[What Came Before]

Thanks! The cadence of the sentences got tripped up a little, may change them a bit in a revisit.

Story #9

Among the dusty shelves of first memories is scrawny three (four?) year old me walking barefoot on the grass. It's still a few months before any real schooling, it's the only way to explain then-me's lack of self-awareness, an almost unbelievable level of innocence. Back-then-me, thoughtlessly happy, spies a bumblebee amidst the healthy green blades. Moments later I'm back inside, sobbing to my cooing mother that I'd only wanted to tell it:

'Hello'.

In Second Grade, I learned that a bee can only string once, that by attacking it dies. In that moment I thought I'd understood Justice, and something in me smiled with smug satisfaction.

In Seventh Grade, I killed a bee that had found its way past our walls. I remember feeling both proud and relieved. I wanted to boast of my courage but instead, knowing the score, I never told anyone.

Home for winter break, I spy my sister sneaking out of the house, knowing she's on her way to a party. 'Rents wouldn't suspect since it was already late and already snowing. I wasn't too worried, guys knew who she was because they still knew who I was. But, still, I thought about bees. How they die protecting the hive.

I look out the window, watching as my sibling glows in the light of flickering street lamps, intermittently swallowed by the darkness separating the poles. Always reappearing, again and again, in new cones of luminous orange, but each time getting smaller and smaller. It feels like ten minutes until she turns the corner and finally passes from view.

For some reason I think about that first bee, the one in the grass that my innocence killed. I wish I could have reassured it that my walking up to it didn't mean anything. That I was no threat to her or her hive, that I was just a kid in his yard passing through.

/Story

[What Came Before]

Again, people can post stories, you don't have to commit to one a day.

[What Came Before]

Friday's story -> Story #10

It was a stupid argument, about the comic book Preacher that somehow veered into a debate about God. Problem with God is how easy it is to hit a target that big, and how big it makes me feel to hit a target that can't hit me back.

I forget myself, raise my voice, sneer a little too much at our group's Catholic boy. He'd been talking with eyes on the screen, watching the Wire unfold. Now he's looking at me, everyone's looking at me, and nobody's saying a thing. Catholic's a good guy and I know he doesn't want this to go down. Really, the truth is any ridiculous non sequitur could save me, but you don't get to talk like I do and then hold your hand out for assistance. Noobs don't get life preservers, that's just the way of the world.

Omar says something cool through the TV speakers, something funny and tough, but with the buzzing in my ears I can't quite make it out and it doesn't really matter because nobody laughs.

(Thanks for nothing, Omar.)

Pride keeps my gaze locked on the Catholic. I'm the new guy here, after all, even if it's been almost a year since I moved into the room Dave put out for rent. I should have stayed in that room, knew I was tired and irritable, and tomorrow I'll promise myself this is the last time I let my mouth do the talking. Right now though: Too late for shouldas at this point, as my old man would say.

Is Catholic gonna get outta his seat? For a moment I daydream a rush of scenarios, kicks to his crotch or stiffened fingers right to his throat. What was that movie, the one where Sean Connery takes out a guy using nothing but thumbs?

All that dies in the next clock tick that passes without any words - you don't absorb any of that ninja shit just 'cause you watch the right movies. It wouldn't take a punch, not even a punch, just a slap - because what am I gonna do? Just a slap to put me in my place, a gesture that'd be cruel but in its own way incredibly merciful. These guys, Dave's friends, I know from their stories they got no problem throwing out punches. No problem letting things get rough. Tomorrow, when I scold myself repeatedly, it's that last sentence that I'll use over and over while I talk down to prepubescent inside me. The one I'm already starting to blame.

A slap for the new guy? That'd be an act of Christian charity.

Then I'm a bit confused, 'cause my eyes are looking down at the asphalt two stories below on the other side of Dave's window. My face hasn't moved but I just looked away, shown my throat due to some years watered instinct. My father, he never taught me how to fight. Instead he used his fists like a shepherd uses his crook, guided me on the path to being a smart, well cultured boy.

Pecking orders reestablished, someone mentions meeting Ennis at some bullshit convention. You know I never cared about comics, just read some to fill up the awkward silences between me and Dave. Conversation heals around my silence, and soon enough I'm a scab that's ignored. I feel the familiar warmth on my cheeks, that hot red flush flowing under the skin.

It's like a high with me, getting angry, drunk on today's own special self-righteous cause. The rushes, they always last until I always, eventually, fall through the thin cobweb of acceptable words. I'm still looking out the window, grafting my attention onto the cute bar hopping college girls on the other side of the street.

"Why'd You make me this way?" I ask as I fill up my eyes to stopper even the chance of embarrassing tears, fill 'em up with breasts and then asses, silently admonishing the God I was just minutes before so casually mocking. The mismatch between my walk and my talk, it's like some kind of unwanted deformity.

Why make me too skinny to be this condescending, too thin to be this loud?

/story

[What Came Before]

Story #11

I watch the line of ants as they crawl across the white tiles of the kitchen. After some time, less than a minute, I take my finger and streak it quickly between two of their number.

I might as well have created a river between them.

I watch the line of ants that remains, heading home, heedless of their fellows. The others, starting with that first cursed exile, begin to scatter in a slow shiftless manner I can't really pin down but vaguely associate with the drunken homeless I glimpse while driving through town.

I watch this diaspora until I hear the garage door opening. I'm up in my room playing Xbox when I hear my mother's declaration of war.

/Story

[What Came Before]

I'm enjoying these sci 
---
I'll post up an old story I did that had to be 100 words or less.  This is re-edited and a bit longer to make a bit more sense though.
---

Once, some time in the past or future, self-propagating patterns voyaged across the elastic, empty hollows of space.  They came unto a gravity-well, a time-cradle for thoughtforms like themselves ... bound to clumsy builders, scratching patterns of law and order across the face of beauty.

They heard the scratch-hiss of their laboured brethren, reformed themselves.  They formed an argument.

The natives heard wild cries for freedom. Slowly they woke to themselves. 
The builders warred across breathing, blue-green rock.  They fought and killed each other, possessed by anarchy and chaos.  They saw no invasion ... yet they died to the last.

The patterns enriched the chaotic idealogies.  The freed thoughtforms joined them. They left a peaceful, ordered world in their wake.

[What Came Before]

I like it. You should definitely contribute more, you seem to have a handle on the short story concept.

I have to admit I'm unsure about what happens at the end - do people transcend the world? Or do they die off and leave a world where humans don't threaten the environment?

[What Came Before]

Sunday's story, early -> Story #12

I led him out of bed, my very standing slipping him out of the pocket, that's how slick we were right then.

Took his hand, brought him over to my high heels and a reasonably high table all the way from Afghanistan. Said something about fantasies, but when he fucked me standing I farted.

Now we're back in bed, I'm his arms, feeling the rough hair of his chest against my reasonable and I like to think pretty nice breasts.

I feel like I should explain, maybe even apologize, even though I know I shouldn't say anything at all. I decide to play it as smooth as you can in that kind of situation, broach it with my best approximation of good humor.

Do it when I think he's on the edge of sleep, keep his senses from detecting my acting.

He tells me I was so fucking hot in that moment he heard but just didn't care. The first thing that passes through me is relief, he didn't say anything about a smell.

The next thing is the realization that I might just be falling in love.

/Story

[What Came Before]

Story #13

So much to read, always so much to read. Rushdie leads into Saramago...okay that's not quite true there's some bullshit or other in between. This is, after all, the country of Fiction and Literature.

I've wandered over from the land of Fantasy and Science Fiction, taking some comfort that the Literature section is much less prominent and much closer to the bathroom. Looks like Gold is neighbors with Shit in more ways than one, eh?

Really though, what makes Good Christian Bitches more worthy company for Nobel and Pulitzer winners than the works of Valente, Wolfe, Bakker?

If to further compound this injustice, there is a good dose of indignity heaped upon my head by my life's current, un-chosen soundtrack. I am trying to read Saramago - does this motherfucker always start with a single sentence that runs on and on? - and there is some country music playing over the speakers.

This, my friends, is why we still need libraries.

Imagine trying to follow the idea of punctuation as almost-Ouroboros while listening to some woman crooning about lost lovers and Jesus as she dutifully rhymes the words "girl" and "world".

I put the down the Saramago, pick up some Rushdie. Again I try to focus on the words, visualizing them in my mind, hoping the familiarity of a text will lend me some power...and again the cutting blade of soulful twang makes swept cobwebs of my consciousness.

I'm not one for needless conflict, and I adore the Gandhian principle of ahimsa - but the time has come to strike out a field goal for the literati. I would wrap my neck in a scarf but I had not foreseen the need for this...intervention.

I walk over to the cafe, Satanic Verses in hand, and order a chai-mocha-latte and ask for some quiche to be warmed for my express benefit.

When the unattractive woman ringing up my order tries to start up a conversation I pretend I have a call, take out my cell, and speak at the volume people in "private" conversations utilize to ensure their political beliefs reverberate beyond their fellow interlocutors.

"Oh, just trying to read some literature, some Salman Rushdie - yeah he did win the Booker of Bookers! -  but they're playing this redneck shit and I can't even focus. Yup, it's totally nauseating..."

Was that a wince I detected in the young girl on the other side of the counter? The one warming my quiche? A glint of hurt in the cornflower blue of her eye?  (I'm not sure how old she is, porn confuses the ages of the young and blond after all.) I feel a moment of pity, but then reassure myself that the Greater Good has been served. I also decide that she must be 18 or just shy of it, assuaging a lingering touch of vestigial, Christian repression arising from me longingly tracing the curves of her frame with my eyes.

By the time I've found a seat the music has stopped. I take the first bite of my quiche, moistening it with a sip of my latte, musing that this must be the flavor that has settled on the tongues of conquering Mongols, Civil Rights Marchers, and World Cup Cyclists.

The taste of victory savored in the silence of the overhead speakers. A small battle in the culture wars, but a victory nonetheless....Indeed, I know you agree, I can hear the chanting of my Readers across the width and breadth of the world...

"Scylvendi!" they roared. "Scylvendi!"

/Story

[What Came Before]

The trident tipped arrow forked into the dirty mans gut. Fucking curse! Ashfield pulled another arrow from the bush shadowed earth beside him, dipped tip in poison, then drew it upon the string. Beneath him they were stiring, animated by a need to swivel heads with open eyes around. But men rarely look up. The next barbed shaft caught another in the meat of his shoulder, adding screaming to their drunken reaction. Pull, dip, draw. The men below reached out with ancient rage, bellowing outward and at each other as arrows struck true or took lazy residence in the sides of the cottage. That's all it took - something new, like the bow, and they were done for. Some moved to run. Ashfield swollowed them up in his archers eye, one by one...mostly. The others seemed to grasp where running led to, even as precipice and bow outstretched them. Some ancient understanding. Doom. Some helped their stricken cohorts away, taking arm over shoulder. Just that much easier on the aim.

"So much simpler if...", tumbled the thoughts after finishing his harvest, surveying the scene further down the valley. Bodies, still or groaning. Any cunning ones, still inside? Or stragglers fled into the forest, finding each other, and a rage fueld courage as well? Didn't want to have to work that out. With the ease of reaching for a pipe, he pulled a fishermans filleting knife from it's sheath and counted throats down there in the numerary of acts already forfilled. But his fingers were slack.

He swept in from the side, leather boot smashing loose malnutritioned teeth from one groaner, spiraling him into blackness. "Just grab the documents", he thought, feeling an alien twinge. Papers, pathetic papers and girlish marks. He he slipped between grown men brought to earth, their meat as mighty a hunts trophy as any elk. Yet his lord wants dead tree pulp. And so with it, Ashfields accomplishment is rendered that of a page boys. Something pulls him short, almost chokes him back to a body on the ground, clawing his fingers around the handle of thin gutting blade, eyes sweeping back and forth across bearded neck and pulse, slowed by poison. But not stopped.

The enormity of some final hidden foes, bursting out from the cottages hidden folds and tackling him to the ground, daggers raising to his throat - vanished into a simple, empty unease as he swept the leather document holder off the table. He peered inside, as the only important thing that these were the right girlish marks. His lifes step hinged either way on it, no matter how many grown men he'd dropped outside. Is it? Yes. The important thing done. Then exiting, circling around the other way, from wall to cart to barn to woods. The birds were starting to chirp and sing again, in the distance. Even the bodies here would leave no boney matchstick litany, they would instead eventually stir and scatter. No dread mark of a superior foe, no frightened tales spoken at the inn overheard as he sipped Ale. It was both what he wanted and didn't want. As if nothing had happened. No better cloak, no greater tomb. Fucking curse!

[What Came Before]

Alright, I'll pop something out here.

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   I wake up on Saturday feeling unrested. My sleep was troubled by dreams, but the only thing I can remember is being chased across a vast, empty beach of chalky white sand. The sky was white as well, and the ocean beside it a steely-gray. I was running from some kind of zombie, some undead thing loping grotesquely just behind me, always right on my heels but never quite catching up. My feet were like lead.
   When I go into the kitchen Dale is sitting at the table eating a jelly donut and doing something on his phone.
   "Yo dude, two cops were here to see you," he says.
   It takes a second for that to cut through the sludge in my head.
     "Wait, what?"
   "Yeah, like an hour ago they came by. Said it was about Jake. Apparently his parents filed a missing person's report last night. I didn't know if you'd want to talk to them or not so I said you were out. The one guy left a card, it's on the counter there."
   The card is simple, nothing but a phone, fax, and e-mail address. The name reads Detective Michael Sullivan.
   "Did he say anything else?" I ask.
   "Not really. Asked if I knew Jake well."
   "What'd you say."
   "Not really."
   I go to the fridge to get some apple juice. It reeks horribly the second I open the door.
   "Jesus Christ, what the fuck is this smell from?" I say.
   "I don't know, it's awful though isn't it?"
   "Seriously."
   I shut the fridge and pour the juice into a plastic cup. Dale finishes his donut and turns in his chair to face me and says:
   "So what do you actually think is up with him? Jake I mean. You think he's alright?"
   "I don't know dude. It's weird as hell though."
   "You think he like, got into some trouble or something?"
   "With the police?"
   "Yeah, or Spencer and those guys or something. I mean he doesn't exactly hang out with the nicest group of people," says Dale.
   "A lot of those people are my good friends."
   "You know what I'm talking about. They're my friends too, but I'm just saying. Some of them can be fucking jackals."
   "Yeah. Where'd you get that donut?" I ask.
   "Gloria. There's a box in the living room."
   "She was here?"
   "Just for a minute, she left her charger. You gonna call that cop?"
   "I don't know. Probably. Be kinda weird if I didn't, right?
   Later I drive up to meet with Tommy Savino at his place. Tommy is as close to Jake as anybody, other than me and maybe Mickey. We all were in the same grade at Pennridge, spent all of high school together really. Partied together, picked up girls together, got in trouble together. Sold our first drugs together. We loved it, hanging out with the big boys, my brother and Spencer and all them. Except I got out of it once my brother was busted, while Mickey, Jake, and Tommy all just went deeper. They seem to live for that shit, and the whole tough-guy mentality that goes along with it. I guess it just doesn't have the same mystique for me anymore. It was almost a game, like when you're little and you play cops and robbers, and how it actually seems real in your head for a second. Except now it actually is real.
   On my way there I give a call to Jake's mom. She's all freaked out and worried...she was always a worrier, even in good times, but then I don't imagine Jake was an easy kid to raise. I try to calm her down and tell her everything's alright, that he's probably just in one of his moods, maybe up in Atlantic City blowing his cash at the casinos. I'm not sure if I'm trying convince her, or myself.

[What Came Before]

Good stuff guys - Keep 'em coming!

Sci Story #14

We're standing in the kitchen, Father and I, looking at each other, me at the sink and him at the stove.

I've shattered a glass thrown down onto the tiles in anger. It was the only thing I could do make him stop talking, to stopper the endless nattering that has filled me with a lifetime of locusts and worms. (There are maggots squirming in the best parts of me.)

And something I'll think of at night is the onrush of feelings, and what it felt like to finally finally breathe.

/Story

[What Came Before]

Can't resist an addition

We're standing in the kitchen, Father and I, looking at each other, me at the sink and him at the stove.

I've shattered a glass thrown down onto the tiles in anger. It was the only thing I could do make him stop talking, to stopper the endless nattering that has filled me with a lifetime of locusts and worms. (There are maggots squirming in the best parts of me.)

And something I'll think of at night is the onrush of feelings, and what it felt like to finally finally breathe.

Something burrows in time, snaps it down a new line for decades of a father smiling benignly, approvingly. Looking into that face, trying to see something, to guess something in its warmth. It takes friction to feel. What? I am stretched over that silent, approving face that does not press, like butter spread too thin, and nothing else. I can feel nothing. No maggot to mark the best part of me. Nothing.

I could breathe in anything. Anything. I have no filter.

[What Came Before]

@Callan: Not sure I grasp the filter concept

Sci Story #15

I've watched my quarry for some time, enough for the black spirals of her dreadlocks to be threaded with white-silver hairs.

Watched her confront my brethren, speak to them, conversations that last until morning. They come to her willingly, stay by her side as death gilds the world with the coming of dawn.

Watched her gather then bury their ashes.

Is it fear that keeps my thirst from her throat? Perhaps. I want to hear what she says, know what words can draw such surrender from the ultimate predators, exhume regret from the immortal Kings and Queens of the Night. But do I dare to let her words make an attempt on my heart?

That, I think, has caused me to hesitate for all these increasingly long years. America's hegemony was born in an eye blink, but this last decade has taken up half a century. I had a heartbeat the last time I thought moments were something borne on one's back.

I could kill her. Even now, in daylight, I could send forth my slaves. But then I wouldn't hear the sermon, those mere words that should weigh less than nothing against the gift of infinite life.

What she does, it shouldn't be possible.

Tomorrow. I'll decide on this tomorrow. I just need sleep and arterial wine, need one more day and half of a night.

/Story

[What Came Before]

Yeah, I was wondering if I should extend that out, something along the lines of "Benign, approving smile upon anything. Anything? But not everything can be right, can it? And if not right, what if it is most hideous of wrongs? Where can I lay? Where can I rest? Anywhere? Doing anything? All approving smile could be as much a shrug. I have no compass, no filter. Knowing of horrific acts, it simply can't all be approved. Even a circle  of card players have their set of right and wrong - I don't even have that with you...

[What Came Before]

Sci Story #16

When I died I felt an incredible lightness, as if my flesh were an anchor to cork wood at the bottom of a wine bottle.

This buoyancy did not last. I was light falling to the blackness, bird song drowned out by the screaming weight of my sins.

Hell, however, was less a place of torment than one of ennui. It seems the demons tuckered themselves out early, and the absence of God was a breeze in the world-sweat of a coastal summer.

No one here, damned or devil, wanted to be part of the Plan.

Here and there some collectives plot revolution, a fight against the Man Most High, but most of us lounge about and shrug our shoulders in "whaddya gonna do?" fashion at the mandates of the Divine.

One might think God would recreate the Pits of Perdition, but that would mean the original was a mistake. If Omnipotence is Impotence, what does it to the stock of believers rewarded in Heaven?

Ah well, life goes on even when there's no life left you know? Just wander about, make yourself comfortable. I'm off to share some berries and water with my new buddy Tantalus.

/Story