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In with Alazia, 'the fear that you're no longer able to change'. to not fail
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Jan 3, 2024 12:59
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:45 |
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Cold Fire under 1500 Alazia, 'the fear that you're no longer able to change'. They took us home, you and me together in the back of the police van. The passing lights made red and gold halos in the fogged-up glass. I didn’t want to see the city. My anger had faded, and with it the burning certainty that what I’d done had been justified. I always struggled to remember fights once they were over, but for now the tactile crunch of Justin McPherson’s nose against my forehead and the hot blood bursting from it like juice from a pomegranate lingered on my skin like they had left marks in the surface. The feeling would be gone by the morning. From then on I’d remember the fight only through the words of the police officer, repeating my story back to me as if describing something he’d heard from someone no longer present. We made it home without speaking. You paid the babysitter her overtime and I looked in on the kids to check they were still alive. Then I went to the bedroom and slipped the knife from my boot and hid it under the dresser. You came in and we got changed in silence. We lay down, me on my back and you on your side facing the wall. I listened to the clock until every tick sounded like a footstep in snow. I imagined I was walking through an endless icy forest, a lone hunter in a world where violence was necessary, pursuing or pursued by a shape in the dark. The vision scared me. I wasn’t a violent man, even if I had been known to do violence. I listened to your breathing. You shifted like you were trying to get comfortable on a concrete floor, sighed in frustration. We both knew we were each only pretending to be asleep. I was waiting for you to ask me why I did it. I thought that maybe it was time to be honest. “I used to think you acted like that to impress me,” you said eventually. “I thought that you thought I liked that macho poo poo. I don’t, you know. Not ever, but especially not now.” “I know you don’t.” “Yes. I realised tonight that I’d got it all wrong. It isn’t that at all.” You lay still and quiet for a while, then sat up, coughed, and lay back down facing the wall again. “You could have gone to prison, Michael. Then what? We have kids.” I wanted to tell you that I wasn’t myself when I was angry. I really wasn’t. I never wanted to fight, but something would come over me. I wanted to tell you about the thing that burned in the darkness inside me, the cold fire that could very quickly lead me somewhere I could never come back from. I wanted to confess to you, tell you how lucky we were that the police hadn’t bothered to check my boot; luckier still that bar security had pulled me off Justin as soon as my skull met his nose, that I hadn’t had the time to take things any further. But the cold fire had animal cunning. It didn’t want me to be honest. “He’d never have pressed charges. He practically groped you. The CCTV would have proven it.” “If he touched me I would have felt it.” “You saw the way he was looking at you.” “I’m a grown woman, Michael. I can deal with men looking at me.” We were silent for a while. I felt your weight shift as you rolled over to face me. I reached for you in the dark, pulled your head into my chest. Your face was wet on my t-shirt. You listened to my heart beating faster and faster. “Sometimes you scare me,” you said, shifting your head to rest on my shoulder. I stroked your hair in the way that you’d always found reassuring. “I would never hurt you, love. You know I would never hurt you.” But what I wanted to say was me too. I didn’t tell you when I started seeing a therapist. I felt like that would cheapen it somehow, make the whole thing feel like a performance. I stopped going to the gym on Saturday afternoons and met her at her office, like I was carrying out an affair. A few sessions in, she implied that I acted the way that I did out of a misplaced sense of ownership; that I felt entitled to your body and that’s why it made me angry to see another man who appeared to be challenging my monopoly. I defended myself. I told her that your decisions had always been your own. You had your career, your long hours, your work trips, and I supported you in all of that. I said we were hardly a patriarchal, nuclear family: I was the one who had sacrificed his ambitions to spend more time with the kids and doing housework. I never worried about what you were doing when I wasn’t there, who you were with or anything like that. It was only at night that I got worried, when it was dark out and you came home later than you said you would, but that was only fear for your safety, and I was never angry at you when you got back, just relieved that you hadn’t been hurt, that no one had got to you. In fact I hated the idea of men owning women, owning anyone, and that was what made me so loving pissed when I saw creeps like Justin McPherson who thought they could touch another person’s body without their consent, who thought they had the right to just do what they wanted and everyone else was too coward to do anything, because I knew men like that and I knew how they thought and the damage they did and more than that I knew that in the end they all got what they loving deserved. I was standing in the centre of her office, fists clenched, and I realised that I had been shouting. The shrink was leaning back in her chair, wide eyed, notepad up like a shield. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” She adjusted her glasses and regained composure. “That’s okay, Mr Williams. Please sit down.” She began to write notes as she was talking. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you about your relationship with your father…” She let the session run long but seemed disappointed by my account of a conventional and happy childhood. She was a shark who had smelled blood but couldn’t find the carcass. I felt like I owed her something, so I told her about the cold fire inside me. I explained that it wasn’t only there when I got angry – it was more than capable of biding its time. I told her how it played on my insecurities, coaxed me into taking the knife to the bar with the simple promise that only I could decide when to use it, fully aware of my propensity to forfeit control, especially if I had been drinking. “Dissociative identities – or split personalities – are a controversial diagnosis,” she said when I was done talking. “If the condition even exists, it rarely presents like it does in the movies. But the feelings you are describing are not at all uncommon in adults who have experienced significant childhood trauma…” I decided then that therapy was worthless. If she was only going to make assumptions about me there was no point in going. My past was my business, it was the present I was worried about. My present and our future. That was the evening I got home to find you dressed to the nines: full makeup, earrings, and a tight purple dress with a plunging neckline and a figure any man would have trouble not noticing. “What’s the occasion, babe?” I asked, kissing you on the forehead. You looked at me like I was telling a joke. “The occasion? It’s your birthday, dummy.” “My birthday’s not until Wednesday.” “I know, but you said you didn’t want to go out on Wednesday. You wanted to go out tonight – tickets to The Mousetrap and maybe a drink at the French House. Mum said she’ll be here in half an hour for the kids. Is your memory okay?” “Of course,” I lied. “Sorry, pushed myself a little hard at circuit training. I must have sweated part of my brain out.” You kissed me again and ran your hands down my back. “You’ve been training like you’re getting ready for the Tour de France. I can feel how tense you are. You’re making sure to stretch properly?” I shrugged you off and dumped my clean gym clothes straight into the washing machine and set it running. The Mousetrap, eh? My demon was forming a sense of humour. It wasn’t until we were in the taxi that I noticed the knife in my boot.
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Jan 8, 2024 08:16
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in and song please
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Mar 6, 2024 10:42
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Ceighk fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Mar 12, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 21:35
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Week 606: cool forest bro I don't have time for a big prompt today so I'll just keep it simple: What I want is a story set in a forest of some kind in which one or more of your characters feels a sense of wonder, awe, or similar. They could be travelling through an inherently wondrous forest from fantasy or science fiction, enchanted or alien, encounter the capital S Sublime of the Romantics, or a find smaller, more personal slice of wonder, magical realist or just plain real. The forest does not have to be the cause of the wonder, and the reader does not necessarily have to share in it (though they certainly can), but I want to see wonder, and I want to see forest. 1400 words Sign-ups close 11:59 PM PDT Friday Submissions close 11:59 PDT Sunday Entered: Black Griffon Captain_Person Toaster Beef Thranguy Seabeams Fat Jesus Judging: Me beep beep car is go ? Ceighk fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 12, 2024 06:54
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Sign ups closed I guess but if anyone wants to last minute enter today I'm not gonna stop you
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Mar 16, 2024 17:56
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(submissions closed)
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Mar 18, 2024 15:22
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WEEK 606 results My co-judge and I have reviewed your forests and found them to be for the most part adequately cool (bro). This was a week where almost all of you reached the level of being reasonably okay, but only a couple made more of an impact. The first exception is Toaster Beef, whose competent and compellingly ambiguous tale of teens getting hosed up on funky peaches is this week's winner. The second exception is Fat Jesus, whose story tried to cram in far too much and generally confused us both enough to be our loser. No other mentions, except that Thranguy is DQ'd for going way over wordcount. (We will both still provide crits, however.)
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Mar 18, 2024 18:20
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606 crits Assembly, Black Griffon Nicely Ballardian but a bit overwrought. Moments of beauty in the prose but it doesn’t quite sell it – the dialogue in particular stands out as corny. Don’t really understand the narrator and Hamdan’s relationship -are they just pals? Either way I think more nuance could be added there. I don’t understand the ending either but maybe that’s user error. Feel like you’re grasping at something interesting here and have ambition in your use of language, but it needs more places for the reader to hook onto. Midish. Peach, Toaster Beef Nice voice and good use of suspense in the opening. Nice teen metaphor for drugs or puberty. Too much hearsay exposition about the Jackson farm in the middle, dampens the mystery. Would prefer to have multiple competing explanations or no explanation at all. Voice drops off midway through, generally too exposition-y and a bit flat – which is a shame when this is a story about teens getting hosed up on alien peaches: would have liked to see a bit more ‘teen’ energy come through in how the story is told. From the events here there’s a great sense of how teens mythologise their surroundings, push for new experiences, and that characteristically teen feeling of ‘incompleteness’, but outside of the opening paragraph the prose doesn’t match that, it’s just expositing events. Nice character work in the body language, though, and compelling in having Evelyn not see what Aiden sees. Overall, a readable, compelling story that fits the prompt well with a very strong core concept, but the prose could be heightened to meet the promise of the opening. Highish. Seebeams, Just Keep Cutting Fun concept. Too much exposition in the law school backstory – interesting enough, if a bit corny, but could’ve been folded into the other stuff more elegantly. Feels well researched though (I thought – but my cojudge disagrees). The beetle stuff is… interesting. I quite like the ambiguity of whether he’s just tripping out, and I like the ambiguity in the kinda sad ending, but the prose is a bit too flat for a story this strange, and the literal city of beetles feels like a bridge too far for the character and world as established. I feel like it’s so extreme that he coud’ve promised everyone millions as nature photographers or something, which makes the forlorn acceptance of it not really land. Midish, but strong for a first entry. Captain_Person, Unspoken Great prose. Compelling atmosphere. Needs a bit more specificity of some kind – not necessarily knowing the secret, but at least clues towards what sort of person the narrator is, what has pushed them towards this desperate measure. Without that there’s not much going on here – I’m waiting for the extra layer that never comes. Still, it’s eerie and well rendered, with a strong tone and atmosphere. High end of mid/low end of high. Fat Jesus, Sigils and Runes Simply, a confusing mess. What is going on? What mythology are we going for? Why is everyone acting like a kid going missing for 8 months is just a little weird? Why do they speak like that? What does the ending mean? Why is there so much content in a 1400 word story? Just pick one of these scenes and do it well, as it is this is borderline incomprehensible. Thanks for the last minute entry, but this is a loss if ever there was one. Thranguy, Rite of Passage So yeah, this is too long, and as such DQ’s. But I think this story also fundamentally doesn’t work for me. The sentence level writing is cool with a strong voice and it’s full of ideas, but it’s so full of ideas that I don’t understand how they all fit together. In particular, we have this fairytale or ‘tall tale’ kinda plot, but it’s all happening within a (heavily exposited) science fiction world, which means it’s hard to get a frame of reference for how outlandish the seriously outlandish stuff is meant to be. We’re introduced to a whole bunch of parallel human species (established as the current normal) and then another one (which is presented as strange) - but to the reader, they’re all strange, so what's the big deal. This kind of thing isn’t necessarily an issue if we’re playing with genre and expectations and so on – it’s Gene Wolfe’s bread and butter after all – but here it doesn’t land for me in terms of vibe or deeper significance. Mid.
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Mar 19, 2024 06:21
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:45 |
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1 card please
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Mar 28, 2024 02:04
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