Story a Day

  • 224 Replies
  • 78966 Views

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« on: June 02, 2013, 01:33:15 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sometimes (ok, a lot of the time) these will be incredible short, maybe a paragraph. But here I'm going to take a stand and put out something every day.

Feel free to comment or add to this thread. In the words of Slim Charles to Omar, "Do what you feel."

=-=-=

Story #1

"There. Did you hear it?"

"What?"

"There's someone at the window."

"We're two stories up." It's just the pot. Or the drink.

"It's not the pot. You know pot just makes me sleepy." You should know that by now.

"Mel, I'm looking out the window and there's nothing there. Maybe it was a bird." Here it comes.

"I know what a bird sounds like. It was something else, like the sound of a spider crawling on glass. Don't laugh."  I don't laugh at your pity parties do I? Like you're the first guy who can't seem to live up to his father.

"I'm not." But I'd have a right to. You know I have that final tomorrow, though you probably can't remember it's the econ one. The one where I'm on the A/B border...You know pot makes you like this, but it's always about you.

"You were thinking about it. You're asking yourself how I'd know what a spider on glass sounds like." You're the one I'm supposed to tell anything to.

"Mel, it's okay. Go back to sleep." Should I glance at the clock? Or will it stress me out, to know what time it is?

"You go to sleep, you have that final in the morning." And I have a paper and a little brother who is failing out of highschool. But I know you're judging me for those tokes I took...five hours ago.

"Alright. Just..wake me if the spider comes back, okay?." Don't fucking wake me, okay?

"I will." I won't.

"Thanks."

/story

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2013, 01:33:35 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sci Story #2

"This shit right here - it's our ticket outta this mess." Billy didn't bother to mention that the mess was as much our fault as the Enemy's, or that the ticket was a way too conveniently found weapon's creche.

We have shit luck, our plans turn to shit, and we get shit on but one thing shit doesn't do is fall into our laps. I'd taken this as our unofficial motto and managed to so far avoid falling into the jaws of the Reaper.

But I'm not going to lie, I looked at that gleaming xeno-tech like water in a desert. 'Cause we're all betting men here on Deltacron XCII, even the cautious, and Death - well, that motherfucker's the House.

Also, I'm aware that number may have meant shit to the Romans. Blame Xerexes Inc and their marketing department. Or fuck it, blame a universe that gave humans a Manifest Destiny (tm) without thinking what'd happen if were left to the interns to name newly conquered planets and stars. At least they left the quasars to the professionals, but even then one got named after Reagan.

"With these guns we can finally smoke those faggots and get the fuck off of Exy-2." Iz remarked while running his relatively delicate hands over what I took be the xeno version of a bayonet. Iz was a man of few words, by which I sadly mean a man possessed of limited vocabulary. He was, to my chagrin, more than ready to close the distance between his mouth and my ear with his personal, highly abridged version of Websters.

I watched as Iz and Billy continued passing the glyph covered firearms between themselves and our final Strongman Crux, with Iz gleefully reiterating that now we'd be able to smoke/stomp/break/dominate/"slap the silliness out of" our Enemy who were faggots/cunts/bitches/fags/pussies/hipsters.

After this overextended version of a dog pissing out the borderlines of its nation isomorphed onto gun owner's foreplay, I was finally allowed to examine the weapons and determine, in the event they were real and not booby trapped, how they actually worked.

(Something in me whispers "Isn't this whole planet a trap for boobs?" and internally I cringe that the cynic in me could be so lacking in cool points. How could the wisest, wry-est part of me make jokes as bad as my mother's?)

=-=-=

Do homework for the bullies and they'll leave you alone, maybe pick you before any of the girls who outdistanced your skill in whatever "unit" the school had decided was a part of American gym class.

In a double past life - middle school, pre-Revelation - I'd resented being made an accessory to cheating, despite having proposed the arrangement myself, but now I was grateful. Back then it'd had kept my skin relatively free of bruises and spitballs, now it kept me from being one of the butt boys.

I made my camp far from the action, just close enough for Billy's watch to keep an eye on my person. Well, not my person really, just the magic box in my skull. If Billy'd been able to scoop out my brain and keep its services in a jar, he'd have been grateful. I was the bone in his salmon, somebody he couldn't just bully into submission.

It's not enough to be useful, and getting a man like that to take you on as a flight risk just means you end up as a dog on a leash. So I told him my girl, a smokin' young thing, had left me as soon as she could. Hinted she left me for a "real man". Flat out stated that being a Whiz wasn't good enough for my PhD parents, that I just couldn't get rid of that gut that drew my skinny frame into an uncanny valley.

All half-lies, save for the part with the girl, but it all worked to let Billy know I hadn't come to Exy-2 to play. Rather, as far as he knew, I'd come here to die.

The "fun" is dying down near the fire, the Strongmen and Kelly having used up the Callers but themselves tuckered out by the Flexibles.

Finally, far enough from Iz's snoring, sleep seems like a real possibility.

I lie back and think of gun-making aliens.

=-=-=

In a world where everyone walks around with a smart drone, being a Whiz can be quite a convenience. In a better world, or at least one better for me, it'd be a world where being able to figure out all kinds of machines would make you standout at least as much as that one dude who ate a whole plane.

But I lived on an Earth where Whizzes were the repairmen for people who built gates between universes, people who deferred to Strongmen, Fleet-foots and the occasional Fire-Eye. It make sense in a sad kind of way - even the most beautiful machine could be punched and burned down to scraps.

Even before the powers, if you admit it to yourself, things weren't all that different. I mean, how much money did you spend on comics to read about people like you? And don't talk to me about Fantastic Four, don't pretend you bought that shit because you just had to know what was up with Reed Richards.

Geeks never ruled the Earth, any Earth, even before our powers kicked in. They just ran shit for the rich kids and pretty faces. Same as it ever was. But God must've known humans were especially dull, which is why I guess He sent down a Revelation to show us something the wisest and wry-est among us already knew.

=-=-=

Viewers on Home must've keyed onto the fact of our apparent advantage, one I was more inclined to trust now that I was watching the descent of a bot holding a box which itself contained nothing less than some brand spanking new uniforms. Nothing like a day or two of not completely stinking like shit to put a vestigial smile on our faces.

I change in the relative privacy of my fellow prisoners, all camera drones focused on Kelly's plasticine body. The last woman we had, Amanda, looked almost exactly like her, save she'd been the victim of skin-bleaching, scalp transplant, and hair dye along with the usual plastic surgery that came with the sentencing. Amanda'd been told that shit was reversible, and given that she'd been a Flexible rather than a far more valuable Fleet-foot, I'd decided not to let her know my Whiz powers were telling me otherwise. Moot point now, though it was weird to think parts of Amanda had a far longer half-life than others. That jelly-bags of omnicone would, if undisturbed by the scavenging flora, lie in a by now unmarked grave with the perseverance of styrofoam.

Kelly for the most part seems to accept the ogling and her new resemblance to the Game's first female Medalist, though a bit of shyness causes her to try and awkwardly use her dope enhanced thighs as a curtain for the lips of her labia.

Kelly's dignity was a blip on my radar, if that to be honest. The biggest thing on our collective minds was the veggie iconography splayed out on our chests. I looked at the broccoli bearing a golden halo around its head and felt my heart sinking down to my balls.

We'd found a creche of workable xeno-tech, and I knew that shit was legit, so there must be a Mecha or three now in the hands of the Enemy.

How else do you explain this fucking shit? We'd gone from championing Saturnalia Crack Pipes to Johnny's Veggie Drumsticks. Unless humanity had pulled a 180 in my absence, we were well and truly fucked.

=-=-=

The air is filled with the tire stain stink of dead Flexibles. Billy's head is pasta, smashed by the Mind-Grabber.

Our two surviving Callers are taking turns stabbing Kelly's corpse, the walking bonzai like things they'd charmed nibbling at the less plasticine dead. I take a moment to notice that the corpses of their actual rapists - Billy and Crux - are untouched by my fellows, and I wonder if it was really so bad having to eat out the ex-housewife who ran as fast as thunder and screams.

Sadly - or not, never knew much about Kelly - sounds are slower than thoughts.

I think to challenge their desecration, given our dismal circumstances, but then stop myself. Who knows how many charges are left in this gun? So long as they don't try to erect some kind of monument amidst the alien ruins, I don't think I'll be getting involved. Whizzes can't compete, even with shitty-ass Callers and their menagerie of bugs and carnivorous plants.

Not to mention without Callers super teams have to actually hunt, and in my fifteen years here I'd never been on a team that didn't have a Caller. What the fuck did I know about hunting? And with two years left before my Earthly incarceration, wasn't something I really needed to learn.

Besides, the Mind-Grabber might actually live through a lung perforated by a thrown stone tentacle. All depended on if the med-drones stationed on Exy-2 would get here fast enough, which was sorta a likely given since Talent like that must good for some ratings.

Survivors get drafted into new super teams, so with his fat-ass on our side we could keep going even if we're more than likely to be sponsoring fucking print-books at this fucking point. Wonder how he ended up here though, Mind-Grabber and Callers with genuine Talent are usually too useful to fall to the Draft.

I glance back at Iz, spending his final moments pinned under some stone monstrosity that's a cross between a wolf and squid. I almost miss the soundtrack of ignorance he provided my life, but then again he'd looked me in the eye as I and the Callers failed to lift up the statue and called me a faggot.

I'd flinched, but I think the Callers' were too weary to notice that even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

At least the Enemy got taken out by the Mind-Grabber before we'd even shown up. One guy with power enough to be famous, even if he stayed away from the front. Why hadn't he prettied himself up? Switched out whatever sugary, carb-loaded shit he had for meals with Johnny's Veggie Drumsticks?

"Coulda been a contender." I say to myself, glad that in the midst of this shit storm my wit's back online.

I hear the buzz of a drone but don't even look up. First one on scene's always a fucking camera-announcer:

"Witness, People of Earth, the Fate of all Conscientious Objectors..."

/story

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2013, 01:33:45 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sci Story #3

Golems made from garbage, wasp swarms resistant to pressure and force, a rain of bacon shards.

These are the messes he leaves me, things to be cleared up with the locals.

Games he plays, to slow down the inevitable passage of my knife through his heart.

The farther from the Center we go, the more ambitious he'll get. Everything's so...malleable out here. It's been awhile since I could see the silver sphere of Order, but now I can't even taste its battery tickle on the surface of my tongue.

I look back and see a the corpses of giant wolf-spiders, their flesh rotting to reveal an internal scaffolding made of something resembling cartilage. I look forward, toward my brother, and see indigo thunderheads stretched across the horizon.

The wind delivers his invitation, carrying the scent of tree sap and wet dog.

=-=-=

My brother has left all glory to me, taking the role of villain for himself. Even before he comes they know him for the Devil, for it is he who tells warns them in their dreams. He steps through their towns, their cities, their villages, bruising reality before passing on.

Each time, I am the Savior he prophesies. I have saved children I could never have, men and women who I could never love. Each time he gifts me new forms of happiness, new lives to slip into. Harems, hometowns, sacrificial altars and even normal lives where I could act with an invisible hand.

I approximate the pre-damaged the physical and metaphysical, best as I can, before I move on. Children call out my name, one night stands curse me or ignore me or weep into the wind.

This time, I don't even do that. If I take these people out of their hardened syrup prisons, if I heal their exsanguinated sky scraping trees, all of them will die. I don't have energy to waste on resurrections, so I bear witness to my brother's ingenuity and quickly move on.

=-=-=

The Wolf Wave crashes around me, a thousand jaws snapping at me as two thousand baleful yellow eyes bear witness. Fangs break on skin as hard as diamond, flame radiates outward from my sternum, blazing out of every orifice.

I burn and burn and the smoke of singed fur and cooked flesh fills the air but still the Wolf Wave scratches its claws against my now naked skin. Gold thread rags lie at my feet for a moment, then melt into scattering aurum rivulets.

Snarls and howls and whimpers fill my days, I am star blazing under the depths of a lupine ocean.

When its over, all that remains is a single cub, just old enough to walk.

I keep to my path, feet upon a bridge of ice i craft from the falling ink rain. The animal chases after me.

It's full grown paw prints stain the grass on the Other Side of the chasm, while my own steps leave no trace at all. (I am an Ouroboros, I feed on my history.)

I stop and look back, and the animal stops and returns my inquisitive gaze. I take a few steps forward and it mirrors this action. A companion for my quest then.

I keep to my path, and the animal follows, unable to see the smile on my face.

The path of my knife does not veer, but it's nice to know my brother still loves me.

/story

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2013, 01:33:56 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Next four will use Madness's endings, if I have to burn out my brain to come up with some shit!

Ending used: And it was the exact colour of her scarf.

To be king you must be wise, and strong, and courageous. You must be worthy of all this luxury.

These are the words his mother, The Rose-Handed Queen, had told her eldest son even before he could walk, even before he knew what the words meant. "Courage", "Strength", "Wisdom" - each taught definition brought on recognition, and he could actually remember the weight of learning each one. 

Yet sometimes strength is not enough, and wisdom must be forsaken so that others will rally around your strength.

And that is how the Queen's third son ending up taking the throne. Conceived rather late, and from the loins of a concubine no less, the third son of the beloved Rose-Handed Lady of Quall had learned little of wisdom or strength due to being weaned on bitterness and neglect.

Courage was a by-word for force in his mind.

What the rule of Liam would be bring the Empire, the once loquacious street augurs smiled wanly then murmured that the omens were silent and our future was our own to determine.

Of his eldest brother, his body was lost on the contested Northern border. All scrolls with his name were burned, all statues struck down, all paintings too beautiful to destroy were "corrected" to depict the face of Liam where his brother's once was. Of his second brother, who stood up to the third child of the Queen, there was at least some physical remnant.

This remnant was a discoloration upon the white tiles of the throne room, just under the statue of the nation's Rose-Handed Lady, dressed in simple robe of white jade and a scarf of rose quartz. There was a stain where the son had keeled, looking into eyes of his now divine Mother, marking the place where her second son had prayed for his life and his kingdom. And it was the exact colour of her scarf.

/story

=-=-=

Heh, that didn't end up going anywhere. I think I messed up by trying to drive into the last sentence instead of working backwards.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #4 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:06 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sci story #3

Ending: Death always comes as a stranger.

Sparrows squabbled over mates on the rooftop, oblivious to the dying woman on the other side of their roof tile arenas.

The vehemence of the competing males caused this soon-to-be-corpse to raise her eyes to the ceiling, an action that would later be misinterpreted by her attending grand^5-children as their mother making peace with God, a figure who their mother had had her own rather public squabbles with via the Lord's intermediaries more inclined to death and aging themselves.

The truth of the matter was the woman's blurred gaze in truth looked through the lens of memory, piercing through not just the roof but the blue veil of sky and grey shaded shell of the moon.

(Again, keep in mind that she looked into her own past, and thus realize that there is no need to point out - with the snide cleverness so popular among those who think themselves clever - that even had she been in possession of far more powerful eyes her line of sight would have failed to touch that natural satellite which was at the time illuminating the other side of the world.)

It was in the lunar caverns of that rock pinched off from earth by an Artist or perhaps Mere Causality in Earth's fetal era that she'd contracted the disease that was both fatal and life prolonging, the illness that carries its victims through centuries yet invariably kills them. The illness that put paid to the cheeky aphorism that had never rung true to her ears: Death always comes as a stranger.

/Story

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #5 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:14 am »
Quote from: Madness
I like #4 and #5. #2 actually has captured my interest most but I felt like you tried to include too many things - titles, names, pronouns.  This is something I failed miserably at in that class in that I tried to include far too many things in my paragraphs - it was also why the paragraph was so important. It forced you to focus on one thing at a time.

Not to detract from your efforts. It takes balls to put your writing out there and to simply attempt short stories like this.

#4 suffered from "And that is how the Queen's third son ending up taking the throne. Conceived rather late, and from the loins of a concubine no less, the third son of the beloved Rose-Handed Lady of Quall had learned little of wisdom or strength due to being weaned on bitterness and neglect."

You might have included some context on the "King" or lack there-of. I'm a history buff, academically and otherwise, and my personal experiential indoctrination still trips me up into forgetting Matriarchal cultures and societies. Why is she a Matriarch and why is her King impotent?

#5 was wicked, felt like you channeled Bakker's Nancy moment.

Quote from: sciborg2
The truth of the matter was the woman's blurred gaze in truth looked through the lens of memory, piercing through not just the roof but the blue veil of sky and grey shaded shell of the moon.

This might have been tighter, aside from the double truth - second truth should have been cut and it reads better. But, in my opinion, it flopped because it didn't sell this well enough:

Quote from: sciborg2
It was in the lunar caverns of that rock pinched off from earth by an Artist or perhaps Mere Causality in Earth's fetal era that she'd contracted the disease that was both fatal and life prolonging, the illness that carries its victims through centuries yet invariably kills them. The illness that put paid to the cheeky aphorism that had never rung true to her ears: Death always comes as a stranger.

Which I felt were connected.

I'll come back to this later. Still have some philosophy homework to get to. Cheers.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #6 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:24 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Thanks for critiques! One thing I'm realizing is that the daily format forces writing on a page, but then what comes out isn't as tight as it could be.

I'm going to see if I can create shorter stories to avoid the dying midway feeling of these.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #7 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:33 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sci Story #6

Ending: Dean felt shame, but resentment more.

When we were boys, I learned the difference between me and Dean. During our occupancy of our mother's womb I suspect Dean found a way to scrape a good part of his own feelings of inadequacy and that I, in turn, manage to inhale a sizable portion of this inky stain polluting the amniotic waters we shared.

I've spent many a day sitting by a window, alone despite my best efforts at mingling, and pondered the situation from a variety of angles. My dedication and achievements in the realm of psychiatric treatments in truth sprang from my desire to understand both Dean and myself, but mostly Dean. I am, in truth, an interesting but altogether not uncommon specimen of this age - another overly sensitive man burdened with a very manipulable sense of self.

Yet I've found solace in the company of other men who have climbed very high in a world measured by papers and theories, men whose triumphs have been nothing more than a form of running from a phobia of failure, a ravenous wolf ready to gobble up all who fall short of their own disproportionate expectations. I take comfort that I only have to glance about my department to realize other men are also engaged in this impossible task of rolling boulders onto the tops of sharp sloping hills.

Dean was another matter. Imagine a snowflake that bore the leering visage of some recognizable figure plucked from the uni archive's dusty hagiographies. That was my brother, an anomaly that I simultaneously rejected and idolized, a boy who upon being caught fondling himself could cry out with such righteous indignation: "Shut the fucking door Mom!" and then not emerge from the bathroom - shoplifted lad mag in hand - for another ten minutes.

I'd of course shared the story with a few friends of mine, an almost involuntary reflex that in another household would have led to my pummeling. Dean, however, did more than just laugh with those who would tease him. He laughed at them, judging his judges for what he saw as their cowardice, until they in turn marveled at a feat that would have gutted another adolescent's reputation. I suspect even a teacher or two, thinking of his own youthful stumbling in the sweeping current of puberty, had to admire The Boy Who Couldn't Blush.

Dean was entitled to the world, that was how he saw things. Of course he'd felt ashamed, as he'd later confessed to me, but it was against this very reaction that he'd placed the bulwark of his ire. Dean felt shame, but resentment more.

/story

=-=-=

I think this might work better as a longer story. Trying to find the sweet spot where a story only requires very few paragraphs to be told, right now I think I promise big things then realize I don't have time to elaborate.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #8 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:41 am »
Quote from: Madness
I liked it. It lost some momentum with the one swear - no big deal, just commenting on my experience reading for your info.

Quote from: sciborg2
I've spent many a day sitting by a window, alone

should be "I've spent many a day sitting by a window alone," yes?

Quote from: sciborg2
When we were boys, I learned the difference between me and Dean. During our occupancy of our mother's womb I suspect Dean found a way to scrape a good part of his own feelings of inadequacy and that I, in turn, manage to inhale a sizable portion of this inky stain polluting the amniotic waters we shared.

This one was awesome, which is actually unfortunate because the rest of it suffers in comparison, especially:

Quote from: sciborg2
I'd of course shared the story with a few friends of mine, an almost involuntary reflex that in another household would have led to my pummeling. Dean, however, did more than just laugh with those who would tease him. He laughed at them, judging his judges for what he saw as their cowardice, until they in turn marveled at a feat that would have gutted another adolescent's reputation. I suspect even a teacher or two, thinking of his own youthful stumbling in the sweeping current of puberty, had to admire The Boy Who Couldn't Blush.

This might have had some more explanation.

I realize you said you were toying with the ambiguity so perhaps these spots felt off to you too.

Bakker says it all with flags and sufficiency I think. Any reader is completely trapped "inside" the world. In terms of narrative, the story will always appear enough until you drop them flags. And in that case, you as a writer, are saying, there is more to this. Make the mystery work for you.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #9 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:51 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Thanks again for the critique, I actually might have to revisit this one later as I just tied it off when I realized how it was turning into another lengthy piece.

I actually was going to have Dean do something much more heinous, where he'd finally feel ashamed and then anger at having been made to feel shame. But I realized that would take a few hours to do well.

I'm going to have to think about how to keep this "Story a Day" idea relevant/useful...

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #10 on: June 02, 2013, 01:34:59 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sci Story #7

ETA -> Ending Used: Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.

Getting this one in early:

I contain and yet am consumed by the deluge of semen that spurts into my mouth. I'd have expected a warning, some crescendo in the melody of his soft staccato sighing. Instead I feel a slight tensing of muscles of the thigh my right hand is using for leverage, like a finch tugging a guitar string itself in need of tightening. I'm too inexperienced to know what this means before the physical evidence of his orgasm have me made quite aware of my tonsils.

Haven't thought about that pair in years.

=-=-=

God, America below the Mason-Dixon line was nothing less than a national Mise en Abyme, with Roland's beat up Chevy doubling as some kind of personal time machine delivering us to clubs and diners, The Nation and Crackerbarrel, raves and square dances. Who knew The Closet could be fitted with a  revolving door?

Still in the V-club but I'm struck by a Moses-gets-Tablets realization that this is my official goodbye from the Maya of heteronormative life. This must have been what Buddha felt like, because yes it's still get-a-job (soon I hope!) and someday-law-school and chop wood & carry water, but all that is awash in colors that I don't even have names for.

I'm swallowing even as it's clicking why we had oysters every one-outta-five meals since this trip began, and for a moment I afraid that my closed-eyed Adonis-Yoda has fallen asleep even as I think of the times I've admired him sleeping.

Just don't want to be the bitch in this relationship or whatever this is because my hearts swelling and I'm grinning at the thought "Mom is going to hate Roland after this, isn't she?" because I believe in that woman's capacity to change.

But the magic won't last if Roland's the bad boyfr- the typical male. His eyes open, and it's like the unfolding of a monarch butterfly's wings. I'm loping over his frame in nervous, good-natured slow motion- God he's cut I'm gonna hafta join a gym - and our lips meet and I swear it's like two soap bubbles touching and conjoining that's how close we are here in this moment.

His tongue goes through the ER-tunnel and enters my mouth. He's tasting himself, and somehow that makes this easier, makes this more okay than it already is.

"My Virgil", I almost whisper, but then if I do that maybe he'll think this is just a pit stop till Beatrice shows up. So then I almost tell him a half-lie about love but then I say nothing at all because thank god for his lips as we're kissing again.

Fire drill right before you have to go up and present.

Roland's right hand is in my hair and I feel so safe until the next moment when the left touches my hard on. I tense like a cat, and his hand darts away. My eyelids flare open like busted down doors and even though I'm screaming at myself - what the fuck are you doing?! - he's smiling and sunlight is gutting the storm clouds.

He's rotating Us so that I'm on my back, kissing my chest and my stomach (gym!) and I watch him, our eyes locked as his lips cup and cradle the tip of my cock.

Everything's going to be different. I'm twelve years old on the beach and the tide is taking the old sand castle away. Part of me wanted to stay and shore it up but Dad says, "You'll build a new one next summer, bigger and better" and then we're driving and I'm looking out the sun-roof at the stars, making contradictory wishes about all sorts of things...

Someone's gone and erased my future, and with a giddy thrill I realize that someone is nobody but me.

What did that one wanker say, in that one Philly bar? (Was it really called "Woodies"?) The one who was trying to chat Roland up? (If bitch could see me now, pretending like I wasn't  there.)

Something about philosophy, or was it religion? Something about the Apocalypse? Bullshit at the time but with me tickling the back of Roland's throat...

Baskin Robins?

Nah-ah-ah-ah, oh that's it, that's it right there: Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.

/story

=-=-=

Hm, assuming my semen trajectory is correct and tonsil hitting isn't a prelude to liquid down the trachea, might have to revisit this one.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #11 on: June 02, 2013, 01:35:08 am »
Quote from: Madness
Ballsy, bud. No pun intended.

The part that tripped me up reading:

Quote from: sciborg2
Just don't want to be the bitch in this relationship or whatever this is because my hearts swelling and I'm grinning at the thought "Mom is going to hate Roland after this, isn't she?" because I believe in that woman's capacity to change.

All the other thoughts were well interspersed - I mean, I'm not so talented a critique to begin with so I don't know how much praise to actually wring from my commentary - but the "dialogue" in the middle of the sentence tripped me up.

Quote from: sciborg2
Something about philosophy, or was it religion? Something about the Apocalypse? Bullshit at the time but with me tickling the back of Roland's throat...

Baskin Robins?

To me, it felt very much like this is where you began shoehorning in the ending. Once again, Bakker comes to mind - let the reader do some legwork on the ambiguity. Even without the paragraphs of little philosophizing at the end, I think you set up for the punchline perfectly right at the beginning, especially as this seems to be about him leaving The Closet.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #12 on: June 02, 2013, 01:35:16 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Thanks again! I was trying to cram too much in here, to capture a blaze of thoughts from someone who has decided to take the plunge into homosexuality after a long life of denial.

First blow job I suspect parallels first experiences with cunnilingus, so sort of trying to "isomorph" one onto to the other.

There's pent up lust, fear, connection to a friend who may or may not have the same level of romantic affection. Feeling like you should say something while worried about saying the wrong thing.

I wanted to have him be wildly optimistic about what his mother would think, as he's high on life. I can only approximate this with a sex before marriage, living with girlfriend experience but I think you're right it'd be better to take the part with his mother out or make it more disjointed.

The part with "being the bitch" is the whole idea that a person can be gay, but it's more "unmanly" to be the catcher, the one who is treated the way some guys treat their girlfriends. Again, this is all guesswork on my part, I can't speak to the actual thoughts going through a young gay man's mind except via second-hand recollections of my friends who came out in a somewhat earlier time period. (late 90s, early 00s).
 
I also wanted it to be purposefully less poetic, throwing in references to Einstein-Rosenberg bridges and Baskin Robins (b/c "Revelation is another flavor").

It's trying to be clunky because I don't think people sort out their thoughts in poetic, literary appropriate fashion, but I think it veers into the trying-too-hard-and-it-shows territory.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #13 on: June 02, 2013, 01:35:23 am »
Quote from: sciborg2
Sci Story #8

Upending the soda cup, I drop the mouse into the cage. It tumbles through space but lands on its feet, nose twitching as it attempts to understand the sudden expansion of space and light in it's world.

For a moment it must think it's been returned to some approximation of it's ancestral horizons, a racial memory that uplifts the heart, but after watching this same scene dozens of times now I swear I can pinpoint the moment it realizes its freedom's restricted. That moment right there, when it stops and perks up its ears, that's when Enlightenment comes, when it knows its bounded by the unnatural right angles of glass meeting glass.

And then the next moment, a glance in the direction of the heat lamp and the Revelation of coils, when despite it's predicament the mouse always chooses to live.

Then the world's boundaries are so tight it can't even draw breathe. Black eyes of pure pupil bright with the mouse's furious rage. There's a courage in mice that we don't fully appreciate, a mammal's will to live that lab-geeks should try to distill.

About two minutes later my snake begins to swallow, and soon it won't need to eat for another week-and-a-half. It'll lie in its cage, lost in reptilian stupor, untroubled by the loneliness that afflicts warm blooded things.

/Story

=-=-=

Hopefully it's clear I realize humans are mammals. ;-)

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #14 on: June 02, 2013, 01:35:32 am »
Quote from: Callan S.
I thought #8 was striking.