jakebe | Entries tagged with thursday prompt

(Author's Note: This little bit of fiction doesn't really fit within any of the worlds that I regularly write about, but I have to admit that the main character feels an awful lot like Robert, the main character for Bird. I wanted to capture a sense of frustrated pessimism, but built on a pragmatic basis. I also wanted this to work mostly through dialogue and 'stage direction' as it were, but as it's told from a first-person perspective there's a little bit of 'telling' that shines through.)

"What do you suppose our future is going to look like?" Sarah was lying next to me in our backyard, looking up at the stars. They were much easier to see now that the electricity had gone out.

I sighed and tried not to look at the one star, bigger than the others, twinkling with erratic, angry life. I didn't want to play this game with her, not now. "I don't know. Why don't you tell me?"

She turned, and I could feel her looking at me. "I think it'll be better than what we have now. Not right away, but eventually. We'll build new farms and towns, and we'll go into the cities only to salvage stuff we need."

I nodded, and couldn't stop myself from saying: "Where you'll have to wade through the bones of the dead and can't do anything about the infections you'll get, because there'll be no medicine." I kept staring up. My eyes kept getting drawn to that star. It was the brightest thing in the sky now, maybe half the size of the moon.

She was quiet after that, for about a minute. I could feel her frowning at me, too. After a while she spoke. "I really wish you wouldn't do that. You don't have to ruin everything."

"I'm not ruining everything. That is." I pointed to the asteroid, now, forced myself to look at it. She did, too. I heard her gasp slightly and immediately regretted it. Then I felt angry at her for making me feel bad. "I'm just reminding you what's going to happen."

"I already know what's going to happen." She turned away, then. Away from me, away from the stars. She was staring at Rodney's doghouse now, I knew. I tried not to think about how he disappeared a week ago, or wonder where he was. People were getting hungry these days. They were trying to stockpile. They were well past the point of being picky.

"No you don't. You have this pie-in-the-sky idea of what's going to happen, but you don't know what's really going to happen. That thing is going to smash into the planet, Sarah. And when it does, that's it. The end. Done. You might think that you can climb out of whatever shelter your family has and just start over, but it's not going to be that easy. It's going to be months before anybody even sees the sun again. If you survive -- and that's a pretty big if -- you're going to come out to a world that's died. Completely. All the plants, all the animals. Just gone. You won't go into the city to salvage anything, because the cities will have melted. The ash will have choked the oceans. The earth will have been scorched away. You can't grow anything. You can't build anything. All you can do is eat what you've got until it's gone, and then you're going to starve to death. That's what the future is going to look like. And I sure as fuck don't want to see it."

There was a voice in my head telling me to stop. I think I heard her gasp, then whimper, then start to cry. But I kept going. I heard my voice getting higher and shriller, carrying through the quiet of the neighborhood, my panic exciting a dog whose family had left him days ago. He barked four times before he went quiet again. He didn't have much fight left in him.

But neither did I. Our family had decided not to survive what was coming. We knew better. If we made it through the impact, we were not equipped in mind or body to handle what would come afterwards. What kind of life would that be? Sarah, sweet and naive, always tried to make things into a fairy tale no matter how bad they were. I think she understood that things would be scary for a little while, but thought it would get better really soon. I knew better. There was no getting better from this. The sooner she understood that, the better off she would be. There would be no more fairy tales. The asteroid would scorch all of that away.

"I don't want to die," she said through her tears. Her voice sounded small, afraid. The way it should be.

I turned to her and held her, scooting closer to her warmth. This would be the last time I'd get to do this, I told myself, and I started to cry too.

"I know you don't," I said. I kissed her hair, put my arms around her. "But if that thing does what we're pretty sure it's going to do, I don't want to live through that."

She cried harder, and so did I. I held her and she backed up against me. What else could we do? Far above us, but getting closer all the time, the asteroid brightened the night sky in its unnatural, malevolent way.

Prescott's ear twitched as he looked down at the paper before him. He had written words and numbers on it, all laid out in a nice little chart. The source of income or expense in the far left column, and money going into his bank account in the middle one. At the far end went all the money that left his bank account for whatever reason, from the beginning of the month until now. At the bottom, the balance in his checking account, as it stood now: $-87.33.

He stroked his nose, from the twitching tip up to the top of his eyes. It soothed him to be petted, even if he was the one doing the petting. And right now, it was the only thing keeping him from having a small panic attack in front of all these nice people inside Zia's Cafe on Allegheny. He double-checked and triple-checked the numbers. It simply couldn't be right.

His phone buzzed. He plucked it carefully and read the text message displayed on its screen. Now I know why you wanted me to buy you lunch.

Prescott looked up and gave the man sitting across from him his best disapproving stare. When you were a six-foot tall walking rabbit, that only worked so well. Vitaly merely smiled back at him, hunched in his comically undersized chair, cradling the comically undersized phone in his massive hands.

To each other, they looked as they truly were. Prescott was the perfect blend of rabbit and man, with big brown expressive eyes, oversized buck-teeth hidden under a blunt and boxy muzzle, a thick coat of white fur covering his entire body. He favored baggy jeans and a light sweater this time of year; his fur was more than enough to keep him warm, but he couldn't walk around naked when most people couldn't see that he was keeping modest. Vitaly was an enormous blue troll of a man, thick white hair forming a mane that nearly hid the small horns and pointed ears that still managed to poke through. He had an underbite to match Prescott's overbite, thick, sharp canines jutting up from his lower lip. He wore simple and sturdy clothing, blown up large to contain the impossible, ancient strength that was his birthright. He had learned restraint by living in a world made far too small for him, and had come to have the patience of mountains.

To the cafe's other patrons, they were merely an eccentric couple -- a hulking man who was constantly texting, and a strange younger fellow carrying out what looked to be a one-sided conversation. They came here together every Wednesday. The smaller man ordered for the larger one, and he had an odd, jokey way of talking. It was simultaneously hilarious and frustrating.

Prescott rarely told the truth outright after he came upon his true nature. It was the birthright of his kind, apparently, and it made simple conversations rather interesting affairs more often than not. He did his best to at least make it entertaining to decipher the truth, but that only went so far and inevitably people got fed up with trying to puzzle him out. Vitaly was the only person who knew what he was getting at most of the time, and that was an immeasurable relief to him. In exchange, he served as the troll's translator so his muteness wouldn't make things weird for anyone. They were the best of friends, and they fought often enough to prove it.

Today, Prescott was too nervous about his bank account to really give Vitaly a good rejoinder. "Ha. Very funny. I'm overdrawn in the first place because I bought lunch for you last week. You could have stopped after your tenth sandwich, you big ox."

It was a lie, and they both knew it. Vitaly simply smirked and tapped away on his undersized phone. It was nothing short of magic that he was able to type anything with those fingers the size of soda cans. I know I could have. But it was more fun watching you sweat.

Prescott allowed himself a small smile. "If you think it's fun watching me sweat, you have a pathetic and incredibly boring life."

Vitaly shrugged, then ate the last quarter of his sandwich in one quick bite. Prescott looked down at his balance sheet and sighed. His ears folded as he thought about the bills he still had to pay. Money had never been his strong suit.

"I have everything under control, of course. My student loans are well in hand, and so are the utilities, and I certainly won't make a late fee on the credit card. I know you think the negative in front of my balance looks bad, but really, it couldn't have come at a better time. I'm in excellent shape." Prescott's heart raced as he thought about it. Where could he get the money?

His phone buzzed. Is no worries. I give you $500 now, and you pay me back over time, OK?

Prescott looked up, stunned. "But you make even less than I do. I mean, you're practically a peasant! Where did you get that kind of money?"

Savings. I save while you buy video games and hair dryers and what not. This is interest-free loan, pay back when you can. But I help you budget your money, yeah?

The rabbit's whiskers and ears lifted. "I don't see what help you could possibly be, but I suppose it couldn't be the worst thing."

No, worst thing is borrowing money from Brendon. He lords it over you until the end of time. Lucky for you, it's just me. Vitaly smiled, then reached over and grabbed the other half of Prescott's sandwich in those big fingers. The troll sniffed it, made a face, and then ate it anyway.

Prescott snickered and rolled his eyes. It's amazing how money in one's bank account could lift your spirits. "Arrogant grand-standing is far better than some lummox eating you out of house and burrow, that's for sure."

They both laughed, then, Prescott loud enough for the two of them.

(This week's prompt was balance, and I wanted to take it to a different place than most people would have thought of. Balancing a checkbook can be rather boring, but...I thought for these two it would fit rather well.

Prescott and Vitaly are two of the Three, a group of characters who find new Sleepwallkers and help them with the realization of their true nature. I really love the idea that they both find basic communication challenging for various reasons, and rely on each other to make things a bit easier. Prescott is the mouthpiece for the group, and all the twists and turns and verbal rabbit-holes can be useful in their line of work. When he needs to be earnest, he can trust Vitaly to decipher what he's actually trying to say. Vitaly, for his part, can't speak at all. For him, those tiny cell phones are a god-send. Also, I never get tired of seeing giant people trying to use tiny gadgets.

That being said, trying to figure out how Prescott and Vitaly actually speak to one another -- and to 'civilians' around them -- is a bit of a challenge. I know that I'm not a good enough writer to really pull it off yet, so I want to get in a lot of practice. They're fun to write, anyway, so expect to read a lot of these guys in the future.)

When Preston regained consciousness, his body sang a chorus of pain. He was under something heavy that trapped his right side, and his neck was tilted at an angle that sent a shock of nerves from his cheek clear down to his left hand. He could feel that his face was covered with something hot and sticky, and he could smell blood through all the dust and char. His stomach was a knot. There was a blossom of pain below his right knee, but below that his leg was worryingly cold, numb. If he moved, whatever was on top of him shifted and conjured fresh pain. He moved anyway.

The desk that had collapsed on top of him moved reluctantly, but eventually it did. Preston rose into a room that could barely be called that anymore. Any sense of order had been shattered along with the windows, along with the walls. There was rubble everywhere, the desk one of many things that had been thrown across the room and smashed against the walls before they crumbled. He picked his way out of the small pile of rubble that had fallen on top of him. It hurt him to put weight on his right leg, but he couldn't feel his foot beneath it.

There were the remains of his laptop on the floor, and the filing cabinet had vomited its contents through the exposed walls of his corner home office. The shards of broken glass that littered everything caught and reflected the light of fire burning inside the room -- inside his house -- and whatever was raging outside. He coughed when he noticed it, and he felt his eyes and throat burning with the coat of soot and smoke. He dragged himself out of the remains of his house and into the rubble-strewn lawn beyond. Preston knew he had to get out of here.

The house was in a good neighborhood, a suburb ten miles outside of the city. There were good schools here, and the neighbors were all young families who had bought into the American dream. A couple expecting their first child bought the house to the left of his. The manager of an insurance company bought the house to his right. He had a family -- his wife made clothes and sold them on the Internet, and their children went to a nearby high school. He had no idea where they were, but as he looked back to see the burning remains of his house he saw the houses of his neighbors rolling with fire, pouring smoke into the air. It made a loud, roaring, popping sound, and the smoke hissed as it joined the immense cloud that hung over everything.

The houses across the street were blown into the street. The only light came from the fire that was consuming his entire neighborhood. The sky was black and solid and low. Preston dimly recalled that before he lost consciousness, he was in a 10 AM teleconference with clients in Europe. There was a flash, and then a ringing in his ears, and then darkness.

He looked up and down his street. There were other shocked people dragging themselves out of the wreckage of their lives, like him, with tattered clothing and bloodied faces. They were moaning, or screaming, or silent. He couldn't tell who they were, but he felt the instinctual need to avoid them all the same. They stared at him, too, like they had no idea who he was.

He shuffled down the block, towards a small group of people at an intersection. The road sloped gently down now, and on clear days you could see the sprawling suburban neighborhoods, all the way down to the highway that circled the city proper. All he saw now was a world razed by fire, the ashes it made floating through the air.

"What happened?" He heard someone say. The voice startled him.

"Nuclear bomb." Someone else answered. "Hit the city right in the middle. I saw the mushroom cloud go up before...before the blast wave hit."

Preston heard that ringing in his ears again. It grew louder, more distinct. A nuclear bomb? In the city? His wife was in there. Nora. Jacob was with her. They were...they were in that.

His right leg wobbled, and he toppled entirely. The world dimmed to a mass of black and yellow. And then there was darkness again.

(The Thursday Prompt for this bit of fiction was "ashes". I immediately thought of ashes drifting through the air and an entire city on fire from some calamity, because my brain will conjure up post-apocalyptic images if given half the chance.

What I wanted to do with this is set a nesting doll of scenes; we begin with Preston's consciousness, awareness of his own body, and then expand out to ever-increasing circles. The room he's in, his house, his neighborhood, the city. Eventually -- and I think this happens with everyone -- you lose the ability to comprehend the enormity of an event or the community you're a part of. Having him lose consciousness at the end is a bit of a copout, but I like the way it bookends the action. Besides, if I were in that situation, I'm pretty sure I'd do the exact same thing.)

(This is what I came up with for a Thursday prompt two weeks ago, boundaries. I wanted to return to Matthew from my previous story and see how he was doing after the transformation was complete. This story doesn't end so much as stop, and I'll need to take a couple more stories to focus specifically on endings. But for now, here's the story.)

"There it is. That's the edge of the reservation." Kikkitik gestured with one long forearm towards the unassuming low fence they were walking towards. Matthew was surprised by its modesty; it was a simple wooden post fence, lined with wires that may or may not be electric. It stretched over the plain that served as the outside edge of the chimeral reservation, as far as he could see to the north and south. It couldn't have been higher than three feet. He could have stepped over it easily, and Kikkitik could simply crawl over it herself. There was a dirt road just beyond it, and beyond that a slope that lead to more grassland. They stopped thirty feet before they reached the boundary. Matthew knew Kikkitik wanted no part of it, and he wasn't sure he wanted to flirt with it, either.

He had been on the reservation for nearly a month now, but this was the first time he had taken the tour. There were a number of reasons he didn't want to leave the confines of the small compound that served as their home, but one by one Kikkitik had resolved them. She was patient and steady with him, and it was the least he could do to reward that effort with the walk around the ground she had been pushing for. That didn't mean he was ready to face the world beyond the reservation just yet, though. Expanding the world he was in was adventurous enough.

He had changed and lost everything he knew. Right now, he was a hulk of a creature, nine feet tall with the solid and shaggy build of a bear. His head was a mixture of bear and beaver, oversized incisors and prominent canine teeth in a boxy, short muzzle. His ears were broad and long, his nose was large and sensitive, his eyes were dark and small. It took him several weeks to navigate the vast gulf between his old body and his new one, and even now he was unsure of how things worked. He shouldn't be able to talk with the strange shape of his mouth, or the teeth that were too large or small and in all the wrong places. But he spoke anyway.

"I was expecting something more." He heard his voice, deep and rich and rolling. He sounded like the noble warrior from a fantasy movie. It didn't suit him.

Kikkitik's mandibles clacked together several times, making a thick and heavy knock-knock-knock-knock sound that he had learned was laughter. "Most people do. But it doesn't take much to keep us in here, or the rest of the world out there. Both groups decided they'd rather stick to their own kind a long time ago."

"Mmm." Matthew turned to look at her. She was something out of most people's nightmares, the unholy cross of a praying mantis and a millipede blown up to vehicular-sized proportions. Out of all the chimera on the reservation, she was easily the most unnerving. But she was quiet and thoughtful, patient and pragmatic. She had carried him through his transition to reservation life, kicking and screaming. He now considered her his best friend. "I'm not sure that's such a good thing. It's only a matter of time before one of us gets tired of tolerant isolation."

She looked down at him, her antennae waving consideringly. "That may be. But for now, this works. We have time and space to consider who and what we are."

"And it gives them time to figure out that they don't want us around, whatever it is we decide we are."

Kikkitik knocked once. "So untrusting." She was practicing her vocal inflection, he could tell. It didn't quite convey the amusement she had been aiming for, but it carried across enough that he knew what she was trying to do.

He grinned at her in the way he learned, opening his jaws, sticking his tongue out over his lower incisors. It was his best approximation, but it still didn't look quite right. The instinctive reaction made it look like he was snarling far too much. "Have you watched the news? Chimera aren't exactly being embraced out there."

"I don't watch television anymore, no. It makes me feel too weird. I guess I haven't seen anyone hating us yet. I've only seen them." She nodded, and stretched out a forearm as far as it would go. Matthew followed her gaze, over the fence and down into the small valley to the east.

His eyesight had gotten a lot worse, but his hearing and smell had gotten a lot better. He lifted his nose to the wind and sniffed, then swiveled his ears in the direction she pointed. He caught the scent of gasoline, sun-baked metal, and people. He heard the hum of generators and idle chatter too distant to make out clearly. He could barely make out the speck of sunlight glinting off a metallic surface, too, but that didn't tell him nearly as much as his nose and ears did.

"Who are they?" he rumbled.

"They're people who've gone out of their way to contact us. When they see us near the boundaries of the reservation, they hold up signs telling us we're welcome and still thought of as people." Kikkitik chittered. Matthew had no idea what that meant.

Matthew had no idea what to think about those people at the bottom of that shallow hill, either. Immediately his mind conjured images of those kooks outside of Roswell or Area 51, welcoming aliens and asking to be lifted to higher states of consciousness. Did those people think of him as something more than human? Did they think his transformation had given him any answers to life's questions? He wanted to run down there, just to tell him that he was as scared and confused as the next man. He didn't have any answers. He barely had any friends.

"That's kind of nice," was all he said.

Kikkitik chittered, then turned away from the fence to begin the long walk back to the compound. "Give it time," she said. "People are always freaked out by the things they've never encountered before. And right now, we're just on the edge of what they know. They just need time to absorb that."

Matthew was silent, but he fell into step beside her. Whenever he had to jog, he had to fight the urge to fall to his hands and run on all fours. He had his doubts about her optimistic view, but he hoped she was right. That small fence made an effective boundary between their worlds right now, but it wouldn't hold forever. Sooner or later, human and chimera would need to deal with each other.

(The Thursday Prompt last week was "forever". That got me thinking about what forever means to us, and how we would never really want something to last forever. People were made to exist in a changing universe, and the drive to adapt is coded in our genetics. That lead me down a rabbit trail and into this story, which is undoubtedly influenced by "The Homecoming", a wonderful Hugo-nominated short story from Mike Resnick. I think it conjures a good idea of what 'forever' really means to us, a vague state of affairs that will exist long into the future after we will. Anyway, here's the story, 1344 words.)

"Forever? What do you mean forever?" Matthew shifted in his bed, his ears scraping against the headboards. They felt so strange, higher than they should have been, long and fragile and immense. They were flaps of skin, really, perfectly shaped for catching sound. He had no need for them. He didn't want them. He felt the developing muscles at their bases fold them downward, and he knew immediately that it was a signal of his mood to the people in the room. It made his stomach roll. He was already getting used to them.

Dr. Patel stood to the left of him, a mask over his face, a clipboard in his hands. The man looked tired, but that was to be expected. Counting Matthew, there were 14 other cases that broke out in the immediate area and chances are they had all come here. How many times had he had this conversation? How many times did he have to look at a misshapen face in mid-transformation and try to sound sympathetic?

"What I'm saying is, there is no known cure for your condition." Dr. Patel's accent and low voice made him difficult to hear under his mask. Matthew's left ear flicked up, scraping the thick mane of hair he was growing and the wall. It was like turning up the volume on the TV. Suddenly he was as clear as a bell. "We have no idea how it works, why it does what it does. For now, the best that we can do is make you comfortable through your change and prepare you for what your life will be like...after."

Matthew's mother began sobbing at the foot of his bed. He watched his father go to her, standing behind her chair to grab her shoulders. He looked like he was about to cry, too. It struck him that they were grieving for him. Right then and there, while he was still in the room. His heartbeat quickened, and he felt a flash of anger. His parents. His own parents. To them, he was as good as dead.

Yet in so many ways, he was. The transformation phase was the contagious phase, at least as far as the CDC had told the public. But that wouldn't stop him from being fired, from people crossing the street when they saw him approaching. It wouldn't keep his landlord from finding a reason to evict him, and it wouldn't protect him from the gangs of anti-chimeral activists popping up all over the world. He would either need to seek sanctuary at the CDC in Atlanta and submit himself to biological testing, or he would have to find one of those reservations out west and live off the grid as much as he could. Either way, his life was over.

He felt his breath quicken. His jaw hadn't broken yet, but he could feel the pain along stress points as he spoke. His eyes were wide, he knew it. He could only imagine how he looked. "I...I got out of the water as soon as I could. As soon as...I....I knew..."

Dr. Patel put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down on the bed. Matthew hadn't even realized how far he had sat up. "I know. You were only exposed for a very brief amount of time, but the agent was very aggressive. By the time anyone knew what was happening, it had taken hold for most of the people on the beach. I'm sorry. I truly am."

Matthew remembered being in the water, the coolness and moisture and salt in the air as he splashed with Amy. The sun was sinking low over the buildings behind the boardwalk, and night approached from the ocean. There were ribbons of brightness in the waves as they crested closer to shore, but everyone thought that was just the sunlight reflecting on the water. No one had any idea something was wrong until a little boy started to scream and slap at his skin as if he was trying to put himself out.

Then Matthew felt it, the water starting to burn on his skin. It was like someone had slipped enough acid into the entire ocean for it to start scouring things. He grabbed Amy and waded back to shore in a panic, and he practically had to drag her on the beach those last few feet. Ten minutes later and the boardwalk was lined with black vans, grabbing people, pulling bags over their head, carrying them away. He saw a man in fatigues grab Amy and lift her over his shoulder, kicking and screaming. He was on the southern edge of the beach by now. He turned and fled.

That was the last time he saw her. That night he drank himself to sleep, chased by a pounding headache. The next morning he woke up with long, rabbit-like ears covered in fuzz that matched the shade of chestnut-brown his hair had become. His parents recoiled when he stumbled downstairs, and they immediately called the hospital. Three days later, and they're still quarantined. His mom and dad will likely go home, eventually. But he'll simply disappear.

Dr. Patel told him what he could expect in the coming days -- there'll be pain as his body's changes grow more and more severe, and they'll come in waves that will last anywhere from hours to days. Bones will stress until they break, and then re-set themselves. His body will be flooded with adrenaline most of the time, and the stress on his heart will be tremendous. They have painkillers and tranquilizers ready to counteract it, though. At some point, maybe in a month, maybe three, he'll be something new, unmistakably and irrevocably, and he'll be released into his parents' care.

His mother had to leave the room halfway through the doctor's speech. His father left a moment or two after that, and the doctor left as soon as he knew there would be no other questions. The silence descended around Matthew's bed, thick and total.

Matthew knew that this would be one of the last times he'd ever see his parents. His mother wouldn't be able to handle the sight of his body mangling itself to become something alien, and his father always retreated from the things he didn't understand. They might tell all of his friends that he died with Amy, and even have a funeral. Of course there would be no body. It would have decomposed long ago to make room for whatever form he'd be walking around with by then.

He flattened his ears and closed his eyes. His life was over. The death would be painful, and at the end of it he would have a brand-new, more difficult life that he would need to learn to live. He knew he wasn't ready, but whoever was? No matter how much time you had to prepare for it, death was always sudden. You could never know how to deal with it when it comes.

His mind spun. He thought of Amy, Mom and Dad. He thought of his coworkers at the office, his drinking buddies, the college friends he always looked up when they came home for the holidays. He would need to say goodbye to each and every one of them. He would have to let them go, forever.

Abruptly, he grabbed the remote and flipped on the television. He watched the news reports of the giant rising out of the Atlantic Ocean and devastating the boardwalk just hours after he ran. The military managed to kill it before it contaminated the entire city, but the loss of life and property was immense. That alien was still stretched across the length of the beach, he knew, covered over with plastic and being slowly dissected by the CDC. The creature had been the death of him, he thought.

But it had also birthed him.