Greetings, everyone.
First, the news. I've decided, in the new year, to make a slight change to my writing habits. I'll be spending my writing time editing my previous shorts and beginning to plot out a few long-form tales. As such, I'll be posting a new short exercise/story just once a month, on or before the last Sunday of each month. I hope you'll all keep checking back in, and I will probably post fragments or chapters of some of the longer works without warning.
Thank you again for reading these exercises, and for passing it on to your friends (or enemies). A special thanks to those who've been commenting and giving me feedback, especially the negative feedback. You continue to keep me honest.
To keep the tap on, I'm sharing with you two oddities that I wrote before I began the weekly story project.
First, is a rewritten and rephrased version of the very first horror story I wrote, "The Hole in the Wall." While I like certain elements of it, including a just slightly tweaked climax that adds some extra menace to the proceedings, much of it, including an mid-story verb tense change, falls flat. I wrote this right after I finished "Up", very early in my evolution, and it shows. I haven't touched it since I began writing in earnest.
But, I thought it might prove of interest.
Secondly, is a mere fragment, the beginning of something longer that I may or may not revisit. It began as an idea for a screenplay that I began to write out in prose, but I've not gone back to the idea. I haven't looked at it since I wrote it around the same time as the second draft of "The Hole in the Wall", and again, I can't think of a better place to air it out.
Enjoy.
The Hole in the Wall (Revised)
It’s been 12 days since I saw the apartment last, but there are echoes of it in everywhere, here in my temporary home. Light streaming through window will remind me of the bright, spacious living room. The squeak of the floorboards recalls the creaking first step in the hallway. The smell of cracked drywall sets my teeth on edge.
I’ve severed all ties with the apartment; all my possessions are in storage or stacked in sagging boxes here in Leif’s squalid garage. I went through the vague motions of filing the police report, and leaving an explanatory message on my landlady’s machine. I’ve done all the right and proper things, so there seems little left to do but share the why, before I move out of the City, and every city, for good.
Last September, my fiancé and I moved into the apartment; the top floor of a stately little four unit building in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis. We were still living out mostly out of boxes six weeks later when the county hospital called us in the middle of the night. Her grandfather, a seemingly invincible ox of a man, who had raised her since her parents passed during her sixth grade year, had collapsed in grocery store line, a blood clot lodged in his tree trunk neck.
She had no choice, yet resentment welled in me when she took our car back to Twin Oaks to care for him, to watch and bathe him as his frozen left side slowly thawed and his mighty body withered. We talked of hiring a full time nurse… but it was the sort of idle way a barren couple might discuss children. She went to watch him die. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lie awake at night, still on the right side of our half empty bed, praying wordlessly for death to hasten.
Despite her absence (a sensation not of pain but of emptiness, a tangible hole) I grew to enjoy in some small way, the luxury of a solitary existence. The apartment stirred feelings of contentment in me from the moment I saw it. It was adulthood, and reward for responsibility made solid and earthly. Newly remodeled, energy efficient, double paned windows on every wall casting beams of sunlight onto the cool and well worn wooden floors. It was the embodiment of our transition from sunburned country children into modern city and cubicle dwellers, rapidly paling beneath the fluorescents.
It was never perfect, but at first, the idiosyncrasies and nodes of strangeness in the apartment felt like pleasant affectations, Persian rug flaws of architecture and design that only increased our affection for the place. The bottom floor was all garages, laundry machines, and strangely irregular spaces with unfinished walls, filled with construction supplies gathering dust. The two upper floors each contain two mirrored units, one facing the street, and the other facing a sad little stone and weed garden that I preferred to ignore.
To my mild disappointment, the worst of the flaws were the walls, thin in a manner I would not have believed possible. The first night of unpacking I heard with sharp clarity the conversation of my downstairs neighbors, a heated discussion about a pair of off-season artichokes spoiling in the fridge. Over the next few weeks, we became intimately accustomed to their schedules; their alarm clocks, their love of forensic cop dramas, their histrionic arguing. I knew when they showered, I knew when they fucked. To be sure, they knew the same about us. I learned their names when we moved in and promptly forgot; the more we knew about each other from voyeuristic proximity, the less we actually wanted to deal with each other.
Two months ago, they moved out without giving a word or reason. One morning I awoke to the sound of dragging furniture, and watched with bemusement from my father’s worn recliner as they loaded a rented moving van. The next morning, the apartment door was open, revealing a swept clean doppelganger of my own living space.
Within a week the other tenant on the lower floor vacated, the door now permanently open on another blank canvas of a home. I can’t even recall his face, an anonymous gray visage that simply stopped appearing in the hallways. The other top unit, opposite my own, had been vacant since I moved in; this left me alone in the building, king of a tiny rented castle.
The youngest of five children, I knew how to appreciate solitude. I relished in the carefree freedom of heavy footfalls late at night, the loud retort of video game gunfire and explosions, the echoing moans of pornography, and the long weekend mornings spent entirely naked and stoned. I occasionally would wander into the empty other units, drifting through the uninhabited, sterile cleanliness with a mild shapeless guilt intertwined with curiosity.
It was a few weeks later that it started. The first of the strange signifiers of something wrong; signposts in a language that I am only now fluent in.
In the small hours of one Thursday morning I began to hear sounds again from downstairs. Delicate and tiny at first, but sustained and insistent. I strained in the dark to hear it, but it was slippery and would not stay in my grasp. When I could isolate it from the wind, I heard something between a hushed conversation with only one voice, or a small motor spinning in the dark, it was a babbling and inconsistent drone. It set my heart pumping as I lay perfectly still, mesmerized by the sounds. I desperately wanted to identify it, but it remained inscrutable.
I collected shifting rationalizations for it as I vainly attempted to sleep that night. A refrigerator motor going south, a failing heating or cooling duct, air in the water pipes. Hours later, I was able to drift to sleep, and despite the return of the noise each following night, I began to accept it. Even when the drone was augmented with a steady, delicate tapping noise, I had learned to live with it, to allow it to become part of the background white noise of urban life.
The sound of creaking boards began to permeate my space, not beneath my own feet but floating up from all around me. It was a warm spring, and I simply associated the sound with the dry expansion of the warming timbers. Although the sounds of a building stretching and contracting have always unsettled me, I never once doubted that these sounds could be anything but benign.
The vague stirrings of unease became solid the night I discovered the great peculiarity of the closet.
I am crouching over the sink, brushing my teeth with a fraying brush when from behind me comes a sudden, dry thud. I freeze in position, the brush protruding from my pursed lips, desperately waiting for some further sign of an intruder, or an explanation to the sound, but it is dead silent. Even the regular drone from downstairs has stopped. I walk the house with silent steps, turning every light on in turn and searching each room, but I am alone.
I check the hall closet last.
The closet lies directly behind the bathroom, exactly where I heard the sound. I open it up, flicking the light on and feverishly hoping to see a rational excuse, one of the last unpacked boxes toppled on the floor. But the closet is immaculate and the sound still hangs unexplained in the air.
Unwilling to accept the sound without explanation, I reach out and tap on the wall between closet and bathroom. The sound is oddly hollow. It slowly dawns on me that the closet is… more narrow than it should be in relation to the bathroom. The certainty grows as I pace out the distance using my bare feet, and then with the tape measure from the tool kit my fiancé’s grandfather gave us. Sure enough, there are 40 extra inches between the bathroom wall and the closet.
My capacity for rationalization is slightly strained. Surely there’s extra insulation to keep the bathroom warmer, or maybe all walls are thicker than I imagine. I’ve never built a house; I have no frame of reference for judging. I imagine a hammer left inside the wall by a careless contractor finally slipping after months of teetering. Once the adrenalin flood dissipates, I am able to forget the incident and drift quickly to sleep, relishing the absence of the babbling sounds from beneath.
The drone returns the next night.
The next few weeks pass in a haze of my rising discomfort in the apartment, until that warm Friday night. It’s two in the morning, and I am returning home late from a perfunctory office trip to the bar, not nearly as drunk as I would like. I am thinking with a grimace of self loathing about the clean laundry I’ve left to wrinkle in the dryer the night before, and I almost miss noticing that the door to the flat beneath mine is shut. I’ve become used to seeing the empty mirror image every day. Maybe the landlady finally started showing the units, I think,
Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.
Down the stairs on the small shared back balcony, I carry an oversized duffle bag to the laundry room, sleep weighing down my ankles and eyelids. I stuff cold, wrinkled shirts into the bag, missing the usual warmth of the process; my mind drifts away to the thought of clean sheets and a morning without an alarm clock.
There are two things you should know about me at this point: I turn every light off when I leave a room. No matter what. My dad used to beat the shit out of me when the power bill spiked higher than he felt it should. Due to the same Pavlovian conditioning, I lock every door as I pass through it. I’ve even locked the back door on the way down the steps.
As I start back up the steps, the nylon cord of the duffel cutting into my shoulder; I happen to glance up at my bedroom window.
The light is on.
And there's a silhouette against the closed blinds.
I feel a warm trickle on my thigh, as the hair on the back of my neck snaps to fucking attention.
And then the light goes out.
It happens in less than a second. Thirty seconds later I’m still frozen in place, trying to parse impossible data and decide whether I’ve actually seen what I know I’ve seen. Rationalization finally fails me and I softly retrace my steps down the stairs and out through the garage, fighting the animal urge in my thighs and heart and feet to run at full speed away from the apartment.
Across the street, I stand beneath in the streetlight shadow of a dying elm, and call first the police and then a cab. After five minutes of silence, moments after I begin to chastise myself for overreacting, the venetian blinds on the living room window part slightly, and I feel the electric tingle of connecting with invisible eyes. And then it is gone.
The cab comes 20 minutes later, and the police never show up. I stay at a hotel the next night and on Sunday morning; my co-worker Leif accompanies me back to the apartment, to see how much has been stolen.
It’s all there. My laptop is still charging next to the bed, the brand new flatscreen TV stands monolith like and untouched in the living room. My stomach is twisted into knots. With Leif, a few other friends, and a pickup truck I move everything out the next day.
When we are almost finished I invite them to help themselves to the last beers in the fridge, and they squat in the empty living room, allowing sweat to evaporate off dripping brows. Emboldened by daylight and company I slip downstairs to examine the downstairs apartment, hoping to make a little sense of the unconnected puzzle pieces I have.
I go straight to the hall closet.
It has the same abnormally thick wall.
Only in this wall, someone has hammered a large, jagged hole, exposing the tiny crawl space between.
And in the dusty cavity, flat against the wall, is a cheap hardware store ladder; running up through the darkness, to the space behind the walls, in my apartment. As I stand, staring in dawning horror at the brushed aluminum and orange paint of the ladder, it moves. It bounces once against the wall and goes still. Dust drifts down in the motionless air.
Then, it creaks, slightly, shifting under invisible weight.
I can’t breathe. My lungs are clawing for oxygen and the edge of my vision goes dark, but I can’t breathe. My limbs feel cold and dead.
The next thing I know, I am outside beneath the elm tree again. I am calling Leif on his mobile phone and asking him to meet me downstairs with the last load of boxes. I don’t mention the hole, or the ladder. I just want to be away from there.
I don’t know how he got into my apartment from that space. I don’t want to know. All I care about is never seeing that building again. I mailed the keys to my landlord, and told her to keep the deposit; filled out an obligatory report with a terminally disinterested cop.
I’m burning through my last vacation days, and ignoring the insistent texts and emails from my boss. I can’t bring myself to go back to work. My chest constricts slightly, thinking about the dense hive of the downtown office building, people surrounding me at all times.
Leif has been letting me sleep on his sagging couch in his filthy one bedroom house, but I can tell I am wearing my welcome thin, and I am leaving in the morning. It’s just as well, I haven’t slept well since I abandoned the apartment; I lie awake, acutely aware of his presence in the next room, hearing him snoring, hearing the sheets shifting every time he moves. It’s time to leave.
Two days ago, my fiancé’s grandfather got a hold of his shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Brave old bastard. I’ll be moving with her into his weathered farmhouse, with acres of barren and rocky fields surrounding it. It’s quiet out there.
It sounds like heaven.
I haven't told her yet, and I don’t think I will. I told her simply that I quit my job and moved out. She's devastated, wounded, and it would be cruel to add to it now. I may have to tell her someday if it ever comes up, because I don't want to live in the city anymore. I don’t ever want to hear people moving beneath my feet, or on the other side of a wall.
Never again.
Starfall (A Fragment)
The night the satellites fall, I am sprawled on the lawn of the home where I grew up, drinking my father’s oldest bottle of scotch. The air in the valley suburbs is crystal clear and my eyes water as I trace the shapes of familiar constellations I haven’t seen in years of city life. Orion, Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, the Pleiades. I fill my head with their mythic names, displacing the lingering tangle of wills, advanced health care directives and death certificates.
The scotch is as smoky and warm as the night is clear and cold, and it infuriates me to see that my father has never opened it, never even tasted it. The dog eared book on his nightstand will never be finished; a stack of rented films will never be seen. My throat burns now as it tightens and my eyes sting; I suck in a cool draft of night air.
The first streak of light cuts through the haze of my regret and clears my mind. The next comes only moments later and I grinned in childlike delight as the frequency increased, the sky now crisscrossed with luminous arcs, enthralling and captivating me.
A few minutes later the first dull thumps roll across the valley floor. Deep tremors, rolling through the earth as much as in the air, pass beneath my feet, rattling the windows and shuddering in my lungs. The falling stars continue to streak, each one now punctuated with an impact.
Disoriented panic and bile rise in my gorge as I stand on uncertain legs, and scan the horizon. The first of the fires are burning now, and columns of smoke are lit by the bright tangles of their tendrils. I watch as little blossoms of fire bloom and grow into thick vines of fire and smoke.
I stare for long moments in disbelief at the flaming sentinels that flare on the horizon, when gradually I become aware of a new noise; a deep bass hum, a melodic drone counter point to the rhythmic explosions.
At first it is warbling at the edge of my hearing insistently, but it changes, quickly. It seems to solidify in my ears like a tentacle, a hard and solid instrument of sound and I feel a sharp bite of pain throughout my head, as it wriggles deep into my skull. It shuts out the fire and concussions and cold grass on my bare feet, and my world withdraws into one bright, hot spasm.
Then it is gone, and the noise evaporates into a gentle electric sigh that seems to crackle and dissipate from the very air. In its passing, the streetlights flicker and go silently dead. The house behind me is dark. A thousand ambient hums from radios, televisions, refrigerators, and light bulbs dissipate in that moment. Without the sudden silence in the gentle sea of background noise, the steady impacts around grow louder. The fires burn brighter in the sudden blackness.
My face is wet; I raise my hand to my nose and it comes away sticky and warm. The heat in my blood from the scotch and sorrow are flooding out now, displaced by cold panic and fright. My mobile phone has leapt into my hand, promising some sort of clarity, a tenuous connection to the news, an emergency broadcast, or another person; some way for me to dissect and categorize what is happening, but it is leaden and dead.
Already the smoke is blotting the sky. I see the constellations that moments ago provided me with a sense of cool order and stability. They are vanishing behind the red veil of burning farmlands and particulate clouds. This is the last time I will see them. This is the last time I will see the sky. I know this now with sinking dread.
My mind is spinning in rusty circles, and I can formulate no plan, can articulate no goal, and can not identify even a direction to run in. I am lost and alone in a rain of falling stars.
These stories are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license
