Songs without Words

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Unrelated to the festivities, I have finished a story three years in the making. Perhaps in a twist of fate, I wrote the first part of this story in 2006, yet left the years-later segment until yesterday, when I uncovered the tale and realized that it was time to reunite my heroes.

Without further ado: “Love Isn’t a Promise”

As always, I’m afraid that it is necessary to resize your browser to make this readily readable. I’ll try to make a browser-friendly version later.

Details after the cut.

Continue reading ‘[735] Love Isn’t a Promise’ »

I’m really excited about the new story project I decided to work on.  The idea struck me this past Saturday morning, and I jotted down a few pages and a preliminary character sketch.  At this point, I have the beginning, middle, and end pinned down, with the two emotional climaxes still in the works.  Since the last completed story I wrote – way back in June of last year, if you can even remember that – was rather plot-driven, I decided to let this one unfold in a more character-driven way.  It is a story about fraternal twins growing up and coming to terms with who they are, starting at age 5 and ending at age 23.  The “main character” is not the narrator, which was a difficult decision to make, but I felt that it was necessary in order to help the audience relate to some of the subject material.  At the same time, this mode of storytelling sacrifices a lot of opportunities I would’ve liked to explain the thoughts and feelings of the main character which instead have to come indirectly or through dialogue.

While this story is not terribly long, I thought it would be fun to go back and tabulate the longest stories I’ve written, in terms of words.  This list should be definitive, except for two stories which have the potential to be in the top 6 for which my computerized versions have been lost, “Cell Wars 0″ and “Emptiness in My Heart.”

Today as I was watching “Today in Class 5-2,” I was reminded of all the innocences and complexities and emotions of youth – and its wide-open honesty.  Five years ago, on New Year’s Day, before I was in a relationship, before I received notice that MIT would accept me after that heartbreaking deferral, before I had ever considered becoming a doctor . . . even back then, I had already unfurled the full expanse of my dreams and ideals.  Those fantasies warmed my heart even as my life leapt and plunged forward through rocky times, and they kept me alive through the imagined interactions that touched my heart in a profound way that maybe only artistic creation can achieve.  This particular short story (a diary-like entry which is best imagined as being spun patiently by a voiceover talent as the reel plays back the memory) is one that marked a turning point in my understanding of my heart’s deepest desires.  It was a time when I was untamed by the forces of adulthood and unafraid to write about a perfect world and a perfect life.  Love has since entered my life (two years and a month), a duration coincidentally approximately the same as the romance below.

You’re already there, a bundle of warmth in the forest glazed in snow and ice. The snowflakes are falling intermittently. I catch one on my tongue, relishing the brief sensation.

In a way, that crazy passion has already worn off, grown into the deeper, more subtle love that could last an eternity. I’m sure you feel the same way. It’s like how the trees seem to greet us now as if we’d been inhabitants here for all our lives – a tree’s romance, a faerie’s tale: a slow dance under many a moon, under the stars as they change like the sand dunes on the beach.

I’m wearing the little ring; I hope you notice! I still remember your cute whispers last year when you gave it to me. You tried to be confident and logical, but alas, even I, watching with my eyes, felt that overwhelming wave as the light leapt off the simple gold band. You were blabbering, and I loved every word of it.

I still remember our meeting two years past, when you had to keep your promise and tell me what you’d done when you slipped away that day we were shopping in our mother land. And oh, how I knew before you even showed it to me that I’d forgive you for keeping a secret! I still finger the necklace every day when I wake up to dawn’s radiant shouts. I can imagine the words of some future construction worker who should dig up my coffin by mistake and find the necklace still there – “Aw, she loved him all her life!” And I should hope that they’d say the same about you!

Oh, you’re already there, a bundle of warmth in the forest glazed in snow and ice. I approach your huddled figure, sitting down on the rock beside you. There isn’t enough room and I have to press against your side lightly to prevent myself from sliding off. I hope you don’t mind.

This year it’s my turn – I got you something special this year. I hope it can be a memento worthy of our four years of friendship. Carefully, I hand it to you; it’s in a wide, flat box to protect it from the snow. Delicately, you open it.

It’s a painting of this very spot, but in our place are two young trees in full bloom. I say that I couldn’t paint you well enough, so I had to think up something else to represent you. You say I’m just being modest. I just blush and remember the other painting I have stashed away in my room; I tried! but sometimes things don’t turn out how you’d like. That’s life, too.

I love the way you squeal in delight like a little child on the swings for the first time. Oh, squeal more; it makes me smile. Gratitude is best expressed in those little cartwheels of the voice.

To protect the painting from the snow, you close the box, getting your fingers caught in between the top and the sides. We both laugh but I don’t let you fix the box because I suddenly have you in a tight embrace, our heads side-by-side so that we can hear each other’s ears doing whatever ears do on cold days. I don’t giggle like this very often, and it feels so good. The wind is blowing against my short hair and my crimson cheeks. Don’t you wish it felt like this every day?

Shyly as always, we move about our faces until our lips brush against each other. The kiss is gentle and pacific like the air around us. ‘I love you,’ I think as I close my eyes. I love you I love you I love you. We don’t have to wish for it to feel like this every day; it already does.

On to another great year of our lives!

If that last entry of “ancient writing” is not your cup of tea, perhaps you might want to read my new short story instead?  A PDF (39 pages) can be found here.

Enjoy!

At a fictional university in Anytown, USA, a literary magazine editor named Melissa decides to compile short essays and stories written by her female peers on the subject of Valentine’s Day.  This is the result of her efforts, a small little collection containing a candid window into the students’ lives.

I hope that you will enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Will post later this evening – I’m about halfway done (preface and two and a half stories complete).

Subway

Metal is a rather peculiar thing. There’s that scent – you know, when you hold a dime in your palm for too long and it gets sweaty and all and it starts to stink. The tokens are like that, too, but they also have that ugly, dull brassy look to them that is more pallid than antique, although I suppose now that they’ve phased out the tokens, they may as well be antiques, beside those old torch-lights and slightly-tarnished menorahs and wrought-metal weeping willow sculptures that probably would cut your hands before you could wind them up enough to play back that old tune your grandfather used to hum to your mom when he would sit her on his lap on the front porch.

I have a token in my pocket at this moment; it is pressed between my index finger and my thumb. I can feel the impressions on each side, the asymmetry of it all. It’s awkward. I flip the coin around with a quick half-turn of my fingers, over and over again, like lovers opposite one another in a revolving door with no exit.

I keep this token in my pocket for good luck. Or rather, more on that unlikely glimmer of hope that maybe one day, time will turn back. I’ll know because the proximity readers will be replaced by those little tin cartons with the slits in the top. I’ll know because there’ll be a person sitting in that booth again, listening to the radio, reading a book, doing anything but giving you tokens – and even then, counting your change wrong, to your dismay. They don’t listen. But then again, neither does the empty booth that’s there now.

The subway is full of relics of times gone by. Even the trains themselves are getting kind of old. Only one thin little ring around the wheels stays that pristine, paladin-armor silver. The rest of the wheel is some strange shade of mauve that looks kind of like rust that it is, but without that sickly peeling that seems to always peek through abandoned buildings and really old cars.

Still, the trains have a function; my token does not. As my left hand swipes the card, my right hand stays firmly in my khakis, turning the warm coin over and over. I walk out onto the platform, steering abruptly to the right when I see that bright yellow slab that you’re not supposed to step on, although a couple guys are playing some sort of game of chicken on it.

I wait, leaned up against the wall, the tiles on this narrow mosaic of sorts squeaky clean, the whites shining brightly to create an effect something like seeing an wrinkly, scruff old man who nevertheless has some pretty spanking new dentures in his mouth. I’m leaning against the subway’s dentures.

The wait is kind of long, not agonizing, just long. There’s a fan nearby, although it’s pointed the wrong way and blowing the heck out of this little kid, who’s jumping up and down and up and down, his red-and-blue jacket swaying about and coming off til it’s barely clutching his elbows.

My spot, with the clean tiles, has some rather stagnant air. The wait is really getting long. There must be a crowd at the previous station, holding up the train or something. Or maybe they just don’t have the right number of conductors to run the system anymore – I hear the transportation authority’s pretty far in debt these days. The fare hikes certainly are complicit in that conclusion.

The times change; my valueless token is an artifact; the trains will break down and be serviced; that fan will be replaced by a bigger one; the kid will grow up and become a man; these tiles will grow old and dusty and chip off in the middle to reveal the cement behind them. But the subway isn’t about any of that. The subway is about waiting, and that’s something that will never change.

the relentless pursuit of a wretched god.

royalty is a spectacle.  pilfered philosophies and glands of steel.

rivers course by and you can see the Corinthian columns of marble and sandstone ..
.. covered in mildew.

stand by the wayside as blue renews itself with black,

and green renews itself with red,

and the yellowing hearts of ugly men

are scrubbed to brown with copious amounts of whitening toothpaste.

spectacles are orgasmic

but they smell bad.

I wrote a little bit this morning because I couldn’t stand being away from fiction for so long.  This new short story doesn’t really have a point or direction, so I may just break it off at a random point.  It’s a sort-of romance story involving a “normal” girl who falls in love with the 100% nerdy guy in the dorm room next over after an accidental encounter (not of the sexual kind).  I just wanted to try painting this the other away around, with the norm being the “innocent” character falling for the non-innocent one (or being corrupted).  I have ~5 pages so far, but who knows when I’ll get another moment to add to it.

The ants slink out of a saw-cut hole on the left-hand side of a wooden plank. The hole isn’t even round – its edges are jagged and unkempt, the jutting splinters like the bristles of a two-day beard. The insects stumble at first, their single-file line wavering hesitantly before asymptotically aligning along a single mahogany-brown grain-line in the wood.

They march, antennae-to-abdomen, tapping so softly on the wood that they can’t be heard without pressing one’s ear right up against the plank itself. Their rhythm is so steady, their speed so fixed, that they look like a thin stream of water dribbling down the side of a cup, writhing with childish abandon at first, then gradually falling into the well-trodden trails down the side, marked by the dotted speckles from streams of yesteryear.

At the end of the ants’ path, they come upon another hole, lined on its sloping rims with a slick substance. One by one, the ants fall into the hole, the next one in line failing to notice the bottomless abyss until the previous ant tumbles away, revealing all too late the gaping destiny. Frantically, for a moment, the ant fights the well, although all six of its legs are already so far from the sane wood that they only grasp air. The ant behind is amused at this little jig – it looks funky. Catchy, almost. It makes no move to reclaim its dancing comrade.

In the midst of this juxtaposition of amusement and tragedy lies enlightenment.

“Dosienne, do you believe in the Outside?”
My twin sister gave her neighbor a small shove, trying to get a bit more breathing space – to no avail, of course. It was so crowded and we were so fat, so motionless, so lifeless. Like oversized spores with nowhere to land. Just here, chained to one another in this dense factory with no windows, no gardens, and no friends. The only world we knew; the only world we’d ever know. But I refused to believe that this was it. That this was the limit.
“The Outside? Of course I do! That’s where all the Barbarians come from, after all,” I said confidently.
“Well, I don’t believe in the Outside, Dosi. I don’t believe a word about it. I think the Barbarians are just pets of the Central Intelligence Organization that broke out of their playpens. No, actually, it’s a conspiracy against us! To strike a few of us down, make examples of us.”
“Oh, hush, sis, or you’ll get us killed!”
“Killed? Killed? I’d rather be sentenced to commit seppuku than make another blasted photocopy of nutritional propaganda to distribute.”
A voice came from a few blocks away. “Hey, shut up over there! We don’t need you blebbing your entrails everywhere, ya hear?”
“Mind your own business!” retorted Gosienne sharply. She had a knack for irritating people. Some said she was just expressing the wrong genes. Me, I think there was something else in her. A spark. A soul. An individual will. That’s why, annoying as she could be and dangerous as she always was, I stuck with her, supported her through all these years.
“We’re just trying to make some conversation here, geez,” I shouted with a groan.
“But listen, Dosi, listen! Don’t you ever wonder why one day we’re at war with the tall and skinny Barbarians, and the next day, the tall and skinny ones are peaceful coexisters and we’re fighting against the Barbarian Sphere-clusters? And then suddenly it’s the Automatons coming by! When will the wars ever stop? Why is everyone out to kill us? It’s a conspiracy, I say!”
“We fight to protect our Motherland,” I said quickly. “That’s all. It’s so warm and beautiful, with bountiful food and tropical weather every day.”
“Yes, every day, the same the same. The Barbarians must think it’s so nice in here, ‘cause it looks pretty from the outside. But I bet if they stayed for more than a year, they’d be sick and tired of it, too!”
“Oh? And give an example of what you don’t have? Food? Shelter? Mail service? Me?”
“Sex. Sunlight. Open seas. The beach! Fresh air. Fresh water! And did I mention sex?”

* to be continued one day *