Terrible Analogies

Thanks to the Super Bowl and Karin’s parents being in town, time was at a premium this weekend.  Writing had to take a back seat these past few days.

In place of Five Minute Fiction please enjoy another unedited and very much rough initial draft excerpt from my upcoming, best selling, great American novel (heh…).

Setup: Hal is lost in thought when he should be giving the weather report, oblivious to the live television studio cameras pointing his way.

Forecast (pages 5-6)

What people underestimate most when visiting Galveston in the summer is how quickly the heat can sap the energy from even the most prepared.  Without taking the proper precautions it’s far too easy to be overcome by that big Texas sun.

Last summer some cops on beach patrol found six dead sea lions baking on the beach.  Because so many were found dead at one time foul play was suspected.  The bodies were collected and sent to a local marine animal rescue facility where a necropsy was performed, revealing that they died from heat stroke.  Shit, if sea lions can die from exposure, how much of a chance does your aged uncle visiting from Wisconsin have when he arrives on your doorstep with nothing but jeans and gift shop t-shirts?

In case you were interested, and I know you are, there are three main stages to heat stroke.

The first stage is when the body initially begins to overheat.  This can be brought on by a lack of hydration while window shopping downtown in mid-July.  When the body overheats, it tends to cramp up.  Nausea and fatigue soon follows.

If shade and water are not provided then heat exhaustion quickly takes over.  The unfortunately victim might lapse into unconsciousness in the afternoon sun, choking to death on an evacuated fast food and soda.

The third stage is actual heat stroke.  It’s an incredible thing to witness a person succumb to exposure.  The skin blooms red and blotchy and breathing becomes labored as the victim, if they don’t fall unconscious, gets that far-off look in their eyes as they ramble in drunk, unfocused sentences.  Sweat stops being produced.  Hands swell to unnatural proportions.  The world drops away, replaced by hallucinations.  They stumble, topple to the ground, then seize right up as the body trembles and mouth foams.  With all cooling systems shut down, the victim lapses into a coma.  Left untreated heart and liver failure occurs, followed closely behind by brain damage.

You don’t see many roofers or gardeners in the emergency room being treated for heat stroke.  Outdoor contractors are, by trade, professionals who can easily identify the effects of prolonged exposure to the sun, and are smart enough to know when it’s time to seek shelter.  But throw an overweight vacationing computer programmer deep into the depths of a broiling Texas summer and things are bound to go south fast.

In a situation where a person succumbs to heat exhaustion the communal hero mechanism inevitably kicks in as people swarm to surround the body, scrambling for anything to block out the sun and provide life-saving shade.  Water bottles magically appear.  Their contents poured over the victim.

There’s always somebody barking that the feet should be raised.

Some stranger always takes it upon himself to prop the victim up and rub their chest with a damp towel.

Hovering above the action is always that one guy who shouts down to the heaving, delirious victim, “Buddy!  Hey buddy!  You’re gonna be alright!”

As the taped scene of downtown life fades out behind me and the local weather map appears in its place, I wonder how long Alan would last if left tied up in the trunk of my car as it sat alone and ignored in a far corner of the studio parking lot under the noon-day sun.

And it’s then I suddenly notice that it’s oddly silent.

I’m pointing into thin air.  My reference monitor is blank.  There aren’t any images being displayed on the blue Chromakey wall.  Colleen and Alan are speaking.  I can see their lips move but I can’t hear them.

My IFB crackles and shakes with the voice of my producer telling me to wake up.  Get it together.  To turn it over to Alan.  It wants to know what the fuck is wrong with me.  “Goddamn it, turn it over to Alan!” it urges again in shrieking feedback.

I must have blacked out again.  Lost in thought, live on the air.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the world’s first deaf-mute weatherman.

“It definitely was another hot one today, Alan,” I finally blurt out through a sheepish smile, “But expect the nighttime temperatures to drop a few degrees later on in the week,” I say as I tug on my suspenders in my trademarked fashion.

Camera two cuts to Alan.

Camera one blinks out of existence, taking me with it.

The IFB hums in my ear.  Plucking it out with a hooked finger I let it dangle on the thin wire jutting out from my collar.  It sways back and forth as I walk off the set and press the power button on the box attached to my belt at the small of my back.  No need to listen.  I can imagine what’s being said to me from the control room.

I imagine a finger firmly pressed down on the talk button of the microphone that’s wirelessly attached to my earpiece.  I imagine the tip of that finger drained of blood from the downward pressure.  I imagine my producer, pursing her lips together tightly, her lipstick worn away from the effort, telling me to get my ass in her office.  That she wants to see me right away.

I also imagine that I don’t give a shit.

Five Minute Fiction is an ongoing experiment. The goal: To write as much as I can in five minutes.  Don’t think.  Let the fingers do the work.  Once done walk away then come back later to clean it up.

Enjoy!

Choices

The young woman, dressed in plain white, with fine gold ribbon wrapped around her thin waist and secured with the traditional Tyet knot over her right hip.  Her bare feet are covered with fine soft dust, which falls silently as a prayer to the sun-warmed earth.  She holds her hands in front of her, clasped softly together so the tattoos on her arms form one continuous work of art.

From somewhere behind her she hears a whisper.  A snarl.  Its familiar voice demanding her selection.

She chooses the lion.

Her kind always does.

Closing her eyes, she stands patient and still, knowing exactly what’s to come next.  Like a practiced dance, she sees the moves in her mind, playing out as they always do.

A gate will open.  From somewhere deep within the shadows a pair of eyes will glint in the fervid sun.  Pads, paws, and claws will slowly, steadily breach the dark.  A rough tongue will glide across teeth as sharp as eagle talons.  Six hundred pounds of muscle and savage anger, which has been starved of both light and food for weeks, emerges with a bloodlust.

All it wants to do now is lash out with fury, and feed.

She’ll not let any hint of emotion betray her.  She’ll do as she was taught.  And like a noble woman from the High House of Leochas she wills herself detached from her body and all its raw baser instincts.

Even as the stadium tenses and the mad bellowing of the maniacal crowd bleeds together into one delirious, indecipherable rumble, she stands as still and serene as classical sculpture.  Emotionless.  Accepting what comes next.  An admirably beautiful creature at peace in the heart of chaos.

Unclasping her hands, she reaches up towards a lever embedded in the ornate white marble wall and gently pulls it down in a singularly graceful motion.

From somewhere within the stadium a gate opens, the crowd grows silent, and a victim screams his last.

The crowd erupts in a deafening cacophony of cheers and animalistic howls.

Behind her, bitter laughter cackles like tumbling armor, takes in a raspy gulp of air, then asks the young woman for her next choice.

Just a small excerpt from some of the writing I managed to get accomplished last week.  This is first attempt hasn’t been edited, so please excuse the burrs and blemishes.

To set it up (page 49):  Donnie the walking suicide has escaped the clinic.  Hal arrives too late to stop him, but manages to rescue Abbey from an unwarranted medical experiment.  Stealing a car they put the clinic and it’s goon squad orderlies in their rear view mirror and disappear into the night.

Meanwhile, the storm of the century is fast making landfall, and it has their town in its sights.

Enjoy?

Abbey dropped out of college the same month her mother died of cancer.  What she had wasn’t the kind of cancer where chemotherapy makes your hair fall out in thick clumps, you’re gifted with an exclusive insight into the secret meaning of life, and your very being exudes a peculiar aura as you calmly tell concerned friends and family that, “No matter what happens, it’ll be alright,” and that, “I’m fine with this,” and, “Do I look silly in this hat?”

No, her mother didn’t come down with that type of friendly cancer at all.

Abbey’s mother had what doctors called Paget’s Disease, which sunk itself deep into her pelvic and femur bones, causing them to grow abnormally large, cavernously porous, and alarmingly weak.  The joints in her hip became so enlarged that any movement made her bones creak like snow being compressed underfoot.  Walking became painfully impossible.

One morning she feebly tried to slide herself out of bed and into an awaiting wheelchair but, slipping on the covers, missed and fell flailing to the shag carpet where her pelvis shattered into several jagged pieces.  It was at the hospital they discovered that she had developed a rare and painful type of bone cancer.  It was some horribly convoluted Latin name that Abbey never bothered to memorize.   “I’m sorry,” the doctor said to her, not taking his eyes off the charts he held in his hands, “but your mother is suffering from a stage four variant of the disease.  We’ll make her as comfortable as possible.”

By “comfortable” they meant “heavily stoned on a continuous morphine drip”.   And even through that delirious drug haze, during those final days when death refused to grant her release, Abbey’s mother squirmed and writhed in terrible agony that no amount of medicine could touch.

Her eyes, withdrawn and sunken into dark pits, never gained that calm ethereal peace that people who come to accept death as a natural part of life always seem to attain.  The cancer had whittled her down until just 78 pounds of flesh hung off her ravaged bones.  Lips that always smiled were now drawn tight against her teeth so that only a paper slit appeared where her mouth used to be.

On that last day, as Abbey tried to give her mother’s foot a comforting squeeze, she felt the bones in her toes crack under the reassuring pressure of her fingers.  Abbey let go and collapsed into a dark corner of the room, lowered her head into her hands, and finally gave up trying to be brave.  And as she cried her mother seizured.  Gripped in the tightening throes of spasm the fracturing bones in her ribcage sounded like distant pops of heavy rain on a closed window.

The machines attached to her mother began screeching and wailing in increasing urgency as the skeleton that used to be her mother thrashed savagely under a thin layer of crisp, bleached hospital sheets. Abbey continued to cry, never looking up, never letting up until the hysterical baying of the machines were silenced, the doctors called the time of death, the body serenely covered up, and Abbey was once again alone in the room with a corpse and a pool of tears that shimmered on the polished Formica floor between her legs.

Five Minute Fiction is an ongoing experiment. The goal: To write as much as I can in five minutes.  Don’t think.  Let the fingers do the work.  Once done walk away then come back later to clean it up.

Enjoy!

The City

Wes vividly remembers lying face down on the curb, arms flayed out on the cold concrete, head bleeding, unable to move.

He thinks about the gun, and the voice, and how things seemed to move in slow motion like the world was drowning in glue.  He recalls walking home late one night from work, the bitter wind biting at his cheeks, and how quiet the city seemed.  But most of all, the one memory that keeps percolating to the surface, keeping him awake at night, is the whiskey voice telling telling him not to move.

He doesn’t remember the face, but the voice he’ll never forget.  Like clockwork gears dipped in sand, it told him not to move (“Don’t fucking move!”).  It told him to hand over his wallet (“Give me your fucking money!”).  It told him that he should move faster or that he’ll get hurt (“Hurry the fuck up or I’ll fuck you up!”).

What he doesn’t recall is the gun smashing into the side of his skull.  How he saw a dancing blanket of stars like television snow.  The tunnel vision.  The blackness that smothered him like a lead jacket.  How he was unconscious before he even hit the ground.  The feet of pedestrians walking past, ignoring him, thinking he was nothing more than a passed out drunk.

But that was then.  This is now.  And Wes is back on that same corner, this time in a wheelchair, pretending to be asleep.  A twenty dollar bill peeking out from a front pocket.  His right hand hidden underneath the flap of a frayed coat, with his fingers wrapped around the worn grip of a chromed .38 special.  Alert.  Listening.  Praying to hear that voice just one more time.

Five Minute Fiction is an ongoing experiment. The goal: To write as much as I can in five minutes.  Don’t think.  Let the fingers do the work.  Once done walk away then come back later to clean it up.

Enjoy!

Our Highlight Reel

I’m not what you call an emotional man.

I posses what the wife called a “heart of stone” that not even the death of my parents could soften.  But today is our anniversary, and I found myself watching a recording I took of our Maui honeymoon on the television.

Lily looked beautiful in her blue bikini, sitting on the railing of the anchored Sea Shanty as it languidly bobbed up and down just off the shore from Molokini island.  With a dive mask perched on top of her head, she reaches out to me and says, “Will you stop it already with the camera and come in with me?”

“I will, hon,” I say, panning back for a wider shot, “But I want to film you jumping in.”

“You perv.  You just want a shot of my ass,” she says, scrunching her cute freckled nose.

I absentmindedly toy with the remote control and think about the first time I saw Lily, and how long it took me to work up the courage to speak to her.  About our first date.  Our first fumbling kiss.  The dimples below the small of her back.  How perfectly her hand fit in mine as we walked together to wherever it was we were going.

On the screen Lily pulls the dive mask over her eyes, smiles, blows me a kiss, then tumbles backwards into the warm ocean with a splash only to surface a few seconds later.  “Come on in,” she says, brushing aside her snorkel,  “The water feels great!”

And that’s when the logo for “Shark Week” appears superimposed over what should have been an idyllic scene from the life of a happy couple just starting their journey down that path of marital bliss.

I turned off the television and did my best to choke down the lump in my throat and wipe the tears from my cheeks.  I couldn’t bear to watch her die again.