Short Stories

Update: Schedule of Posts, and My short story, Endtown

/ Ajmorse / Leave a comment

It took me a while to figure it out, (probably longer than it should have) but I will be posting each Monday and Thursday night, with the weekends and days in between left for miscellaneous posts.

Thursday is of course the night where I will  post a short story, with a little bit more added to the story each post.

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The story is titled “Endtown,” which is turning into a paranormal/young adult short story. So far, the story focuses on Genevieve, a young teen who died way too early. Both her and her friends find themselves in Limbo, or “the in-between,” in neither Heaven or Hell. They are offered the chance to make a difference in the war that the Angels are still fighting against the demons, who are trying to take over the earth.

So far it is great practice for me, a journey-into-plot-as-I-go experience and so far I am loving it!

Last night, I posted more on “Endtown” a little later than I had planned, so if you missed it, you can view it Here. You will also find parts 1 and 2 there as well.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Happy Writing!

 

Part 3: Endtown (a short story)

/ Ajmorse / 2 Comments

Author’s Note –

I’m posting this tonight a little later than I thought, but I am very proud of how this story is going – it took itself in a direction that I hadn’t planned on, but is exciting!

If you haven’t read Part 1 and 2 that I posted the previous Thursdays, read them Here, and Here. Thanks for stopping by! Enjoy!

 

The train appeared on the track, rushing closer, growing bigger. Just as Genevieve was about to open her mouth to let Gaven know, there was a rush of heat, and white light and the front of the train exploded in the darkness.

 

     THEY were trying to rustle through the broken pieces in the darkness, lit only faintly by the burning embers of the wreck. Everything smelled of soot and burnt meat.

“There weren’t humans on this train was there?” she thought with horror.

“No,” said Gillian as he flipped over a burnt piece of wood. “The trains are used for cargo.”

In the darkness, Gen could see the faint outline of his dark cloak. He was the same age as Gaven, but where Gaven was muscular and tan, Gillian was pale, black-haired and gaunt. The three G’s the others sometimes called them, and other things…but Genevieve was just happy to have friends. Being dead could be a lonely thing sometimes.

Gaven came to stand by her then and she looked up at his shiny eyes. He grabbed her elbow suddenly as a figure stepped out from the darkness in front of the simmering embers of the train wreck. She had momentarily forgotten about the rest of the train, but its tail end still waited in the darkness, white, silent, and expecting.

“Oh, in-between-ers,” a voice hissed as it stepped closer. “This night just gets better and better.”

“Don’t come any closer,” said Gaven as he took a step forward.  “We are not here to fight you.”

“What are you here for then, if not to sabotage our plans?” said the voice, dark and raspy.

Gillian came up to stand on the other side of Genevieve. “We are here for answers,” he said. “There is no place for you here, demon.”

The figure laughed and Genevieve felt a chill in her heart. She could never be this evil. She felt a sudden feeling of hopelessness. Maybe she really was just a little girl after all.

“I can feel your hopelessness, your distrust,” said the figure. He lowered the dark hood that he wore. Besides a chill, he stank of fire and fish. His face was all white, his eyes were completely black. He had no hair, and a thin black slash for a mouth. “Tell me, how goes your revolution?”

“Our business is none of yours,” said Genevieve as she held Gaven’s arm. “What are you doing here?”

The figure tilted his head towards the cold wind that blew through the trees and stirred the ash at his feet. A glowing piece of wood glowed orange and then caught on fire. He studied his claw-like fingernails.  “I don’t waste my time talking to children. I wonder…does your master know your here?”

Genevieve remembered the first time she had met their master.

The thing they never tell you when you are saying your goodbyes: how quiet death is. For a long time she felt like she existed, except there are no formal introductions to the places you wake up in. In Sunday school she learned it this way: You go to Heaven if you are good; Hell is for the sinners and the unclean. But what she didn’t know, was that there were places that existed for the In-Between. Limbo wasn’t just for those who slept and never woke up.

Limbo was the place you went if you weren’t quite good enough. Limbo was for the punished who’d repented. It was for the few stranglers of the Great Fall, back when Lucifer had tried to make a claim to earth and all its inhabitants. A war they were still fighting, actually. Some from the Great Fall were trying to make right what they had done. Some were sent there because they weren’t quite done with where they had been. Some thought that it was a place to be alive again, but Genevieve wasn’t so sure. Neither Angel or Demon, the “In-between-ers” were neither living or dead. They possessed the skills and strengths of an Angel and Immortality but they weren’t all-seeing like some, and they had the limitations of a human body.

Genevieve felt like a broken record sometimes, living a life that she had a few times before. Moments never change, regrets still exist and living life like a human constantly reminded her how fragile and stupid they were sometimes. She was sick of making the same mistakes over and over again.

But the man they called Master gave them a purpose. They were the insiders, helping to fight a war that the Angels struggled with. They could blend in, they could be the eyes in every corner.

She vaguely remember Heaven, as a warm place as she was fighting for life. She remembered struggling to breathe, twisting her arms around in the murky river, trying to kick at the thick, car window. Between bursts of unconsciousness, she felt warmth surround her and then there was nothing. She woke up in a white room. There was no smell, no breeze, nothing. Just an ever present fog and the feeling that she had forgotten something, left something behind.

She wore a hospital gown and sat up on a bed that you normally see in a doctor’s office when you are getting a check-up. A man approached. He wore dark rimmed glasses and had a Clark Kent type of feel, and a presence about him, a strength. His eyes were not natural either, they were a wide blue-almost purple, and his ears were pointed at the tip. He wore a white lab coat. When he was closer, Genevieve could see the tops of feathered wings poking over his shoulders.

“You’re awake,” he said. “Good.”

“You’re an Angel,” she said, and was surprised to hear her own voice. It had felt like a long time.

He sat down in a desk chair that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. “Sort of.” He eyed her over a manila folder that had also appeared in his hand. “First time driver, huh?”

Genevieve blinked at him. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

He rolled back in his chair as he looked at her. “Let me put it this way for you. Heaven is not quite ready for you, you’re too good for Hell, and you were too young to die. Sixteen…” He shook his head then. “You are supposed to have the whole world in front of you. What if I said you could make a difference for others instead?”

That was how it had started.

The demon was still looking at them. “Your Master doesn’t know, does he?” He grinned, and Genevieve shuddered. His teeth were filed down to points, for gnawing on flesh.

“What are you going to do?” said Genevieve.

He looked the three of them over. “You’ll never know.”

To Be Continued Next Thursday…

Part 2: Endtown (a short story)

/ Ajmorse / 1 Comment

Happy Thursday! If you haven’t read Part 1 of this story, you can read it here. I am temporarily calling it “Endtown.” Here goes, enjoy!

OVER pancakes, sausage, and bacon they talked about the master’s plan.

“So, you want to board a train?” said Genevieve as she forked pancake into her mouth. She chewed slowly and then swallowed. “After we were told strictly by the master to leave it alone? It’s clearly dark territory.”

“Well, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” said her friend, mentor, and sometimes brother.

“He’s all-seeing, he’ll find out, Gaven.”

Gaven shrugged and started eating some bacon. “You know what I like about earth-food?”

“What’s that?” she said as she stared at the ice in the bottom of her empty glass.

“The grease.” He took another bite of bacon and crunched it loudly.

She just shook her head, but she couldn’t completely hide her smile. He kept her sane this friend, who looked like an older brother. Gaven was tan all over, with blue eyes and brown hair. He looked like the type of guys that girls her age would probably giggle over. But things weren’t always what they seemed. She wasn’t the little girl she appeared either.

She watched him as he set down his fork. “You didn’t tell me about the parents?” he said.

“They think I’m twelve,” she said with a grimace. “They treat me like I’m twelve.”

He sighed. “If you’d just repent…”

“I’ve said my sorrys, what more do you want from me?”

“This punishment won’t last forever, Gen.”

She stirred scrambled eggs around her plate. “That’s not what Harry said.”

“Harry is a wicked angel, Gen, you know that.” He gulped at his orange juice. “God, that’s good.”

“He said something about the master telling him it was true. How I was stuck like this. Forever.”

“Nothing is permanent in this world, you know that. It’s life and death and high calories.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“There,” he said as he saluted his empty juice glass at her. “Now you’re starting to act your age.”

 

An hour later, they shivered in the dark next to the train tracks. The place was lit by a single street light, and the usually brown-dirt looked a strange purple in the darkness. “What are we doing here?” she hissed, as she hugged herself against the early morning chill. “We are going to get ourselves killed.”

“You can’t get killed if you are already dead, and besides, we are invincible.” Gaven bounced up and down on his feet. He glanced at his watch. “It’s passed 3am, something’s wrong.”

Genvieve gazed down the tracks; it ran through trees and behind buildings, but the only thing she saw were the hills on the other side of town. She looked across the tracks at the tall, shadowy rundown factory. She could see the rust on the smoke stacks, the grime that spilled down their sides. Stretched out in front of the leftover rusty pipes and barrels were mounds of dirt, bulldozers and holes in the ground. Somebody was rebuilding something.

A train horn sounded in the darkness.

“So we are going to jump onto it as it comes by?” she said faintly as she waited for the front of it to appear.

“That’s the plan,” said Gaven.

Genevieve didn’t like this plan. She didn’t like anything about the dark just then, the way morning seemed so far away, the way the smell of the trees and dirt smelled sweet and heavy to her nose, like something was rotting.

She heard something snap. “Something’s here,” she hissed and turned around. But beyond the light that lit up the construction site and part of the tracks, she saw nothing. She heard the scuff of someone kicking a stone in the darkness, the sound of a muttered curse. A man’s voice.

“Who’s there?” she called out.

They saw the glow, first. Of eyes that snapped on, like someone had turned on a light switch. Glowing faint at first, and then closer, she gasped as two orange and fiery red eyes appeared. She thought she should be scared, but for some reason, Gen thought of campfires and felt like lying down and going to sleep.

“Knock it off, Gill,” said Gaven, “We know it’s you.”

“Oh, the master’s going to kill you,” said a deep voice, gleefully.

“Gillian!” cried Genevieve. She heard laughter and grunts as Gaven punched him in the gut. The glowing eyes disappeared. Not all of them knew how to use glamor.

The train appeared on the track, rushing closer, growing bigger. Just as Genvieve was about to open her mouth to let Gaven know, there was a rush of heat, and white light and the front of the train exploded in the darkness.

To be continued… (next Thursday!)

Author’s note:

These story posts have minimal edits; I thought I’d let the story take me where it wants to go, so the next words are as much of a surprise to me as it is to you, the reader. I do have a vague idea of what I thought I wanted this story to be, or want it to go, but I think I’m going to continue on like this and let the words take me.

I’ve read that some authors do that, they let the story take them where it needs to be and I think this will help me work on plot-building too, (which is something that I struggle with.)

So the result might be a big win or a big disaster. I can already see some things I need to work on, meh. 😉 Thanks for reading, and for the support!

Tune in next Thursday for more!

Happy writing everyone!

A Short Story: Endtown

/ Ajmorse / 2 Comments

I decided what I am going to do for my a continuing post…and that would be, a story! Originally I was going to post the story on Fridays, but upon observation, I think Thursday is the best night to do so. A lot of people are busy Friday nights, (myself included,) so instead, I’ll leave Friday night to the miscellaneous posts, the randomness that is me, etc. 🙂

This is a story that I started several weekends ago, inspired by the street lights I can see from my office window. For some reason, the town we live in has this sort of grugdyness feel…as if it has lived its heyday, and has let itself go. There are still a lot of nooks, and sweet spots to find, but they are like the diamond in the rough, difficult to see against all that grey.

Anyway, here goes. It has no name yet, for now…we will call it…

“Endtown”

            The train rattled, a rata-tat-tat, a rata-tat-tat, ending with a drawn out horn as it whooshed past. The girl standing under the street light turned towards the sound. She could see the train’s cars flying past in between the distant buildings, a blur of colors, grey and blue and a burnt red all blending together. One minute there and the next gone. She tossed a ball up and down in her hands, up towards the street light, which turned everything in the darkness a pale sort of yellow.

She leaned down and squinted at some writing that someone had chalked onto the sidewalk: a hand with the middle finger sticking up all done up in orange and pink. Underneath the drawing someone had written in white chalk in capital letters: UP YOURS.

“Ridiculous,” she said as she paced back and forth. “So angry,” she muttered. “So…undisciplined.”

“You of all people should know,” said a hissing voice next to her elbow, with a faint laugh.

The girl jumped. “God! You scared the shit out of me!”

She looked down at a green and white striped snake who was stretched out on a blue garbage can. “Of all the forms you could choose, and you come to me like that.”

“Oh, forgive me your great worshipfulness,” hissed the snake. “Next time I’ll come as a chipmunk…or a kumquat.”

“A kumquat? What the hell is that? Anyway, it feels like I’m talking to the garbage can. I’m sure it looks like it, too.”

“Hey, if cans could talk,” said the snake, with a slither of his tongue and a wink. “I wonder what they would say?”

She looked across the street at a run down convenience store. It was a white square building, with a faded coco cola sign out front. “Probably something like it stinks in here.”  She noticed that the neon sign was supposed to say Jerry’s, but an R was missing. “Have you heard from the master tonight?”

“Not a thing. I thought that is why you called this meeting?”

“My job was to watch this small town. Watch the train, watch the exports, watch the people, and yet…nothing. I haven’t heard from anybody in weeks.”

“Have a little faith Gen,” said the snake. “That’s what we are here for.”

She folded her arms across her chest, as the wind rustled a chunk of brown hair by her face. Freckled, blue-eyed and dressed in a red t-shirt and shorts, she felt trapped by her boyish figure, by the fact that she never could grow up, no matter how much she wanted to. She scratched at the sweat that had gathered at the back of her neck.

“It must be on the train,” she said as she swatted at a fly that flew in front of her face. She watched with wide eyes as it buzzed in front of the snake who swallowed it down with a big gulp.

“You’re disgusting,” she said as she turned away. “I can’t believe I spend time with you.”

“You love me,” said the snake. “I just know it. Anyway, tell me about this town. Any diamonds in the rough?”

“Some. There was a baker who gave me an extra doughnut in my box yesterday, but he thought it was for my mother.”

The snake gave her a side-long glance. “How are the live-in parents doing?”

“Fine.”

He wasn’t stupid, he knew what she wasn’t saying.

Genevieve scratched at an itch on her nose. She wriggled her shoulders. The itch was spreading. It felt like the time she had gotten poison ivy when she was at summer camp.

“Can we go get a coffee or something?” she said as she scratched at the freckles on her arms. “I can’t stand under this street light anymore. I feel like a hooker.”

The snake snorted. “You’re breaking out in hives again, aren’t you?”

“I am not.”

“You worry too much.” He flicked his tail toward her and managed to poke her in the side. She glared at him.

“Stop that,” she said.

“I don’t think snakes drink coffee.”

“Change then,” she said and she was already walking down the street. She heard a grunt, and then there was the sound of footsteps behind her.

She looked down at her mentor’s blue tennis shoes, jeans and then up to his blonde-silver hair. His brown eyes twinkled with mischief. “So, where are we going?”

The only thing open was a 24-hour diner that promised the best fried chicken this town has to offer! “That’s promising,” muttered the girl as they walked inside. “And there’s a KFC next door.”

“They are hardly the best,” said their hostess, as she grabbed their menus. She had long, silky brown hair and smooth skin. “Will you guys be having dinner? We have a separate dinner, dessert and breakfast menu. ”

The man standing next to Genevieve scratched at his head. “Haven’t decided yet. Why don’t you give us all three.”

Over pancakes, sausage, and bacon they talked about the master’s plan.

To Be Continued…

15 Minute Journaling: Don’t let fear get you down

/ Ajmorse / 3 Comments

I need to do some writing, so what am I doing? I’m sitting here doing everything but that. I’ve painted my fingernails, I’ve gotten on Facebook – I’ve even read a few other blogs here on WordPress, including some of my own posts. Then why aren’t I writing? What am I afraid of? I thought I’ve gotten past all this.

Me, being silly!

Me, being silly!

I guess the fear was this: What’s the point of writing if its going to turn out terrible? Well, that’s not the point is it? The point is WRITING.

All things writing. Write, write, write, write, write!!  Gahhhh….Now why am I sitting here staring and fearing the blank page?

In all things in life you can’t let fear let you get behind, and that includes writing.

I’m even sitting here with my new headphones on (a nice birthday present from yesterday, woo hoo!) trying to drown out the world, and FOCUS.

Hmm…okay, let me visit my book shelf and see if I can scrounge up some writing prompts. That might help.

A few weeks ago at the Barnes and Noble, I found this book: A Writer’s Book of Days: A spirited Companion & Lively Muse for the Writing Life by Judy Reeves.

IMG_20140608_171217531

It’s basically like a writing devotional. It offers you daily writer prompts, as well as lessons for each month on writing and how to improve the craft. I have a tendency to over think some of the writing prompts – actually now I’m starting to realize that I work best sometimes with a challenge. It’s okay to take the prompts where you need them to go.

It is fun sometimes to see how creative you can get. Instead of just one word or one sentence to get the creative juices flowing, lets try about five of them.

Here are the prompts for five days in June from June 6th – June 10th:

June 6:  While the world sleeps

June 7:  I have a confession to make

June 8: “There is a place somewhere called Paris”

June 9: Across the railroad tracks

June 10:  The place where wild pines grow

15 MINUTES ON THE CLOCK….GO!

“There is a place somewhere called Paris,” she told me with a flick of her blond hair as she started reapplying her lipstick. She squinted at herself in the tiny blue compact mirror and then smacked her lips loudly. “They say that everyone walks around naked, I’d like to go there sometime.”

I eyed her smooth body, the tan legs and free arms, the way her hips curved over her jean shorts. “I bet you would.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she snorted as she put her make-up away. “It exists somewhere out west they say, across some railroad tracks at some nudist colony. You know, the place they say where the wild pines grow.”

I couldn’t imagine her anywhere surrounded by naked people, much less trees as a walk through the park seemed too much for her most of the times. She hated the squirrels that scurried down the trees, she hated the babies that cried on the playground, sometimes I think she even hated me.

I was her boyfriend, too. The one she was supposed to love – supposedly.

“I have a confession to make,” I breathed into her ear as I wrapped my arms around her thin frame and crushed those curves against me. “You’re beautiful.” I kissed her neck. “You’re sexy.” My hands trailed down her hips. “You’re lovely.”

She laughed a cruel, sarcastic laugh, and pushed me away. “Please,” she said with her hand on my chest. “Don’t make a fool of yourself.”

“I didn’t want to be here anyway,” I muttered. She’d taken me for a drive, and then had parked on the side of the road across from the local park. I could see pine trees and several screaming kids running towards picnic tables as she’d put the car in park. The air tasted fresh on my tongue, was cool and fresh in my nose.

Then she’d uttered those dreaded words as she turned towards me. “We need to talk.”

We walked hand and hand for about two minutes and then she pulled away from me. I could see the coldness in her posture, the way her body seemed to be trying to avoid me. She adverted her eyes, pretended like she was crying. But I knew she wasn’t.

“You live in your own world,” she continued then. “Like, everyone else could die, and the world could continue sleeping and you would be the one outside of it, like in slow motion or something. Living your life oblivious to those around you.”

God, she was so stupid sometimes. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Of course you don’t. The world doesn’t evolve around you Isiah Crane.”

“It doesn’t revolve around you either,” I said.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about!” she cried, as she turned back towards me. “That sarcasm! You’re so God-damned sure of yourself!”

I thought about that. I mean, why wouldn’t I be? I was smart, strong…and intelligent. I was pretty sure I was good looking. I shrugged. “Yeah, I got nothing.”

She started to cry then, loud, horrible tears. “I don’t understand why you’re so mean to me.” I didn’t really understand anything either. How she seemed to use everything but the truth to get what she wanted. She played games. She probably thought: maybe today, I’ll grab his balls and tug just a little bit more. I winced as I thought about it.

I didn’t want anyone tugging anywhere. “So this is it, huh?”

She brought her hands away from her face. Her mascara had left black tracks down her cheeks. “Aren’t you even just a little bit sad?”

I looked out at the fresh air surrounding us, the trees and green grass and water gurgling in a fountain nearby. Everything seemed brand new all of a sudden. I laughed once. “Should I be?”

 

 

 

 

 

Character Files: “The Conductor”

/ Ajmorse / Leave a comment

I’d like to try something new to add on here – I call it “Character Files.” In my struggle to find some kind of story inspiration some time ago, I purchased a book called Writerific II: Creativity Training for writers by Eva Shaw, which offers encouragement, but most importantly, writing prompts for the creative writer.

One such prompt, has a page full of groups of words. Each group of three words is meant to inspire a story, by using each word in a story or situation that you may create. I decided to take it a step further, and as such created – Character Files.

spy8Each group of words inspired me to create a character, someone who may or may not have a story – a character that I could store away in a file with other characters I created, that I could return to and use that character for story inspiration if need be.

There are a lot of word groups in the writing prompt, and I’ve only created a few different characters already. But I was pleased with the different results. This particular example took me to a place and genre that I don’t normally write, but it allowed for some nice practice of sensory images. Here goes…

The words are:  pigeon   voltage   train

“The Conductor”

He is a nobody, tall and willowy with a pale face, and dark brown hair. His back is straight as he sits on the park bench in his navy blue conductor’s uniform, his long legs bunched up in front of him as he reads the newspaper.

            Looking at him, no one would know that he’s killed someone and framed somebody else for it, although, he twitches occasionally at every other sentence he reads. His brown eyes squint, his face bunches and then goes straight. Two-thousand volts of electricity frying their way through his veins. It could have been him. The memories eat at him, peck at his brain like a flock of crows.

            The sight of the butchered man he killed in the alley late that night. The rain pouring in his ears and over the curve of disgust on his lips. The bastard he caught sleeping with his wife…maybe he should have killed her too.

 

He smelled the rain that night, and he never smelled anything more visceral. Felt his thoughts mix with the sewage and the blood water that swirled around the man’s body, the man that he killed, a milkman, another nobody. What was so important about this stranger that made his wife take her pants off?

He thought, just once – it was a fleeting thought really – that maybe he should be down in the sludge and the darkness of the alley, too. Let the smell of something putrid, the river of feces, blood and rain water pour over him. Feel the fear of something cold and slimy creep its way across his bare skin. Let it feed off of him for a moment and taste the sponginess of his brain, the holes there, the parts that were missing that tasted brown, like something sweet and rotting. Let blood pour out of his nose and his eyeballs bounce down his face. Let him feel hell just once.

Instead, he swiped at the water on his chin, shook his head like a dog, shivered once, pulled his coat around his shoulders and walked home. The knife he used on the stranger who was defiling his wife, he hid in his cousin’s apartment, still wet, the blood dripping.

The next day, while drinking his morning coffee, he placed a call to his local police department to let them know that his cousin, an alcoholic and a man who occasionally liked to feel up little girls, was in town and that he came around the other day begging for money. His cousin had threatened him with a knife, which the conductor described to the police in great detail. A butcher’s knife, he said and then shuddered with a slight catch in his throat. There were groves and barbs on the blade, the kind that shreds through skin when you use it. Mostly likely cut a man in two. Or remove somebody’s head.

The next day he read the front headline of the newspaper while he sat on a park bench on his lunch break: Child Molester Arrested for Murder. He folded the newspaper carefully and tucked it under his arm. The sun felt warm and soft on his navy blue uniform and he looked down at his shiny, black shoes and smiled to himself. It was going to be an excellent day.

Laundry, a menial chore – a nice journaling opportunity!

/ Ajmorse / Leave a comment

Moved to a new place in the last few months, and the building we are living in doesn’t have laundry on site, so every week or so I must make that dreaded trip to the laundromat. I hate doing laundry, and I hate laundromats, but the last time I brought my journal along and it gave me this somewhat amusing (if a bit depressing) journal entry:

ZZZZZ

3/5/14

I hate the sound of a laundromat. The way everyone’s laundry bumps up and down and goes every which-way, it makes me feel like there’s a hovercraft nearby, the rinsing and the swooshing, the quick, jagged vibrating of a laundry load full of jeans. The heavy slosh of an empty washer only half-full, only half used.

The dryer doors that fly open in mid-spin on a whim, flinging out their contents…be free undies…be free towels…be free…

Then there is the final rinse, the final spin, the heavy drone of a washer that bids you to keep waiting, groans and shudders, waiting….waiting…wait. One final spin, a heavy moan and then it shudders. It’s done.

How disturbing that washing clothes sounds like sex on paper, but it’s not like that at all.

Doing laundry is not sexy. It is the un-sexed, the final hangnail, the equivalent of having a migraine with a piercing light shining down on you.

It is like finding a stain on your favorite t-shirt, drumming your steering wheel in long lines of traffic, a fly buzzing in your ear, diarrhea, a sink full of dirty dishes, an open wound, the stink and the squelch of feet stuck in cold mud.

It is that raw, open feeling of words not said, of empty spaces, of regrets that come flying back in crowds of laughing, boisterous people. It’s like realizing you’ve forgotten something very important, and that dread of forgotten assignments…a pop-quiz, a failed class, the feeling of social paranoia. It is that trapped, dizzying realization that no one is coming to rescue you – life really comes with disappointments, heart ache and hurts.

And no one is going to rescue you from the overwhelming joyless feeling of living sometimes. Sometimes, all you can do is feel lost in the hullabaloo of it. Sometimes all you can do is look around hopelessly at the blank, wide-eyed, too-beautiful people and hope that they won’t notice that you might smell like prey to their eyes, that you might be that one person that might make this second of their lives a little more entertaining.

But ah, I digress – laundry. That menial chore that reminds you that there are other hopeless people in the world around you. You may think that you smell like roses most of the time, but in the end of it…eventually, all your clothes smell like shit. And that’s enough to bring dread to anyone.

Yeah, I really hate laundry. One day, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll hire someone to do it for me. But for now, it keeps me with the realization, and reminds me that no one is perfect – myself included.

Can you guess what color I am?

/ Ajmorse / 2 Comments

Dusk at Binghamton University’s wildlife reserve.

It’s early morning, and I really should be sleeping, but thought I would post my latest assignment from my writing class. It really is forcing me to stretch back into that creative mold and realize just because I’ve been to a few college classes, doesn’t mean that I am the expert that I think I am – sometimes I forget that we writers can get cocky sometimes. 😉

Anywho…the assignment was to describe a color and do this in the first person. (Pretend we are essentially the color.) The bit I wrote was a broad scope of how one color can be many, but I like the phrases I got here:

I am that periwinkle color of a forgotten sweater. I am royal, I am sweet, call me what you want; pop in your mouth grapes, a plum, hanging loose from the vine. I am everything that you want to go right in your life. Find me on the highway, stripped from its owner; a scarf blowing in the breeze. A dark, bleeding sunset, a midnight sky so inky. I am velvet, I am happy beams of ambrosia, lavender, freesia. The sparkle in a raindrop, no larger than a pin-prick. Find me soaring, the color of wind, grey and regal. Find me goofy. A bulky mauve dinosaur that everyone hates. Flowers in a field of straw, choking out the other plant life. Birthed by two colors, given life from two opposites, warm, cold, light and dark.

What am I?

A bit of flash fiction – At the Ball Park

/ Ajmorse / 4 Comments

I have about 5 minutes before I have to shower, dress and get around for work tonight, but just wanted to share something real quick with you guys.

I signed up for an online class called, “Creativity Training for Writers” and although the class is clearly geared for writers who are more or less getting into the craft of writing, it has really helped me get back on track and is slowly curing my writer’s block – which is what I hoped it would!

The creative mind is still alive and kicking, and what a relief it is to get my writer’s voice back! Our first assignment we were given prompts and a limit of 5 minutes, in which we were to create a story finishing a sentence with a twist at the end. It is the closest I have ever come to writing some decent flash fiction and I was rather proud of it:

At the Ball Park

They called it a near miss, but I called it a coincidence. Sandy called it fate and I kissed her nose whenever she said this and she would smile at me with that wide, red-lipped smile; the kind that she gave me even after I had broken her hip and dislocated her right shoulder.

I’d tried to swerve to the right, but I just couldn’t move fast enough. There were so many people in the way and the lane was crowded. I’d hollered, “Get out of the way!” And before I knew it, my brown, leather glove was in the face of the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen with red-brown hair. How was I to know that I would accidentally push her down the ball park stairs?

I’d visited her at the hospital after I muttered my sorrys to her on the gurney as the EMTs rolled her away, but that still wasn’t quite good enough. I gave her the ball I caught though, which was signed by every memory of the team. And when I was leaning over her hospital bed, the ball out-stretched in my hand, she gave me that red-lipped smile and asked me to marry her. Turns out she was a Yankees fan, too.

***Thoughts below if you got ’em! 🙂

New page “Short Stories”

/ Ajmorse / Leave a comment

I created a short stories page, so for those who were interested in some of my writings, you can go check it out!

It is the story that I just posted recently about the Planets having dinner. Thank you all for the wonderful likes and views. 🙂  I will certainly add more stories to the page as time goes on.

I wish I could make it its own drop down menu…but I don’t think this theme supports that. :/ Hmm…will have to do some research, probably.

Happy Reading!