Lens On: The Rusted Mall

The Rusted Mall, I admit, was directly inspired by the seemingly unrelenting news of public mass murders in America during the time of its writing.  I have a number of opinions about these events that I don't think I'll share here, except for the one alluded to in the writing.  I don't think the murderer's pictures, names, motives, friends, should be a center of celebrity attention the way they often are. 

The character, Shannon Vega, is someone I envisioned having to grow up knowing what her father did, but sharing my views of disdain on the sensationalizing of it.  In my head she's devoted a lot of her young adult life shooting portraits of the survivors, and she donates any money earned from that to various prevention and recovery charities.   It always irked her, though, that there was a memorial painted in the mall that got shot up, so she had to go take care of that, too.

The setting was the prompt, I believe - just the abandoned mall setting.  I've always had a fascination with abandoned and derelict places, with graffiti that outlives the scrawler, and other tiny things.  I wish that I was brave enough to explore these places for myself, but I think it's okay for now that I can just build them up in my head.

Lens On: More than Enough

When I was little, there was a junkyard nearby.  Very nearby.  So nearby, in fact, that when a lightning strike to a junked car created a ball of St. Elmo's fire, the blue alien light caught my eye through my bedroom window and I watched it drift upwards.  No one believed me.

I can't say I had a particularly privileged childhood;  I lived with my mother and her mother.  My grandmother was retired, far too early, and my mom worked in a shop, holding things together with hair pins while raising two children.  A lot of our toys were handmade, but mom made a point of getting us store-bought things, too.  

Mom talked a lot about her dad, who had died when she was a child, and about all the things he wanted to give his children and couldn't.  Sometimes she'd do this over a box of a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts that she'd splurged for and brought home, and we'd listen with sticky lips and fingers, enjoying the rare treat.  

Also, nearby, when the junkyard had metamorphed into a small strip of constantly changing shops, there briefly existed a small ice creamery.  It smelled of bleach, and a little bit of pee.  Mom would take me there to get a banana split very rarely - I think I only experienced it four or five times while the places existed.  They had "real cherries," which is a strong memory for me even though I can't for the life of me think of what I considered fake cherries.  They had a wooden pachinko machine that ate quarters and sometimes gave gumballs that tasted like dye.  

Mom also had (and still has), a flaky old wallet.  It's not leather anymore - if it ever was, all the skin is gone now, leaving just the cloth mesh it had been stitched too and a few grey, tattered whisps of unidentifiable material.  She always says she'll get a new one.  She never does.  It wasn't her dad's - she had other things from him that she treasured.

Still, all of this wove together for the story, which came up when I was challenged to do flash fiction about a wallet and a donut shop.  Mom recognized either herself or her dad in it, which was a better prize for me than the acknowledgement I got for a win in that contest.  

Monsters

The room was not black, but full of a soft purple gloaming born of the street lamps burning away the evening fog.  What was black, however, were the formerly comforting shapes along the softly illuminated walls. Books, jagged like rotted teeth, froze in mid-chomp above the menacing claws of tree shadows and the searchlight sweep of passing cars.  Toys grew large and looming, and button eyes gleamed.  

It was almost time, Nancy knew, and she pulled herself into a tight shape in the very center of the creaking bed.  Tonight, she made sure to drag the edges of her blanket in with her so that no corner draped over the edge.  Her eyes stared fixedly on the closet’s sliding doors, which she had had the foresight of bracing closed with a line of schoolbooks.  

After several mornings of complaint, Nancy’s father had attributed her fears to the patter of the family cat, who was now banished to the bathroom at night.  This meant, naturally, that the subtle bump under her bed was not Mr. Mittens.  Any minute now...

“Serves you right,”  muttered a smug voice from under the bed. Nancy was far too little yet to know the word “lugubrious”, but later in life she’d have the perfect reference for it in the voice from behind the dust ruffle.  It sounded very much the way Nancy herself might just after a crying jag, but just before she was ready to have people stop feeling sorry for her.  She didn’t respond to it, in any case, and hoped that the closet - 

The door rattled, very softly, as if a coat inside had fallen off its hanger and partially dropped.  A sound somewhere between a snigger and a snot burbled from near the headboard.   Still silent, Nancy reached over her head and pulled her pillow away from the headboard, just in case.  The closet hissed softly, and rattled just one more time.

“You’re not fooling her, you know,” burbled something from behind Nancy’s back, and the girl folded her feet together while trying to ignore the sensation of fingers on her back.  It wasn’t real; she was under her blanket and she was safe.  Those were the rules.  

Still, she let out a small sound when the closet door slide further open than she felt it could go, braced at it was.  An inch, two inches, two and a half - the widening gap ripped a black stripe in the lavender light of the wall.  The sound of the schoolbooks sliding hissed until one by one they tumped together.  Finally, though, it stopped, and something that sounded much like two sheets of paper rubbing together said, “....shit.”

“Gluh-huh-huh,” burbled the thing under the bed.  “Just kidding.  You’re really stuck in there aren’t you,”  it continued, and Nancy scrunched her eyes closed again.  Doing so prevented her from seeing a thin, thin hand, with fingers like raw and broken spaghetti, scrabble out and tap along the door.  She could hear it, however, those clicking clacks, as the thing in the closet tried to find the obstruction.

“....you could help,”  whispered the thing from the closet, its voice a hiss of irritation.

“S’not my fault you made yourself so short where it counts,” burbled the voice, and something thumped up under Nancy’s hips.  She risked opening her eyes to see the hand retreating back into the closet with a gesture her mother taught her was rude.

“...too fat to come out anymore...”  it responded as it disappeared again, and something clicked along the back of the closet door as it tried to find another way out. “..that’s why you won’t help.”

“That’s a lie,” came the retort from beneath the bed, but even to Nancy that sounded unconvincing, and something in the closet laughed in a thing and nasty way, like coat-hangers rattling.

Nancy uncurled slightly and began to sit up, pressing her lips together.

“...try it, then...”  whispered a challenge from the stickly monster, and Nancy watched as it slid its fingers between the doors of the closet, looking for the barricade still.

“She’s already awake, so it doesn’t matter now,”  huffed the second voice.

Nancy sat up the rest of the way and said, “Yes, I am,” surprising herself with the peevishness of her own voice.  After all, this had been going on for nights now, nearly a whole week.  “And I’m trying to get some sleep.  Can’t you be quiet?”

Silence fell over the house for a long few moments, and neither the closet nor the bed moved.

“Nancy?”  came her mother’s voice, and a beam of light erupted from beneath the bedroom door as the hall light came on.  Shadows in the room retreated from it, growing darker in their compressed space in the recesses of the room.  

Worried that she or even Mr. Mittens might get into trouble if she was caught away with the “nightmares” again, she dropped back down and covered herself with the blanket once more, just in time to avoid the brilliance of the door opening.  Her mother’s shadow fell over her, but she didn’t move.  

A second shadow joined the first one, but Nancy didn’t move an inch.  “...no, she’s not,”   whispered her father.  “....can we try to keep it that way?  She’s been having nightmares as it is,”  he said, and his hand came around to draw her mother away from the door.

Nancy listened to her mother sniffle as she turned away, and waited for the darkness to come back into the room.  She could hear her parents stepping down the hallway, and the click of the hall light as it went out, painting the room in light purples once more.   For a long time, the house was quiet, and the only sound was Mr. Mittens meowing to be let out.  Nancy was able to sleep.

---originally posted on Reddit

Glass Beads and Processional

The Processional was taking place. It was the one day of the year the markets of Jerukkasar shuttered their doors and ceased their hawking. The yellowing stink of incense made the crowd nearly silent, as snow can quiet a herd of shuffling cattle.  There would always be the one or two men that coughed in involuntary protest to the smoke, breaking the surface of the hush. 

Their weakness broke the otherworldly illusion as well.  What persisted though, in the quiet between the coughs, was a gentle patter, almost like rain pelting a hard packed dirt road.  It came from the sins of the priests that passed, which hung in the form of beaded strings on their mortar boards.  Artificial tear drops, etched with foul words, they swam in the vision of the solemn walkers, permitting anyone brave enough to come close to read the treacheries and betrayals those men had wrought upon the city and each other during the year. 

At the end, the priests would hurl their beads, their strings, their hats and sometimes each other into the Lubangterak.  They’d break their silence then, wailing and tearing at themselves and each other, and come out sinless, sweating, bruised and caked in the soot of the slag pits.  They’d call themselves clean, then. 

But really, everyone knew better.  Especially those that had to clean up the bodies afterwards.  Not every sin was successfully burned.  Not every bead melted.  At some point during the next year, it was likely that a priest would open a bound, leathery flower, as yellow as the incense smoke, and find inside it their sin, coated in soot and pollen. 

It was the people’s reminder to them that, sometimes, true repentance needed to happen more than once a year.

---

Originally posted on Reddit.

Paris and the Paintbrush

He was always reluctant, but he clearly needed the rumpled twenty dollar bill, transferred palm to palm.  It was the only time I touched him.  I liked to linger.

“Here?” he asked, though he well knew where to be, standing in front of the broad, open window.  I know he hated that window - that vulnerability - that was why he always asked. 

“Yes,”  I said, and settled onto the stool.  I liked triptychs.  I liked how the wings of the window pane spread out behind him, purple in the moonlight and sparkling with the small patio lights I strung in the trees outside.  I liked him, spreading out the front of his coat and letting it drop to his ankles, puddling around his feet before he awkwardly kicked it and his tatty sneakers away.  “Like this,”  I said, and held up a book for him to see in the dim light.  As he pulled off his shirt, he leaned forward to peer at the picture. 

“I can’t do that,”  he said.  In my other hand I cupped the camera.

“Use the coat rack to hold on to,”  I directed, pointing to the heavy iron stand by the door.  He dragged it over, and took some time finding a way to recreate the frantic drape of one arm around an eagle’s neck, and the weightless appearance of struggling naked legs in mid-air. 

“What’s that one called, anyway?”  he asked, his voice tight with the effort. 

“The Rape of Ganymede,”  I answered.   As his expression grew confused and worried, I took my shots. 

Once alone again in my studio, with the coat rack standing erect and alone in the wings of the bay window, I selected my thickest paintbrush.  I always did like to work with oil. 

-Originally posted on Reddit

Lens On: Mr. Bends

So a little while ago I posted about Mr. Bends.  He lives in Blue Holly Wrath (aka Blue Holly's Wrath,) a town I created in my head after my roleplaying group fell apart and I needed to have a place to store my cast of OC's.  At the time, Mr. Bends didn't exist.  The star players were, and still are, remnants of that original cast, but after a while a standing quirk I have with my characters threw up the idea that they'd need some sort of curse-breaker in town.

The thrust of Blue Holly's Wrath is that it's where heroes who do not want to hero, or who currently cannot hero, go.  Sometimes they go to recuperate, sometimes they go there to retire.  The quirk I have is that all of my OC's really need to have some sort of day job.  A skill, a craft, or a willingness to do something that people will regularly pay for.  It irks me to no end when an adventure's only job is "adventurer."

I also wanted to give my favourite OC, "Illiandi Bondsmiller," someone he'd like to deny citizenship to but, at the end of the day, couldn't.  Undead folks bug that guy to no end for obvious reasons as well as personal ones, and I thought it would be fun to introduce an undead that was unassuming, hard working, and necessary to have around.  That Mr. Bends is a gem-cutter (sortof) wasn't enough to really justify him - roleplay communities are full of characters that make endless bead and bauble stuffs, so I started to think about where he was getting his gems from.

Blue Holly's Wrath is a tiny little seaside town inside a free-floating liminal bubble.  It drifts around and settles up against other realities for short periods of time and has a minor population change while the gates are open.  This makes most supplies tricky to obtain, so I figured that he'd have to get them from the population themselves, somehow.  After all, most heroes have enchanted blades and sacred stones and whatnot.

This, in turn, coincided with a recurring dream I have where I expel and illness or sadness by physically ejecting a pearl-like object (usually by sneezing!) and I decided to just hand that over to a zombie who wouldn't think it too disgusting to deal with.  After that, everything started to settle into place, including how he has to be sort of relegated to a side-alley.  My own psychiatrist is down a long, narrow alley gated at both ends by wrought iron, so I figured he could be, too.

I like it when things I write come from the dog-ends of experiences I've really had, or fragments of unconscious obsessions I've never been able to pin down.  I also like Mr. Bends.  I think he could be a useful side character in many stories, because so much of what he does and is can be frowned on by different communities, and because he's ultimately so useful.  I hope he shows up again in my writing some day.

Sometimes my writing comes to me problem first, or setting first, or character first.  I think Mr. Bends is one of those that cropped up from the setting rather than on his own, since he was formed largely by how he'd fit in, or not, with the people and place around him.

No Words, Just Notes

The chime rang heavily on the stone step, echoing against the brick walls of the subway station.  The heavy gold coin bounced, wobbled in the air, and flashed a merry, winking orange up at Massoud in the warm light of the metro’s mouth.  Then dove back down, tinking again and again as it tumbled down the steps to rest below him.

Slightly more annoyed than anything at first, he stilled his thin fingers on the guitar strings and glanced up, his dark brown eyes scanning the edges of the station, up where it met with the sidewalk.   No passing pedestrian had thrown it down at him.  His caution and suspicion were not unfounded.  It could be a trick, to send him chasing after one coin to steal the bait-money of a couple of paper dollars and a few quarters already in his swati cap.  Frowning, he retreated a step or two to lift up the coin, and found it much heavier than anticipated.  It was a full dollar, slightly abraded by the fall, but clearly well taken care of beforehand.  Sacagawea squinted knowingly over her shoulder, appearing to wink due to the new scratch across her face.  The effect had him huff a brief laugh to himself, and he dropped the impressive tip down into his upturned hat, and he relaxed.

Massoud had only been playing this early because it was better to keep the guitar strings warm before the morning rush picked up, so that he remained in tune for all the people that would pass, pockets jingling with the unwanted change from their coffee purchases.  He’d had no audience that he was aware of, not unless he counted the homeless couple huddled in the lee of the staircase below, or the occasional early dog-walkers and joggers.  The gold coin floated warmly in the colourful cap, and brought Massoud’s fingers around to play a flighty, high octave ditty he’d heard from a music box once.  Perhaps unconsciously, he plucked the same note the coin had made as it struck the stairs more loudly than the others.

A streak of whimsy had him more alert now as he played, recalling his mother singing the tune to him and telling him about Peri, the fairyfolk who played their roles as helpers and tricksters both in stories.  Perhaps, he thought, one had dropped the coin out of the air for him, in thanks for his early morning music.  As he smiled down to his guitar, another harsh ping struck against the steps.  This time, the coin bounced toward his legs, and he brought one of his brown leather shoes down on top of it to still it.  His head whipped around, and then up again, but again, there was no one to be seen.  This time, however, he saw a flick of motion - just a small streak of brown from the second floor balcony of the shop nearest the stairwell.  Like the coin, the window glowed softly orange in the chilly morning air.  He stared, and waited, but no one came to the window.  As his eyes focused, he could tell it was open; the tan curtains moved when a bus passed on the street above.

He began to play, after a short while of nothing happening.  The first business people were starting to tromp their way past him, and he could not afford to miss many tips, not these days.  His eyes, however, remained fixed on the golden window above, until his neck developed a crick and he began to fantasize himself a swain standing underneath his beloved’s bower.  The fantasy affected his music, and he again went back to a more whimsical, lighter fare that tinkled and teased among the passing commuters, winning the occasional nickel and dime off them the way children might pickpocket a crowd just for mischief.

And then she leaned out. Moussad’s breath caught in his throat, sure for half a second that he had plucked her into being.  Skin the colour of a chestnut glowed like an ember in a fireplace, and a white sleeveless shift draped loosely around her.  Her hair, uncovered and loose, tumbled forward as she peered down at him, one hand in a fist, and drawing forward.  She saw him looking, and recognized that she’d been caught with a girlish giggle.  Still, she flung the third dollar coin down, and Moussad’s hand flicked out to catch it in midair, startling an older woman who bustled quickly down the stairs, glaring back at him and his big satisfied grin.

His eyes remained on the young woman, however, who drew her arm back in to the safety of the balcony, and twisted it to pull her long hair back away from her face.  As she turned to head back inside, she lifted her free hand to open and close all of her fingers in a graceful, fluttering wave, and disappeared inside, where for the rest of the morning Moussad serenaded the commuters of Market Street, his eyes and thoughts above their heads to the happy golden glow of the window, which thereafter remained empty - but open.

---

Originally published on Reddit.

Inspired by art owned by Pascal Campion, [website]