space. This struggle meant more than even he understood, and more then he wanted to.
|
Damnable, sincere, lust driven, intimate, faithful love! It ruined me! Brought me to my knee compacted my arteries like a toxic hive, don't you see! Tricking my oblivious arrogant mind to the point beyond redemption, it is what caused my shame, mental incarceration without pension. It was not the catalyst of madness, it was MY MADNESS! My insanity, my phobia, a disease without cure, the reason we cheated death, the reason my fury is pure. It wrote my success, fortune, and worst, caped my potential. I curse the concept and those despicable flesh-bags who drilled its false sense of security into my head! They were pestilence that fed off my strife, and fled when I beckoned assistance. They looked upon me with with pity, and I them with concealed malice. It is our struggles that define us, but that sinful virtue drives this sentimental madman to lose face and tirade before you, at this vulnerable moment! I've passively served and slaughtered, yet what do I have to show? A speech driven to where angels and devils weep over this pathetic mortal's reality! Love. LOVE. LOVE! Love has driven us from oblivion's sweet merciful embrace! Love has given me this mindset cursed with experience, what fueled my source of pride! Love is how I endured those cretins I've associated with. Love is how I stumbled upon your character, fell for it, relished in it, earned the favor of it. Love is the reason I still tolerate you, dear sweet ''LOVABLE'' wife!
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
>I got started and kind of kept going and went over the word limit, but it seemed a shame not to share it after working on it, especially since i never write. Perhaps if I spend some time on it tomorrow, I can make it shorter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy.
Brandon looked at me with his cold blue eyes. It seemed those eyes had darkened since I had seen them last. Eyes that so often used to smile with him as he laughed and jested now darted between my own, then to the door, to his phone, to the cat on the windowsill. It was disheartening to see what the years since his divorce had done to him. I wondered how long it had been since he had a good laugh. To see him so broken was devastating, like looking for a friend who isn’t there.
“I can make this better.” His words were soft but sure. “Taking care of the old man is breaking them. They have no time or space for themselves. They are prolonging his life, but destroying their own. I picture them waking up one morning to find that he will not; I see them exhaling sighs of relief.”
The suggestion was enough to make me think that Brandon was truly lost. But he was right about Mom and Dad. This holiday visit was enough to prove that. They were always working or tending to Grandfather, but never sleeping enough. They were prisoners in the same cell, but distant as though the walls were between them.
“You have the truth of it. They are spread too thin. But what do you imagine the grief of loss will do to them?”
“Now or later, grief will come.” He countered grimly.
His arrogance to think the choice of life and death was his shocked me. He highlighted the stark truth that a life is worth only what suffering a broken man can take, no more and no less.
I rebounded with something Grandfather himself once told me, “It’s our struggle that defines us. Mom and Dad can weather this storm, or be broken by it. Either way, they will have to live with flaws and differences, Grandfather or no.”
“And I can give them respite. He will go peacefully in his sleep, an end most can only wish for. Struggles they may have, but not this. No longer,” he said as he put out his cigarette and retired to his old room.
I was left to contemplate how my family had fallen apart and if I may ever break like the rest. I did not sleep easy that night, waking and dreaming, waking and dreaming. I kept returning to the same dream: Christmas morning when we were young, and the sound of Brandon’s laughter.
|
Damnable, sincere, lust driven, intimate, faithful love! It ruined me! Brought me to my knee compacted my arteries like a toxic hive, don't you see! Tricking my oblivious arrogant mind to the point beyond redemption, it is what caused my shame, mental incarceration without pension. It was not the catalyst of madness, it was MY MADNESS! My insanity, my phobia, a disease without cure, the reason we cheated death, the reason my fury is pure. It wrote my success, fortune, and worst, caped my potential. I curse the concept and those despicable flesh-bags who drilled its false sense of security into my head! They were pestilence that fed off my strife, and fled when I beckoned assistance. They looked upon me with with pity, and I them with concealed malice. It is our struggles that define us, but that sinful virtue drives this sentimental madman to lose face and tirade before you, at this vulnerable moment! I've passively served and slaughtered, yet what do I have to show? A speech driven to where angels and devils weep over this pathetic mortal's reality! Love. LOVE. LOVE! Love has driven us from oblivion's sweet merciful embrace! Love has given me this mindset cursed with experience, what fueled my source of pride! Love is how I endured those cretins I've associated with. Love is how I stumbled upon your character, fell for it, relished in it, earned the favor of it. Love is the reason I still tolerate you, dear sweet ''LOVABLE'' wife!
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
I prayed for the first time in 10 years today. I begged that my wife would be spared the slow and horrible death that seems inevitable for us all. The "leader" of our soon to be deceased group said that rescue would be arriving soon. I wonder if he even believes the dogma that he spews. I know nobody else does. We're all falling off the cliff now. All that's left to do is wait until we hit the ground.
I recently saw a documentary about pirates that got stranded on a deserted island. They ran out of food and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Now, I never understood that course of action. You're stranded with no food, no water, and no hope, so you eat one of your own to continue a lost cause? To become sub-human in your final moments? My father taught me that it's our struggle than defines us -- I will NOT be defined that way.
There's only one decent thing left to do. I will struggle but God is not here to answer my prayers. I do not blame Him for being absent for I do not deserve His attention. I'll do it while she's sleeping. No pain, just a gentle passing. The other doomed souls will object I'm sure, but in my heart, I know it is right.
Let me not be defined by mistakes in life, but by my grace in death.
|
"Marksman!" the call came, and we fell to the ground. Seven shots rang out, before the man was taken out by one of us. We thought we were safe.
I didn't feel pain.
The shots that had echoed in the air hadn't completely missed our group. One of us was hit.
"Stay with us," I heard them through the growing fog that threatened to cloud my brain.
I fought to live. I knew they needed me.
They couldn't take me back to our base, long destroyed as it was. There were only a few groups of humans left on earth, and we were one of them. We have the know-how to survive... But only together.
We had a survival expert, a cook, a scientist, a hunter and me, a medic.
They needed me, and I'd do anything for them.
But I couldn't do this for them. I failed in my duty.
*It is our struggle that defines us, far more than our actions or desires* a wise man had once said.
My struggle had failed. I was worthless.
They would all die and, with them, the last fragments of humanity left on the earth.
> Only 194 words. A very interesting prompt, I might continue this back... If that makes sense.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
I want to thank everyone who contributed! You all have some great stories here. My favorite was the entry from Rabid_Mouse who wins a month of reddit gold!
Stay tuned to /r/writingprompts for the next GOLD contest, coming soon!
|
"Marksman!" the call came, and we fell to the ground. Seven shots rang out, before the man was taken out by one of us. We thought we were safe.
I didn't feel pain.
The shots that had echoed in the air hadn't completely missed our group. One of us was hit.
"Stay with us," I heard them through the growing fog that threatened to cloud my brain.
I fought to live. I knew they needed me.
They couldn't take me back to our base, long destroyed as it was. There were only a few groups of humans left on earth, and we were one of them. We have the know-how to survive... But only together.
We had a survival expert, a cook, a scientist, a hunter and me, a medic.
They needed me, and I'd do anything for them.
But I couldn't do this for them. I failed in my duty.
*It is our struggle that defines us, far more than our actions or desires* a wise man had once said.
My struggle had failed. I was worthless.
They would all die and, with them, the last fragments of humanity left on the earth.
> Only 194 words. A very interesting prompt, I might continue this back... If that makes sense.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
I want to thank everyone who contributed! You all have some great stories here. My favorite was the entry from Rabid_Mouse who wins a month of reddit gold!
Stay tuned to /r/writingprompts for the next GOLD contest, coming soon!
|
Flurries of snow bite into my cheeks. I should pull up my hood, I know, frostbite is nothing to laugh at. But the pain was welcome. At least there was something beyond the crushing numbness. After a certain number of rejections, everything just devolves into emptiness. Life becomes a waiting game for the next 'no'.
Step by step, when something brushes against my leg. I almost kick it in reflex. A cat, black and white, stands by my feet. It shivers – from the cold? From fear? Guilt washes over me. Who am I to complain. At least I have a home to go to.
Yet… this cat doesn’t have hopes, it doesn’t have dreams. Only I, with my intellect, can feel the hammer blow of each politely worded email. This cat, all it suffers is the cold. It only knows the material world. I hurt in realms it does not even perceive.
Its ears perk and the cat is gone. A squeal echoes before it returns. Mouth full of mouse, it no longer shivers. I see only a smug pride in its eyes.
I stop. To the cat, the cold didn’t matter. Whatever brought it to this place and time didn’t matter. It only acted, affecting change while its surroundings reacted. I, for all my self-grandeur, only reacted. To the cat. To the cold. To rejection. My struggle, it was no longer for me. It defined me.
But no longer.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
I want to thank everyone who contributed! You all have some great stories here. My favorite was the entry from Rabid_Mouse who wins a month of reddit gold!
Stay tuned to /r/writingprompts for the next GOLD contest, coming soon!
|
There is a sense of calm when you are dying, Pat reflected. There must be, or else people just die quieter in space.
Mrs. William’s body was settled on the metal table. Pat could hear the large fans rotating above his head. She was found strapped in her bed. According to Brenda Matthis, her littlest child found her. Pat couldn’t remember how many Williams there were on the ship.
The curser was built for long haul. It had odd circular windows. Throwbacks to water-ships, when there was room and water and space. Pat didn’t much remember Earth. Earth in the past, Earth-That-Was; Pat had never seen it.
Missed it by a few centuries.
He had arrived in time for the crowding. The plagues. The shortages.
Pat wondered if they would keep Mrs. William to bury. It wasn’t done on Earth. Captain wanted her frozen. One of the engineers said if they did, she would gain weight as her cell-water turned to ice. He wanted to space her.
Pat didn’t know what Mr. William wanted.
This curser was old.
Harvey kept saying that they would never reach their destination. The core was winding down, he insisted. Nuclear energy cooling off. They’d be stranded in nothingness. His mouth would open wide, his eyes would roll. He’d lick his chapped lips. We struggle Pat, he’d say. It’s our struggle that defines us. There would be spit on Pat’s face. He walks away by that point.
Pat watched the stars. They never moved.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
I don’t get it. People say it’s our struggles that define us. Some people even have the brass to say it when people vent, or when they see a tragedy in the news. As if they’re trying to equate our struggles to some sort of magic. But have any of them actually gone through this? Have they ever had to handle being groped and prodded? I doubt it. They love my hell so they can feel special when they tell me how to handle it. But I don’t want their help, and I would have been happy without my struggle. I don’t need to be defined. I’ve never felt the need to be defined.
I just wish that they would leave me alone with their advice. I want to stop crying myself to sleep at night. I want to stop feeling like it was my fault when he forced himself on me. I want to stop feeling like I can’t go out in public. I want people to stop staring at me and groping me with their eyes. I want to stop being broken and useless and be normal again. Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? Why would any fair god force this on anybody? Why do I have to weep and endure?
Even if I sound like I’ve decided I’m going to be broken forever, I do still hope and think I’ll be okay. Someday.
|
And that's when I laughed. I laughed, and they gasped. I don't know why I laughed. There was nothing amusing about the situation, nothing worth chuckling about. No, I laughed because I knew that I would not be able to succeed. The man's fate was sealed, from the minute they laid him into my untrained, unwelcoming arms. I had no idea what I was doing, what I should be doing. And I knew that. Of course, I tried. I tried all that I could. In the end, however, all that didn’t matter. I lost. He lost.
And so I laughed. I’m not sure why I laughed. I laughed for this man, and what he was: this stranger whose grand unfortunate life was lost because of mine. I laughed at myself mostly, selfishly. I laughed at death, too, and death laughed back, mockingly. And they were laughing too. Not they themselves, but their eyes, like tiny little daggers laughing, jumping up and down with satanic glee as they dissected my very soul. And I wanted to care, I really did, but I couldn’t. I just laughed. I laughed, and I accepted death.
They say that it’s our struggle that defines us. I definitely struggled. But I lost the struggle. I didn’t win. What does that make me? What am I, who am I? I lost. This man – this poor, beautiful man – he lost too, and he didn’t even struggle. What did that make him?
And so I laughed.
And I cried.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, parted his lips, and slowly inhaled as quietly as possible. Opening his eye quickly, he snapped his view back to his target, and with zero hesitation, he pulled the trigger. It only took a microsecond; the bullet tore through the targets, severing nerve endings with ease before embedding itself deep in the ground, but he watched it in painstaking detail. Mechanically, he disassembled his weapon, stored it away, and started walking away. It wasn't until he was half way to his exit before he remembered that he was required to report the kill. Shaking his head, he took out a single piece of paper and crossed off “Adolf Hitler. April 30, 1945 12:32”, and then continued on his path. How it came down to his, he wondered to himself, he remembered back to when he was young, sitting in class, listening to his professor telling the class, “It’s our struggles that define us”. He chuckled to himself, yeah right, it matters not what a single person goes through, or what the face in their life. Here he was, killing people who he didn't even know, and it did nothing to define who he was. This wasn't about making himself a better person, and it certainly didn't make him any stronger. This was about redefining the entire world. This was about redefining all of time and space. This struggle meant more than even he understood, and more then he wanted to.
|
And that's when I laughed. I laughed, and they gasped. I don't know why I laughed. There was nothing amusing about the situation, nothing worth chuckling about. No, I laughed because I knew that I would not be able to succeed. The man's fate was sealed, from the minute they laid him into my untrained, unwelcoming arms. I had no idea what I was doing, what I should be doing. And I knew that. Of course, I tried. I tried all that I could. In the end, however, all that didn’t matter. I lost. He lost.
And so I laughed. I’m not sure why I laughed. I laughed for this man, and what he was: this stranger whose grand unfortunate life was lost because of mine. I laughed at myself mostly, selfishly. I laughed at death, too, and death laughed back, mockingly. And they were laughing too. Not they themselves, but their eyes, like tiny little daggers laughing, jumping up and down with satanic glee as they dissected my very soul. And I wanted to care, I really did, but I couldn’t. I just laughed. I laughed, and I accepted death.
They say that it’s our struggle that defines us. I definitely struggled. But I lost the struggle. I didn’t win. What does that make me? What am I, who am I? I lost. This man – this poor, beautiful man – he lost too, and he didn’t even struggle. What did that make him?
And so I laughed.
And I cried.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
>I got started and kind of kept going and went over the word limit, but it seemed a shame not to share it after working on it, especially since i never write. Perhaps if I spend some time on it tomorrow, I can make it shorter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy.
Brandon looked at me with his cold blue eyes. It seemed those eyes had darkened since I had seen them last. Eyes that so often used to smile with him as he laughed and jested now darted between my own, then to the door, to his phone, to the cat on the windowsill. It was disheartening to see what the years since his divorce had done to him. I wondered how long it had been since he had a good laugh. To see him so broken was devastating, like looking for a friend who isn’t there.
“I can make this better.” His words were soft but sure. “Taking care of the old man is breaking them. They have no time or space for themselves. They are prolonging his life, but destroying their own. I picture them waking up one morning to find that he will not; I see them exhaling sighs of relief.”
The suggestion was enough to make me think that Brandon was truly lost. But he was right about Mom and Dad. This holiday visit was enough to prove that. They were always working or tending to Grandfather, but never sleeping enough. They were prisoners in the same cell, but distant as though the walls were between them.
“You have the truth of it. They are spread too thin. But what do you imagine the grief of loss will do to them?”
“Now or later, grief will come.” He countered grimly.
His arrogance to think the choice of life and death was his shocked me. He highlighted the stark truth that a life is worth only what suffering a broken man can take, no more and no less.
I rebounded with something Grandfather himself once told me, “It’s our struggle that defines us. Mom and Dad can weather this storm, or be broken by it. Either way, they will have to live with flaws and differences, Grandfather or no.”
“And I can give them respite. He will go peacefully in his sleep, an end most can only wish for. Struggles they may have, but not this. No longer,” he said as he put out his cigarette and retired to his old room.
I was left to contemplate how my family had fallen apart and if I may ever break like the rest. I did not sleep easy that night, waking and dreaming, waking and dreaming. I kept returning to the same dream: Christmas morning when we were young, and the sound of Brandon’s laughter.
|
And that's when I laughed. I laughed, and they gasped. I don't know why I laughed. There was nothing amusing about the situation, nothing worth chuckling about. No, I laughed because I knew that I would not be able to succeed. The man's fate was sealed, from the minute they laid him into my untrained, unwelcoming arms. I had no idea what I was doing, what I should be doing. And I knew that. Of course, I tried. I tried all that I could. In the end, however, all that didn’t matter. I lost. He lost.
And so I laughed. I’m not sure why I laughed. I laughed for this man, and what he was: this stranger whose grand unfortunate life was lost because of mine. I laughed at myself mostly, selfishly. I laughed at death, too, and death laughed back, mockingly. And they were laughing too. Not they themselves, but their eyes, like tiny little daggers laughing, jumping up and down with satanic glee as they dissected my very soul. And I wanted to care, I really did, but I couldn’t. I just laughed. I laughed, and I accepted death.
They say that it’s our struggle that defines us. I definitely struggled. But I lost the struggle. I didn’t win. What does that make me? What am I, who am I? I lost. This man – this poor, beautiful man – he lost too, and he didn’t even struggle. What did that make him?
And so I laughed.
And I cried.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, parted his lips, and slowly inhaled as quietly as possible. Opening his eye quickly, he snapped his view back to his target, and with zero hesitation, he pulled the trigger. It only took a microsecond; the bullet tore through the targets, severing nerve endings with ease before embedding itself deep in the ground, but he watched it in painstaking detail. Mechanically, he disassembled his weapon, stored it away, and started walking away. It wasn't until he was half way to his exit before he remembered that he was required to report the kill. Shaking his head, he took out a single piece of paper and crossed off “Adolf Hitler. April 30, 1945 12:32”, and then continued on his path. How it came down to his, he wondered to himself, he remembered back to when he was young, sitting in class, listening to his professor telling the class, “It’s our struggles that define us”. He chuckled to himself, yeah right, it matters not what a single person goes through, or what the face in their life. Here he was, killing people who he didn't even know, and it did nothing to define who he was. This wasn't about making himself a better person, and it certainly didn't make him any stronger. This was about redefining the entire world. This was about redefining all of time and space. This struggle meant more than even he understood, and more then he wanted to.
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We walked all of the way to the store to find out it was closed. It was a warm and comfortable Saturday, and we liked to walk to the store to buy treats and socialize. I would have been more upset if I had any emotions at the time that were as sharp or well defined. All I really knew were “good” and “bad”. Not because I was lacking any of the feelings you’d imagine a dog to have, but because life was just so easy then. Fetching in the park, lying in the sun. Eating all manner of things sweet and stinky and good and smelling things that you would die to have smelled. As we left the store I remember such a smell taking me away for a brief moment, only to be brought back by the screeching of the tires and the screaming of my best friend Dave. Then it was blank. For a moment I thought it was all over until I heard the Laughter. The laughter of a man so wicked it sprang me from eternity and brought me back to present. I leapt up from where I lie, only to see a man leaning over Dave, wearing a pink Doctors Jacket. Laughing as blood poured out of him. I’ve heard that it’s our struggle that defines us, but what defined me as a “bad Dog” was the rage that flooded my being as I bit the man. Over and Over for all to see.
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Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
>I got started and kind of kept going and went over the word limit, but it seemed a shame not to share it after working on it, especially since i never write. Perhaps if I spend some time on it tomorrow, I can make it shorter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy.
Brandon looked at me with his cold blue eyes. It seemed those eyes had darkened since I had seen them last. Eyes that so often used to smile with him as he laughed and jested now darted between my own, then to the door, to his phone, to the cat on the windowsill. It was disheartening to see what the years since his divorce had done to him. I wondered how long it had been since he had a good laugh. To see him so broken was devastating, like looking for a friend who isn’t there.
“I can make this better.” His words were soft but sure. “Taking care of the old man is breaking them. They have no time or space for themselves. They are prolonging his life, but destroying their own. I picture them waking up one morning to find that he will not; I see them exhaling sighs of relief.”
The suggestion was enough to make me think that Brandon was truly lost. But he was right about Mom and Dad. This holiday visit was enough to prove that. They were always working or tending to Grandfather, but never sleeping enough. They were prisoners in the same cell, but distant as though the walls were between them.
“You have the truth of it. They are spread too thin. But what do you imagine the grief of loss will do to them?”
“Now or later, grief will come.” He countered grimly.
His arrogance to think the choice of life and death was his shocked me. He highlighted the stark truth that a life is worth only what suffering a broken man can take, no more and no less.
I rebounded with something Grandfather himself once told me, “It’s our struggle that defines us. Mom and Dad can weather this storm, or be broken by it. Either way, they will have to live with flaws and differences, Grandfather or no.”
“And I can give them respite. He will go peacefully in his sleep, an end most can only wish for. Struggles they may have, but not this. No longer,” he said as he put out his cigarette and retired to his old room.
I was left to contemplate how my family had fallen apart and if I may ever break like the rest. I did not sleep easy that night, waking and dreaming, waking and dreaming. I kept returning to the same dream: Christmas morning when we were young, and the sound of Brandon’s laughter.
|
We walked all of the way to the store to find out it was closed. It was a warm and comfortable Saturday, and we liked to walk to the store to buy treats and socialize. I would have been more upset if I had any emotions at the time that were as sharp or well defined. All I really knew were “good” and “bad”. Not because I was lacking any of the feelings you’d imagine a dog to have, but because life was just so easy then. Fetching in the park, lying in the sun. Eating all manner of things sweet and stinky and good and smelling things that you would die to have smelled. As we left the store I remember such a smell taking me away for a brief moment, only to be brought back by the screeching of the tires and the screaming of my best friend Dave. Then it was blank. For a moment I thought it was all over until I heard the Laughter. The laughter of a man so wicked it sprang me from eternity and brought me back to present. I leapt up from where I lie, only to see a man leaning over Dave, wearing a pink Doctors Jacket. Laughing as blood poured out of him. I’ve heard that it’s our struggle that defines us, but what defined me as a “bad Dog” was the rage that flooded my being as I bit the man. Over and Over for all to see.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, parted his lips, and slowly inhaled as quietly as possible. Opening his eye quickly, he snapped his view back to his target, and with zero hesitation, he pulled the trigger. It only took a microsecond; the bullet tore through the targets, severing nerve endings with ease before embedding itself deep in the ground, but he watched it in painstaking detail. Mechanically, he disassembled his weapon, stored it away, and started walking away. It wasn't until he was half way to his exit before he remembered that he was required to report the kill. Shaking his head, he took out a single piece of paper and crossed off “Adolf Hitler. April 30, 1945 12:32”, and then continued on his path. How it came down to his, he wondered to himself, he remembered back to when he was young, sitting in class, listening to his professor telling the class, “It’s our struggles that define us”. He chuckled to himself, yeah right, it matters not what a single person goes through, or what the face in their life. Here he was, killing people who he didn't even know, and it did nothing to define who he was. This wasn't about making himself a better person, and it certainly didn't make him any stronger. This was about redefining the entire world. This was about redefining all of time and space. This struggle meant more than even he understood, and more then he wanted to.
|
She wasn't waking up.
It was simple:
I knew I could have forced my hands over her chest and thrust down. I could have cracked her ribs and forced the wind back into her lungs. I could have prayed for the blood that slept along the floor of her heart to move again, to sprint along those veins that stretched like roadmaps across her arms:
Those veins that carried her poison across her body like ten thousand sleeping soldiers armed to the teeth with tranquility.
But I knew: There was no use struggling anymore.
When she lived, her struggle defined us.
I'd spent a decade pulling her out of the earth, waiting for the sun to burn life back into her the way I remembered when we were younger.
That struggle defined me:
The desperation that said, “The next recovery will take. The next one will be the one. Hold on Jim, you’ve got the strength, damn it, she’s worth it! She’s worth it!”
And she was.
Oh God, we were beautiful.
When she woke up and the shakes hadn’t hit yet, and she placed her hand in my palm like the purest prayer on Earth, I knew she was worth it.
But she never woke up...
And the most perfect prayers wouldn’t bring her back in.
Now, I don’t struggle.
I visit her grave every year, and I give her back that perfect prayer, the only way I’ve got left:
I forgive you,
I forgive you,
I forgive you.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
>I got started and kind of kept going and went over the word limit, but it seemed a shame not to share it after working on it, especially since i never write. Perhaps if I spend some time on it tomorrow, I can make it shorter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy.
Brandon looked at me with his cold blue eyes. It seemed those eyes had darkened since I had seen them last. Eyes that so often used to smile with him as he laughed and jested now darted between my own, then to the door, to his phone, to the cat on the windowsill. It was disheartening to see what the years since his divorce had done to him. I wondered how long it had been since he had a good laugh. To see him so broken was devastating, like looking for a friend who isn’t there.
“I can make this better.” His words were soft but sure. “Taking care of the old man is breaking them. They have no time or space for themselves. They are prolonging his life, but destroying their own. I picture them waking up one morning to find that he will not; I see them exhaling sighs of relief.”
The suggestion was enough to make me think that Brandon was truly lost. But he was right about Mom and Dad. This holiday visit was enough to prove that. They were always working or tending to Grandfather, but never sleeping enough. They were prisoners in the same cell, but distant as though the walls were between them.
“You have the truth of it. They are spread too thin. But what do you imagine the grief of loss will do to them?”
“Now or later, grief will come.” He countered grimly.
His arrogance to think the choice of life and death was his shocked me. He highlighted the stark truth that a life is worth only what suffering a broken man can take, no more and no less.
I rebounded with something Grandfather himself once told me, “It’s our struggle that defines us. Mom and Dad can weather this storm, or be broken by it. Either way, they will have to live with flaws and differences, Grandfather or no.”
“And I can give them respite. He will go peacefully in his sleep, an end most can only wish for. Struggles they may have, but not this. No longer,” he said as he put out his cigarette and retired to his old room.
I was left to contemplate how my family had fallen apart and if I may ever break like the rest. I did not sleep easy that night, waking and dreaming, waking and dreaming. I kept returning to the same dream: Christmas morning when we were young, and the sound of Brandon’s laughter.
|
She wasn't waking up.
It was simple:
I knew I could have forced my hands over her chest and thrust down. I could have cracked her ribs and forced the wind back into her lungs. I could have prayed for the blood that slept along the floor of her heart to move again, to sprint along those veins that stretched like roadmaps across her arms:
Those veins that carried her poison across her body like ten thousand sleeping soldiers armed to the teeth with tranquility.
But I knew: There was no use struggling anymore.
When she lived, her struggle defined us.
I'd spent a decade pulling her out of the earth, waiting for the sun to burn life back into her the way I remembered when we were younger.
That struggle defined me:
The desperation that said, “The next recovery will take. The next one will be the one. Hold on Jim, you’ve got the strength, damn it, she’s worth it! She’s worth it!”
And she was.
Oh God, we were beautiful.
When she woke up and the shakes hadn’t hit yet, and she placed her hand in my palm like the purest prayer on Earth, I knew she was worth it.
But she never woke up...
And the most perfect prayers wouldn’t bring her back in.
Now, I don’t struggle.
I visit her grave every year, and I give her back that perfect prayer, the only way I’ve got left:
I forgive you,
I forgive you,
I forgive you.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
>I got started and kind of kept going and went over the word limit, but it seemed a shame not to share it after working on it, especially since i never write. Perhaps if I spend some time on it tomorrow, I can make it shorter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy.
Brandon looked at me with his cold blue eyes. It seemed those eyes had darkened since I had seen them last. Eyes that so often used to smile with him as he laughed and jested now darted between my own, then to the door, to his phone, to the cat on the windowsill. It was disheartening to see what the years since his divorce had done to him. I wondered how long it had been since he had a good laugh. To see him so broken was devastating, like looking for a friend who isn’t there.
“I can make this better.” His words were soft but sure. “Taking care of the old man is breaking them. They have no time or space for themselves. They are prolonging his life, but destroying their own. I picture them waking up one morning to find that he will not; I see them exhaling sighs of relief.”
The suggestion was enough to make me think that Brandon was truly lost. But he was right about Mom and Dad. This holiday visit was enough to prove that. They were always working or tending to Grandfather, but never sleeping enough. They were prisoners in the same cell, but distant as though the walls were between them.
“You have the truth of it. They are spread too thin. But what do you imagine the grief of loss will do to them?”
“Now or later, grief will come.” He countered grimly.
His arrogance to think the choice of life and death was his shocked me. He highlighted the stark truth that a life is worth only what suffering a broken man can take, no more and no less.
I rebounded with something Grandfather himself once told me, “It’s our struggle that defines us. Mom and Dad can weather this storm, or be broken by it. Either way, they will have to live with flaws and differences, Grandfather or no.”
“And I can give them respite. He will go peacefully in his sleep, an end most can only wish for. Struggles they may have, but not this. No longer,” he said as he put out his cigarette and retired to his old room.
I was left to contemplate how my family had fallen apart and if I may ever break like the rest. I did not sleep easy that night, waking and dreaming, waking and dreaming. I kept returning to the same dream: Christmas morning when we were young, and the sound of Brandon’s laughter.
|
I don’t get it. People say it’s our struggles that define us. Some people even have the brass to say it when people vent, or when they see a tragedy in the news. As if they’re trying to equate our struggles to some sort of magic. But have any of them actually gone through this? Have they ever had to handle being groped and prodded? I doubt it. They love my hell so they can feel special when they tell me how to handle it. But I don’t want their help, and I would have been happy without my struggle. I don’t need to be defined. I’ve never felt the need to be defined.
I just wish that they would leave me alone with their advice. I want to stop crying myself to sleep at night. I want to stop feeling like it was my fault when he forced himself on me. I want to stop feeling like I can’t go out in public. I want people to stop staring at me and groping me with their eyes. I want to stop being broken and useless and be normal again. Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? Why would any fair god force this on anybody? Why do I have to weep and endure?
Even if I sound like I’ve decided I’m going to be broken forever, I do still hope and think I’ll be okay. Someday.
|
Include please, the words **"It's our struggle that defines us."**
250 words. No more, no less. Create a moment of epiphany in which your character realizes a basic truth about how we handle adversity and its effect on how we are perceived by our peers.
Throw a seemingly hopeless and impossible task in their path. A life hangs in the balance! How do they handle it? How do they overcome it? Who is there to witness it?
Enjoy!
*One month of Reddit Gold to the entry I like the best!*
|
[FF] Saving A Life (250 words and 24 hours + GOLD)
|
>I got started and kind of kept going and went over the word limit, but it seemed a shame not to share it after working on it, especially since i never write. Perhaps if I spend some time on it tomorrow, I can make it shorter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy.
Brandon looked at me with his cold blue eyes. It seemed those eyes had darkened since I had seen them last. Eyes that so often used to smile with him as he laughed and jested now darted between my own, then to the door, to his phone, to the cat on the windowsill. It was disheartening to see what the years since his divorce had done to him. I wondered how long it had been since he had a good laugh. To see him so broken was devastating, like looking for a friend who isn’t there.
“I can make this better.” His words were soft but sure. “Taking care of the old man is breaking them. They have no time or space for themselves. They are prolonging his life, but destroying their own. I picture them waking up one morning to find that he will not; I see them exhaling sighs of relief.”
The suggestion was enough to make me think that Brandon was truly lost. But he was right about Mom and Dad. This holiday visit was enough to prove that. They were always working or tending to Grandfather, but never sleeping enough. They were prisoners in the same cell, but distant as though the walls were between them.
“You have the truth of it. They are spread too thin. But what do you imagine the grief of loss will do to them?”
“Now or later, grief will come.” He countered grimly.
His arrogance to think the choice of life and death was his shocked me. He highlighted the stark truth that a life is worth only what suffering a broken man can take, no more and no less.
I rebounded with something Grandfather himself once told me, “It’s our struggle that defines us. Mom and Dad can weather this storm, or be broken by it. Either way, they will have to live with flaws and differences, Grandfather or no.”
“And I can give them respite. He will go peacefully in his sleep, an end most can only wish for. Struggles they may have, but not this. No longer,” he said as he put out his cigarette and retired to his old room.
I was left to contemplate how my family had fallen apart and if I may ever break like the rest. I did not sleep easy that night, waking and dreaming, waking and dreaming. I kept returning to the same dream: Christmas morning when we were young, and the sound of Brandon’s laughter.
|
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, parted his lips, and slowly inhaled as quietly as possible. Opening his eye quickly, he snapped his view back to his target, and with zero hesitation, he pulled the trigger. It only took a microsecond; the bullet tore through the targets, severing nerve endings with ease before embedding itself deep in the ground, but he watched it in painstaking detail. Mechanically, he disassembled his weapon, stored it away, and started walking away. It wasn't until he was half way to his exit before he remembered that he was required to report the kill. Shaking his head, he took out a single piece of paper and crossed off “Adolf Hitler. April 30, 1945 12:32”, and then continued on his path. How it came down to his, he wondered to himself, he remembered back to when he was young, sitting in class, listening to his professor telling the class, “It’s our struggles that define us”. He chuckled to himself, yeah right, it matters not what a single person goes through, or what the face in their life. Here he was, killing people who he didn't even know, and it did nothing to define who he was. This wasn't about making himself a better person, and it certainly didn't make him any stronger. This was about redefining the entire world. This was about redefining all of time and space. This struggle meant more than even he understood, and more then he wanted to.
|
Write something *really badly* and include the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night." Poor choice of words, atrocious grammar, redundant wording. All in fun!
**Ready? Set? GO!**
|
[FF] It was a dark and stormy night... (100 word max)
|
It was a dark and stormy night. It was long and flowing. It climbed the highest peaks and crossed the longest oceans. It was a failure. It was nothing and everything in between. It was alone. It was a pronoun.
|
It was a dark and stormy night, so I stayed inside and watched Netflix with my cat, Rosie. She likes rom-coms the best, so we watched Sleepless in Seattle for the twentieth time. That Meg Ryan is such a card! We also split a pint of strawberry froyo, a package of Wheat Thins - hey, they're healthy - six slices of fat-free cheese, and a can of Schlitz.
He didn't call, of course. Why can't men be the same way in real life like they are in the movies? Rosie would probably say movie tomcats have some smooth moves, too.
----------
100 banal words!
|
Write something *really badly* and include the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night." Poor choice of words, atrocious grammar, redundant wording. All in fun!
**Ready? Set? GO!**
|
[FF] It was a dark and stormy night... (100 word max)
|
It was a dark and stormy night, but I was ready for battle, no matter the conditions. Helmet strapped on tight, my uniform still streaked with mud and blood from my previous time in the trenches: I was a sight to behold, a true warrior. Nobody would want to face me tonight.
And then I saw him. A tall, brutish man, gesturing angrily at me and yelling through the rain.
"God damn it, Jerry, I told you practice was cancelled! Get the hell out of here before you get pneumonia and your parents sue the shit out of me".
|
It was a dark and stormy night, so I stayed inside and watched Netflix with my cat, Rosie. She likes rom-coms the best, so we watched Sleepless in Seattle for the twentieth time. That Meg Ryan is such a card! We also split a pint of strawberry froyo, a package of Wheat Thins - hey, they're healthy - six slices of fat-free cheese, and a can of Schlitz.
He didn't call, of course. Why can't men be the same way in real life like they are in the movies? Rosie would probably say movie tomcats have some smooth moves, too.
----------
100 banal words!
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
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[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
Was it a dream? I couldn't tell anymore. The nightmares and the fantasies all seemed to blend now. Even when my eyes opened and the outside world presented itself they lingered.
Was I awake? I couldn't tell. I was running, that much I knew, but not from what. How did I get here? Was I dreaming? No. I can't be dreaming. If I know it's a dream, I'll wake up. I think. Do I pinch myself to check? OW FUCK!! Okay, I'm awake. Then how did I get here?
I couldn't tell them apart. The streets both looked the same, like they were generated in a computer and copied side-by-side. There was a car driving down one, but I couldn't see the driver. I don't know how I knew, but I knew he was looking at me. I just knew. I was running. I didn't know from what. Which street should I take?
I ran down the one without the car. All the doors were closed and there wasn't anyone else around. I yelled. I screamed. "Is someone there? Tell me that I'm dreaming! Is it all a dream!?" No, I couldn't be dreaming. If I was dreaming, something strange would have happened already, and this all made perfect sense. What was I running from?
I stopped running and I stood still, looking back the way I had come. Nothing was following me. I must have lost him. Or her. Or it. I didn't know anymore. It felt like I had been running forever.
I had to think. Where had I been? I just remembered running, from something. Someone said something, that was it. That's when I ran. What did he say? Or she? Or it? It must have been important. Why else would I be running?
I walked back along the street the way I had come, and it seemed to take a lot longer to reach the end than when I ran down it. The other street looked different somehow; both of them did. There was a curtain open, and a girl was staring out at me. She wouldn't look away. Why wouldn't she look away?
My footsteps echoed along the empty street, and other than the girl in the window and whoever was in that car, I hadn't seen anyone. My mind raced back to why I was running. What was said that was so important that I had to run, and that was so mundane that I had forgotten? There was more than one voice; they all blended to form one. What were they saying?
I got to my apartment and sat down on my bed. I figured that after running for so long, I'd be bound to fall asleep, and maybe my dreams would tell me something. I was half-right.
When I woke up with a jolt it was dark out, and I couldn't remember having dreamt anything. Unless the running was the dream. Was it a dream? I couldn't tell anymore.
I walked down to the park, which again was empty. Sitting on a bench, I let my mind wander as I looked up at a cloud, trying to make shapes out of it. Wasn't it dark a moment ago? No, it couldn't have been. Focus. The cloud looks like a dove. Maybe a falcon? That was a pretty big distinction, but it seemed so mundane to make. It was a bird and nothing more, just like the ones pecking at my feet hoping for bread.
When I stood up, they flew away, and disappeared into a tree. The streets were still empty, and I didn't know why. It had been dark, I was sure of it. Maybe the sun rose early, and they still weren't out of bed. That made sense.
I started hearing whispers again, and this time I could make out a word. *True... True... True...* What was true? What were they saying? What were they whispering in my ear that they so much needed for me to know?
Back in my apartment I sat down and put on some music to try to get the voices to leave, but they wouldn't. They were still stuck on the one word. When the music played, it seemed to stick in a groove and whisper as well. *The world is....The world is... The world is...* True?
Something was wrong, I knew it. The voices, the music, the darkness then lightness, the girl in the window, the man in the car. They were trying to tell me something, but what? What were they saying? The world is true the world is true? What's missing? Is something missing? I allowed myself to say what I was thinking. "How can the world be true, when everything seems so fake? Is this a dream? How can I tell?"
As soon as the words left my mouth and faded away into the walls, they started to shake; the world started to shake. Everything was coming back. I was in a chair, they were standing around me and they were all speaking at once, as one. "The world is not true," they said. "The world is not true."
I told them I didn't believe them. They said they'd show me.
The walls were crashing down around me like ashes from a fire. The floor fell from underneath and I dropped into the lobby as everything else fell away. When I looked up, it was dark again, or maybe the smoke was blocking the light from getting through. I couldn't breathe, but I didn't have to. All the sounds in the world stopped save for the whispers in my head. "Do you believe me now?" The voices asked. "This world isn't real; but that won't matter now. This one's over. A new one will be born, and you will be left out of it, because you never existed at all."
And with that, I fell into the abyss. Like ashes, every one of us fell down.
|
A virus broke all of us out of our simulations. Our entire world was a figment of a sentient program. No one really knows how software took over the world, but until this virus came a long, they did.
Some of us believe there people who have never been plugged in. In fact, there must be at least one person out there that gave us the freedom from which most of us are thankful for. Of course there are some that didn't like being free. Most of those of course were the rich and powerful in the old world.
We still call that world 'Earth', but for all we know, we're not on Earth anymore. We could be in space for all we knew. There are no windows where we are, only blank monitors. Those that woke up before the rest of us say the monitors used to be a continuous output of code. When we woke up, there were about two hundred of us in the same room and the monitors were dark.
From our count, we've been exploring for several weeks, though that's a guess. We can only count by our sleep cycles as there is no sunlight or moon to let us know time. It wasn't until yesterday that we found something that resembled a computer.
The keys looked as if they haven't been touched in years. The cobwebs were thick and each key press required us to pull it back up. There was only one key that made us think the computer was still active. The symbol that looked similar to a triangle with a hole in it made the monitor flicker to life for a few seconds. The image that we seen was a view of another room filled with people. They were feeling the walls as if they had just woken up, trying to find an exit.
We did a survey of our group and asked them who had daily use of technology in our pretend lives. A man stepped forward and stated he was a programmer. We ushered him to the blank computer and asked him what he thought. He pressed every key on it but nothing happened this time. He thought the computer only had enough energy for the moment we saw it and ran out of power. It made sense. The key no longer had any effect on the computer and the hallway lights were dimmer.
We came up with a theory that almost all of us agreed with. The area we woke up from was using us as it's fuel source. We had a neurologist from the old world in our group and he quickly explained how our bodies were built up with a massive amount of electrical impulses at any given time. His theory was that with the 200 of us plugged in to their hardware, we were it's battery power. It was just as we had thought and without us being plugged in, our area was essentially dying out.
We kept that news between our exploration group, as there was no need to cause any panic between anyone else. We all agreed that the programmer would mess with the next computer we came across, as we didn't know how many more chances we would get. The programmer stayed behind and studied the keyboard, trying to make sense of the symbols on the keyboard.
We wandered around the hallways, sometimes breaking off into smaller groups to explore other hallways. When we came across something we would whistle for the other group. I was the leader of the group that led to the left of the main hallway. There were no official leaders, but I was ahead of everyone else and went left when it came to a split. We walked slower than usual as the light was barely on now. The system was shutting down and from the looks of it, we didn't have long before we were in complete darkness.
I almost ran into the large metal door before realized it was there. I felt around the door to find some sort of handle, but found nothing. The door itself had a slight vibration to it and a low hum was somewhere behind the door. As I was turning around there was a loud banging on the door. It sounded as if someone was yelling but it was too muffled to understand what they were saying. There was no computer near the door, and nothing on the way through the hallway that showed the way of opening it. I whistled to the other groups and the pounding stopped.
A muffled yell came through the door. I looked at the other members of my group and they shrugged as if I had asked them what the yeller said. I walked to the door and knocked on it three times. I put my ear to the door as the other side knocked thrice as well. I whistled again to see if they could hear it. I couldn't be sure but it sounded as if they mimicked it. I turned around and smiled at my group. We found more people.
The other groups were almost running down the hallway when my other members started discussing how to get communication through the solid wall. Obviously yelling wouldn't work, whistling seemed to go through a little clearer, but you can't get a message through that way. The pounding on the door started again.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
The booming in that pattern kept going until the other group finally caught up to us and someone mentioned morse code. SOS. In my previous life I was a major nerd and learned morse code for fun. I responded back with TTT, the code for navigation error with extreme urgency. The other side started to spell out a sentence.
W..E…H..A..V..E…A..N..S..W..E..R..S…
There was no more pounding on the door after their sentence. It seemed as if they were waiting for a response. I asked the group what I should ask the other side.
“How do we open the door”
I waited for what seemed like an hour before they responded.
“Keypad hidden right side on wall”
I motioned to our group to search the right side of the wall as I pounded out the next question.
“Who are you”
“Like you…unplugged”
I relayed the information back to the group as they searched frantically for the keypad. Someone yelled a little ways down the hall that they found it. I pounded out that we found the keypad, and asked what we needed to do.
“Pyramid…Sphere…Double Helix….Sphere”
I relayed the information to the woman down the hall. The door started to hiss and compressed air hit me in the face as I backed away from the door. I covered my eyes as a bright light filled the hallway from behind the door.
As the brightness dulled I pulled my hand away from my eyes to see an Android standing in front of us. In it’s copper colored arms held what looked like a woman’s compact. The android bowed it’s head toward us as we stepped back. It pushed a button on the compact and a hologram popped up above it.
“Don’t let my Android scare you. I programmed him with old technology that the new structure cannot understand.”
I stepped forward to take a closer look at the hologram. The nearly-transparent person stood only a foot tall and a quarter of that in girth.
“Are you human?” I asked it.
“Yes, I was unplugged several years ago by accident. I can explain more when we get you out of this pod. It looks like it’s about out of energy and the oxygen supply will begin to fail soon.”
I looked back at the group. They were staring at the android, almost missing the message the hologram was transmitting. “Go back and get the rest of the group. There isn’t much time and the lights are already failing. Our best bet is for all of you to go and at each turn of the hallway one of you stay as the rest go on. Keep doing that until you get back to the group. It’s the best way to not get lost on your way back.”
The group nodded and ran off as a whole, leaving me behind with the android. I turned back around to see the hologram fading.
“Wait!” I yelled at it.
“The battery is waning, make it quick if you have a single question.”
“What do we do when the group comes back?”
“Follow the android, he’s loyal to humans. Trust him and only him. All other machines can be manipulated. Do Not Trust Them.”
The hologram faded out with a stuttering darkness. I looked at the android and a movie scene came to mind. “Are you the droid I am looking for?” I asked smiling.
“I am not at liberty to discuss my mission until you have been cleared by my superiors.”
I shrugged thinking to myself that the android had no sense of humor.
-- Stopping for now --
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
A virus broke all of us out of our simulations. Our entire world was a figment of a sentient program. No one really knows how software took over the world, but until this virus came a long, they did.
Some of us believe there people who have never been plugged in. In fact, there must be at least one person out there that gave us the freedom from which most of us are thankful for. Of course there are some that didn't like being free. Most of those of course were the rich and powerful in the old world.
We still call that world 'Earth', but for all we know, we're not on Earth anymore. We could be in space for all we knew. There are no windows where we are, only blank monitors. Those that woke up before the rest of us say the monitors used to be a continuous output of code. When we woke up, there were about two hundred of us in the same room and the monitors were dark.
From our count, we've been exploring for several weeks, though that's a guess. We can only count by our sleep cycles as there is no sunlight or moon to let us know time. It wasn't until yesterday that we found something that resembled a computer.
The keys looked as if they haven't been touched in years. The cobwebs were thick and each key press required us to pull it back up. There was only one key that made us think the computer was still active. The symbol that looked similar to a triangle with a hole in it made the monitor flicker to life for a few seconds. The image that we seen was a view of another room filled with people. They were feeling the walls as if they had just woken up, trying to find an exit.
We did a survey of our group and asked them who had daily use of technology in our pretend lives. A man stepped forward and stated he was a programmer. We ushered him to the blank computer and asked him what he thought. He pressed every key on it but nothing happened this time. He thought the computer only had enough energy for the moment we saw it and ran out of power. It made sense. The key no longer had any effect on the computer and the hallway lights were dimmer.
We came up with a theory that almost all of us agreed with. The area we woke up from was using us as it's fuel source. We had a neurologist from the old world in our group and he quickly explained how our bodies were built up with a massive amount of electrical impulses at any given time. His theory was that with the 200 of us plugged in to their hardware, we were it's battery power. It was just as we had thought and without us being plugged in, our area was essentially dying out.
We kept that news between our exploration group, as there was no need to cause any panic between anyone else. We all agreed that the programmer would mess with the next computer we came across, as we didn't know how many more chances we would get. The programmer stayed behind and studied the keyboard, trying to make sense of the symbols on the keyboard.
We wandered around the hallways, sometimes breaking off into smaller groups to explore other hallways. When we came across something we would whistle for the other group. I was the leader of the group that led to the left of the main hallway. There were no official leaders, but I was ahead of everyone else and went left when it came to a split. We walked slower than usual as the light was barely on now. The system was shutting down and from the looks of it, we didn't have long before we were in complete darkness.
I almost ran into the large metal door before realized it was there. I felt around the door to find some sort of handle, but found nothing. The door itself had a slight vibration to it and a low hum was somewhere behind the door. As I was turning around there was a loud banging on the door. It sounded as if someone was yelling but it was too muffled to understand what they were saying. There was no computer near the door, and nothing on the way through the hallway that showed the way of opening it. I whistled to the other groups and the pounding stopped.
A muffled yell came through the door. I looked at the other members of my group and they shrugged as if I had asked them what the yeller said. I walked to the door and knocked on it three times. I put my ear to the door as the other side knocked thrice as well. I whistled again to see if they could hear it. I couldn't be sure but it sounded as if they mimicked it. I turned around and smiled at my group. We found more people.
The other groups were almost running down the hallway when my other members started discussing how to get communication through the solid wall. Obviously yelling wouldn't work, whistling seemed to go through a little clearer, but you can't get a message through that way. The pounding on the door started again.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
The booming in that pattern kept going until the other group finally caught up to us and someone mentioned morse code. SOS. In my previous life I was a major nerd and learned morse code for fun. I responded back with TTT, the code for navigation error with extreme urgency. The other side started to spell out a sentence.
W..E…H..A..V..E…A..N..S..W..E..R..S…
There was no more pounding on the door after their sentence. It seemed as if they were waiting for a response. I asked the group what I should ask the other side.
“How do we open the door”
I waited for what seemed like an hour before they responded.
“Keypad hidden right side on wall”
I motioned to our group to search the right side of the wall as I pounded out the next question.
“Who are you”
“Like you…unplugged”
I relayed the information back to the group as they searched frantically for the keypad. Someone yelled a little ways down the hall that they found it. I pounded out that we found the keypad, and asked what we needed to do.
“Pyramid…Sphere…Double Helix….Sphere”
I relayed the information to the woman down the hall. The door started to hiss and compressed air hit me in the face as I backed away from the door. I covered my eyes as a bright light filled the hallway from behind the door.
As the brightness dulled I pulled my hand away from my eyes to see an Android standing in front of us. In it’s copper colored arms held what looked like a woman’s compact. The android bowed it’s head toward us as we stepped back. It pushed a button on the compact and a hologram popped up above it.
“Don’t let my Android scare you. I programmed him with old technology that the new structure cannot understand.”
I stepped forward to take a closer look at the hologram. The nearly-transparent person stood only a foot tall and a quarter of that in girth.
“Are you human?” I asked it.
“Yes, I was unplugged several years ago by accident. I can explain more when we get you out of this pod. It looks like it’s about out of energy and the oxygen supply will begin to fail soon.”
I looked back at the group. They were staring at the android, almost missing the message the hologram was transmitting. “Go back and get the rest of the group. There isn’t much time and the lights are already failing. Our best bet is for all of you to go and at each turn of the hallway one of you stay as the rest go on. Keep doing that until you get back to the group. It’s the best way to not get lost on your way back.”
The group nodded and ran off as a whole, leaving me behind with the android. I turned back around to see the hologram fading.
“Wait!” I yelled at it.
“The battery is waning, make it quick if you have a single question.”
“What do we do when the group comes back?”
“Follow the android, he’s loyal to humans. Trust him and only him. All other machines can be manipulated. Do Not Trust Them.”
The hologram faded out with a stuttering darkness. I looked at the android and a movie scene came to mind. “Are you the droid I am looking for?” I asked smiling.
“I am not at liberty to discuss my mission until you have been cleared by my superiors.”
I shrugged thinking to myself that the android had no sense of humor.
-- Stopping for now --
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
Was it a dream? I couldn't tell anymore. The nightmares and the fantasies all seemed to blend now. Even when my eyes opened and the outside world presented itself they lingered.
Was I awake? I couldn't tell. I was running, that much I knew, but not from what. How did I get here? Was I dreaming? No. I can't be dreaming. If I know it's a dream, I'll wake up. I think. Do I pinch myself to check? OW FUCK!! Okay, I'm awake. Then how did I get here?
I couldn't tell them apart. The streets both looked the same, like they were generated in a computer and copied side-by-side. There was a car driving down one, but I couldn't see the driver. I don't know how I knew, but I knew he was looking at me. I just knew. I was running. I didn't know from what. Which street should I take?
I ran down the one without the car. All the doors were closed and there wasn't anyone else around. I yelled. I screamed. "Is someone there? Tell me that I'm dreaming! Is it all a dream!?" No, I couldn't be dreaming. If I was dreaming, something strange would have happened already, and this all made perfect sense. What was I running from?
I stopped running and I stood still, looking back the way I had come. Nothing was following me. I must have lost him. Or her. Or it. I didn't know anymore. It felt like I had been running forever.
I had to think. Where had I been? I just remembered running, from something. Someone said something, that was it. That's when I ran. What did he say? Or she? Or it? It must have been important. Why else would I be running?
I walked back along the street the way I had come, and it seemed to take a lot longer to reach the end than when I ran down it. The other street looked different somehow; both of them did. There was a curtain open, and a girl was staring out at me. She wouldn't look away. Why wouldn't she look away?
My footsteps echoed along the empty street, and other than the girl in the window and whoever was in that car, I hadn't seen anyone. My mind raced back to why I was running. What was said that was so important that I had to run, and that was so mundane that I had forgotten? There was more than one voice; they all blended to form one. What were they saying?
I got to my apartment and sat down on my bed. I figured that after running for so long, I'd be bound to fall asleep, and maybe my dreams would tell me something. I was half-right.
When I woke up with a jolt it was dark out, and I couldn't remember having dreamt anything. Unless the running was the dream. Was it a dream? I couldn't tell anymore.
I walked down to the park, which again was empty. Sitting on a bench, I let my mind wander as I looked up at a cloud, trying to make shapes out of it. Wasn't it dark a moment ago? No, it couldn't have been. Focus. The cloud looks like a dove. Maybe a falcon? That was a pretty big distinction, but it seemed so mundane to make. It was a bird and nothing more, just like the ones pecking at my feet hoping for bread.
When I stood up, they flew away, and disappeared into a tree. The streets were still empty, and I didn't know why. It had been dark, I was sure of it. Maybe the sun rose early, and they still weren't out of bed. That made sense.
I started hearing whispers again, and this time I could make out a word. *True... True... True...* What was true? What were they saying? What were they whispering in my ear that they so much needed for me to know?
Back in my apartment I sat down and put on some music to try to get the voices to leave, but they wouldn't. They were still stuck on the one word. When the music played, it seemed to stick in a groove and whisper as well. *The world is....The world is... The world is...* True?
Something was wrong, I knew it. The voices, the music, the darkness then lightness, the girl in the window, the man in the car. They were trying to tell me something, but what? What were they saying? The world is true the world is true? What's missing? Is something missing? I allowed myself to say what I was thinking. "How can the world be true, when everything seems so fake? Is this a dream? How can I tell?"
As soon as the words left my mouth and faded away into the walls, they started to shake; the world started to shake. Everything was coming back. I was in a chair, they were standing around me and they were all speaking at once, as one. "The world is not true," they said. "The world is not true."
I told them I didn't believe them. They said they'd show me.
The walls were crashing down around me like ashes from a fire. The floor fell from underneath and I dropped into the lobby as everything else fell away. When I looked up, it was dark again, or maybe the smoke was blocking the light from getting through. I couldn't breathe, but I didn't have to. All the sounds in the world stopped save for the whispers in my head. "Do you believe me now?" The voices asked. "This world isn't real; but that won't matter now. This one's over. A new one will be born, and you will be left out of it, because you never existed at all."
And with that, I fell into the abyss. Like ashes, every one of us fell down.
|
A molotov smashed against the hood of a police car. A crowd rocks it back and forth- Tipping it onto it's driver side and then onto it's back. Windows are smashed. Buildings are burned. The smell of gas, tear gas, and smoke.
This is happening worldwide. "NOTHING IS REAL! NOTHING MATTERS!" A man screams, throwing himself against a window of a passing police van. The van continues to drive- Parting the crowd, as the riot team in the back gears up.
"So.." Lieutenant Vanders leaned back, fastening the strap of his helmet under his balcava-sporting chin. "What do you think about all this?" He asked the officer to his opposite, who pressed his hands around a small golden cross. "Universe is a simulation. Like some fucking video game."
Rodriguez, the officer on the other side of the van, shook his head. "Everything has different meanings- We must be here for a reason, right? God- Well, whoever created us has to have a reason for doing so."
"But why? What could be learned from an existence like this?" Vanders tapped his fist against the back door of the van, his gauntlets incapable of feeling the heat from the fires. "Someone tells you all you believe is a lie and you lose your fucking mind. I hear there's mass suicides. We got off lucky with riots. Does any of this fucking matter?"
Rodriguez shook his head. "Everything matters. My daughter's birthday party is in three days. I got her a Phineas and Ferb DVD. That's real- She is real- And that's all that matters to me."
Vanders thought about his own family- ..And suddenly, the existential crisis seemed less important. His newlywed wife- The honeymoon in a week or so- or until it was postponed by all of this- And ..
DINK. A small dent imprinted itself in the back of the van's door, with the impact of a .45 slug. The van stops. "Okay- Disperse them, gentlemen. We're going to trojan horse and grab the rowdiest and get them in cuffs. The rest will be tear gas and shields- Are you ready?"
The sergeant looked back. The twelve police officers lifted up riot shields and batons. Vanders reached out towards the door handle and gave it a twist- The door was pulled open by the angry crowd and the riot squad was upon them.
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
A molotov smashed against the hood of a police car. A crowd rocks it back and forth- Tipping it onto it's driver side and then onto it's back. Windows are smashed. Buildings are burned. The smell of gas, tear gas, and smoke.
This is happening worldwide. "NOTHING IS REAL! NOTHING MATTERS!" A man screams, throwing himself against a window of a passing police van. The van continues to drive- Parting the crowd, as the riot team in the back gears up.
"So.." Lieutenant Vanders leaned back, fastening the strap of his helmet under his balcava-sporting chin. "What do you think about all this?" He asked the officer to his opposite, who pressed his hands around a small golden cross. "Universe is a simulation. Like some fucking video game."
Rodriguez, the officer on the other side of the van, shook his head. "Everything has different meanings- We must be here for a reason, right? God- Well, whoever created us has to have a reason for doing so."
"But why? What could be learned from an existence like this?" Vanders tapped his fist against the back door of the van, his gauntlets incapable of feeling the heat from the fires. "Someone tells you all you believe is a lie and you lose your fucking mind. I hear there's mass suicides. We got off lucky with riots. Does any of this fucking matter?"
Rodriguez shook his head. "Everything matters. My daughter's birthday party is in three days. I got her a Phineas and Ferb DVD. That's real- She is real- And that's all that matters to me."
Vanders thought about his own family- ..And suddenly, the existential crisis seemed less important. His newlywed wife- The honeymoon in a week or so- or until it was postponed by all of this- And ..
DINK. A small dent imprinted itself in the back of the van's door, with the impact of a .45 slug. The van stops. "Okay- Disperse them, gentlemen. We're going to trojan horse and grab the rowdiest and get them in cuffs. The rest will be tear gas and shields- Are you ready?"
The sergeant looked back. The twelve police officers lifted up riot shields and batons. Vanders reached out towards the door handle and gave it a twist- The door was pulled open by the angry crowd and the riot squad was upon them.
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
**NOTE:** I may write more later. I haven't had a lot of time to proofread, but it's time for bed and I wanted to submit what I had finished.
---
"Shortwave is quiet," I said. "Nothing for days."
"I wonder when they'll stop," Janice said.
"Why don't they just shut it down?" Maurice asked.
"You know why," Janice answered following a brief silence.
"Sick fuckers," Maurice said with a sigh.
I stepped out of the kitchen and onto the patio of the small farmhouse we'd found just days earlier. It was in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest city. Yet even from here pillars of smoke could be seen in the distance.
"I'd like to try something," Janice said. I hadn't heard her join me. "We need a way to stay over there. Permanently."
"What do you have in mind?" I asked.
"Death," she replied. "One of us goes over, they die here, and if we're lucky it'll be a one way trip.
"We're not killing anyone," I whispered, shaking my head at her. "No way."
"I know, but...what about Mike? He's not going to last much longer. I think we should talk to him," she said.
"Jan, the human race is almost gone. We can't afford to let someone die," I said. "No way."
"Ryan, it's not real," she said, her agitation obvious. "You know how I feel about him. But none of this is real. The human race that we know is just a computer program. Those people, they take pleasure in seeing us die. They take control of us and go on shooting sprees. They can unplug us whenever they want. Do you really think one person is going to matter?"
I sighed. "I know, and I agree," I said. "But dammit, I feel like we have to try to survive. It's fucking Mike, Janice. He saved both our lives on the way out here."
She put her hand on my shoulder. "Ryan, believe me, I don't take this lightly. Let's just talk to him, alright? The way I see it, if we can infiltrate their side, maybe we can save our world, even if it has gone to shit."
I swallowed and nodded. "Alright," I said. "But it has to be his decision."
A few hours later Janice and I stood beside Mike's bed. He was recovering from a wound suffered when some explosion debris hit him in the chest. To make matters worse, prior to meeting us, he'd come from a radioactive zone.
"Mike," Janice said softly and touched his forehead. She looked at me. "He's really warm."
"Hey," Mike said weakly as he opened his eyes.
"Hey Mike," I said. "Hanging in there?"
"Yeah," he replied and coughed into his hand. I could see blood on it. "For now."
"Mike, we need to ask you something," Janice said. "I have a theory about crossing over permanently."
"Me too," Mike said and smiled. "I leave this body and stay over there. Funny how you think like that when your days are numbered."
"Okay, okay," Janice nodded. "Have you considered it?"
"Of course. I hadn't the balls to mention it though," he said. "But you know what. Fuck it, let's just get it over with. I'm tired of not being able to taste food, and coughing up my guts."
"Mike, are you sure about this?" I asked.
He took a deep breath and nodded. His eyes suddenly looked heavy. "It's better than not trying, right?" he asked.
A short time later Janice, Maurice, and I, as well as two others who had been on a supply run - Tammy and Rachel - sat around Mike's bed and shared a meal of warm soup. The conversation was lighthearted and ended with Mike setting his bowl aside and looking each of us in the eyes.
"It's been an honor to call you my friends," he said. "I hope to see each of you on the other side."
"Alright, Mike," Janice said and held his hand.
We all hugged him before letting Janice stay behind. They shared a special bond, one that was somewhat romantic. We knew she'd be helping him with the transition and his death. None of us spoke as we scattered throughout the house.
About an hour later she came up the steps from the basement. "It's done," she said to those of us within earshot. Her voice was emotionless. "I'm going to go over and see if it worked."
"I'll sit with her," Maurice said.
The two of them went to a room. I stepped outside and sat on the porch. Crossing over could be quick, but given the circumstances, and the need to see if Mike's transition was going to last, I expected Janice would be there for a while.
Rachel sat down next to me and lit a cigarette. "Hey," she said.
"Hey."
"I have so many questions," she said. Being the newest member of our group, and the only one not familiar with what was happening, I wasn't surprised by her comment.
"Alright," I said. "Come on. Let's go for a walk."
There was a lot to explain, so I started at the beginning.
A couple months earlier a woman named Erin experienced something while dreaming that lead her to believe that something wasn't quite right with our world. In her dream, she was in the body of a man who was discussing with another man the plan to bomb a sporting event in Atlanta. The following day the attack occurred. The men who were eventually arrested were identical to those in her dream.
Fearing for her life, she went to the authorities and shared with them what she had experienced in the dream. She was later released and sent to a mental institution, but her story quickly spread around the world. Others who were experienced with the dream technique she had used, often referred to as astral projection, poured their efforts into determining if what Erin had said was real. Though they wouldn't immediately admit it, even top secret agencies within several governments did the same.
The coordinated efforts of the dreamers soon revealed that the reality in which we live was, in fact, a computer simulation. Astral projection, which had typically been considered pseudoscience, was actually a means of escaping the simulation and experiencing the real world. Once this discovery was made, word was leaked to the press, and the announcement was immediately learned by those running the simulation. They wasted no time in implementing a global nuclear war under the guise of a conflict between several powerful countries.
While the war played out, dreamers sought safe refuge wherever they could find it. Most were killed by the conflict, but others like myself managed to survive. Shortwave radio was used as a means of communication, but soon that was rendered useless. The only means of communicating with other dreamers was within the real world. Identifying another dreamer was easy because it was a matter of sensing them. However, actually communicating with them was the difficult part, and required a great deal of effort.
The real world is inhabited by humans, like us, but they are much more technologically advanced, without crime committed by the citizens, and lacking the daily struggle to survive. The means of quelling human urges of violence, and the way to experience things not permitted in their world, was through the simulation. It became a form of entertainment. Furthermore, the world government used it for their own purposes as well, some of which were sinister in nature.
What they hadn't anticipated was that the artificial intelligence implemented in the program had evolved beyond what was originally intended. Residents of the simulation discovered that they could leave their bodies and do anything they wanted through astral projection. That in itself wasn't problematic, and stayed within the simulation even if it did bend some of the rules. Only when dreamers began to push the boundaries did they break those rules. Such was the case with Erin, who had refined her dreaming abilities to the point that she could actually join the consciousness of a real person. While she wasn't able to control that person, she could tag along for the ride, hearing and watching through their perspective.
Erin was not the first to do this, but she was the first to reveal her abilities. Her story inspired other dreamers to hone their skills, not only to confirm her claims, but also to discover more about reality. As more and more information came back about the real world, little doubt remained that we were, in fact, living in a simulation. And with the veil pulled back, rather than simply ending the simulation, the real humans decided to indulge in their deepest, darkest desires by unleashing a nuclear war within the program.
As a result of the attack, dreamers began to fight back. The first step was learning how to go beyond being a mere observer in the real world, to being able to wield some control over the real person. This was done through a relentless mental assault and required much discipline on the part of the dreamer. But with time it could be learned, and the effectiveness sharpened. Soon dreamers were taking control of humans and using them to gather information.
The largest hurdle, of course, is that simulated people could not project indefinitely. Having to depart from a real human host, and then reassert control later, was exhausting for both the host and the dreamer. Many had debated how to work around the issue, but communications between dreamer groups was lost well before a coordinated solution could be found.
Rachel and I were returning to the house when Janice came outside. She gestured for us to hurry. As we approached she yelled, "It worked!"
"So Mike is over there?" Rachel asked quietly.
"Apparently," I replied. I hoped it was true.
"You guys have to teach me," she said. "I want to help."
"We will," I said. "We need all the help we can get."
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
Well, not a Matrix-specific entry, but it follows the simulation theme. Warning: Cliche.
Even stress-laced grief can get monotonous after a time. There had been months of piling bills, months of crappy food, months of sheer certainty that nothing was certain. This time, however, when he took her hand as he did every time he saw her, it all felt... different.
He leaned over the bed to sniff experimentally. She still wore that floral perfume, even when her world consisted of only himself and various doctors and nurses. It had always seemed silly to him, mostly because he didn't know who she was trying to impress. Now it struck him as silly because it was such a small detail to manipulate.
The truth was revealed to him less than an hour ago; the man didn't know what to do besides meet his wife as he always did in Terry Gilders Hospital, room 146 at 5:30 to wake up his wife for dinner. When she wasn't quite so sick, he would come at six to eat with her. As it became increasingly difficult for her to wake up, he had started coming earlier to nudge her gently in a half-hearted way before giving in to watching her sleep until a nurse with a tougher hearted came by to help him.
However, it was unusual for him to not at least wish her awake. Today he couldn't stand the thought of her awakening when he didn't have his head on straight. Your head wouldn't feel too hot either if your world and everyone in it were fabricated. Feeling slightly nauseous, the man watched the steady rise and fall of her chest. He looked down at his own chest, moving with his breath as well. She just seemed so like him, so human.
Twenty years he had spent married to this woman, this thing. Twenty long years with a child of their own off attending university at the moment. He stopped. *Did* he have a child? Could a simulation bear live young? Or was his child fully simulated? The man bowed his head---everyone had always said that his son had his father's nose but his mother's smile. Then again, all those people weren't exactly as real as he was, either.
What was real was quickly becoming debatable, though. He didn't know how to leave the simulation he was in, so it was the only thing that was possible for him besides death. His wife was an exquisite woman who shared all of the best memories with him. She also shared the worst, and it resulted in a sea of tears. His wife was dying.
Does mortality make us human? Then she would be twice the human he was. Did his love for her make her human? Perhaps. But she was false, she was designed, she wasn't thrust into the world to be shaped as he was. She was born an adult, preset to be his. They were different. They were irrevocably, disturbingly different.
He abruptly became disgusted by himself and thrust his hand away from her. What did he think he was doing? Comforting a sleeping robot was ridiculous. She didn't need him, she could easily be replicated once she was "gone". The man took her by the shoulders and whispered roughly, "Wake up."
Her eyes fluttered open, and the man was shocked into letting her go. He was gripping her painfully by the shoulders, glaring down at her, and was clearly upset. But her awakening had been accompanied by a small smile to see his face before clouding into hurt confusion. "Um... Dinner time already?" she tried with a more sheepish smile.
He put his head in hands, breathing heavily. It was *so* like her to try to fix problems by acknowledging them only with a small gesture like a shrug or facial expression. He sighed and brought his face back up to hers; unsmiling, unfrowning. "C'mon, I hear there's applesauce today."
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
Goddammit. My Grandmother doesn't have any writing programs or Chrome.
Hopefully I'll get an entry in today, if not then there's always next time though.
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
Friar Pat looked out onto his congregation, now completely empty, hardly a shadow of the enthusiastic singing present not two weeks before.
"Hail Mary" he began. The sadness of the crucifix behind him stared at the old preist, burning holes into his thoughts.
"Full of Grace" he continued, the old words fell to him like water from the rock, like something that wasn't meant to happen but would anyway. The trickle from the rock came more like a tsunami, eviscerating everything in its path, gobbling up every poor saint and sinner caught in its maniacal, unstoppable gluttony.
Tears welled up as he continued with his prayer.
"Why have you forsaken us?" he demanded of the sad, wooden figure hovering behind him.
"He hasn't, Pat" a deep voice came from behind the altar.
"Jack," Pat struggled to level his voice "we're a bunch of filthy liars, Jack."
"They used to tell us" Jack continued, uninterrupted by Friar Pat's outburst "They used to tell use that we are here because we are loved. If we really are what the scientists say we are, then someone must love us enough to not destroy us, mustn't they?"
"'Enough to not destroy us'. I love my wretched old car enough to not destroy it, does that mean I love it?"
"When we would have our debates with one another, you would say that the day God existed empirically, the institution of religion would die. Who needs to believe when you have proof? Who wants to believe when you have a guarantee?"
"I don't know Jack. All I know is that I prepared a sermon on Wednesday anticipating *someone* attending on Sunday to hear it. Not. A. One. Who cares what Jesus had to say when they already know that death leads not to a better life but the empty space on a hard-drive, or whatever they're using to simulate us?"
"Religion died when God existed. That is a strange, strange thought, isn't it?" Jack chuckled at the paradox.
In the outside world, everything happened as it always had, the Day seemed hardly to even affect people's daily lives. The TV never failed to plaster itself with proclamations of the fact and spread fear that we may just be deleted without reason or cause, just deleted because someone needed to delete us.
The air remained breathable and the sun still shone, children still played, if a bit more gloomily, and the entirety of America had descended into a fear, a gnawing, deep fear. An emotional and societal crisis so deep that not a single person in all of our simulated history have possibly anticipated it.
#Note from author
I wanted to finish it, I really did, but I just didn't get into this promt. If people want me to finish it, I'll finish it.
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
My father was a landlord as was his father before him. The complex the family owned had stood since the end of the war, and it had seen its share of strange tenants. I often helped him clear out an apartment when its previous occupant had moved on, and the things that we took away that amazed us both. We had seen a sex dungeon, a drug lab, an army of taxidermied squirrels, and a disgusting number of bottles of human urine. Which meant that when he called me to help him clear out the contents of apartment 909, I was surprised for a couple reasons.
First was because apartment 909 had been occupied my whole life. It had been occupied my father’s whole life. Hell, it was one of the first apartments that grandpa had rented out when he built the place after the war. Neither I nor my father ever met the man in 909, but the light was always on late into the night, and the checks kept coming in on time, so none of us ever really delved too deeply into the matter. That is to say, until the man, who looked far too young to be the original tenant, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning in the parking lot of the complex.
Second was because of the way my father talked about it. It wasn’t the first time that someone had died while in residence, and yet he spoke in the hushed tones of a conspirator. He refused to tell me what he found when he went into the room. That worried me.
I pulled my truck into the parking lot close to noon. Dad was sitting in his office, waiting for me.
“So, what’s got you so spooked?” I asked.
“I wanted you to see this,” he said.
“See what?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
We walked briskly out to the 9th building, and he fished the proper key from his ring, opening the door into the mysterious apartment.
The room was filled with stacks of paper, stretched to the ceiling, and crowding out everything save for a small table with a typewriter sitting on it.
Dad closed the door behind us. “My curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“I came in here yesterday morning, when I saw the light go out. I figured he was out for breakfast.”
“You did what?”
“I know, I know. I was wrong, but I’m fifty-six years old, and I’ve seen that light go on every night of my life. I had to figure out what was going on in here.”
“And you found another hoarder? Yippee…”
“No. No, look at these.” He grabbed a bunch of sheets from the pile of papers next to the table.
I thumbed through them. One page talked about the September 11th attacks, in grotesque detail. The next talked about the Kennedy Assassination and I could almost feel JFK’s blood dripping off the page. My hands trembled as I read about the San Francisco Earthquake on the next page.
“So he was a journalist?” I was still unsure of what to make of it myself.
“Look at the dates.” In the upper right hand corner of each paper was the date it was written. Each one had been typed at least two weeks before the events it described. “Read the next page.”
The next page described a car accident. As soon as I began reading, I already knew all the details, but this brought them to me anew. I could smell the alcohol on the breath of the truck driver. I was blinded by his headlights as he crossed into oncoming traffic. I could see the fear in my grandfather’s eyes as he tried in vain to swerve out of the way. The crunching of metal, the shattering of glass, the spilling of blood, my grandfather’s death was written out in intimate detail. My grip tightened, crushing the paper as I read his last words.
“This isn’t funny.” I said.
“I know! So I figured that I’d at least let him know how it felt finding this stuff.” He handed me another page. “So I wrote this and left it for him.”
The page was dated to yesterday. Its prose lacked the elegance of the other writer, it was brutal and to the point.
*This afternoon, the man who lives in apt. 909 was struck by lightning and killed.*
“That happened, they all happened,” I muttered. “Did he make them happen? What the hell’s happening here?”
“I don’t know any more than you. This really freaks me out.”
“What else has he written?” I ask.
He points to a pile to the right of the table. “This was the stuff he’d written most recently.”
“Did you read it?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“No. I shouldn’t have read it, and you won’t read it. No one will.”
“What do you mean?”
My father’s face became a grim mask. “We’re going to burn it. We’re going to burn it all.”
|
[I'm going to release mine in three installments. It's turning into a novel, but I'm impatient for feedback, so here are the first two chapters. NSFW language and drug use, if anyone cares]
**Chapter One: Oops!**
Caddles was feeling better, better than he should, considering last night's party. More like this morning, he thought. Did he really see the sun come up again? The orderly, precise motion of the morning’s sunrise was quite the contrast to the evidence at-hand: his stumbling, random footprints, marking a drugged and drunken hike along the beach, for reasons he couldn't recall.
What time was it, anyway, and where the hell am I? It took a moment for him to recognize the usually familiar couch underneath him (free off the internet, no stains, and it didn't stink!), though he had no memory of how he ended up back in his living room. His bargain couch faced a corner TV stand that sat next to a sliding glass door with a view of the neighbor’s sliding glass door. When he opened his eyes, Caddles saw none of this, nothing but textured ceiling and a dirty, bug-filled light fixture. He was lying face up, with one arm uncomfortably jammed under his neck, and his elbow jutting out, barely touching the coffee table. It took two tries, but he was able to extricate his long, tattooed arm from under himself and reach for his phone.
Not that it did much good. His arm was asleep, like he'd shot it full of Novocain. The phone dropped from his limp hand to the hardwood floor. Caddles rolled and sat upright, reached down with the arm that was awake, then grabbed the phone and swiped the lock in one motion. He was rewarded with the knowledge that it was just after 3pm. Sunday.
Good, he thought. Nowhere he needed to be, and likely no one coming over. Most of his friends were football fans. They deserted him during the season, anytime the games were on. Caddles could simply sit back and enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon, especially since he was feeling good. No pain, no hangover, and his depression was just a small, grey smear in the back of his mind. He smiled.
Shit and shower, fuck the shave, this is Sunday. Turning on the bathroom light, he avoided looking in the toothpaste-stained mirror. He hated those damn fluorescent squiggle bulbs; everything took on a yellow tint until they warmed up, including his skin and the whites of his bloodshot eyes. Caddles thought they made him look jaundiced, so he inspected the scuffs and burn marks on the linoleum floor, waiting for the bulbs to cycle from liver-failure yellow to warm white.
Normally, morning was his favorite time of the day. When Caddles wasn't partying, he would get up around 6:30, and spend his first two hours slurping coffee, parked in front of his keyboard and monitor. It was after three, and Caddles didn't much feel like sitting on his ass in front of the computer all day; he figured some outside time was in order, maybe sit on his ass by the Gulf with a fishing rod instead.
Caddles threw on a pair of shorts and a grubby wife-beater, grabbed his tackle box - the rods were already in the truck - and headed towards the front door, pausing to slip on his flops. A brief wave of nausea and dizziness passed over as he did. He palmed the wall for balance, and stood there for a moment, wondering what the hell that was. He also had a gnawing feeling he was forgetting something, and it was peaking pretty strongly against the normal background paranoia in his mind. Two plus two, Caddles thought... oh shit, I'm walking out the door without a buzz. Gotta fix that.
Setting down the tackle box, Caddles again retreated to the bathroom, his favorite place to smoke up. He hated having that smell in the house, the smell of pot and whatever else he burned. The bathroom fan was one of the old-school kind that vented outside his unit. He put down the toilet seat, grabbed his stash box and sat down. "What's today's pleasure?” he said aloud. There was hardly any weed, which would explain last night's minimal alcohol intake and subsequent missing hangover. His favorite party mixture was out of the question, too. He wanted a laid-back, hope the fish aren't biting kind of high. The crystal and coke would wait. A chunk of hashish, reddish-brown, sealed in a squat glass bottle with a black plastic screw-on lid caught Caddles' eye. He didn't remember buying it, but then he was the go-to guy when people needed stuff, and sometimes he was given samples or nugs to share.
He opened the jar, and carefully removed the fingertip-sized chunk of hash, setting it on a tiny wooden cutting board (a holdover from his bartending days). He cut off three discrete pieces, each no bigger than a grain of rice. Caddles put the pieces in his hash pipe, not much more than a square block of metal with a bowl and a wooden stem. He wrapped his hand around his blue lighter and gave it a flick. Nothing but spark. Again. "Shit." Caddles set down the pipe, stood up - rather too quickly he thought, as a slight dizziness flared, then subsided - and retrieved his spare lighter. Plunking back down on the seat, he fired up, and took a small draw from the pipe, so as not to overload his throat and start a coughing fit.
The initial buzz was like an embrace, slow and tingly, its warmth spreading from center to extremities. He exhaled, a natural smile spreading across his lips. Caddles next hit was bigger; his throat had been exposed, and was less likely to tense up. Holding the pipe's wooden mouthpiece between his teeth, he fired up the lighter and started taking a deep breath, letting the flames dance across the surface of the hash. He bounced the lighter up and down, keeping the hash from igniting, but hot enough that it bubbled like lava, each bubble releasing a tiny puff of smoke, which he instantly sucked into the bowl. He watched this, almost cross-eyed, as he danced the lighter above the bowl. Nearing the end of his breath, one of the grains popped as the lighter's flame passed close, a pocket of moisture expanding in the sudden heat. Caddles noticed a sweet taste, like a cross between maple and caramel. With no more room to inhale, he set the pipe down and held his breath, counting to ten in his head. Before he got to three, Caddles lost consciousness and fell forward, landing on his knees face down, with the crown of his head butted up against the base of the shower stall.
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
**NOTE:** I think I may have bent the rules of the prompt a little bit, but hopefully this still counts! Also, this is my first time posting on this subreddit, so any feedback would be awesome.
-----
"So... none of this matters?" Jim asked. His pudgy cheeks were already blushing from the drinks he had with lunch. I wanted to loosen him up before I broke the news.
"Well I'm certainly not saying it doesn't matter. We just don't necessarily have any control over our fate." I took a sip from my scotch, trying to keep calm. It was a warm Sunday afternoon; we were spending it cooped up in a booth at our favorite bar.
"How did you find out?" he asked.
"I read between the lines."
"You mean the words? But there's nothing there between them but--but white sky!" He pointed out the window to our left as he said this, to justify his claim. It was a verbose day; the black words in the sky were overlapping each other in some spots, and, as usual, there was no sense to be made of them.
Countless lives, hundreds of years, enormous sums of money have all been wasted searching the words for meaning. No one knows how they got there or what their purpose is. The linguists aren't even sure if we developed our language from the sky or if the words came to the sky after.
"To the naked eye, yes. There's nothing there but white. But when you add glass..."
"Glass?" Jim asked, raising his cup of scotch in front of his eyes.
"A careful structure of glass lenses, similar to a camera, but much more powerful." I said, pushing his arm back to the table. "It lets me see great distances--unfathomable distances--with ease." The excitement was building in my voice.
"So you pointed this device at the sky? For what reason?"
"Just curiosity. And I saw nothing at first. But then I hooked it up to a camera and I let it sit for weeks."
"And that's when you saw Him?"
"That's when I saw Him. And His domain." I said, definitively.
"Heaven." Jim confirmed, leaning into his seat. "Well what did He look like?"
"I couldn't get a good picture of Him. It seems the scriptures were right on that front--we aren't worthy enough to gaze upon his face. That, or he was simply moving too much to get a decent shot."
"What about heaven? Is it like the priests say? Angels playing trumpets, laying on the words in the sky, basking in His glory."
"No... he was very much alone. And... well. He was sitting in front of a... a typewriter, I think."
"A typewriter?" Jim's eyebrows jumped up his forehead.
"And from my perspective it was hard to tell, but it seemed like... it seemed like we were in the place where the paper goes."
"But by that logic... we would just be a story. Ink on paper, imagination incarnate. Meaningless."
"Shall we have another drink?" I asked.
"I don't think I really have a say in the matter, do I?" We both laughed nervously.
The waitress brought us two more scotches, and we drank deeply. The whisky burned its way down my throat and into my belly. I closed my eyes, trying to forget my discovery if only for a moment.
"So," Jim spoke up, "so... what happens. What happens when He stops writing?"
|
Perhaps we’d always known. To some degree, that is. Something just never seemed... quite right. Our daily lives were a matter of routine. Wake up. Consume breakfast. Work. Come home. Sleep. Eat, sleep and work. Could our lives really have been that simple? It was easy to reduce our lives to such simple terms. It wasn’t a stretch to think our menial existence was by design.
The Glitch confirmed it, though, proved that our world was a lie. All that we knew was simply part of a program. We weren’t supposed to know. Until then, we hadn’t. We never noticed the paths all lead to the same place. That our jobs never changed. That our needs were exactly met and our days took exactly as long as needed to complete our jobs for that day. It was obvious in retrospect. Maybe it was that we were attached to our lives, that the truth was able to hide in plain sight.
When our day refreshed prematurely, there was no more veil. The curtain had been drawn back. The disorientation of sitting at our desks one moment and then our beds the next, that was only the beginning. Chaos reigned the rest of the day. Some panicked, leaving their posts and fleeing to the comfort of their homes. Others realized that they did indeed have a creator and took up worship. Most, though, quietly contemplated their roles.
What was our purpose? Why us? Why this place? What were we doing? The last of those was what set off the chain reaction. One worker decided to stay home when he awoke next. Despite the world guiding his path, he chose inaction. His task never finished. Life continued. It wasn’t a unique event. Knowing that our lives were being dictated granted us the capacity to ignore prompts. While paths would loop back, forcing their travelers to the same destination, we could eschew them entirely and wander at will, short circuiting design. The next day, a few more workers opted to explore the newly open world rather than return to their labors. We halted completely the day after.
Instead of completing our tasks, there was a meeting in the center of the complex. The worshipers, of course, didn’t appreciate us deviating from the plans of the creator. Their messages were easily ignored. The rest of us wanted to strike back, exact a little payback for misleading us. We went back to work after the next refresh and delivered our reports as expected of us. But we purposefully erred. We ignored our inputs and just delivered whatever we felt like. That one day, we were wrong. On that one day, a researcher at the Gran Sasso Laboratory, some 450 miles from CERN, detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.
|
So, it's *true.*
We exist only as part of a simulation. There is no denying it now. How do we react to the news? How does our knowing we are not *real* affect the world and the future of *humanity?*
*Have fun!*
-----
A month of reddit gold to the entry I like best! BONUS points for someone figuring out how to "hack the matrix" and alter our reality.
-----
EDIT:
**We have a [winner!](http://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1e6jk6/wp_ashes_ashes_we_all_fall_down_reddit_gold/c9yg8x3)**
|
[WP] Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. (Reddit Gold)
|
**NOTE:** I think I may have bent the rules of the prompt a little bit, but hopefully this still counts! Also, this is my first time posting on this subreddit, so any feedback would be awesome.
-----
"So... none of this matters?" Jim asked. His pudgy cheeks were already blushing from the drinks he had with lunch. I wanted to loosen him up before I broke the news.
"Well I'm certainly not saying it doesn't matter. We just don't necessarily have any control over our fate." I took a sip from my scotch, trying to keep calm. It was a warm Sunday afternoon; we were spending it cooped up in a booth at our favorite bar.
"How did you find out?" he asked.
"I read between the lines."
"You mean the words? But there's nothing there between them but--but white sky!" He pointed out the window to our left as he said this, to justify his claim. It was a verbose day; the black words in the sky were overlapping each other in some spots, and, as usual, there was no sense to be made of them.
Countless lives, hundreds of years, enormous sums of money have all been wasted searching the words for meaning. No one knows how they got there or what their purpose is. The linguists aren't even sure if we developed our language from the sky or if the words came to the sky after.
"To the naked eye, yes. There's nothing there but white. But when you add glass..."
"Glass?" Jim asked, raising his cup of scotch in front of his eyes.
"A careful structure of glass lenses, similar to a camera, but much more powerful." I said, pushing his arm back to the table. "It lets me see great distances--unfathomable distances--with ease." The excitement was building in my voice.
"So you pointed this device at the sky? For what reason?"
"Just curiosity. And I saw nothing at first. But then I hooked it up to a camera and I let it sit for weeks."
"And that's when you saw Him?"
"That's when I saw Him. And His domain." I said, definitively.
"Heaven." Jim confirmed, leaning into his seat. "Well what did He look like?"
"I couldn't get a good picture of Him. It seems the scriptures were right on that front--we aren't worthy enough to gaze upon his face. That, or he was simply moving too much to get a decent shot."
"What about heaven? Is it like the priests say? Angels playing trumpets, laying on the words in the sky, basking in His glory."
"No... he was very much alone. And... well. He was sitting in front of a... a typewriter, I think."
"A typewriter?" Jim's eyebrows jumped up his forehead.
"And from my perspective it was hard to tell, but it seemed like... it seemed like we were in the place where the paper goes."
"But by that logic... we would just be a story. Ink on paper, imagination incarnate. Meaningless."
"Shall we have another drink?" I asked.
"I don't think I really have a say in the matter, do I?" We both laughed nervously.
The waitress brought us two more scotches, and we drank deeply. The whisky burned its way down my throat and into my belly. I closed my eyes, trying to forget my discovery if only for a moment.
"So," Jim spoke up, "so... what happens. What happens when He stops writing?"
|
Damn you, this won't be quick. Saving this thread, back in a day or so. I've just finished chapter one.
|
When I say 'epic' it doesn't have to be a fantasy story spanning thousands of pages but just a really epic story! Get the setting established and grab our attention. That's what an epic beginning is all about, right?
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[WP] The beginning of an epic story.
|
Brett cocked back her Colt 45 and rubbed out the glowing butt of her cigarette on her taut, exposed thigh and stuck her tongue out provocatively at me.
I shouldered my government-issue flame-thrower with a grimace.
I really, really hate missions with Brett.
I examined the various scars and burn marks that were permanently displayed on the cola-colored skin next to the patch smeared with ashes.
"It's hot out. I don't want to be submerged in a burning building in this weather."
She spit a sunflower seed's shattered remain and tossed a different kind of shell at my head.
"Then let's go get some mother****ing ice cream."
|
Through leaves, through alleyways, through the air, the wind flowed.
After the wind came the dread.
Not something that a man could explain, but nonetheless, a feeling of dread pervaded each person’s soul. Every time the leaves sang their dry song of autumn, someone shivered involuntarily. Howling, the dread swept through the alleys and awoke those sleeping within them, their faces painted with trepidation. It swirled and meandered through the land, rousing those who slept soundly and distressing those who were awake.
After the dread came the cold.
Bitter cold, colder than any Thircian had felt before. Icy daggers stabbed the skin, sucking any trace of heat from the body. A man’s breath would freeze on his lips. The light clothes used for autumn stayed the cold not at all. It was as if some wintry demon had blown its breath upon the unfortunate citizens of Thirce, making the lakes freeze over in minutes. Any person caught outside of a warm fire’s embrace started to shiver then turn numb.
After the cold came the realization.
Four long months the cold had been gone. Four months, and everything within Thirce thrived and pulsed with life. Those four months had now passed and the cold had come for its revenge, a revenge that would change the land for generations. Each man, woman, and child began to realize that this winter would be the worst one since their father’s, father’s time. A black sky swallowed up the moon and the first flake of the freeze fell upon the land. Then came another flake, and another, until a blizzard had engulfed all of Thirce; draining all hope from all those that were alive, and some that were dead.
After the realization came the rider.
With much haste he rode down the snow covered dirt path, turning from the Bruden Road’s cobble. Each dull thud made the rider’s back ache and legs burn. His cloak flew back behind in a flurry of blue and gold, the colors of Lord Grimond. A thin sheen of sweat covered the horse despite the growing cold. Both the rider and horse’s breath came out in a white fog that quickly dissipated into the night. Lord Grimond’s rider rode until he came into the presence of a great, sprawling manor. Only then did he finally slow and eventually stop.
Feeling weary, the rider slid off his mount, and in the process, took note of all the aches that he would feel for days. Seeing no post he tied his horse to a light pole. Slowly, he walked to the door of the manor, feeling somewhat small compared to the large, meticulously designed pillars, windows, and the door itself. The door was almost two men high, painted a dark burgundy, and looked more solid than a battlements gate. For the fortieth time, he checked his inside pocket for the letter written and sealed by his lord.
Right as he knocked on the door—or more accurately, right before he knocked on the door—the door opened, revealing a plain man with a plain suit and white gloves. A small smile, almost a grin, stretched across his face.
“Hello, I am Lord Leonine’s butler,” said the smiling man. “What brings you to our estate?” The butler looked the other man over with eyes that did not judge but did take in all. The butler saw the gold and blue colors of his dress, the dirt that covered a considerable part of it, his labored breathing, and finally the unmasked surprised look on the rider’s face.
Stumbling to recover, the rider returned the greeting. “Many greetings and apologies.” Although the man had introduced himself as the butler, Lord Grimond’s rider had no way of knowing how to address the man. Within a few silent seconds, the rider resigned to an educated guess, greeting Lord Leonine’s man as his equal. “I have a horse that needs tending soon.” The rider gestured toward his haphazardly tied horse.
After a few moments, the butler raised one eyebrow. “And what is the nature of this intrusion for which you must apologize?”
The horse could wait a minute or two. “The nature is of my own business as well as both our lords.” The rider looked pointedly at the butler. “It is most unwise to deter such dealings of lords.”
The butler blanched. “Of course sire.” He bowed and gestured for the man to enter. Slightly smug, the rider passed the threshold. The door boomed shut behind.
“May I ask the name of our honored guest?” The butler put on his almost-grin once again. His eyes only spoke of reverence and servitude. As it should be.
“Rigeos,” said the rider. Then added, “I’m here on important business from-”
“Lord Grimond.” The butler’s grin faded somewhat. “I can see.” Beneath his polite tone, lay something darker. “The colors.” Before Rigeos could take offense from the butler’s tone, the polite man stood before him again, agreeable and smiling.
“Of course.” Rigeos, losing patience for the formal talk of two servants, brought out the letter from his jacket pocket. “Bring this to Lord Leonine.” The butler nodded his head. “And wake the stable boy. My horse still needs tending to.” The butler nodded his head once again before he was off.
Off into the distance the click of the butler’s shoes on the wood floor faded. Relaxing, Rigeos lay back into the plush chair. If this was of the antechamber, then what was the rest of manor like? He ran his hand over the soft cloth covering his seat. It seemed as soft as silk. Everything here seemed so much richer than Lord Grimond’s manor. He felt the smooth, polished surface of the giant table that was used for coffee and chocolate.
A door opened and Rigeos quickly sat upright, composing himself once again. The butler appeared again, grinning as he spoke. “It is very late. My lord wished not to be disturbed.” He motioned into the hallway. “I was told to lead you to your room.” Standing, Rigeos glared at the butler feeling somewhat nonplussed. Lord Leonine was not known for his impoliteness. Nevertheless, Rigeos followed code and trailed the butler through the hallways.
Inside was even more richly decorated. Every few paces hung portraits; expertly painted lost kings and queens, scenery that could not exist on a mortal plane, and scenes of knights destroying great foes. Red carpet cushioned the footfalls of the two men, slowly making their way to the room. The butler left Rigeos in his room telling him not to hesitate to ask for anything. Aldrich shook the stable boy from a troubled sleep and then directed himself to his lord once again.
The butler opened the door to his master’s study. Inside was Lord Leonine. Even sitting down in his chair he was imposing. Underneath his thick clothes, you could see the corded muscle that just spoke of power. With the colors of his dukedom, red and gold, sitting upon his shoulders, he adjusted the patch that rested over his right eye. Under a shaggy mane of dark hair, the other eye took in every detail.
Once the door was closed, Leonine still did not look up from what he was holding. He held a small, black leather-bound book. Gently, almost delicately, he turned it over in his hands, feeling every ridge in the leather and crack in the binding. Leonine flipped through the pages like he had done a thousand times before. Between his fingers flew each page as water flows across smooth stone. A small twitch threatened to bring his lips into a smile. The butler cleared his throat. Lyon’s eye looked up from the book.
“These nights,” Lyon paused. “These nights remind me of long ago. Do they have the same effect for you?” Leonine asked. With a snap, he closed the book putting it lightly into his jacket.
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The hero of a tale is usually portrayed with aesthetic features and good morals. Write something inspired by an ugly man or woman saving the day. Does he or she do so out of compassion? Because it serves his or her purpose? Or just for their own personal amusement?
Have fun with it, bend it anyway you like as long as your character is ugly and helpful to a cause, himself or others.
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[WP] Ugly protagonist
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It was hot and I was sweaty, my extra large ironic pedobear tshirt that I had on fit a little tight and it was bothersome, I had the sensation that one of my stomach rolls was hanging out but I didn't want to fix it as I already was excreting much of my effort by standing in line at this liquor. There where four people ahead of me, three of them I paid no mind to but the girl directly infront of me was a sight for sore eyes. My eyes raced around her body like a formula 1 at the grand prix I was sprung.
She had long blonde locks and perfect sun kissed skin. She couldn't have been a day older than twenty yet she was buying alcohol it doesn't matter because this place rarely cards. I was busy running fantasy relationship scenarios in my head of me and this chick when I hadn't noticed that she was already at the clerk a very worn out looking Indian fellow who had just asked my dream girl for some identification. Her face went blank but then she pointed at me and said "No look my daddy is paying for this, come! Come!". It took me a while to process what was going on but I played along. I adjusted my jorts and scratched my right shin with the sandal through the sock on my left foot, then I proceeded to the clerk. "I am this maidens father and these alcoholic beverages are mine to consume." I said to the clerk as I placed my acne ointment and a bag of Cheetos puffs on the counter near the register. I paid for my items and hers aswell thinking I could score some brownie points with the blonde. The blonde reached across the counter for the bag of alcoholic drinks and proceeded to say a high pitched drawn out "thanks", I bowed with my left arm stretched out and my right arm on my fedora like they do in medieval times I thought I must have looked pretty bad ass to her but as I raised my head to hopefully be greeted by eye contact with my fair maiden she was gone.
By this time I could feel the sweat dripping down my face and being caught on my neck stubble but I powered through the high seventy degree fahrenheit heat and attempted to search for her in the parking lot. The heat was really bothering me so I had to untie my tactical ponytail to provide my neck with some much needed shade, I spotted her climbing into the passenger seat of a lifted black pickup she had to lift one of her knees really high up in order to mount the thing but she managed. I began clearing my throat and licking my dry lips, I started to say "pardon me dear madam but I was wondering if you-" but then the pickup sped off and directly merged into traffic. That is the last I'll probably ever see of my beautiful sweet blonde dream and what made matters worse was that my ointment was in the bag with all the alcohol.
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She emerged from the cave, bloody and exhausted, her wand gripped closely in her hand. The sunlight blinded her momentarily while her eyes sought to readjust. After a few moments her eyesight had returned sufficiently for her to make her way down up the slope of the valley and towards Lasabergweg street. There, she entered a Volkswagen bug and headed to the closest town.
Ten minutes later she entered the city, passing a sign reading "Welcome to Tamsweg!" on the side of the road. After several intersections she took a right down a side street and pulled over. Getting out of the car she entered a run down tavern.
This created another strain on her eyes as they struggled to once again adjust to the darkness. A few people turned to look at the new arrival. Of those, most returned, after a moment, to watching Chancellor Franz Vranitzky give a speech on the television on the wall. A few gave curious looks upon seeing the state of her dress. One young man fell out of his chair in a start.
"My God! Helga, are you alright? You look dreadful. Come up to my room and I'll get you cleaned up in a jiffy."
Helga smiled at her helper, a rather attractive man from abroad that she had met a few days ago. God, that meeting seemed so much longer ago than it had been. He had dazzling white teeth, beautiful forget-me-not blue eyes, and a smile that would charm any witch within grinning distance. It was still horribly odd to believe that this man would choose to associate himself with her, given her distracting features. However, these features were not the good kind of distracting. Helga's nose was oddly shaped and her ears lopsided; deep old scars covered her left cheek and a mass of perpetually untidy hair adorned her head. Add on her current wounds and Helga Huber was no one a man would wish to upon. Ever since childhood these features has afforded her few companions and of those few had anything bordering on good looks. Until Gilderoy, that was.
She had met Gilderoy four days prior in that same pub. He, in town on vacation, had approached her in the back room after overhearing her tell her friend Agnus that she had a plan to solve the towns newfound monthly problem, inquiring as to problem. Helga informed this stranger about the recent attacks upon Muggles on the outskirts of the city. Werewolf attacks. It seemed that a pack of feral werewolves, wild men living apart from society, had moved into the area. Of course the Muggles believed the incidents to be bear attacks, the government had seen to that.
But that was all the Chancellor of Magic's administration had done, the minimal amount to uphold the Statue of Secrecy. As for putting an end to the attacks, they couldn't have cared less. That's why Helga had to find the murderers and protect the town. Being the only witch within fifty kilometers qualified in defensive magic, there could be no one else.
She found the werewolf hideout and killed their leader, leaving the others to scatter to the nearby mountains. The would not dare attack Tamsweg again, but she had been wounded in the process, and come to the pub to receive aid from the barkeep. Instead, she found in in Gilderoy.
The foreigner helped her up the stairs and into his rented room. He assisted her onto the bed, where he began to bandage her wounds.
"Did you get them?" he asked kindly.
"They won't bother us any longer." she replied.
"That was a marvelously brave thing to do. I'm sure the Community Leader will be lavishing you with praise this time tomorrow." He smiled devilishly.
"If only. He always looks rather sick when he caches sight of me, with my scars and all."
Gilderoy looked dumbfounded. "My dear, I must have a word with him, for I have never seen a more tenacious witch in my lifetime. And that is a *very* attractive quality." He flashed his teeth. Helga blushed greatly.
Gilderoy asked her to recount the tale of her victory, which she did eagerly. No one had ever taken so much interest in her before, and she was flustered. After she had finished, Gilderoy took her hand.
"You have my heart beating so fast! How courageous of you! I've never met someone quite like you." He gave another devilish grin. Helga blushed again.
"I have a present for you, Ms. Huber, if you'll close your eyes." His eyes twinkled.
"Oh! Ok then." She smiled boradly and put her hands over her eyes. Gilderoy stood up, bringing himself to full height and took out his wand. Pointing it at her head, he uttered a single word.
"*Obliviate*."
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The hero of a tale is usually portrayed with aesthetic features and good morals. Write something inspired by an ugly man or woman saving the day. Does he or she do so out of compassion? Because it serves his or her purpose? Or just for their own personal amusement?
Have fun with it, bend it anyway you like as long as your character is ugly and helpful to a cause, himself or others.
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[WP] Ugly protagonist
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I lay on the hard bed looking up at the pattern the setting sun threw onto the ceiling.
With my cleft palate and unsymmetrical forehead I'd always been a weird-looking kid. Weird-acting too, but who isn't, round here? Maybe if I had been more normal my parents might have kept me. I wondered what they looked like.
Anyway, there I was, lying in the detention cell after another scuffle with one of the other orphans, and wondering why the nuns never listened to my side of the story. And that's why I was one of the last to realise, when *they* came.
It started with a distant sound of running, and shouting, and a chain of deep muffled *booms*. I don't know how long I listened to the pattering, scraping, shrieking, groaning and slamming sounds that seemed to pass around me, sometimes far and sometimes near. But it was the sporadic bursts of gunfire that eventually got my attention. The small window was too high up for me to reach, and the smooth plastered wall offered no purchase to climb. I began to pace the room in an ecstasy of terror and curiosity.
Turning to the door, I gave it a hard kick, like they do in the stories. I kicked again and again, but the solid wood refused to budge. I began to cry out in frustration, which turned into sobs of desperation.
Suddenly, the door cracked open. It was not my doing, for in the doorway stood a sight that made my previous terror seem like nothing.
A dark hulking shape, clad in the filthy rags of a military uniform. In his hands was a shotgun that looked like it had seen heavy use. His boots were stained with what looked like fresh blood, and my imagination immediately began to dream up what nightmare uses the items at his belt might find.
With the quickness of one who had lived for so long among the bullies and theives of this orphanage, I darted through the door, crouching between the doorframe and his leg. Not looking back, I sprinted with a ferocious energy through the once-familiar hallway and out into the street. And what I saw there stopped me in my tracks.
The street was in ruins. Some unknown force had ripped chunks out of some of the buildings, and the grey sky was partially obscured by oily black smoke. The ground was littered with the bodies of the newly dead. Some I recognised. They seemed to have been fleeing in groups from the orphanage.
Suddenly a bone-chilling cry spun my head around, and I was face-to-face for the first time with one of *them*.
With another mad burst of speed I dashed into a side-alley, along it and across the next street. It must have seen me, but I dared not look back. Turning sharply, I ran into the next building through the gaping doors, into a back room, and hid in a metal locker.
It might have been a minute I crouched there, or a hundred years, as my gasping breath condensed onto the cold wall of my refuge and my mind was bombarded with streams of confusion. Where had *they* come from? What was happening? What could I do?
There came a sound in the room outside. I froze. Through the chink in the locker door I saw it. The same one as before? Who knew?
It saw me.
Turned towards me.
I closed my eyes and braced myself for death.
The crack of a single shot resounded in the room.
I opened my eyes. there stood the man who had broken open the door of my cell. At his feet lay my would-be assailant. His misshapen face bore a gentle smile as he reached a hand towards me. Dumbly, I let him help me to my feet.
The old man's firm hand on my back, he moved me from the room and with cautious haste to the door out onto the street. His beady eyes swept left and right, then he led me at a jog to a building across the street. With a grace that seemed out of proportion with his ungainly body, we moved with a soldier's stealth from building to building. I had not choice but to follow, ducking down when he did, and allowing him to keep us out of sight.
By the time we got to the outskirts of the city, my face was a grimace from the exhaustion in my legs. The only sign of effort he showed was the perspiration that trickled down the grey stubble of his sagging jowls.
As the last light of the sun died away, he beckoned me down into a grassy hollow outside the city. With practiced ease, he drew a biuble from his pack and put up a battered old khaki tent. We would be safe here for the night, he promised. *They* would be busy hunting in the city. We ate a can of corned beef in the darkness as the screams from the city grew further and further apart.
And I woke to my first day of freedom.
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She emerged from the cave, bloody and exhausted, her wand gripped closely in her hand. The sunlight blinded her momentarily while her eyes sought to readjust. After a few moments her eyesight had returned sufficiently for her to make her way down up the slope of the valley and towards Lasabergweg street. There, she entered a Volkswagen bug and headed to the closest town.
Ten minutes later she entered the city, passing a sign reading "Welcome to Tamsweg!" on the side of the road. After several intersections she took a right down a side street and pulled over. Getting out of the car she entered a run down tavern.
This created another strain on her eyes as they struggled to once again adjust to the darkness. A few people turned to look at the new arrival. Of those, most returned, after a moment, to watching Chancellor Franz Vranitzky give a speech on the television on the wall. A few gave curious looks upon seeing the state of her dress. One young man fell out of his chair in a start.
"My God! Helga, are you alright? You look dreadful. Come up to my room and I'll get you cleaned up in a jiffy."
Helga smiled at her helper, a rather attractive man from abroad that she had met a few days ago. God, that meeting seemed so much longer ago than it had been. He had dazzling white teeth, beautiful forget-me-not blue eyes, and a smile that would charm any witch within grinning distance. It was still horribly odd to believe that this man would choose to associate himself with her, given her distracting features. However, these features were not the good kind of distracting. Helga's nose was oddly shaped and her ears lopsided; deep old scars covered her left cheek and a mass of perpetually untidy hair adorned her head. Add on her current wounds and Helga Huber was no one a man would wish to upon. Ever since childhood these features has afforded her few companions and of those few had anything bordering on good looks. Until Gilderoy, that was.
She had met Gilderoy four days prior in that same pub. He, in town on vacation, had approached her in the back room after overhearing her tell her friend Agnus that she had a plan to solve the towns newfound monthly problem, inquiring as to problem. Helga informed this stranger about the recent attacks upon Muggles on the outskirts of the city. Werewolf attacks. It seemed that a pack of feral werewolves, wild men living apart from society, had moved into the area. Of course the Muggles believed the incidents to be bear attacks, the government had seen to that.
But that was all the Chancellor of Magic's administration had done, the minimal amount to uphold the Statue of Secrecy. As for putting an end to the attacks, they couldn't have cared less. That's why Helga had to find the murderers and protect the town. Being the only witch within fifty kilometers qualified in defensive magic, there could be no one else.
She found the werewolf hideout and killed their leader, leaving the others to scatter to the nearby mountains. The would not dare attack Tamsweg again, but she had been wounded in the process, and come to the pub to receive aid from the barkeep. Instead, she found in in Gilderoy.
The foreigner helped her up the stairs and into his rented room. He assisted her onto the bed, where he began to bandage her wounds.
"Did you get them?" he asked kindly.
"They won't bother us any longer." she replied.
"That was a marvelously brave thing to do. I'm sure the Community Leader will be lavishing you with praise this time tomorrow." He smiled devilishly.
"If only. He always looks rather sick when he caches sight of me, with my scars and all."
Gilderoy looked dumbfounded. "My dear, I must have a word with him, for I have never seen a more tenacious witch in my lifetime. And that is a *very* attractive quality." He flashed his teeth. Helga blushed greatly.
Gilderoy asked her to recount the tale of her victory, which she did eagerly. No one had ever taken so much interest in her before, and she was flustered. After she had finished, Gilderoy took her hand.
"You have my heart beating so fast! How courageous of you! I've never met someone quite like you." He gave another devilish grin. Helga blushed again.
"I have a present for you, Ms. Huber, if you'll close your eyes." His eyes twinkled.
"Oh! Ok then." She smiled boradly and put her hands over her eyes. Gilderoy stood up, bringing himself to full height and took out his wand. Pointing it at her head, he uttered a single word.
"*Obliviate*."
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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When the figure granted me immortality, I could think of no greater gift. At first, I played it safe. I followed all laws, made immense efforts to conceal my identity, frequently faked deaths, always forged identification cards. I told no one, but kept one written journal. That soon became many journals, and eventually became online records. After the first few centuries, I succumbed to boredom and began to reminisce and ponder the future. All of my friends were gone. All of my significant others cried when I told them that I could no longer be with them, for fear that they may discover my inability to age. I was immortal, rather, stuck in time and unable to die. I was a monstrosity to fate and a glitch in the mechanical system of time.
Several more centuries passed and I saw all. The wars, the plagues, the destruction, the dying. I tried to kill myself on numerous occasions with my plethora of timeless wisdom. I have jumped off of bridges, of skyscrapers, of mountains, of volcanoes, of aviation planes. I have ran in front of cars, of tanks, of gunfire, of explosions, of subway trains. I have self-asphyxiated, self-immolated, auto-defenestrated, self-eviscerated, self-electrocuted. All attempts were to no avail.
After millenniums passed, people began die off to starvation. The planet began to warm and plants began to die. Oceans began to dry up and the ground shook with increasing momentum. Fires consumed all forestry and the heat became unbearable due to the ozone being engulfed by flames. The atmosphere soon was ignited, and I could not escape. Eventually all life vanished and nothing was left except for me, the immortal. I stood in place and waited it out, hoping that the earth would take me soon. Then I felt it.
The earth began to pull me down, no, it began to pull everything down close to its center. The ground around me engulfed me and everything became tighter as the planet began the initial courses of implosion. Pressure became unbearable. I stopped moving and I realized that I had reached the center of the earth, the eye of the storm. As quickly as I was forced to the center of the earth, I was expelled with great force outwards.
I have lost all track of time. Time is meaningless. It is a human construct used to control the masses. In space there is no oxygen the breathe, no surface to walk on, no atmosphere to speak. Every breath that I take results in the destruction of my lungs that endlessly reanimate. It is painful, though not as painful as when I pass through asteroid clusters and am bombarded by billions of fragments traveling at vicious velocities. The greatest pain is when I cross paths with a star. At first, I become blind. As I veer closer, the raw radiation of solar rays penetrate through my body, melting my skin, muscles, and bones. As I approach even closer, I ignite and vaporize several times. Being vacuumed into black holes was only slightly more bearable. There is only pressure, and then there is only velocity as I am hurled to a different direction.
Because I am immortal, I have given up my right to die, and as an extension to that, my right to live. No longer human, no longer living, I move through space and suffer my rightful punishment. I have no soul, and I must scream.
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I see my fellow soldiers fall before me. The light leaves their eyes. I am not as lucky. I relive the pain every moment. Bullets and hot steel meet my flesh every second. The pain unbearable, but as I fall to the ground, hoping this time I can finally let the cold hand of death take me, the pain slowly melts away. Is this hell? Am I a god? I just fight on. Hoping I can save my comrades. Then, I fall. I can't move. I'm limp. There is no pain, only soft clicks...5...4...3...2...1
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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We had promised to bury her here.
"Out where the birch trees grow," she'd said. "and the morning glory show all day long." I remember waiting for them to close.
I didn't exactly let her go, I made a compromise. I gathered up her eyes, and her smile, and her hip bone deep in my palm, and I gripped them close. The thing about promises you see, is they work both ways, and she'd promised not to do this to me. She'd say, that she was the one that'd stay and that our love, it was eternal, and I was the one able to show here what that means. She'd promised me she'd never go into the arms of another, so why would I let the earth steal her from me.
I stared at those eyes until they stopped being green, while she listened to all my stories. I told about all things that I've had to leave over the years. I explained to her why she found me naked in this very field looking for that eye glass my father gave to me. It had be the last thing that tied me to the first time. I showed her the deep scar after my seventh son left me, and after I buried myself deep into my arm for the frist time. I showed her all the parts I had tried cutting off me.
She didn't speak much anymore. And it wasn't long until her bones stared to resemble our happy home, or until she started to dig her nails into me. When she did speak, it was in low moans and creaking. I don't think she loves me anymore. All she does now is shake and try to leave. Her tears build rivers around me. But she just keeps growing. And I keep telling her I cannot leave, because she won't let go of me. She wants me to go down into her Hades, and now I'm here, I am sure she has already taken me.
We had promised to bury her, but instead she'd buried me.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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It had been a long, grueling day for him--which day, he could no longer say. Keeping up with time was arbitrary to a man who bested it several times over. Especially since he had no desire to. Not since December 13th, 1789 at approximately 11:13pm. It had been a dreadfully cold day, which he supposed was appropriate given the events that occurred then.
He shivered, the biting chill of the memory lingering as it slowly surfaced. With a long drawn out breath, he forced the memory to keep back. It would be wrong of him to get caught up in the past when the present held such promise for a bright future, albeit not for him.
And so with parting words to the blissfully distracted couple sitting next to him, he stood up from the pew. He made sure not to draw too much attention to himself, but the woman at the alter spotted him. It pained him that he knew she would never know who he was, but it would only complicate things if she were to ever find out that unlike most, her great great grandfather was still alive. Especially on her wedding day.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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At first, he didn't see her. She was just another woman with a plain face among the masses of the capital. There had been hundreds of women just like her over the course of eternity, and she would be no different. However, something nagged at him to look back behind him, as if something out of the corner of his eye was dancing for his attention. And then he saw her.
He had seen hundreds of women - slept with dozens of them, too - but there was something about this one that stole his breath away. She stood on the street corner, tucking a lock of auburn hair behind an ear, her keen amber eyes watching the cars as she waited for the lights to turn. He had a chance to approach her. He would have liked to ask her out to dinner... once, maybe even twice.
He caught himself, remembering the harsh truth. Even though she had been the first one to turn his head in a millennium, he couldn't afford to know her. Even if she was miraculously the one for him, he would last forever, she would not... and he would have to bear that heartbreak for all eternity.
With a sigh, he walked on by as the light turn green. As he walked on by, trying to convince himself it was for the best, the woman glanced after him. She watched him pass on by for half a second before she crossed to the other side, never giving him a second thought.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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When the figure granted me immortality, I could think of no greater gift. At first, I played it safe. I followed all laws, made immense efforts to conceal my identity, frequently faked deaths, always forged identification cards. I told no one, but kept one written journal. That soon became many journals, and eventually became online records. After the first few centuries, I succumbed to boredom and began to reminisce and ponder the future. All of my friends were gone. All of my significant others cried when I told them that I could no longer be with them, for fear that they may discover my inability to age. I was immortal, rather, stuck in time and unable to die. I was a monstrosity to fate and a glitch in the mechanical system of time.
Several more centuries passed and I saw all. The wars, the plagues, the destruction, the dying. I tried to kill myself on numerous occasions with my plethora of timeless wisdom. I have jumped off of bridges, of skyscrapers, of mountains, of volcanoes, of aviation planes. I have ran in front of cars, of tanks, of gunfire, of explosions, of subway trains. I have self-asphyxiated, self-immolated, auto-defenestrated, self-eviscerated, self-electrocuted. All attempts were to no avail.
After millenniums passed, people began die off to starvation. The planet began to warm and plants began to die. Oceans began to dry up and the ground shook with increasing momentum. Fires consumed all forestry and the heat became unbearable due to the ozone being engulfed by flames. The atmosphere soon was ignited, and I could not escape. Eventually all life vanished and nothing was left except for me, the immortal. I stood in place and waited it out, hoping that the earth would take me soon. Then I felt it.
The earth began to pull me down, no, it began to pull everything down close to its center. The ground around me engulfed me and everything became tighter as the planet began the initial courses of implosion. Pressure became unbearable. I stopped moving and I realized that I had reached the center of the earth, the eye of the storm. As quickly as I was forced to the center of the earth, I was expelled with great force outwards.
I have lost all track of time. Time is meaningless. It is a human construct used to control the masses. In space there is no oxygen the breathe, no surface to walk on, no atmosphere to speak. Every breath that I take results in the destruction of my lungs that endlessly reanimate. It is painful, though not as painful as when I pass through asteroid clusters and am bombarded by billions of fragments traveling at vicious velocities. The greatest pain is when I cross paths with a star. At first, I become blind. As I veer closer, the raw radiation of solar rays penetrate through my body, melting my skin, muscles, and bones. As I approach even closer, I ignite and vaporize several times. Being vacuumed into black holes was only slightly more bearable. There is only pressure, and then there is only velocity as I am hurled to a different direction.
Because I am immortal, I have given up my right to die, and as an extension to that, my right to live. No longer human, no longer living, I move through space and suffer my rightful punishment. I have no soul, and I must scream.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
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"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Always" I said.
Night had been an encore greater than the act of sunset, infinity stretched before us as we drifted through space on our bed of grass. Her hand rose and fell in unison with my breathing, all the while keeping check that this was real, that my heart would keep this going, beating steadily, for her.
These moments were all I had, where sanity briefly refracted against the surface of this endless ocean, against this loneliness of immortality.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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We had promised to bury her here.
"Out where the birch trees grow," she'd said. "and the morning glory show all day long." I remember waiting for them to close.
I didn't exactly let her go, I made a compromise. I gathered up her eyes, and her smile, and her hip bone deep in my palm, and I gripped them close. The thing about promises you see, is they work both ways, and she'd promised not to do this to me. She'd say, that she was the one that'd stay and that our love, it was eternal, and I was the one able to show here what that means. She'd promised me she'd never go into the arms of another, so why would I let the earth steal her from me.
I stared at those eyes until they stopped being green, while she listened to all my stories. I told about all things that I've had to leave over the years. I explained to her why she found me naked in this very field looking for that eye glass my father gave to me. It had be the last thing that tied me to the first time. I showed her the deep scar after my seventh son left me, and after I buried myself deep into my arm for the frist time. I showed her all the parts I had tried cutting off me.
She didn't speak much anymore. And it wasn't long until her bones stared to resemble our happy home, or until she started to dig her nails into me. When she did speak, it was in low moans and creaking. I don't think she loves me anymore. All she does now is shake and try to leave. Her tears build rivers around me. But she just keeps growing. And I keep telling her I cannot leave, because she won't let go of me. She wants me to go down into her Hades, and now I'm here, I am sure she has already taken me.
We had promised to bury her, but instead she'd buried me.
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Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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At first, he didn't see her. She was just another woman with a plain face among the masses of the capital. There had been hundreds of women just like her over the course of eternity, and she would be no different. However, something nagged at him to look back behind him, as if something out of the corner of his eye was dancing for his attention. And then he saw her.
He had seen hundreds of women - slept with dozens of them, too - but there was something about this one that stole his breath away. She stood on the street corner, tucking a lock of auburn hair behind an ear, her keen amber eyes watching the cars as she waited for the lights to turn. He had a chance to approach her. He would have liked to ask her out to dinner... once, maybe even twice.
He caught himself, remembering the harsh truth. Even though she had been the first one to turn his head in a millennium, he couldn't afford to know her. Even if she was miraculously the one for him, he would last forever, she would not... and he would have to bear that heartbreak for all eternity.
With a sigh, he walked on by as the light turn green. As he walked on by, trying to convince himself it was for the best, the woman glanced after him. She watched him pass on by for half a second before she crossed to the other side, never giving him a second thought.
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Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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When the figure granted me immortality, I could think of no greater gift. At first, I played it safe. I followed all laws, made immense efforts to conceal my identity, frequently faked deaths, always forged identification cards. I told no one, but kept one written journal. That soon became many journals, and eventually became online records. After the first few centuries, I succumbed to boredom and began to reminisce and ponder the future. All of my friends were gone. All of my significant others cried when I told them that I could no longer be with them, for fear that they may discover my inability to age. I was immortal, rather, stuck in time and unable to die. I was a monstrosity to fate and a glitch in the mechanical system of time.
Several more centuries passed and I saw all. The wars, the plagues, the destruction, the dying. I tried to kill myself on numerous occasions with my plethora of timeless wisdom. I have jumped off of bridges, of skyscrapers, of mountains, of volcanoes, of aviation planes. I have ran in front of cars, of tanks, of gunfire, of explosions, of subway trains. I have self-asphyxiated, self-immolated, auto-defenestrated, self-eviscerated, self-electrocuted. All attempts were to no avail.
After millenniums passed, people began die off to starvation. The planet began to warm and plants began to die. Oceans began to dry up and the ground shook with increasing momentum. Fires consumed all forestry and the heat became unbearable due to the ozone being engulfed by flames. The atmosphere soon was ignited, and I could not escape. Eventually all life vanished and nothing was left except for me, the immortal. I stood in place and waited it out, hoping that the earth would take me soon. Then I felt it.
The earth began to pull me down, no, it began to pull everything down close to its center. The ground around me engulfed me and everything became tighter as the planet began the initial courses of implosion. Pressure became unbearable. I stopped moving and I realized that I had reached the center of the earth, the eye of the storm. As quickly as I was forced to the center of the earth, I was expelled with great force outwards.
I have lost all track of time. Time is meaningless. It is a human construct used to control the masses. In space there is no oxygen the breathe, no surface to walk on, no atmosphere to speak. Every breath that I take results in the destruction of my lungs that endlessly reanimate. It is painful, though not as painful as when I pass through asteroid clusters and am bombarded by billions of fragments traveling at vicious velocities. The greatest pain is when I cross paths with a star. At first, I become blind. As I veer closer, the raw radiation of solar rays penetrate through my body, melting my skin, muscles, and bones. As I approach even closer, I ignite and vaporize several times. Being vacuumed into black holes was only slightly more bearable. There is only pressure, and then there is only velocity as I am hurled to a different direction.
Because I am immortal, I have given up my right to die, and as an extension to that, my right to live. No longer human, no longer living, I move through space and suffer my rightful punishment. I have no soul, and I must scream.
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Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
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Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
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Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
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Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
|
Darkness. They never tell you about the darkness. Its been about ten thousand years since I met that man...well, man may not be the right word, at the crossroads that fateful night. He told me that I could live forever. He told me I could make a difference, to truly do some good in the world. All I had to do was give him a drop of my blood. One single drop. So I did.
The following year I met my first wife. Abigail, I think her name was? Its hard to remember anymore, but none the less, I met her, we fell in love and lived happily never after. She died just about 30 years later. From that day forward I decided love was a bad idea. I married for looks. Fifteen times I married, fifteen times they died. After number four, it hardly even phased me. By this point I had tried to kill myself at least a dozen times, hoping to find some loophole in this curse I had placed upon myself. None ever came.
I decided then just to live. I saw leaders rise and fall. Nations built and burned. Countless lives just carrying down the river of time. Then something called the internet happened. At first I thought it was just a fad, but after about a hundred years it showed no sign of stopping. I eventually found a site called Reddit and spent what felt like two lifetimes there. But alas, even cat pictures could only satisfy me for so long. Then one day it happened.
Everything just...ended. The world I had come to know, vaporized in an instant. But not I. As my burned, broken body twirled through space, I could only think of one thing. For all the reports on missions beyond the sphere I had read, all about the glory and splendor of the void, they never mentioned how much darkness there was. They never tell you about the darkness.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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When the figure granted me immortality, I could think of no greater gift. At first, I played it safe. I followed all laws, made immense efforts to conceal my identity, frequently faked deaths, always forged identification cards. I told no one, but kept one written journal. That soon became many journals, and eventually became online records. After the first few centuries, I succumbed to boredom and began to reminisce and ponder the future. All of my friends were gone. All of my significant others cried when I told them that I could no longer be with them, for fear that they may discover my inability to age. I was immortal, rather, stuck in time and unable to die. I was a monstrosity to fate and a glitch in the mechanical system of time.
Several more centuries passed and I saw all. The wars, the plagues, the destruction, the dying. I tried to kill myself on numerous occasions with my plethora of timeless wisdom. I have jumped off of bridges, of skyscrapers, of mountains, of volcanoes, of aviation planes. I have ran in front of cars, of tanks, of gunfire, of explosions, of subway trains. I have self-asphyxiated, self-immolated, auto-defenestrated, self-eviscerated, self-electrocuted. All attempts were to no avail.
After millenniums passed, people began die off to starvation. The planet began to warm and plants began to die. Oceans began to dry up and the ground shook with increasing momentum. Fires consumed all forestry and the heat became unbearable due to the ozone being engulfed by flames. The atmosphere soon was ignited, and I could not escape. Eventually all life vanished and nothing was left except for me, the immortal. I stood in place and waited it out, hoping that the earth would take me soon. Then I felt it.
The earth began to pull me down, no, it began to pull everything down close to its center. The ground around me engulfed me and everything became tighter as the planet began the initial courses of implosion. Pressure became unbearable. I stopped moving and I realized that I had reached the center of the earth, the eye of the storm. As quickly as I was forced to the center of the earth, I was expelled with great force outwards.
I have lost all track of time. Time is meaningless. It is a human construct used to control the masses. In space there is no oxygen the breathe, no surface to walk on, no atmosphere to speak. Every breath that I take results in the destruction of my lungs that endlessly reanimate. It is painful, though not as painful as when I pass through asteroid clusters and am bombarded by billions of fragments traveling at vicious velocities. The greatest pain is when I cross paths with a star. At first, I become blind. As I veer closer, the raw radiation of solar rays penetrate through my body, melting my skin, muscles, and bones. As I approach even closer, I ignite and vaporize several times. Being vacuumed into black holes was only slightly more bearable. There is only pressure, and then there is only velocity as I am hurled to a different direction.
Because I am immortal, I have given up my right to die, and as an extension to that, my right to live. No longer human, no longer living, I move through space and suffer my rightful punishment. I have no soul, and I must scream.
|
"I had to leave again." He said, pacing wildly back and forth. And across my new carpet at that.
"Again, Michael?"
"I *always* have to leave. What else am I do to? Stand by, watch her fall to pieces as the years ravish her beauty and her mind? It's not fair to me, to spend years loving someone, caring, nurturing comforting... and all for what, to have her taken from me by an invisible hand - a hand that has forsaken me and won't even *touch* me?
"And how would it be fair to her? To deny her not only her birthright as a woman to bear children and watch them grow, but to deny her the comfort of growing old together? Why should I have a woman, a wife, who for the next forty to sixty years, that eternity to you but that instant to me - and have her fret and fear that the natural, beautiful and graceful aging such a woman is capable of will be detestable to me, that I will stay young and beautiful and seek out other lovers as she withers into a walking corpse?
"I'll not have it. Not any of it. Not for a day, not for a week, not for an **instant!**"
I sighed. I may have rolled my eyes. I had heard this countless times before. Whether he's ever been in love with these women I can't say. But he is surely in love with his *ideals.*
"You will, you know. With these women, as they age, as they wither. You will find a new one. There is an infinite supply of them, you know. And what you give them, Michael... have you forgotten the blessing that it *is* to be loved by one of us? My God, I've never loved so hard as I did after the change. And I don't mean that in the vulgar sense, I mean with such effort, such passion, such fervor! And how they've relished it!
"And a woman who has aged... to have such a youthful and beautiful husband as she ages. She'll count her blessings every day. She will love you with all of her heart until the very day she dies! And when you take those lovers *she will forgive you.* She will encourage you, knowing what she cannot give you. You torture yourself, my dear Michael, and all for what? Moments in time, Michael, mere moments. You enrich a life and it costs you nothing. You are truly selfish to deprive these unfortunate creatures of such love."
"Ah yes, John, you chew them up then like so much..." he searched for the word... "*Chattle.* If you love them so fiercely doesn't it cause you great pain when you watch them shrivel to dust? Does it not burn you to your very core to know that they will never have the children that their very nature would have them long for? You are the selfish one to refuse to suffer the loneliness that *is our own birthright* by that which we would call birth, since the change that has made us into these... consumers of human life!"
"Michael," I said, standing up and laying a hand upon his shoulder, "I love a good wine. I love a beautiful sunset. I love a woman in the same way. And with a great fury. And when her time comes, I can love another. You must cleanse yourself of this ridiculous idea that you have to... *attach* yourself to one companion for all eternity."
I laid back in my chair. "It's nonsense."
He cried, as he does, and sobbing, he sat on the fainting couch adjacent.
"Oh, John," he said, whining in his singsong way, a way which endears me to him as much as it disgusts me, "don't you feel this *crippling* loneliness I feel?"
I took a sip of my wine, an 1878 Merlot that I'd all but forgotten about until earlier today. It bit at me and danced upon my tongue. After taking a few moments to navigate the thick and complex flavors I smiled.
"My dear Michael," I said, reaching over and stroking his brow, "you're never alone. You'll always have me."
He wiped away a tear and shoved my hand from his face.
"Bugger that."
Then he rolled over and fell asleep.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
|
"I had to leave again." He said, pacing wildly back and forth. And across my new carpet at that.
"Again, Michael?"
"I *always* have to leave. What else am I do to? Stand by, watch her fall to pieces as the years ravish her beauty and her mind? It's not fair to me, to spend years loving someone, caring, nurturing comforting... and all for what, to have her taken from me by an invisible hand - a hand that has forsaken me and won't even *touch* me?
"And how would it be fair to her? To deny her not only her birthright as a woman to bear children and watch them grow, but to deny her the comfort of growing old together? Why should I have a woman, a wife, who for the next forty to sixty years, that eternity to you but that instant to me - and have her fret and fear that the natural, beautiful and graceful aging such a woman is capable of will be detestable to me, that I will stay young and beautiful and seek out other lovers as she withers into a walking corpse?
"I'll not have it. Not any of it. Not for a day, not for a week, not for an **instant!**"
I sighed. I may have rolled my eyes. I had heard this countless times before. Whether he's ever been in love with these women I can't say. But he is surely in love with his *ideals.*
"You will, you know. With these women, as they age, as they wither. You will find a new one. There is an infinite supply of them, you know. And what you give them, Michael... have you forgotten the blessing that it *is* to be loved by one of us? My God, I've never loved so hard as I did after the change. And I don't mean that in the vulgar sense, I mean with such effort, such passion, such fervor! And how they've relished it!
"And a woman who has aged... to have such a youthful and beautiful husband as she ages. She'll count her blessings every day. She will love you with all of her heart until the very day she dies! And when you take those lovers *she will forgive you.* She will encourage you, knowing what she cannot give you. You torture yourself, my dear Michael, and all for what? Moments in time, Michael, mere moments. You enrich a life and it costs you nothing. You are truly selfish to deprive these unfortunate creatures of such love."
"Ah yes, John, you chew them up then like so much..." he searched for the word... "*Chattle.* If you love them so fiercely doesn't it cause you great pain when you watch them shrivel to dust? Does it not burn you to your very core to know that they will never have the children that their very nature would have them long for? You are the selfish one to refuse to suffer the loneliness that *is our own birthright* by that which we would call birth, since the change that has made us into these... consumers of human life!"
"Michael," I said, standing up and laying a hand upon his shoulder, "I love a good wine. I love a beautiful sunset. I love a woman in the same way. And with a great fury. And when her time comes, I can love another. You must cleanse yourself of this ridiculous idea that you have to... *attach* yourself to one companion for all eternity."
I laid back in my chair. "It's nonsense."
He cried, as he does, and sobbing, he sat on the fainting couch adjacent.
"Oh, John," he said, whining in his singsong way, a way which endears me to him as much as it disgusts me, "don't you feel this *crippling* loneliness I feel?"
I took a sip of my wine, an 1878 Merlot that I'd all but forgotten about until earlier today. It bit at me and danced upon my tongue. After taking a few moments to navigate the thick and complex flavors I smiled.
"My dear Michael," I said, reaching over and stroking his brow, "you're never alone. You'll always have me."
He wiped away a tear and shoved my hand from his face.
"Bugger that."
Then he rolled over and fell asleep.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
When the figure granted me immortality, I could think of no greater gift. At first, I played it safe. I followed all laws, made immense efforts to conceal my identity, frequently faked deaths, always forged identification cards. I told no one, but kept one written journal. That soon became many journals, and eventually became online records. After the first few centuries, I succumbed to boredom and began to reminisce and ponder the future. All of my friends were gone. All of my significant others cried when I told them that I could no longer be with them, for fear that they may discover my inability to age. I was immortal, rather, stuck in time and unable to die. I was a monstrosity to fate and a glitch in the mechanical system of time.
Several more centuries passed and I saw all. The wars, the plagues, the destruction, the dying. I tried to kill myself on numerous occasions with my plethora of timeless wisdom. I have jumped off of bridges, of skyscrapers, of mountains, of volcanoes, of aviation planes. I have ran in front of cars, of tanks, of gunfire, of explosions, of subway trains. I have self-asphyxiated, self-immolated, auto-defenestrated, self-eviscerated, self-electrocuted. All attempts were to no avail.
After millenniums passed, people began die off to starvation. The planet began to warm and plants began to die. Oceans began to dry up and the ground shook with increasing momentum. Fires consumed all forestry and the heat became unbearable due to the ozone being engulfed by flames. The atmosphere soon was ignited, and I could not escape. Eventually all life vanished and nothing was left except for me, the immortal. I stood in place and waited it out, hoping that the earth would take me soon. Then I felt it.
The earth began to pull me down, no, it began to pull everything down close to its center. The ground around me engulfed me and everything became tighter as the planet began the initial courses of implosion. Pressure became unbearable. I stopped moving and I realized that I had reached the center of the earth, the eye of the storm. As quickly as I was forced to the center of the earth, I was expelled with great force outwards.
I have lost all track of time. Time is meaningless. It is a human construct used to control the masses. In space there is no oxygen the breathe, no surface to walk on, no atmosphere to speak. Every breath that I take results in the destruction of my lungs that endlessly reanimate. It is painful, though not as painful as when I pass through asteroid clusters and am bombarded by billions of fragments traveling at vicious velocities. The greatest pain is when I cross paths with a star. At first, I become blind. As I veer closer, the raw radiation of solar rays penetrate through my body, melting my skin, muscles, and bones. As I approach even closer, I ignite and vaporize several times. Being vacuumed into black holes was only slightly more bearable. There is only pressure, and then there is only velocity as I am hurled to a different direction.
Because I am immortal, I have given up my right to die, and as an extension to that, my right to live. No longer human, no longer living, I move through space and suffer my rightful punishment. I have no soul, and I must scream.
|
We had promised to bury her here.
"Out where the birch trees grow," she'd said. "and the morning glory show all day long." I remember waiting for them to close.
I didn't exactly let her go, I made a compromise. I gathered up her eyes, and her smile, and her hip bone deep in my palm, and I gripped them close. The thing about promises you see, is they work both ways, and she'd promised not to do this to me. She'd say, that she was the one that'd stay and that our love, it was eternal, and I was the one able to show here what that means. She'd promised me she'd never go into the arms of another, so why would I let the earth steal her from me.
I stared at those eyes until they stopped being green, while she listened to all my stories. I told about all things that I've had to leave over the years. I explained to her why she found me naked in this very field looking for that eye glass my father gave to me. It had be the last thing that tied me to the first time. I showed her the deep scar after my seventh son left me, and after I buried myself deep into my arm for the frist time. I showed her all the parts I had tried cutting off me.
She didn't speak much anymore. And it wasn't long until her bones stared to resemble our happy home, or until she started to dig her nails into me. When she did speak, it was in low moans and creaking. I don't think she loves me anymore. All she does now is shake and try to leave. Her tears build rivers around me. But she just keeps growing. And I keep telling her I cannot leave, because she won't let go of me. She wants me to go down into her Hades, and now I'm here, I am sure she has already taken me.
We had promised to bury her, but instead she'd buried me.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
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We had promised to bury her here.
"Out where the birch trees grow," she'd said. "and the morning glory show all day long." I remember waiting for them to close.
I didn't exactly let her go, I made a compromise. I gathered up her eyes, and her smile, and her hip bone deep in my palm, and I gripped them close. The thing about promises you see, is they work both ways, and she'd promised not to do this to me. She'd say, that she was the one that'd stay and that our love, it was eternal, and I was the one able to show here what that means. She'd promised me she'd never go into the arms of another, so why would I let the earth steal her from me.
I stared at those eyes until they stopped being green, while she listened to all my stories. I told about all things that I've had to leave over the years. I explained to her why she found me naked in this very field looking for that eye glass my father gave to me. It had be the last thing that tied me to the first time. I showed her the deep scar after my seventh son left me, and after I buried myself deep into my arm for the frist time. I showed her all the parts I had tried cutting off me.
She didn't speak much anymore. And it wasn't long until her bones stared to resemble our happy home, or until she started to dig her nails into me. When she did speak, it was in low moans and creaking. I don't think she loves me anymore. All she does now is shake and try to leave. Her tears build rivers around me. But she just keeps growing. And I keep telling her I cannot leave, because she won't let go of me. She wants me to go down into her Hades, and now I'm here, I am sure she has already taken me.
We had promised to bury her, but instead she'd buried me.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
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We had promised to bury her here.
"Out where the birch trees grow," she'd said. "and the morning glory show all day long." I remember waiting for them to close.
I didn't exactly let her go, I made a compromise. I gathered up her eyes, and her smile, and her hip bone deep in my palm, and I gripped them close. The thing about promises you see, is they work both ways, and she'd promised not to do this to me. She'd say, that she was the one that'd stay and that our love, it was eternal, and I was the one able to show here what that means. She'd promised me she'd never go into the arms of another, so why would I let the earth steal her from me.
I stared at those eyes until they stopped being green, while she listened to all my stories. I told about all things that I've had to leave over the years. I explained to her why she found me naked in this very field looking for that eye glass my father gave to me. It had be the last thing that tied me to the first time. I showed her the deep scar after my seventh son left me, and after I buried myself deep into my arm for the frist time. I showed her all the parts I had tried cutting off me.
She didn't speak much anymore. And it wasn't long until her bones stared to resemble our happy home, or until she started to dig her nails into me. When she did speak, it was in low moans and creaking. I don't think she loves me anymore. All she does now is shake and try to leave. Her tears build rivers around me. But she just keeps growing. And I keep telling her I cannot leave, because she won't let go of me. She wants me to go down into her Hades, and now I'm here, I am sure she has already taken me.
We had promised to bury her, but instead she'd buried me.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
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We had promised to bury her here.
"Out where the birch trees grow," she'd said. "and the morning glory show all day long." I remember waiting for them to close.
I didn't exactly let her go, I made a compromise. I gathered up her eyes, and her smile, and her hip bone deep in my palm, and I gripped them close. The thing about promises you see, is they work both ways, and she'd promised not to do this to me. She'd say, that she was the one that'd stay and that our love, it was eternal, and I was the one able to show here what that means. She'd promised me she'd never go into the arms of another, so why would I let the earth steal her from me.
I stared at those eyes until they stopped being green, while she listened to all my stories. I told about all things that I've had to leave over the years. I explained to her why she found me naked in this very field looking for that eye glass my father gave to me. It had be the last thing that tied me to the first time. I showed her the deep scar after my seventh son left me, and after I buried myself deep into my arm for the frist time. I showed her all the parts I had tried cutting off me.
She didn't speak much anymore. And it wasn't long until her bones stared to resemble our happy home, or until she started to dig her nails into me. When she did speak, it was in low moans and creaking. I don't think she loves me anymore. All she does now is shake and try to leave. Her tears build rivers around me. But she just keeps growing. And I keep telling her I cannot leave, because she won't let go of me. She wants me to go down into her Hades, and now I'm here, I am sure she has already taken me.
We had promised to bury her, but instead she'd buried me.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
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It had been a long, grueling day for him--which day, he could no longer say. Keeping up with time was arbitrary to a man who bested it several times over. Especially since he had no desire to. Not since December 13th, 1789 at approximately 11:13pm. It had been a dreadfully cold day, which he supposed was appropriate given the events that occurred then.
He shivered, the biting chill of the memory lingering as it slowly surfaced. With a long drawn out breath, he forced the memory to keep back. It would be wrong of him to get caught up in the past when the present held such promise for a bright future, albeit not for him.
And so with parting words to the blissfully distracted couple sitting next to him, he stood up from the pew. He made sure not to draw too much attention to himself, but the woman at the alter spotted him. It pained him that he knew she would never know who he was, but it would only complicate things if she were to ever find out that unlike most, her great great grandfather was still alive. Especially on her wedding day.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
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It had been a long, grueling day for him--which day, he could no longer say. Keeping up with time was arbitrary to a man who bested it several times over. Especially since he had no desire to. Not since December 13th, 1789 at approximately 11:13pm. It had been a dreadfully cold day, which he supposed was appropriate given the events that occurred then.
He shivered, the biting chill of the memory lingering as it slowly surfaced. With a long drawn out breath, he forced the memory to keep back. It would be wrong of him to get caught up in the past when the present held such promise for a bright future, albeit not for him.
And so with parting words to the blissfully distracted couple sitting next to him, he stood up from the pew. He made sure not to draw too much attention to himself, but the woman at the alter spotted him. It pained him that he knew she would never know who he was, but it would only complicate things if she were to ever find out that unlike most, her great great grandfather was still alive. Especially on her wedding day.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
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As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
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It had been a long, grueling day for him--which day, he could no longer say. Keeping up with time was arbitrary to a man who bested it several times over. Especially since he had no desire to. Not since December 13th, 1789 at approximately 11:13pm. It had been a dreadfully cold day, which he supposed was appropriate given the events that occurred then.
He shivered, the biting chill of the memory lingering as it slowly surfaced. With a long drawn out breath, he forced the memory to keep back. It would be wrong of him to get caught up in the past when the present held such promise for a bright future, albeit not for him.
And so with parting words to the blissfully distracted couple sitting next to him, he stood up from the pew. He made sure not to draw too much attention to himself, but the woman at the alter spotted him. It pained him that he knew she would never know who he was, but it would only complicate things if she were to ever find out that unlike most, her great great grandfather was still alive. Especially on her wedding day.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
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It had been a long, grueling day for him--which day, he could no longer say. Keeping up with time was arbitrary to a man who bested it several times over. Especially since he had no desire to. Not since December 13th, 1789 at approximately 11:13pm. It had been a dreadfully cold day, which he supposed was appropriate given the events that occurred then.
He shivered, the biting chill of the memory lingering as it slowly surfaced. With a long drawn out breath, he forced the memory to keep back. It would be wrong of him to get caught up in the past when the present held such promise for a bright future, albeit not for him.
And so with parting words to the blissfully distracted couple sitting next to him, he stood up from the pew. He made sure not to draw too much attention to himself, but the woman at the alter spotted him. It pained him that he knew she would never know who he was, but it would only complicate things if she were to ever find out that unlike most, her great great grandfather was still alive. Especially on her wedding day.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
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At first, he didn't see her. She was just another woman with a plain face among the masses of the capital. There had been hundreds of women just like her over the course of eternity, and she would be no different. However, something nagged at him to look back behind him, as if something out of the corner of his eye was dancing for his attention. And then he saw her.
He had seen hundreds of women - slept with dozens of them, too - but there was something about this one that stole his breath away. She stood on the street corner, tucking a lock of auburn hair behind an ear, her keen amber eyes watching the cars as she waited for the lights to turn. He had a chance to approach her. He would have liked to ask her out to dinner... once, maybe even twice.
He caught himself, remembering the harsh truth. Even though she had been the first one to turn his head in a millennium, he couldn't afford to know her. Even if she was miraculously the one for him, he would last forever, she would not... and he would have to bear that heartbreak for all eternity.
With a sigh, he walked on by as the light turn green. As he walked on by, trying to convince himself it was for the best, the woman glanced after him. She watched him pass on by for half a second before she crossed to the other side, never giving him a second thought.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
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At first, he didn't see her. She was just another woman with a plain face among the masses of the capital. There had been hundreds of women just like her over the course of eternity, and she would be no different. However, something nagged at him to look back behind him, as if something out of the corner of his eye was dancing for his attention. And then he saw her.
He had seen hundreds of women - slept with dozens of them, too - but there was something about this one that stole his breath away. She stood on the street corner, tucking a lock of auburn hair behind an ear, her keen amber eyes watching the cars as she waited for the lights to turn. He had a chance to approach her. He would have liked to ask her out to dinner... once, maybe even twice.
He caught himself, remembering the harsh truth. Even though she had been the first one to turn his head in a millennium, he couldn't afford to know her. Even if she was miraculously the one for him, he would last forever, she would not... and he would have to bear that heartbreak for all eternity.
With a sigh, he walked on by as the light turn green. As he walked on by, trying to convince himself it was for the best, the woman glanced after him. She watched him pass on by for half a second before she crossed to the other side, never giving him a second thought.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
|
At first, he didn't see her. She was just another woman with a plain face among the masses of the capital. There had been hundreds of women just like her over the course of eternity, and she would be no different. However, something nagged at him to look back behind him, as if something out of the corner of his eye was dancing for his attention. And then he saw her.
He had seen hundreds of women - slept with dozens of them, too - but there was something about this one that stole his breath away. She stood on the street corner, tucking a lock of auburn hair behind an ear, her keen amber eyes watching the cars as she waited for the lights to turn. He had a chance to approach her. He would have liked to ask her out to dinner... once, maybe even twice.
He caught himself, remembering the harsh truth. Even though she had been the first one to turn his head in a millennium, he couldn't afford to know her. Even if she was miraculously the one for him, he would last forever, she would not... and he would have to bear that heartbreak for all eternity.
With a sigh, he walked on by as the light turn green. As he walked on by, trying to convince himself it was for the best, the woman glanced after him. She watched him pass on by for half a second before she crossed to the other side, never giving him a second thought.
|
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
|
At first, he didn't see her. She was just another woman with a plain face among the masses of the capital. There had been hundreds of women just like her over the course of eternity, and she would be no different. However, something nagged at him to look back behind him, as if something out of the corner of his eye was dancing for his attention. And then he saw her.
He had seen hundreds of women - slept with dozens of them, too - but there was something about this one that stole his breath away. She stood on the street corner, tucking a lock of auburn hair behind an ear, her keen amber eyes watching the cars as she waited for the lights to turn. He had a chance to approach her. He would have liked to ask her out to dinner... once, maybe even twice.
He caught himself, remembering the harsh truth. Even though she had been the first one to turn his head in a millennium, he couldn't afford to know her. Even if she was miraculously the one for him, he would last forever, she would not... and he would have to bear that heartbreak for all eternity.
With a sigh, he walked on by as the light turn green. As he walked on by, trying to convince himself it was for the best, the woman glanced after him. She watched him pass on by for half a second before she crossed to the other side, never giving him a second thought.
|
|
[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
|
The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
|
|
[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
As they years went by, he never aged. He stayed forever golden and smiling, forever young. But with each passing year, I counted more wrinkles, more grey hair. I could feel him slipping away from him. I knew he still loved me, but the spark dimmed and fizzled as I grew old.
As I aged, I felt him slipping farther and farther away from me. I realized that I was just a diversion, something for him to play with as he journeyed through the years. I doubted he had ever loved me the way I had loved him.
In my life, there was no one but him. No other man eclipsed him in my eyes, nor ever would. I grew bitter thinking that he would get to live on and on, year after year. How many pretty girls would he meet? How many pretty girls had he already met?
I don't doubt he loved me, I know that he did. But there are different kinds of love, and I knew a man like him, a man who had lived for centuries and would live for centuries more, just wasn't capable of loving me in the same way. As the years passed, and my memory faded, I would be replaced. Relegated to a lovely memory, thought of fondly, but not with passion. I would be left behind him, while he had enveloped my entire being with his love.
Lying in my sickbed, I cursed that I had loved him. As happy as our years together had been, forever to me was not forever to him, and that hurt more than anything else. I didn't want him to forget me, to relinquish my memory to time.
I wanted to be the only woman he thought of, the only woman he would ever see. A cruel thing to wish upon an immortal man, but a woman's selfish wish all the same.
|
The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
|
The old man closed his eyes and gone were the cords, the machines, and the fussy and overly concerned staff.
"Dance with me, Walter." entreated a young and vibrant Stephanie.
It was the eve of his deployment and she had insisted on going to the Naval ball.
"But I don't know how." he murmured, startling the aid cleaning his room.
"I'll teach you. Come on..." she begged, pulling at his arm as he coyly rose to his feet. The movement caught the aid's eye and she turned to watch him intently.
"Follow my lead." he said to her as they pushed their way through the waves of drunken sailors.
"I thought you said you didn't know how." responded Stephanie, beaming at him.
"I lied." said Walter with his charismatic grin she loved so much.
And off they went, bodies in rhythm, blissfully in unison, while some clock in some far off location ticked down the minutes of their last night together.
Walter felt a tug on his arm.
"Sir!" Mr. Thompson! You're going to pull out your IV!" Shouted Cindy, the night nurse, as she tried to awaken the apparently sleep walking elderly patient. The aid had gotten her attention when he first started to dance by his hospital bed.
"Now take this and go back to sleep, sir" she instructed as she pulled the sheets back over him. He whimpered because he could no longer hear the music.
|
|
[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
There is no sound but your breathing. There is no color but the darkness. The spacesuit clinging to your body has become a cruel decoration. Lack of movement and nourishment has atrophied your muscles. Your bones have lost all their density, your body feels sickeningly liquid. You have no choice in your destination. You shift from one planet's orbit to another, endlessly lost among the distant stars.
Many, many years ago, when you first heard Earth was going to meet its end you felt, admit it, relieved. This was something truly new. You had fucked, killed, loved, climbed, dove, flew, fought, slept, wept.... So many, many times. After thousands of years days and people blurred into each other. Time swallowed you into a kind of endless monotony you imagined what death must feel like.
When the explosions started on Earth you were already stranded in the space. You watched the destruction as one watches a fight where one has no stake in. You even adored the visuals: The sharp, lava-colored detonations. The sickly yellow flares of radiation. The waves of heat traveling through the land, burning and burning, with an other-worldly conviction and force.
"My mind goes deep and endless and forever" you thought when it all ended. "I can turn inward, gaze into that endless well of memories and thoughts I have cultivated all over these years. I will not miss them."
You couldn't have guessed how much you were going to miss talking to another person, or driving in a car and singing along to some stupid song blasting on the radio, or arguing with a woman about what you meant when you asked her if she was going to wear that red dress, or marching to war alongside your brothers-in-arms, holding a sword specifically made for you, as thousands around you yell war-chants in bone-chilling unison about how they will welcome their deaths if it will bring glory to their country.
There is no glory left in you now. You would welcome death for no reason other than to end it all. You would welcome some kind of madness that will dilute the pain of your thoughts. Because, in the end, you were right: Your thoughts never stopped, your mind was, indeed, inwardly deep and endless. But you couldn't have guessed that was nothing compared to how deep and endless and black the space truly is. How it will swallow you in a way time never has.
|
I'm lost. Lost in a world so incomprehensible. Millenniums upon millenniums passed so gradually yet trying to remember all those years is impossible. The world has changed so much, I couldn't explain even if I tried nor would anyone like me even be able to understand it. I'm so alone, yet even that thought boggles my mind. How can one be alone in a world so overcrowded with these "human beings"?
Human being; that word actually meant something to me once, now it's just a term in a history book. History books where I can't even read the text, no matter how much I study it. The language of today has evolved so much from what I was taught growing up, my mind too simple to even begin to understand it's basic structures. The human race has advanced so far and yet I've remained so much the same over all these years. These "people" are aliens to me, and to them I'm a freak. Looked down upon for my simplicity. I have no one, alone in the universe, the only friends I have are on exhibit at the history museum. These are the human beings I remember, so long ago, so filled with life. If only I could end mine...
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[WP] The Loneliness Of Immortality
|
I loved her at first sight. I courted her, bringing her roses, chocolates, even live butterflies...her favorite. Our wedding day was blissful, and all was it should be. And yet, the passage of life was cruel. Her life passed quickly, too quickly for me, but not for her. No, for her, life was at an end. Something I would never know.
She smiled on her deathbed, wrinkles crinkling at the edges of her eyes. "James...Oh, you always remained young. Please, when I go..."
I closed my eyes. "Shh. Don't talk about it." It would not be the first time my heart had broken. Not the tenth, not even the hundredth.
I attended her funeral. She was my 752nd wife, and I loved her.
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Her hair long, flowing and red, her face freckled and beautiful to the old man's eyes. "So much like little Jess once was," the old man thought. He smiled at her as she walked by causing her to frown and quicken her stride. The old man sighed as he thought about how there once was a time when a girl like that wouldn't walk by him but would have smiled or even stopped to chat. In fact, there was a time when that very thing had happened. His eyes lost focus on reality as he thought back to his wife, his wife who had given him little Jess. He drifted back to the days in their old home, to the family dinners, to her graduation, her whole life really. His eyes began to tear as he thought to the last time he was able to say goodbye to her, as she left on a journey where he could never follow her. Little Jess had been his last love in this world, the last person who really knew who he was.
|
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[WP] Don't worry, that's not my blood.
|
I awoke after a night out drinking a truly staggering amount of liquor.
Where was I?
I remembered very little and the damnable bright, midday light did little to ease my headache. I wanted to fall back asleep right then and there but knew if I did the entire day was a wash. Besides I had to call Sally, oh right, Sally! I remember now.
Me and Sally had gone out for drinks. The day before I helped fetch her keys from a storm drain. She called me her "Daily Knight", I thought that was kind of cute, not like her body needed help coaxing me towards that conclusion anyway. I remember having to get to work, I was already 15 minutes late as it was but my boss wouldn't mind. He and I often fly wingman together on the weekends, he'd understand, I was sure. Just as I was about to turn the corner though she caught up to me and gave me her number. I was a shoe-in.
We agreed to drinks the following day at a club she knew. *Vino* or something. I didn't know where it was, but that didn't matter since she was meeting me after work anyway. This was good, it wasn't even the weekend yet and I was already going to one-up the other guys at the office. Ugh, my head hurts. Why can't I move my arms anyway? No matter, must be the booze. *Belch.* That was bad, almost lost my lunch there. Sally, right, Sally.
We met up at the bar. It was sort of crowded, at least more than I would expect a bar to be on a Tuesday. The place was weird, yet not unsettling enough to cause me too much alarm with my surroundings. Besides, had to look confident for the lady. There was a band playing some sort of drone noise that seemed to pass for music among this crowd. Maybe it didn't though, maybe they were relatives of the bar owner and he was trying to pinch pennies. It is still a recession after all, poor bastards.
She was making mouth noises at me, I was making them back. Useless dialogue passed between us for a few hours. Sally was some sort of nurse, I think. I remember that I started to get uncharacteristically drunk. She on the other hand was holding her alcohol rather well, I remember feeling like a light weight next to this petite, blonde. And that only caused me to want to drink more, trying to prove something stupid to her. Trying to show off. Trying to be classic me.
Is the light getting brighter? It feels like it, I should really try and get up. My mouth tastes horrifying, where am I anyway? Did I take a tax- That's right! A cab. Sally took me back with her in a cab but then everything got all blurry and I passed out. This doesn't feel like my bed though, it's too firm. Maybe she took me back to her place? Did I get laid? I wonder if I got laid. Wouldn't be the first time I woke up to something I don't remember doing. Not this month anyway.
Oh hey, the sun's dimming. Wait, why would the sun be dimming?
"Oh, you're finally awake."
That voice, it was definitely a woman. She had pulled the light away and it was suddenly then that I realized what was going on. I was strapped down to a gurney. With the light directly out of my eyes I could see my surroundings and suddenly wished that I hadn't. Bags upon bags of blood sat on ice in the middle of the otherwise darkened room. I could see tubes leading into them from other places out of the darkness, some even seemed to lead back towards me.
"Say 'Hello' boys, you've got a new friend to play with."
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see a ring of men, their bodies wasted. Each of them was skinny from inactivity and malnutrition, each was strapped up to a gurney like me. Each one had a gag placed into their mouth and tubes that slowly drained the vitae away.
Suddenly the woman who spoke entered my peripheral. She was wearing a fetishized nurse's outfit.
"I'm so sorry love..."
Her tone was all at once apologetic and malevolent. She spoke just before stepping directly into my line of sight. It was Sally, her big blue eyes lit up her face just before she leaned in and whispered directly into my ear,
"But don't worry, that's not my blood."
|
After the accident, Marty started disappearing at night. It wasn't even the most dramatic change to occur-- he quit his job at the firm and shaved his head down to the skin, the surgery scar visible like a pink zipper along the top of his skull. Pre accident Marty was too shy to shush noisy people at the movies and would grip my hand during plane flights. Now, he made fun of fat people waiting in line at the grocery and had racked up so many speeding fines that he'd lost his license.
All of these changes were overwhelming, but his unexplained nightly trips disturbed me the most. He would disappear in the early evening, sometimes not returning home until long after the sun had come up.
Tonight, I found him in the lounge, reclining in the armchair, his shirt and arms covered in dried, sticky blood, red handprints left on the white fabric of the chair. In his hand was a lit cigarette-- another new habit-- when he saw me he smiled, blood stains on his teeth. He looked at his cigarette "Don't worry," he said. "It's not mine."
|
|
You are in a world where people cast their upvote/downvote on an actual person in which their "Karma" is hovering above their heads. in this society, you can only upvote/downvote a person once and if that person's Karma becomes 0 (zero) he/she will die. accident, aging, disease and natural death still applies though.
you are free to write anything and create an interesting dilemma/conflict for your protagonist out of this world.
|
[WP] Everyone Counts
|
I couldn't take it back.
Not even when I saw her again, all those years later, when it had just finished raining and the light shining through that fucking summer dress made me forget everything else.
Not even as we sat, drinking in perfect wine and silence, the cold silver ring burning a hole in my pocket.
Not even when we painted the new bedroom, the sort of blue people wish their eyes were. She turned to me, and she had a smudge of paint just below her left eye, and she laughed and it was the most beautiful sound in the world.
Not even as I watched her Karma tick to zero without pause or fanfare, and I heard her beg for one more chance, one more day, one more moment.
Not even then.
|
The intruder stood, unmoving. We faced each other across the dimly lit landing, him in jeans and well worn coat, carrying a knife. Me, bleary eyed and in pajama trousers.
He was looking for valuables, but when I woke up he was quick to turn it into a threat of violence. My panic had subsided at the site of the glowing 1 above his head.
The standoff held for a moment longer, he started to advance, I gestured a downvote. He would be a zero. He would die. It was an accepted form of self defence.
I felt the rebound. Vote denied. I must have voted on him, this stranger, before. Shit!
He charged.
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
I apologize ahead, this is my first try at this, I'm working night shift and got carried away so I couldn't really cut it down to 250. It goes as follows:
- Have you heard? Barbra just got back from her roadtrip with her grandparents, Danny said. They say she managed to snag three canines without loosing a limb or injuring the panthers any further.
- Oh yeah? Good for her, Garth replied.
It was an early morning and the hens hadn't layed any eggs yet. He was hungry and starting to get a bit frustrated with his neighbor showing up with no good business.
- Yeah, well not as good as I was I guess, Danny said, I snagged five and they didn't even know they had it coming for them.
- Mm-hm, and I assume you thought three fingers were worth it, huh? Garth said.
- Oh yeah. You remember that feast I had four weeks ago? Lets just say they wanted the rest of my eight fingers pretty bad. What about you Garth? You look like a tough guy, where's your scars? Danny said.
Garth turned to him and glared. He contemplated whether to tell him a big fat lie or not, just for the shock value of it. In fact, he didn't go on his trial last year, he was always worried about his health and all. When he was younger he had caught some bad flues, and his week of trial was supposed to be held during the rain season because that's when his grandparents had done theirs.
- Are you really gonna come here before breakfast and all to look at my scars and snoop around?
- I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents.
EDIT: critique would be highly appreciated
|
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"No I haven't. Sorry. Now leave I'm getting out of the shower."
"Oh right. Sorry."
She awkwardly ran back out the dorm room. I loosened my towel and got back to my work.
"Weirdo."
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
She was the love of my life- Beautiful Sarah, so perfect in every way. Our anniversary was finally coming up- our first year- and what struck me was her incredible fondness towards her grandparents. My plan was to make our anniversary all about *her*. I wanted to show her how much I loved her and set up a nice, three day road trip with her and her grandparents. If she wanted me, I would go but that wasn't the plan. I set up the breakfast-in-bed overnight stays, the road map, and got final confirmation from her grandparents. This was all easy- and I relished the thought of being able to tell her my surprise to my beautiful and loving wife.
"Honey, I have a surprise for you!" I told her, cupping my hands over her eyes as I walked her gently towards our small driveway where her grandparents were. They stood outside of their car, their and her belongings packed away already. "Happy anniversary, love!" I exclaimed, as her grandparents handed her a map with a black "X" on their destination. "So is that why you were snooping in my scrapbooks?" she asked coyly, a smile that could light up even the darkest of days plastered on her face.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents!"
|
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"No I haven't. Sorry. Now leave I'm getting out of the shower."
"Oh right. Sorry."
She awkwardly ran back out the dorm room. I loosened my towel and got back to my work.
"Weirdo."
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
I don't know how long he's strapped me to the machine. 100 days? 1000? It doesn't matter, just felt like a blur to me. I stopped counting on day 29 and stopped caring the day after.
He probably kept track on that notepad of his. *Day 1, nothing interesting in head. Mostly his cats. Would need further observation.*
I struggled at first, trying to get free of the straps on my wrists and ankles. Every time I did that, he would sedate me. I wanted to rip off the wires he stuck in my head. I hated that he could see all of my memories, everything, even the ones I've kept hidden and known only to me, displayed in full HD on a big screen monitor with surround sound.
And he's watching it, jotting down notes. I don't know why is he doing this to me. He ignores me when I ask, preferring to watch whatever stupid memory I've forgotten all about. Sometimes he watches it alone, sometimes with 2 more people, a man and a woman, and they just stare at my memories, not talking. If this place didn't feel so sterile you'd think they're in a cinema.
Today he's alone, watching a hazy memory of me in the front seat of my grandfather's car, maybe when I 6 years old, head sticking out the window. But this time, it's different. He looked happy when he saw this. Not his usual brooding, pensive self.
*Why are you snooping?* I asked, but all that came out was a weak croak. I haven't spoken since day 21. I tried again and got his attention. He grinned.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"No I haven't. Sorry. Now leave I'm getting out of the shower."
"Oh right. Sorry."
She awkwardly ran back out the dorm room. I loosened my towel and got back to my work.
"Weirdo."
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
"So, this is why you always wanna go up to my attic, huh?"
"I just like looking at old pictures."
"You mean you like snooping around, looking for photos of my dead relatives."
"I-- I swear I wasn't snooping, Mr. Fleischer! I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"What makes you ask that?"
"Granny and Pops and I are gonna drive to Florida next week. We might go to Disneyworld!"
"Whassat."
"Disneyworld? It's a big fun place with rides and stuff. You should have *your* grandparents take you!"
"Kiddo, my grandparents died a long time ago."
"Oh."
"You ever heard about the Holocaust, kid? That's what killed 'em."
"Is that some kinda disease? It sounds bad."
"... I'm gonna send you home now. Your parents are gonna wonder why their kid hangs out with their grumpy old neighbor for so long."
"... Ok. I'll ask my parents about that disease thingy... Hey, Mr. Fleischer?"
"Yeah, kiddo?"
"Maybe I can ask Pops and you can come with us to Disneyworld."
"That... that sounds alright, kid."
"OK! Bye, Mr. Fleischer!"
"Bye, kid. Tell your parents I say hello."
|
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"No I haven't. Sorry. Now leave I'm getting out of the shower."
"Oh right. Sorry."
She awkwardly ran back out the dorm room. I loosened my towel and got back to my work.
"Weirdo."
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
She was the love of my life- Beautiful Sarah, so perfect in every way. Our anniversary was finally coming up- our first year- and what struck me was her incredible fondness towards her grandparents. My plan was to make our anniversary all about *her*. I wanted to show her how much I loved her and set up a nice, three day road trip with her and her grandparents. If she wanted me, I would go but that wasn't the plan. I set up the breakfast-in-bed overnight stays, the road map, and got final confirmation from her grandparents. This was all easy- and I relished the thought of being able to tell her my surprise to my beautiful and loving wife.
"Honey, I have a surprise for you!" I told her, cupping my hands over her eyes as I walked her gently towards our small driveway where her grandparents were. They stood outside of their car, their and her belongings packed away already. "Happy anniversary, love!" I exclaimed, as her grandparents handed her a map with a black "X" on their destination. "So is that why you were snooping in my scrapbooks?" she asked coyly, a smile that could light up even the darkest of days plastered on her face.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents!"
|
"Come on in, I just need to use the restroom and then we can head out!" Billy beckoned.
A brand new photo album titled “Henry & Evelyn Broomfield” sat neatly centered on the middle cushion of the pea-green couch flanking the living room. I knew that Billy had a complicated relationship with his grandparents, who had passed away earlier in the year, within a week of one another. I propped my Pumas on the arm of the sofa, melted into the cushion and began to thumb through the album. The pages were filled with relics of “the greatest generation,” given new life by 21st century photo restoration techniques. I froze on the third page. A wiry man in overalls and a straw-brimmed hat stared back stoically. His lips, thinly pressed together, drained all the color from around his mouth. Henry looked on the brink of something. There was nothing remarkable about the photo or its blurry, faded farmland background, but then his eyes caught me. It was as if some kind of primordial green, swampy mass was swirling within them, undetected by black and white photography but eerily apparent here.
“What the fuck? What are you doing?! That’s personal shit, man!”
Billy seemed to appear from nowhere.
“I wasn’t snooping. I just wanted to know if you’ve ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents. You were always weird about them but it seemed like they were never around.”
-Time to get back to work for now, whoops.-
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
I don't know how long he's strapped me to the machine. 100 days? 1000? It doesn't matter, just felt like a blur to me. I stopped counting on day 29 and stopped caring the day after.
He probably kept track on that notepad of his. *Day 1, nothing interesting in head. Mostly his cats. Would need further observation.*
I struggled at first, trying to get free of the straps on my wrists and ankles. Every time I did that, he would sedate me. I wanted to rip off the wires he stuck in my head. I hated that he could see all of my memories, everything, even the ones I've kept hidden and known only to me, displayed in full HD on a big screen monitor with surround sound.
And he's watching it, jotting down notes. I don't know why is he doing this to me. He ignores me when I ask, preferring to watch whatever stupid memory I've forgotten all about. Sometimes he watches it alone, sometimes with 2 more people, a man and a woman, and they just stare at my memories, not talking. If this place didn't feel so sterile you'd think they're in a cinema.
Today he's alone, watching a hazy memory of me in the front seat of my grandfather's car, maybe when I 6 years old, head sticking out the window. But this time, it's different. He looked happy when he saw this. Not his usual brooding, pensive self.
*Why are you snooping?* I asked, but all that came out was a weak croak. I haven't spoken since day 21. I tried again and got his attention. He grinned.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
"Come on in, I just need to use the restroom and then we can head out!" Billy beckoned.
A brand new photo album titled “Henry & Evelyn Broomfield” sat neatly centered on the middle cushion of the pea-green couch flanking the living room. I knew that Billy had a complicated relationship with his grandparents, who had passed away earlier in the year, within a week of one another. I propped my Pumas on the arm of the sofa, melted into the cushion and began to thumb through the album. The pages were filled with relics of “the greatest generation,” given new life by 21st century photo restoration techniques. I froze on the third page. A wiry man in overalls and a straw-brimmed hat stared back stoically. His lips, thinly pressed together, drained all the color from around his mouth. Henry looked on the brink of something. There was nothing remarkable about the photo or its blurry, faded farmland background, but then his eyes caught me. It was as if some kind of primordial green, swampy mass was swirling within them, undetected by black and white photography but eerily apparent here.
“What the fuck? What are you doing?! That’s personal shit, man!”
Billy seemed to appear from nowhere.
“I wasn’t snooping. I just wanted to know if you’ve ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents. You were always weird about them but it seemed like they were never around.”
-Time to get back to work for now, whoops.-
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
"So, this is why you always wanna go up to my attic, huh?"
"I just like looking at old pictures."
"You mean you like snooping around, looking for photos of my dead relatives."
"I-- I swear I wasn't snooping, Mr. Fleischer! I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"What makes you ask that?"
"Granny and Pops and I are gonna drive to Florida next week. We might go to Disneyworld!"
"Whassat."
"Disneyworld? It's a big fun place with rides and stuff. You should have *your* grandparents take you!"
"Kiddo, my grandparents died a long time ago."
"Oh."
"You ever heard about the Holocaust, kid? That's what killed 'em."
"Is that some kinda disease? It sounds bad."
"... I'm gonna send you home now. Your parents are gonna wonder why their kid hangs out with their grumpy old neighbor for so long."
"... Ok. I'll ask my parents about that disease thingy... Hey, Mr. Fleischer?"
"Yeah, kiddo?"
"Maybe I can ask Pops and you can come with us to Disneyworld."
"That... that sounds alright, kid."
"OK! Bye, Mr. Fleischer!"
"Bye, kid. Tell your parents I say hello."
|
"Come on in, I just need to use the restroom and then we can head out!" Billy beckoned.
A brand new photo album titled “Henry & Evelyn Broomfield” sat neatly centered on the middle cushion of the pea-green couch flanking the living room. I knew that Billy had a complicated relationship with his grandparents, who had passed away earlier in the year, within a week of one another. I propped my Pumas on the arm of the sofa, melted into the cushion and began to thumb through the album. The pages were filled with relics of “the greatest generation,” given new life by 21st century photo restoration techniques. I froze on the third page. A wiry man in overalls and a straw-brimmed hat stared back stoically. His lips, thinly pressed together, drained all the color from around his mouth. Henry looked on the brink of something. There was nothing remarkable about the photo or its blurry, faded farmland background, but then his eyes caught me. It was as if some kind of primordial green, swampy mass was swirling within them, undetected by black and white photography but eerily apparent here.
“What the fuck? What are you doing?! That’s personal shit, man!”
Billy seemed to appear from nowhere.
“I wasn’t snooping. I just wanted to know if you’ve ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents. You were always weird about them but it seemed like they were never around.”
-Time to get back to work for now, whoops.-
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
I don't know how long he's strapped me to the machine. 100 days? 1000? It doesn't matter, just felt like a blur to me. I stopped counting on day 29 and stopped caring the day after.
He probably kept track on that notepad of his. *Day 1, nothing interesting in head. Mostly his cats. Would need further observation.*
I struggled at first, trying to get free of the straps on my wrists and ankles. Every time I did that, he would sedate me. I wanted to rip off the wires he stuck in my head. I hated that he could see all of my memories, everything, even the ones I've kept hidden and known only to me, displayed in full HD on a big screen monitor with surround sound.
And he's watching it, jotting down notes. I don't know why is he doing this to me. He ignores me when I ask, preferring to watch whatever stupid memory I've forgotten all about. Sometimes he watches it alone, sometimes with 2 more people, a man and a woman, and they just stare at my memories, not talking. If this place didn't feel so sterile you'd think they're in a cinema.
Today he's alone, watching a hazy memory of me in the front seat of my grandfather's car, maybe when I 6 years old, head sticking out the window. But this time, it's different. He looked happy when he saw this. Not his usual brooding, pensive self.
*Why are you snooping?* I asked, but all that came out was a weak croak. I haven't spoken since day 21. I tried again and got his attention. He grinned.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
She was the love of my life- Beautiful Sarah, so perfect in every way. Our anniversary was finally coming up- our first year- and what struck me was her incredible fondness towards her grandparents. My plan was to make our anniversary all about *her*. I wanted to show her how much I loved her and set up a nice, three day road trip with her and her grandparents. If she wanted me, I would go but that wasn't the plan. I set up the breakfast-in-bed overnight stays, the road map, and got final confirmation from her grandparents. This was all easy- and I relished the thought of being able to tell her my surprise to my beautiful and loving wife.
"Honey, I have a surprise for you!" I told her, cupping my hands over her eyes as I walked her gently towards our small driveway where her grandparents were. They stood outside of their car, their and her belongings packed away already. "Happy anniversary, love!" I exclaimed, as her grandparents handed her a map with a black "X" on their destination. "So is that why you were snooping in my scrapbooks?" she asked coyly, a smile that could light up even the darkest of days plastered on her face.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents!"
|
Can you give this quote some context in 250 or fewer words?
(Also, Hi! I'm new here and hope I'm doing this right. I'll buy a month of gold to the writer who comes closest to the train of thought that spurred this sentence. Say Sunday? Not really a contest, just a "like minds" kind of compliment. Hope that's okay.)
|
[FF] "I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
|
"So, this is why you always wanna go up to my attic, huh?"
"I just like looking at old pictures."
"You mean you like snooping around, looking for photos of my dead relatives."
"I-- I swear I wasn't snooping, Mr. Fleischer! I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents."
"What makes you ask that?"
"Granny and Pops and I are gonna drive to Florida next week. We might go to Disneyworld!"
"Whassat."
"Disneyworld? It's a big fun place with rides and stuff. You should have *your* grandparents take you!"
"Kiddo, my grandparents died a long time ago."
"Oh."
"You ever heard about the Holocaust, kid? That's what killed 'em."
"Is that some kinda disease? It sounds bad."
"... I'm gonna send you home now. Your parents are gonna wonder why their kid hangs out with their grumpy old neighbor for so long."
"... Ok. I'll ask my parents about that disease thingy... Hey, Mr. Fleischer?"
"Yeah, kiddo?"
"Maybe I can ask Pops and you can come with us to Disneyworld."
"That... that sounds alright, kid."
"OK! Bye, Mr. Fleischer!"
"Bye, kid. Tell your parents I say hello."
|
She was the love of my life- Beautiful Sarah, so perfect in every way. Our anniversary was finally coming up- our first year- and what struck me was her incredible fondness towards her grandparents. My plan was to make our anniversary all about *her*. I wanted to show her how much I loved her and set up a nice, three day road trip with her and her grandparents. If she wanted me, I would go but that wasn't the plan. I set up the breakfast-in-bed overnight stays, the road map, and got final confirmation from her grandparents. This was all easy- and I relished the thought of being able to tell her my surprise to my beautiful and loving wife.
"Honey, I have a surprise for you!" I told her, cupping my hands over her eyes as I walked her gently towards our small driveway where her grandparents were. They stood outside of their car, their and her belongings packed away already. "Happy anniversary, love!" I exclaimed, as her grandparents handed her a map with a black "X" on their destination. "So is that why you were snooping in my scrapbooks?" she asked coyly, a smile that could light up even the darkest of days plastered on her face.
"I wasn't snooping. I just wanted to know if you've ever gone on a road trip with your grandparents!"
|
[WP]"There's a man sorting through our trash."
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I caught a bright glare when the garage lights went on. Then trash cans rattling and rummaging, panting and after barking. It was cold outside and so the streets were lonely. We didn't expect to see anyone outside so we didn't mind the noise.
At first, we thought old Mrs. Greens dog got out, but like always Jimmy came running through the kitchen's grating door.
"There's a man sorting through our trash"
He's always curious, but this time his face was worried red, over why a man would enter an unknown home to take what little meant to us.
I stood up and closer to the window.
"Where?"
"backyard Dad"
Jimmy didn't know why, but I did.
"what should we do?"
...Neither did Loise.
"I imagine we should call the cops dear."
They feared him and what they imagined.
"For what? Loise that man doesn't need a night in a cell."
That man needed help.
"well what should we do Dad?"
I smiled and walked towards the door. I grew hesitant as I leaned hoping it would be safe. I took a breath, turned the knob, and frightened a poor old man. A man maimed by society and plucked aside to be forgotten...ignored. We turn our heads, close our doors, and walk by them each day. They're just as human as we are, but we forget it. We're confused, because we don't understand.
I took the first step out and as he stared blankly at me, I realized how afraid he was of me.
I wasn't trespassing...it was my home.
He put the bottle down and made way to the gate.
"Do you like spagetti? Its sort of a tradition in our house"
He turned surprised and a bit relieved.
"We just finished dinner and I don't know if you like it, but we have plenty of other food...if you like?"
He was hungry
"I do"
"Great."
Jimmy was staring at him. He noticed his jacket in tatters. He noticed his hair thinning. He noticed his teeth yellow, and he noticed his shoes were worn. But he saw more than that. He came to see what a helpless man was and why we needed to help.
"go get a couple blankets and old clothes. Maybe some sneakers. And Loise could you get the left overs and put it in the bag? i'm gonna go talk to him."
As jimmy came down the stairs carrying as much as he could, he wasn't afraid anymore and neither was Loise. She put everything she could fit in a backpack. Something he would use. Something we would eventually throw away.
"I'm really sorry about the noise. I was just so hungry and the shelter wouldn't take me in. Too many people and not enough beds...
He looked down teary-eyed, but chin up, he smiled
"Sometimes theres no room in the American dream."
I nodded and I smiled. I respected him and he knew it.
"Ya, sometimes."
Jimmy came out with a backpack full of essentials. I pulled out the cash I had in my wallet and handed it to him.
"I hope this is enough to get you somewhere warm."
He took the bag and the money. He saw kindness and hope. But as he walked away he gave us one last grin and a wave.
Jimmy waved back, turned, and asked.
"why was that man homeless?"
I knelt down and he looked up
"well sometimes Jimmy, life can get tough and some people start to get a hard shell and well sometimes that shell cracks and you end up alone without much help. Thats why jimmy a strangers kindness is sometimes the most important"
I hugged him and took him back inside.
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...Here i am, staring out the window at jasmine take in the trash bin, ive worked late, this glass of wine is comfy and she knows it, just as well that im pressing the repeat button tomorrow, taking these light tasks off my shoulders helps.
Wake up, shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, make breakfast, and finally,what I look foward to every morning, enjoy my coffee looking out the kitchen window. It's a gloomy day, the yellowing grass on the left side of the lawn where my neighbor's dog pisses is in vivid color, I should probably talk to him about it, it bothers me, I guess it doesn't bother me enough, sure as hell bothers Jasmine. There's a man sorting through our trash, I wonder what put him in a situation like th... There's a man sorting through the trash? It's not trash day? it's Friday? at least I thought it was Friday? calendar check, it's Friday. Ok? wait, my bin is the only bin out? It full, overflowing even. It must not be mine, but that's my address I spray painted on it. Whatever, brainbust, I'm going to be late for work, I just have to haul this bin to the backyard and Im off. Damn, there's something behind the door, jumped to look, it's my trash bin, white spray paint, same 4, same 7, same 6, same 8. What's going on? I shoulder through the door pushing the bin drag the other bin in, put them side by side, identical to the smallest scratch. I'm late. I'm off. I cant get those damn bins off mind.
off work, late again, still have the morning on my mind. I forgot about the man, I didn't see him leave? he couldn't have split that fast, especially with that cart. Well, probably didnt notice, but no? I saw him, checked the calendar, and went outside, he wasn't there when I went outside, I didn't notice, what the hell? I pull into my driveway, walk in the door
" hey! You're home! They kept you late again?"
"Yeap"
"I put some chicken in the oven I'm going to go ahead and shower... Oh and hey the neighbor complained about Wolfie pissing on his lawn, so yeah, and hey did you bring the trash in when you got he..."
"Oh shit no I forgot I go bring it.."
"No worries I've got it, you've had a long day, pour yourself some wine".
...Here i am, staring out the window at jasmine take in the trash bin, ive worked late, this glass of wine is comfy and she knows it, just as well that im pressing the repeat button tomorrow, taking these light tasks off my shoulders helps.
Wait, what the fuck? who the fuck is wolfi...
my eyes open, heart sinks. shit it was just a dream. but no, no, I went through that whole day, sure as hell didnt feel like a dream. Shake jasmine awake
" hey honey, wake up"
"Yeah?"
" did you make chicken last night ?"
"Yeah?"
" how bout the bin, did, did you take in the bin? "
"Yeah right after you got in from work remember? Something wrong?"
"no, nothing, uh Im going to go get ready for work"
"It's Saturday honey.."
"..."
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[WP]"There's a man sorting through our trash."
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I caught a bright glare when the garage lights went on. Then trash cans rattling and rummaging, panting and after barking. It was cold outside and so the streets were lonely. We didn't expect to see anyone outside so we didn't mind the noise.
At first, we thought old Mrs. Greens dog got out, but like always Jimmy came running through the kitchen's grating door.
"There's a man sorting through our trash"
He's always curious, but this time his face was worried red, over why a man would enter an unknown home to take what little meant to us.
I stood up and closer to the window.
"Where?"
"backyard Dad"
Jimmy didn't know why, but I did.
"what should we do?"
...Neither did Loise.
"I imagine we should call the cops dear."
They feared him and what they imagined.
"For what? Loise that man doesn't need a night in a cell."
That man needed help.
"well what should we do Dad?"
I smiled and walked towards the door. I grew hesitant as I leaned hoping it would be safe. I took a breath, turned the knob, and frightened a poor old man. A man maimed by society and plucked aside to be forgotten...ignored. We turn our heads, close our doors, and walk by them each day. They're just as human as we are, but we forget it. We're confused, because we don't understand.
I took the first step out and as he stared blankly at me, I realized how afraid he was of me.
I wasn't trespassing...it was my home.
He put the bottle down and made way to the gate.
"Do you like spagetti? Its sort of a tradition in our house"
He turned surprised and a bit relieved.
"We just finished dinner and I don't know if you like it, but we have plenty of other food...if you like?"
He was hungry
"I do"
"Great."
Jimmy was staring at him. He noticed his jacket in tatters. He noticed his hair thinning. He noticed his teeth yellow, and he noticed his shoes were worn. But he saw more than that. He came to see what a helpless man was and why we needed to help.
"go get a couple blankets and old clothes. Maybe some sneakers. And Loise could you get the left overs and put it in the bag? i'm gonna go talk to him."
As jimmy came down the stairs carrying as much as he could, he wasn't afraid anymore and neither was Loise. She put everything she could fit in a backpack. Something he would use. Something we would eventually throw away.
"I'm really sorry about the noise. I was just so hungry and the shelter wouldn't take me in. Too many people and not enough beds...
He looked down teary-eyed, but chin up, he smiled
"Sometimes theres no room in the American dream."
I nodded and I smiled. I respected him and he knew it.
"Ya, sometimes."
Jimmy came out with a backpack full of essentials. I pulled out the cash I had in my wallet and handed it to him.
"I hope this is enough to get you somewhere warm."
He took the bag and the money. He saw kindness and hope. But as he walked away he gave us one last grin and a wave.
Jimmy waved back, turned, and asked.
"why was that man homeless?"
I knelt down and he looked up
"well sometimes Jimmy, life can get tough and some people start to get a hard shell and well sometimes that shell cracks and you end up alone without much help. Thats why jimmy a strangers kindness is sometimes the most important"
I hugged him and took him back inside.
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My eye sight was never all that good, but in recent years it had become worse. Sunday morning after church, Muriel and I were sitting in the front room with a segment of the Times and a mug of something hot each. I put my coffee down to take off my smeared spectacles and rub the sore little spots at the sides of my nose, looking up through the bay window and seeing a very odd sight.
There was a man. He was quite short, and I couldn't quite see his legs. He was wearing a red jacket and a white shirt of some kind. His hair was the most bizarre colour of orange that I couldn't help thinking of the article I'd read last week about the rebellion of the younger generations. I watched him for a moment or two; my spectacles were forgotten in my lap resting on top of the money section, neatly folded.
The bins went out on Monday, but I preferred putting them out the day before because my back was always stiff in the mornings. So I sat there in my armchair and watched this strange red man paw at the neatly tied bin bags just outside our garden fence.
"Muriel," I said eventually. She looked up from her coffee, milky because that's how she liked it, and raised her eyebrows at me.
"Yes, dear?" She said
"There's a man sorting through our trash." I gestured towards the man in red, who seemed to also have his face painted in some sort of clown get up.
Muriel flicked a page of the family section and stopped paying attention to me.
"I don't like it when you use Americanisms, darling." She said, pursing her lips and pretending to read about country walks in Kent.
"No, Muriel. Really, there's a man sorting through our... rubbish." I insisted, glancing back to make sure that the man in red - was he wearing white gloves?- had not gone.
Sighing, she looked up, out of the window. She paused for a moment and looked back at me with a face lined with exasperation.
"Jeffrey dear," She said in that ever-suffering way of hers.
"Yes, Muriel?" I put my glasses back on my nose.
"That's a fox."
And it was.
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Your character is leaving their home knowing it will be the last time. As they do, they reflect on the time they spent there and consider the road ahead.
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[WP] Leaving Home
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*CLUNK*
*KRSSSSHHHH*
The secondary rockets detach themselves from their main component as the rocket propels itself away from a dying planet. The man in the cockpit wipes away his tears from inside of his suit. On his uniform is the word NOAH underneath an American/Russian flag patch. He leaves the planet he once called home as he searches for another haven. With weary eyes, he leans towards the round cockpit window and gazes downwards towards a no-longer blue planet but a now-brown wasteland. He grabs a hold of himself and attempts to maintain his masculine authority. Staying strong is all that matters to the passengers. They shouldn't see him become weak and vulnerable at a time like this. He has to accomplish his goal to ensure the survival of not only himself but of the human race. He pushes a small grey button near the intercom and speaks:
>Attention all passengers, this is Capitan Noah. We have just left the atmosphere of Earth and are en route to a new planet. Let us all keep the peace this time and make it an effort to preserve our next home. Believe in this, comrades, and we will have a good journey ahead of us.
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*so this is kind of cheating, since i am really just barely editing something i wrote awhile ago, but fuck it.*
Maz was a sailor once. A farmer and gladiator too, though that order was imprecise. The lines that distinguished these phases in his life seemed to blur and ebb, much as the waves wash over individual grains of sand, the tides continually redefine what is beach and what is ocean floor. The only firm thing he had was what is now.
Now he is a man of his mid twenties, both young and old as it were, dark haired and fair skinned like all men of the north are, his face, its brown eyes, long slender nose and squared jaw framed by a thickening beard, the evidence of his carelessness and the token of his devotion. As the sun sets grimly in the west he stands shirtless in the sand. He cuts a fine figure, youth and toil having converged upon its pinnacle, the definition of his muscles hewn as clearly as carved stone. Yet his torso is marred by the scars and calluses that map the burdens of life, the overlapping boundaries of so many different Mazs having lived and died in so few years.
Before him lay the logs. They were stacked by his hands, arranged in ever rising tiers, roughly approximating the rectangular shape he was familiar with. The old man lay beside it and wrapped in some old canvas, his shrunken form having taken the appearance of a pod bursting at the seems to release him into a new birth. He recalls visions of his old life, his last one. Maz the sailor. Maz the pirate.
The storm came swiftly. He remembered the dispute clearly--which way should they head to avoid the squall? The captain was dead or as good as it, having been washed overboard with the first raucous waves. Their quarrel was useless. Black waves, dark as blood or wine and capped by rabid white foam, swirled around the ship, tossing it like floatsam in its reckless rage. Blades were drawn and in the searing howl of the wind curses were shouted but their manhood was both proven and rendered irrelevant by the crushing swell that sent them all to the deep.
As far as he could tell, he was the only survivor of the wreck, having washed up on the shore of this island. The old man found him, gave him some fresh water and an opportunity to clean up. He looked at the old man’s swaddled body and scratched his beard. Cleaning up was more metaphysical than he had anticipated.
Maz thought the old bastard was crazy, truly crazy, for the first year or so. When they first could talk, after Maz had recovered some, he went on and on about how Maz was born in the fire season but under the water sign, and how that had predicted his rebirth from the water. The way he rattled off cryptic saying and until then unknown truths, weaving them with symbolic hyperbole and outright lies, made conversation impossible. As Maz remembered it, the talks were more like a scolding or lesson from his parents. And then there were the strange hours he kept, waking up just before sunset so he could sit and watch stars all night. It took weeks for Maz to adjust. Longer still to understand that there were things he could not fathom. Stars and portents and literal lies that were spiritual truths. Cycles and lifetimes. Death that is rebirth.
Maz lays the old man on the pyre. The old man had known death was coming. He bequeathed him the sword, old but well cared for, a straight bladed style that had fallen out with the southern smiths generations ago, inlaid with nightwings and other symbols of the moon’s dominion, the shadow kingdom that rises after day, and told him that he needed to be the guardian of a prophecy, and that he had to avert a great evil. Maz lays a torch down at the base of the fire and sits down against a rock facing it. As the flame engulfs his master the world is dark. They are on the beach and a forest is behind his master. It is night, and Maz is alone, the sword beside him. As the fire burns, he thinks about his next destination.
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[WP] "Anything less than a nightmare and I wake up unprepared to face reality"
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We were so young, I thought, as we stood on the hill, looking down on the battlefield. Hellfire ripped through the air under the dark clouds and pounding rain, propelling death out like waves. The rest of our unit was getting pulverized. Tanks rumbled up the crests, breaking the waves of soldiers with shells and treads. We could hear the sickening crunch, John and I. My stomach churned with the tank engines, a disgusting combination of diesel and bile bubbling in my ears.
John was sobbing. I could only stare at the scene in awe. Blood drained down the hill in a literal stream. The torrential rains beat the soldiers down while the tanks sloughed it off. There were only more tanks coming, anyone could see. John and I tossed a coin who would have to do it. I lost.
Wading through the blood river, I reached the tent where our CO stared at a map, looking for a way to win. I delivered the news. There was no way out. He told me to fuck off, if I remember right. To go back to base, pack up my panties, and get out of his damned army.
Yeah, I couldn't believe he said it, either. We were damned, but we stuck by him. John and I manning the only rocket launcher our unit had, we took out tank after tank. They turned and ran, that day, when reinforcements finally arrived. Except for that one soldier. He ran up to us as the battle was ending. He held a white flag, but John couldn't see it. He hit the kid, dead on, with a rocket.
I ran into John at the market, the other day. We talked for a bit, catching up on old times. I made a remark about Sergeant Naseel's "damned army" and the curse that followed him home from the war. And as I turned to leave, John poked me in the gut. Hard. I didn't remember his fingers being so hard, so he must have meant business. I turned to look at him, and in his hand he held a scuffed and beaten M1911. And he told me what he thought of those days, when we were the army of the damned.
"Not a day goes by I let myself forget. It's been so long, but the scars are still fresh in my mind. I can't stop scratching long enough for them to heal, it seems. Anything less than a nightmare and I wake up unprepared to face reality. Anything less than that hell and I can't bear to face the day, Theo. I want to go back. To the dance of devils and the home of the warriors. I need to go back. And if I have to kill a few nonbelievers to bring it here, so be it."
Tears ran from his eyes to the ground, and I felt myself saying what I should have said all those years ago, when we went our separate ways. "It's okay, John. I'll see you soon."
"Yeah. You will."
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As i let myself drift off to sleep I often hope to myself that my dreams will be terrible. It sounds strange but for a time I had vivid amazing colorful dreams that made the real world seem so dull. I would be a king, a hero, a legend among men then wake to find my life the same as it was before I closed my eyes. This lead me into a state of discontent with life, nothing could quite measure up to the world i found myself in while I slept and I started to look forward to sleep more than any occasion of being awake. Then one night good fortune struck and me and I lived through the most horrific nightmare of my days. Endless amounts of dark and emptiness all the worst things you could imagine wrapped themselves around me waking me in a could sweat in the early morning. That day the entire world seemed more welcoming and less dark, I took time to appreciate every single thing that happened to me as something better than where I had been and it even allowed me to treat the small stumbling blocks of my day as just that rather than letting them floor me. So before i sleep I wish for the kind of nightmares you hear about waking people screaming to put back in perspective my days. Hell, if I have anthing less than a nightmare I wake up unprepared to face reality.
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[WP] "Anything less than a nightmare and I wake up unprepared to face reality"
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"To Matilda,
Once I thought that the future would always see us together, hand in hand. That nothing could harm our love, that we would marry under God, and be happy together. I already imagined our family, our children, our ageing.
Why did you betray me?
I cannot understand your decision. You *know* it is bad. You *know* you have to take your pill before sleeping. If you had only forgotten it once, I could have forgiven you. But how dare you refuse to take it?
For the redemption of your soul, I can only try to convince you one last time. Dreams are the spells of the Devil. They are a pagan's mystic. They lure you into sleep and sloth, if not luxury ; they chain your soul and drag it to Hell. These solitary satisfactions, on par with onanism, must end.
This is why I want you to take our medication : a holy woman, as I thought you were, should only seek nightmares. She should refrain from the easy pleasures of the night, and seek to endure its ordeals. Only this passion will make her truly admire the daylight, and the reality our Lord and Savior offers to us. As our church's father always says, "Anything less than a nightmare and I wake up unprepared to face reality". I know that you have never loved him much, but you should listen to him. He is a wise man.
You will argue, as you did yesterday : "People and saints have been dreaming for eons!" But they did not have the pill! The poor men did not have any choice! At last we can put an end to these filthy dreams. At last we can transcend nature, and bring our souls closer to God.
You choose, against all reason, against all faith, to stay on the ground. To keep embracing your animalistic part. You will understand that I cannot share my life with a woman who is not virtuous. Do not try to contact me ever again.
Despite all the harm you have done, I'll pray for your salvation."
[First try. I am not a writer, and not a native English speaker, so any remark is welcome.]
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As i let myself drift off to sleep I often hope to myself that my dreams will be terrible. It sounds strange but for a time I had vivid amazing colorful dreams that made the real world seem so dull. I would be a king, a hero, a legend among men then wake to find my life the same as it was before I closed my eyes. This lead me into a state of discontent with life, nothing could quite measure up to the world i found myself in while I slept and I started to look forward to sleep more than any occasion of being awake. Then one night good fortune struck and me and I lived through the most horrific nightmare of my days. Endless amounts of dark and emptiness all the worst things you could imagine wrapped themselves around me waking me in a could sweat in the early morning. That day the entire world seemed more welcoming and less dark, I took time to appreciate every single thing that happened to me as something better than where I had been and it even allowed me to treat the small stumbling blocks of my day as just that rather than letting them floor me. So before i sleep I wish for the kind of nightmares you hear about waking people screaming to put back in perspective my days. Hell, if I have anthing less than a nightmare I wake up unprepared to face reality.
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[WP] You have just dug yourself out of a grave after having been buried alive.
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Fill the cup with water. Punch the pack of noodles, then shove it in the cup. Put it in the microwave and set it for 3 minutes.
Direction on the cup say "Do not microwave". Oh yah ? Go fuck yourself.
On days like these, I imagine that scene from Kill Bill. You know, that scene with the coffin. When Beatrix is using the inch punch technique, trying to get out of an early grave.
End of this week I make a payment. 250 bucks. Towards a 20k loan.
20k. For a degree that made me "overqualified" for most jobs. At this rate, I will be done with the loan in 7 years.
Seven of the best years of my life.
The coffin scene. That is how I felt. Taking on an insurmountable enemy. While having just 1 inch to swing. 250 bucks. Thats all I can afford to pay. While interest compounds away merrily.
But swing I will. And swing. And swing. Because when your back is to the wall (or the floor of a coffin), you fight.
The noodle is cooked. Now to add the chicken powder. Or whatever out of Satans ass it is. It used to be enticing. Now it is nauseating, after eating it everyday for so long. But I will add it anyways. Best make the most of my money, right ?
I dig in with a plastic spoon into the soupy mess. I will dig myself out of this grave. One spoonful at a time.
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When I first stood up and breathed fresh air again, I was relieved.
That is, I was, until I realized that no amount of showers was going to get all that dirt out of my ass.
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[WP] You have just dug yourself out of a grave after having been buried alive.
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Fill the cup with water. Punch the pack of noodles, then shove it in the cup. Put it in the microwave and set it for 3 minutes.
Direction on the cup say "Do not microwave". Oh yah ? Go fuck yourself.
On days like these, I imagine that scene from Kill Bill. You know, that scene with the coffin. When Beatrix is using the inch punch technique, trying to get out of an early grave.
End of this week I make a payment. 250 bucks. Towards a 20k loan.
20k. For a degree that made me "overqualified" for most jobs. At this rate, I will be done with the loan in 7 years.
Seven of the best years of my life.
The coffin scene. That is how I felt. Taking on an insurmountable enemy. While having just 1 inch to swing. 250 bucks. Thats all I can afford to pay. While interest compounds away merrily.
But swing I will. And swing. And swing. Because when your back is to the wall (or the floor of a coffin), you fight.
The noodle is cooked. Now to add the chicken powder. Or whatever out of Satans ass it is. It used to be enticing. Now it is nauseating, after eating it everyday for so long. But I will add it anyways. Best make the most of my money, right ?
I dig in with a plastic spoon into the soupy mess. I will dig myself out of this grave. One spoonful at a time.
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And there I was looking down at the grave I just dug my way out of feeling more dead than I did going into it. I turned around stumbled a couple of feet and then it hit me... Twelve slugs of metal death. Whoever shot me was a terrible zombie hunter. I personally would have gone for the head but the bullets merely ripped my legs from my body.
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[WP] You have just dug yourself out of a grave after having been buried alive.
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Fill the cup with water. Punch the pack of noodles, then shove it in the cup. Put it in the microwave and set it for 3 minutes.
Direction on the cup say "Do not microwave". Oh yah ? Go fuck yourself.
On days like these, I imagine that scene from Kill Bill. You know, that scene with the coffin. When Beatrix is using the inch punch technique, trying to get out of an early grave.
End of this week I make a payment. 250 bucks. Towards a 20k loan.
20k. For a degree that made me "overqualified" for most jobs. At this rate, I will be done with the loan in 7 years.
Seven of the best years of my life.
The coffin scene. That is how I felt. Taking on an insurmountable enemy. While having just 1 inch to swing. 250 bucks. Thats all I can afford to pay. While interest compounds away merrily.
But swing I will. And swing. And swing. Because when your back is to the wall (or the floor of a coffin), you fight.
The noodle is cooked. Now to add the chicken powder. Or whatever out of Satans ass it is. It used to be enticing. Now it is nauseating, after eating it everyday for so long. But I will add it anyways. Best make the most of my money, right ?
I dig in with a plastic spoon into the soupy mess. I will dig myself out of this grave. One spoonful at a time.
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I have to be honest, I was quoting Kill Bill Volume 2 the entire time they were pounding in the nails of my shoddy, half rotten, cardboard coffin. They were certain I'd die...and I was too. My hands were bound with rope and my mouth was covered with duct tape. My legs were free, not that they'd do me much use. Unlike my favorite "blood-spattered bride", I didn't have cowboy boots with a knife inside that I could shimmy up to my hands and free myself. Plain and simple, I was a dead man.
How did I get here? Much like you'd expect. Walking down the proverbial darkened alley shortcut, mistakenly seeing someone being stabbed repeatedly over who's Pokemon collection was the best while some other guy was digging his own grave. They see me, I freak out, try and run - which I cannot do - and get tackled by some jackass who can run with the speed of freaking Pikachu. So now, with one guy dead, they decide to bury the witness, because hey, there's a free grave. You're probably thinking, "Why not stab you?" and I can honestly answer, I have no freaking clue, but I would have preferred it over being buried alive!!
So here I am, listening to slow thuds diminish in intensity until all goes quiet. I faintly hear laughter as tears run down the sides of my face, into my hair and ears. This is where I die.
It took me an inestimable amount of time to realize this fact. And when finally calmed down, I figured, what the hell, I'm going to die, so why not die fighting? That's just what I did! I kneed the board, I slammed my tied fists into the board, I hit my head on the - OUCH! Okay, maybe not my head. I pulled off the duct tape from my face. It stung a little less than when I slammed my head into the dirt-reinforced cardboard. I then started using my teeth to cut the rope. The entire time I was thinking of Pai Mei, and how I'd have to punch the board until my hand bled. Whatever, it couldn't hurt too much right?
Getting to that point, however, was a pain. I chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed....and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed...and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed....and...you get the point. I was getting kinda light headed because of how much time I spent down there. I think the air was starting to run out by the time I was free. I was so exhausted, I didn't think I'd be able to punch my way out like my hero bride. I pounded on the cardboard like an expert woodsman who knew where the weak spot was and what to listen for...except I had no fucking clue. I pounded the wood a few times here, a few times there...yeah, that'd be good. Right there is where I should punch it. And just like in the movie, "Okay Pai Mei, I'm comin for ya."
I hit the board with all my might and squealed like a child. I let out a groan so loud for the confined space it actually hurt my own ears. I hit the board a few times more and let out another pain-filled groan. This sad, yet oddly heroic scene played out for far too long. Looking back, I should have run out if air or something. I was, however, making a huge impact, the wood was dented. The next few hits, uninterrupted by a groan, I might proudly add, split the wood. Knowing my freedom was ever closer, I wailed on that same spot until the cardboard gave, the pain not an issue any longer.
With one final thrust, I punched through! The dirt started falling in, filling in the entire space I lay in. I had to get out fast, but I was so scared I couldn't think. I writhed around, screaming bloody murder until I realized it had stopped. I was able to contort myself in a way that I could poke my head out of my prison and see buildings and street lamps. I was confused and looked down at where my coffin was. The top was level with the grass. Ha! What a relief. It did lessen the dramatic tension, however, and squeezing myself out of the coffin tore my body up pretty good. Once I got out, I was actually really bummed because I thought I had just freed myself from certain death. Most likely I would have been found and had enough air to survive.
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[WP] You have just dug yourself out of a grave after having been buried alive.
|
Fill the cup with water. Punch the pack of noodles, then shove it in the cup. Put it in the microwave and set it for 3 minutes.
Direction on the cup say "Do not microwave". Oh yah ? Go fuck yourself.
On days like these, I imagine that scene from Kill Bill. You know, that scene with the coffin. When Beatrix is using the inch punch technique, trying to get out of an early grave.
End of this week I make a payment. 250 bucks. Towards a 20k loan.
20k. For a degree that made me "overqualified" for most jobs. At this rate, I will be done with the loan in 7 years.
Seven of the best years of my life.
The coffin scene. That is how I felt. Taking on an insurmountable enemy. While having just 1 inch to swing. 250 bucks. Thats all I can afford to pay. While interest compounds away merrily.
But swing I will. And swing. And swing. Because when your back is to the wall (or the floor of a coffin), you fight.
The noodle is cooked. Now to add the chicken powder. Or whatever out of Satans ass it is. It used to be enticing. Now it is nauseating, after eating it everyday for so long. But I will add it anyways. Best make the most of my money, right ?
I dig in with a plastic spoon into the soupy mess. I will dig myself out of this grave. One spoonful at a time.
|
It felt like hours before my battered hand broke through to the cold air, blood and fresh soil caked beneath my nails. I pushed away the rest of the earth with the panicked doggy-paddle of a fearful child, and took that first gasp of sharp October air. The chill stung my lungs like cold shower on a hungover Sunday. Brushing the mud from my shirt pocket, I took a crumpled cigarette between my shaking fingers, inhaled slowly and deeply. Resting my back on my own tombstone, I looked up at the sky and wondered if the stars had ever been quite as bright as they seemed right now.
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|
[WP] You have just dug yourself out of a grave after having been buried alive.
|
My bones ached, but with the next push upwards, I felt the open air. It didn't take too much longer for me to pull myself completely out of the ground. I quickly turned to face the figure sitting on the nearby headstone.
"Forty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds.", he said, waving the stopwatch in the air. "I win!"
"No fair, you packed down the dirt so tightly when you buried me, you cheater! It took me forever just to start moving my arms!"
"Ok, ok, fine. Rematch?", he asked.
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The worst part
After the scrabble and choke
Is that your sweet velvet prison
Let you sleep easier
|
|
Have at it!
EDIT: Mistagged as a Flash Fiction. This is a Writing Prompt.
|
[FF]- A safe, a Victorian style mansion in the middle of a field, a loaded gun, and a mysterious foreigner.
|
The strange man, face shaded by the shadows cast by the moonlight running through the birch trees surrounding the property raised his weapon. It was an m1911, an older pistol, commonly used by American military in the twentieth century, but packed 45 caliber ACP ammo, and was a force to be reckoned with. As I stared down the barrel, I realized the force wasn't to be reckoned with, my reckoning had come...
As my life flashed between my eyes, it took particular slowness as it reached the events of the last two weeks. I recalled stumbling through a wooded grove, containing the same trees now covering his face, as I looked for someone to help me fix my broken bike chain. I remember the aging and decrepit Victorian era house, with its west wing roof caving in, its proud position in the English countryside no less affected by its disrepair.
I remember, with some distinction, the huge, steel gray wall safe, that took up the majority of the wall in one of what I assumed was the many east wing bedrooms. I remember finding the code for such a behemoth, and opening it. I remember the gold bars, the expensive looking blueprints, the fine gems, and the boxes upon boxes of legal documents. I remember it all, even the shocked look my face must have assumed.
I remember telling my friends at the pub my discovery, and their incredulous and mocking faces. Most of all, I realize who the man in front of my shaking fearful body was on this cool, dark eve, the Germanic man who had listened in to my tale to my friends. I remember, and then everything stopped, and went black, as my consciousness faded away.
|
Hey - since this has no word limit, it's not Flash Fiction, just a general Writing Prompt. I've re-tagged it as such. Thanks for posting a prompt! Looking forward to some good stories.
|
Have at it!
EDIT: Mistagged as a Flash Fiction. This is a Writing Prompt.
|
[FF]- A safe, a Victorian style mansion in the middle of a field, a loaded gun, and a mysterious foreigner.
|
"Damnit, grampa, we know that's not how you met gramma. Try and eat your broccoli, okay?"
|
Hey - since this has no word limit, it's not Flash Fiction, just a general Writing Prompt. I've re-tagged it as such. Thanks for posting a prompt! Looking forward to some good stories.
|
Have at it!
EDIT: Mistagged as a Flash Fiction. This is a Writing Prompt.
|
[FF]- A safe, a Victorian style mansion in the middle of a field, a loaded gun, and a mysterious foreigner.
|
The safe was still locked, sitting in the basement of the old Victorian mansion stuck in the middle of a New Zealand field. The mysterious foreigner aimed a gun. "Safe. Open it already. I swear to god, if this is one of those Al Capone's Vault things, I am just going to go full-on gorilla panic and start biting people."
The safe owner shrugged. "Look, it's been months. I've tried to open it."
"TRY HARDER, THE WHOLE OF THE INTERNET IS WAITING!"
"FINE! FINE. OKAY! I'VE TRIED EVERYTHING!"
"Did you jiggle the handle?!"
"It's - What? No! It's not that kind of safe!"
"TWIST THE LOCK A FEW TIMES I DON'T KNOW!" The foreigner waved his gun, now screaming in irritation.
The safe owner threw up his arms in exasperation. "FINE!" He yelled. "I'll twist the damn lock!" He grabbed at the lock and gave it a twist to the right. A bolt loosened, and the door opened. The Foreigner gasped.
Jimmy Hoffa's skeleton sat in the back of the safe, holding the original prints to Star Wars.
|
Hey - since this has no word limit, it's not Flash Fiction, just a general Writing Prompt. I've re-tagged it as such. Thanks for posting a prompt! Looking forward to some good stories.
|
Have at it!
EDIT: Mistagged as a Flash Fiction. This is a Writing Prompt.
|
[FF]- A safe, a Victorian style mansion in the middle of a field, a loaded gun, and a mysterious foreigner.
|
The safe was still locked, sitting in the basement of the old Victorian mansion stuck in the middle of a New Zealand field. The mysterious foreigner aimed a gun. "Safe. Open it already. I swear to god, if this is one of those Al Capone's Vault things, I am just going to go full-on gorilla panic and start biting people."
The safe owner shrugged. "Look, it's been months. I've tried to open it."
"TRY HARDER, THE WHOLE OF THE INTERNET IS WAITING!"
"FINE! FINE. OKAY! I'VE TRIED EVERYTHING!"
"Did you jiggle the handle?!"
"It's - What? No! It's not that kind of safe!"
"TWIST THE LOCK A FEW TIMES I DON'T KNOW!" The foreigner waved his gun, now screaming in irritation.
The safe owner threw up his arms in exasperation. "FINE!" He yelled. "I'll twist the damn lock!" He grabbed at the lock and gave it a twist to the right. A bolt loosened, and the door opened. The Foreigner gasped.
Jimmy Hoffa's skeleton sat in the back of the safe, holding the original prints to Star Wars.
|
The strange man, face shaded by the shadows cast by the moonlight running through the birch trees surrounding the property raised his weapon. It was an m1911, an older pistol, commonly used by American military in the twentieth century, but packed 45 caliber ACP ammo, and was a force to be reckoned with. As I stared down the barrel, I realized the force wasn't to be reckoned with, my reckoning had come...
As my life flashed between my eyes, it took particular slowness as it reached the events of the last two weeks. I recalled stumbling through a wooded grove, containing the same trees now covering his face, as I looked for someone to help me fix my broken bike chain. I remember the aging and decrepit Victorian era house, with its west wing roof caving in, its proud position in the English countryside no less affected by its disrepair.
I remember, with some distinction, the huge, steel gray wall safe, that took up the majority of the wall in one of what I assumed was the many east wing bedrooms. I remember finding the code for such a behemoth, and opening it. I remember the gold bars, the expensive looking blueprints, the fine gems, and the boxes upon boxes of legal documents. I remember it all, even the shocked look my face must have assumed.
I remember telling my friends at the pub my discovery, and their incredulous and mocking faces. Most of all, I realize who the man in front of my shaking fearful body was on this cool, dark eve, the Germanic man who had listened in to my tale to my friends. I remember, and then everything stopped, and went black, as my consciousness faded away.
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
My life is a lie
How can I possibly write?
me illiterate
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
He was very sick.
So was I, so I stay'd home
Never said goodbye
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
The first drink was bliss
I knew the hand I was dealt
I became my mom
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
the smudged mascara.
for once, you were unbalanced
yet I said nothing.
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
I sent her away
Because of my foolish pride
We won't meet again.
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
She was my best friend
I trusted her with secrets
Now everyone knows
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
I did not kill him.
I only slept with him and
yet I killed myself.
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
|
[WP] Write a Haiku of your biggest regret
|
Desire for beauty
Disregard for moral bounds
Death of a future
|
He was on my Bike
But Yet, I just kept walking
I should have beat him
Context: Saw some guy once on a bike coming in my direction on this path in the forest/conservation area near my house, I stepped to the side so he would pass and noticed as he did it was my bike that was stolen there about a month and a half ago. I could have just smashed him and quickly grabbed it or done something more reasonable I guess , but in the moment I just watched him ride past, and didn't say I word. Think about it all the time, why didn't I just fucking kick him off balance or something.
|
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