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I'm gonna write a story for this but you better have low expectations!
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Sep 14, 2021 17:33
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 19:25 |
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We Will Not Be Okay 1099 “Scooch over,” The old man behind the white mustache didn't look like he was taking no for an answer, so I put down my comics section and let him in. He was tall, but that sort of tall that age had bent like a candy cane after stretching him up in his youth. He wore a cowboy hat, dusty white feather boa and brown leather everything. He sat down next to me with a little fart, pulled an apple from a brown paper bag and held it in my direction. I held up a hand. “Suit yourself. It's a long way to Tippytown,” he said with a bite. His voice was deep and pleasant. I had no idea where “Tippytown” was. The conductor came and promptly took our tickets. Across the sandy red desert, out the window a single green cactus came close enough to wave hello, and the train tugged on. Hours past. I woke up in the late afternoon to a nudge in the side. “Scuse me,” said the old cowboy. “Would you mind holding this bag? It has something important.” And with that he dropped the brown paper bag in my lap and extracted himself, elbows and all, from the narrow seat. “Duty calls,” he said. I opened my mouth to protest, but he was already halfway down the car before I could say anything. The crinkled brown bag was heavy. Across the aisle a fat woman in a pink dress and lilyflower hat dozed while her little boy made funny faces at a comic book in his hands. I waited. And waited. I opened the bag. With a sucking noise the mouth of the bag yawned to a chasm of infinite depth. My glasses began vibrating down my nose toward the void. Far in the deeps a few stars twirled madly into the center and winked out. I shut the bag. Gently, carefully, holding the thing by the neck with my right hand, I felt the bottom of the bag with my left. There was a lump, almost but not quite round. An egg-like shape, uniform around with square bumps. It felt like something much too heavy for the paper, like it would have torn if I'd just lifted the sack without supporting it. “Looked, didn't ya?” He sat down with a chuckle. Outside, the sun was setting. Already? How long had I been asleep? “You looked and now you have the knowledge. Me too. Look at me, son. Look me in the eyes.” He had a smile on his face, long and lean and curved perfect like an upside down rainbow. But his eyes were the same dark as the bag, with two points of light fixed in dead black. And it was like staring into a night sky and the entirety of the night sky turning to stare back. “It's gonna be okay. Just need to do something for me, and all of this'll be okay.” The passengers in the cart were gray. Night peered back from every window. “Just stick your hand in and pull it out. You can feel it from the outside, right? But it's deep, deep in there. I know you can do it. And then we'll all be fine.” Did anyone know what was going on? Did any of them see this? The little kid across the aisle was staring right at me, right through me, but he was frozen and colorless, smeary and strange. Something streaked past the window outside, shaped like the cactus from before but gray. It wore eyes like the stranger's and it seemed to not fly so much as ooze through the dark like paint dripping down a canvas. “They want me, son. They don't want any of you,” he said, and I wanted to respond but the words froze in my throat. “I can leave as soon as I have it.” His voice was so calm, so understanding. “We can all leave. I can't touch it, they made sure of that. But you can.” There were more of the gray things now, large and small and I couldn't tell if they were just different sizes or if some were near and others far. They weren't banging on the glass, but a vibration in the walls felt like somehow, some way, they must get through. “You don't want it. Wouldn't know how to use it. It belongs to them, yeah. But we can't trust them with it. Give it to me.” The other passengers' bodies were twisted as taffy. The whole train wiggled up and down. “Give it to me, son.” I opened the bag and two stars shone in the distance. “Close your eyes. Feel for it. Don't see it.” I thrust my arm into the bag, not to the wrist but deeper, deeper! The bag shouldn't have been so deep. My flesh shouldn't have stretched so long but it did and it was agony. Whatever the thing was it was at my fingertips, cold and metallic. I could only just barely brush it and each time it sent a spike of ice through my veins. The the windows shattered and glass danced and chimed above our heads. The wind rushed in! “Pull! Pull son! You almost have it! They're almost in! They're almost in!” I pushed further in until it felt as if my arm would snap. My fingertips clasped the metal. I had it! I had it! The gray things were now in the train. No, they were on the passengers. The peoples faces and shapes imprinted upon them like comics on putty. They already had tendrils on the cowboy, pulling him away. “Hand it to me! Quick! Quick, son!” I dragged my hand from the bag, the skin was in tatters, every movement was torture. In my hand was a crocodilian thing of dark metal, shaped like a grenade, a nauseating white light spitting from cracks in its sides. I threw the thing at the cowboy and he bobbled it into his hands. He laughed a laugh like thunder. “Now you got the knowledge, and I got the metal. Later son!” The gray things faded. The afternoon sun came out and the train jumped back onto its track from whatever sky it had been suspended. I was too stunned to move or to think. A scream came from my right. The woman in her lilyflower hat. In the aisle, my dead arm lay limp as rope, bleeding from red wounds. And now I knew. Now I had the knowledge. Everything would not be fine. We would not be okay.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:37
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Chili posted:
QuoProQuid posted:
Beezus posted:
One of the greatest compliments I ever received on a piece of writing was (paraphrased) that the events were so wrong that a reader can see no way to fix things. The story was about a man with a decapitated neighbor. The neighbor is just going on living his life without a head but constantly gushing blood from his neck. The man is fed up and disgusted with this and goes out to procure a substitute head for him. It gets weird. There seems to be an air of anxiety in everything I write. Something is always hosed and its often not fixable, with the only way out being to push through to the other side. I don't have much to say because everything above makes sense. The overall idea was someone trying to pass off something horrible to another, willing person and I wanted a reader to be as unable to find a solution as the victim. The bizarre imagery and the confusion/discomfort in it is more or less what I was aiming for. Putting flesh to unusual or impossible ideas and imagery is something I love but I guess the execution sometimes doesn't pan out. 
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Oct 14, 2021 04:52
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