writing

Sunny day

Today was the first fully sunny day I think we’ve had all week, since last Sunday actually. We had plenty of sun yesterday, but rain later in the day. I think today, for a change, we maybe didn’t have any rain at all. Inconceivable!

I spent the day as I do most Sundays, struggling through the New York Times crossword puzzle and free-writing with friends. I don’t usually like rebus crosswords — they often feel like a cheat that hurts my brain — and I can’t say I loved this one, but it at least was genuinely sort of clever. I still haven’t actually finished, despite doing a little cheating.

I hesitate to share the free-writing I did, since I don’t think it adds up to much of anything. We were distracted by the air show going on across the parking lot — we meet right near one of Long Island’s airports, and this was going on over the weekend — and I struggled with the prompts. Here’s the non-narrative I cobbled together:

“The real issue, if you want to know the truth,” says Furlough, “is the promiscuity of electrons. Test materials in the lab were exhibiting sporadic and unintentional electron conductivity, which we finally traced back to an unexpected surplus of hydrogen atoms in the surrounding atmosphere. The atoms were the discharge of an earlier experiment, which for reasons not yet determined, had failed to be removed during standard decom procedures, were missed during numerous sensor sweeps prior to the event, and which unfortunately bonded strongly with the zinc oxides Dr. Kendrick and his team were experimenting on. Despite the conductivity and potential dangers it represented, Dr. Kendrick continued on, citing in his log book, which we have since been able to recover, numerous deadlines and previous failures. This is not to suggest that Dr. Kendrick was himself at fault, or that any legal action is recommended; however, there is every indication that his actions, or rather his failure to cease the zinc oxide experimentation, led directly to the aforementioned event, namely the explosive destruction of Lab 17 and all its contents, Dr. Kendrick and his three technical assistants included.”

“Yes,” says Bellman, “that or the WWII airplane we all saw crash into the side of the friggin’ building!”

“Our data on that is still inconclusive. Given that no aircraft was recovered at the site, nor any wreckage beyond the equipment expected and signed out to Lab 17, it is our combined and considered belief that this ‘crash’ was in point of fact a mass hallucination brought about by elements as yet unknown.”

I told you, distracted by aircraft. How often do you see the Blue Angels flying in formation above Wal-Mart?

Anyway, that was my Sunday.

Some assembly required

Sunday. That means the New York Times crossword — kind of a dull non-theme this week — and my writing group. I had to take the long way there, avoiding the Wantagh Parkway which was reportedly closed for the Long Island Marathon this morning and afternoon, and when I got there, this is what I wrote:

“This word,” I ask, “it’s written everywhere and he was reportedly shouting it at the end — what’s it mean?”

“It’s an obscure hue,” says Marcus. “A color the human eye supposedly used to be able to see until — well, who knows? A hundred, two hundred thousand years ago? It’s mentioned dozens of times in each of the diaries we procured at the scene, and scrawled all over the walls, and it turns up maybe once or twice in the referring texts we also discovered there.”

“So you’re saying he didn’t just make it up, then?”

“No, but god knows where he first found it, or why it seemed so important to him. He claims near the end to have actually seen it, seen this color, but I doubt any of that’s true.”

“The running theory in the precinct is he was nothing but a crazy man.”

“It’s not a bad theory. HE seemed to think he was mad. But I think if you could ask him — ”

“That’s not going to happen. Even if they’d let me near him after what happened, the doctors at Mercy don’t like his chances.”

“Well anyway, IF you asked him, I think he’d tell you it was the COLOR that drove him mad. ‘Man was not meant to gaze upon…yadda yadda yadda.’ It’s really just your garden-variety kind of psychosis.”

“Eighteen dead…that’s some nasty garden.”

“The color was a conduit. Old gods. He tried to sacrifice those people to make the voices go away.”

It’s admittedly nothing great, and I didn’t even manage to squeeze all of the prompt-words into it. But sometimes that’s how these writing prompts and forty-minute free-writing exercises play out.

After the writing, we went to see The Avengers. Because, seriously, how were we not? I thought the movie was genuinely terrific and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. I’m not un-tempted to go see it again.

So, anyway, that was Sunday.

Sunday? So it was

This Sunday was an awful lot like last Sunday, except this week I wrote this. It was based on the prompt that is that first sentence, a separate piece supplied by each of the three of us. The rest is then just me:

When she opened the door, the doctor lost what was left of his mind, and the witch turned into a raven.

“Don’t just stand there,” said Persephone. “Help me get him to the bed before she gets back.”

Her sister did not move. She stared, dumbly, out the window through which the impossible black bird had flown. Hadn’t it just been five minutes before that they were sitting down to nothing more remarkable than a warm cup of tea? They had been chatting, hadn’t they, Dr. Gregory and the witch? They called her a witch in the village, but obviously it wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. She was just the old woman who had taken them in. She and the good doctor had been chatting, ever so politely, about the two girls, about a newly found relative in the city, about a small inheritance when the girls came of age, about releasing them both from the witch’s care. The witch had been smiling, maybe whispering something beneath her breath, but she often did that, often mumbled strange phrases neither of them understood, or read aloud passages from her old books, and mumbles and pages didn’t mean she was really a —

“Estella!” Persephone shouted. “Are you listening? We have to help Dr. Gregory before that awful hag-bitch returns!”

It was the profanity that snapped Estella back. “What?” she cried. “Oh. Right. Is he — ?”

“She opened a door in his mind,” Persephone said, “and he was fool enough to walk through it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Estella. “They were just having tea. And then Aunt Baba — ”

“She isn’t our aunt!” spat Persephone. “She’s an awful hag Father made a terrible wager with before he died. Dr. Gregory was here to finally pay off that debt and set us free. Now are you going to help me or not? Grab his legs!”

Estella bent over and grabbed Dr. Gregory’s boots in her hands. The last week had seen heavy rains, and the man’s feet were caked in grayish brown mud that stained her fingers and dress, but she said nothing as she and Persephone carried him to one of the two beds in the corner of the cabin. They laid him down as gently as they could, but even for a man as gaunt as Dr. Gregory, rail-thin and none too tall, Estella found it heavier work than she was used to. Her chores were more often sweeping out or re-lighting the fire, or gathering herbs and roots for the witch’s broths from the woods behind the house. Persephone showed no struggle, but then, her sister also held the man around the shoulders, where there was no mud to dirty her hands.

“We have to find the book with the spell that she used,” Persephone told her. “If we’re going to undo what she did, we have to act quick. She won’t have flown too far past the village, not with him still here.”

Sunless Sunday

It rained all day, so what can you do? Me, I mostly just did the Sunday crossword, watched some Fringe and Supernatural — both quite good episodes, actually — and wrote this with my weekly free-writing group:

“If you retire, take up hobbies or volunteer work.”

“What’s that?” asked Edgars. Haggerton had his feet propped up on the car’s dash and a reader open in his lap. Edgars tossed him his food and slammed his own door shut.

“It’s this mag,” said Haggerton. “Billie left it behind. It says you gotta plan for retirement, gotta ‘stockpile ideas to keep yourself busy.'”

“Like keeping busy’s ever a problem,” said Edgars. He pulled a french fry, sweaty with oil and cheese, from the bag. “You seen this town lately?”

“Sure, but it ain’t always gonna be like this. Get yourself a wife, a dog, get out of this place, settle down.”

“That’s crazy talk,” said Edgars. “You’re talking crazy.” He sighed, turned the ignition. Nothing but static on the scanner and radio. “These fries are soggy.”

“Those fries are always soggy,” said Haggerton. “I thought that’s why you liked them.” He bit deep into the side of his own burger. “And what’s so crazy about gettin’ out of here?”

“What’s Billie doin’, thinking about retirement? She just joined the force.”

“She’s not. But, y’know, ya gotta plan ahead. Think long-term, big picture.”

“That mag says that?”

“Nah, that’s what Billie says. Even if she makes detective, what good’s that gonna do her? But, hey, you wanna stay in this town til you’re old and gray or somebody puts a bullet in your back, be my guest.” He crumpled the empty wrapper and tossed it out his window. “Where’s my lemonade?”

“They were out.”

“So you didn’t get me nothin’? That’s hardly considerate.”

“We oughta get going. Dispatch says there was another attack over on Baker Street.”

“Sure,” said Haggerton. “Dispatch.”

“What?”

“Nothin’. It’s just…if you’re gonna start hearin’ voices again, you could at least do me the courtesy of not pretending. The radio’s broke.”

I really have no clear idea of what’s going on in this scene, and I was trying more to get the rhythm of the dialogue down than anything else. But there’s something here that I might return to.

Cabin fever dream

I’m off tomorrow. Yay! It’s for a pair of doctor appointments, though. Less yay.

Today, I did the Sunday crossword, though I’m already on record as having not enjoyed it much. I read some more Kaleidotrope submissions, again out on the back deck. (It was hot enough we took the covers off the air conditioners today, though not quite hot enough to switch the units on.) I watched an episode of Fringe from two weeks ago. And I went to see The Cabin in the Woods, which I thought was great…but really difficult to talk about without spoilers. (Honestly, even saying it’s meta-horror feels like I’m maybe saying too much.)

And beyond that, my weekly writing group started up again. I wrote this:

“Cyanide is an unholy weapon,” said Father Franklin, eying the boy who had been brought before him. “Only a coward resorts to the ungodliness of poisons, Horace.”

“I just thought — ”

“Clearly you did not. Or your intended would be dead by now, don’t you think? You bring shame upon yourself with such an attack, young man. Even if you had succeeded, there would be no honor in your actions.”

“But cyanide isn’t on the codex of forbidden — ”

“And what would a young initiate like yourself be doing reading the forbidden codex? Didn’t your teacher — remind me, boy, who is your weaponmaster?”

“Brother Andrews,” the young Horace said.

“Did Brother Andrews not train you in the art of the weapons that God expects you to use? Were you not given a holy blade upon elevation from first year?”

“I was, Father. But — ”

“And yet you choose not to use this weapon, which God Himself has put in your hand. You sully yourself — your teachings and this entire school — by taking such a cowardly route. And worse, you failed.”

“But I — ”

“‘A blade may find its mark a thousandfold, while but a drop of water may dilute the most venomous bite.’ Do I need to quote scripture to you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then explain it to me, Horace. Explain why I have been disturbed from evening prayers to learn that not only have you failed in your weaponmaster’s assignment, but you have failed because you tried to poison the man you were assigned to kill.”

“But he wasn’t a man, Father. Not really. It — it wasn’t fair. Brother Andres couldn’t have expected me — ”

“Robert Andrews is a proven member of his guild and has served this school well for twenty years. He would not send a second-year initiate after someone he felt you could not — ”

“But this man, Father. The target. He was an initiate. I mean…or he had been. That’s why he was on the list. But I…I don’t know, Father. I think maybe Brother Andrews wanted me to fail.”

“He — ? Are you accusing the Brother of some kind of wrongdoing, Horace?”

“I…no, Father. It’s just… ‘Know your intended,’ right? Know the man you would kill like you know your own shadow, like you know your own life. That’s in the later gospels, isn’t it?”

“A rough and butchered translation of St. Marcellus, but yes.”

“Well, I studied, Father. I researched, and I followed, and I learned all I could. And the thing is, Father, I think the target knew I was doing this. Like I said, I think he was an initiate. An assassin. It was hard to find, but in the archives — ”

Father Franklin held up a hand.

“Enough. You know as well as any student here that the archives are restricted. Whatever you think you might have discovered there…”

“The target’s name, Father. That’s what I discovered.”

“And what name could have forced your hand in such a disgraceful act? What name sent you looking for poisons in the locked armory? What name made you break your covenant with God?”

“Robert Andrews,” said Horace. “The man I was sent to kill. His real name, Father…his real name was Robert Andrews.”

I’m not really sure where it was going, since I was figuring that out as I went along, but I had some fun with it.

And with Sunday overall.