NoisyRoom

Short story beginnings

October 2nd, 2009 Edit

Notes: I find “John” is my default male name. John is not, however, a reoccurring character. Each character from story to story, despite (placeholder) names, is different.

First up. the newest. Currently, without a title:

John found very few things to dwell on. But his wife was still gone; she’d been on a business trip for the last two weeks and would be gone for another two. He’d started an affair only a week ago with a woman named Charlotte.
And this is what he dwelt on. The affair. Because he loved his wife, or he supposed he loved his wife, he couldn’t understand why he’d slept with Charlotte. The sex wasn’t very good; he’d had to fake an orgasm.
But, he thought, it’s not that the sex wasn’t very good. The sex was just normal, it was plain. And she wasn’t anything special; she wasn’t fat, she was attractive, she had nice eyes and laughed at his jokes and seemed to be genuinely attracted to him.
But looks and attractiveness and breast size and hair color, length, style and density (thinning/thin hair in women made John unequal parts disturbed, disgusted and despaired) did not a good lover make.
Charlotte was into John and he knew it. But it didn’t matter; she was a normal girl, into nothing more than (to John) classic but overdone positions. Missionary only works for so long and doggy was boring with her. Although he enjoyed the view and feels of cowgirl, it had no sensation.
She came at least once and didn’t know that he’d faked. And she invited him out the next night. And we went; he saw her again and they had sex again. And he faked it again; after two hours he ran out of steam and things were getting sore and she seemed to have had her fill.
And he was going to see her again tonight; it’d been three days since he last saw her, since he last betrayed his wife. And he was preparing to do it again but he was dwelling in the in-between time. He was dwelling and thinking and meditating on what he’d done. And he wasn’t sure why he kept on going back.
The new woman wasn’t into his things; wasn’t into a slight bit of bondage or domination or anything else John liked yet he kept on coming back. He was dwelling on it; why’d he keep on seeing her?
But she was into him. Maybe that was it, he thought. His susceptibility. She was into him.
That’s how he’d fallen for his wife; she had been into him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had to work to gain her affection but she had shown affection, been overly flirtatious with him, since the beginning.
Or maybe she just showed interest, he thought. Maybe that was all and he’d just picked up on it. Was that why he was so malleable to the whims of Charlotte, or was it that she had whims involving him?
Or, was it that she was a pretty girl, who had whims involving him? He didn’t know. Yet, he hadn’t broken a date with her yet, he’d as of yet failed to have sex with her, he’d continued to betray his wife. And he was getting ready to do it again.

Next up, with a working title of “3 AM Doner” — Sucks, I know.:

John read while at the tram stop. It was 3:30 on a Saturday morning. He’d been out at a bar playing foosball with a few of his Volkshochschule classmates. They’d called it a night and he’d walked to the nearest tram stop.
“Does anyone speak English?” he heard. Three girls approached the people waiting under the veranda.
“Yea, I speak English,” John said.
“Oh my god, that’s so awesome!” the short, browned, slightly round girl, Leila, said. To call her fat would be incorrect; to call her skinny would be a lie. To call her pleasantly plump would be to overestimate her mass in comparison to the tallest and biggest of the three, a pasty-white girl from Canada. She was, John decided, a normal girl with a little baby fat.
“Do you know where Burger King is?” Her voice was a little high with a slight inflection that went beyond the question. California, John thought. “We want to get a burger or something. We’re starving.”
John tried to give directions, saw his tram was late by at least 20 minutes and offered to walk them down to the nearest Doner place.
“It’s just a little ways down,” he said. “And it’s past three in the morning, nothing else is open.”
“Would you really? That would be so awesome!”

Leila was from California, she said. The pasty Canadian, Megan, was from a small town near Vancouver and the third girl, Sandy, a more red-earth color than Leila, was from Seattle. She had with a long face; the first two-thirds face led to a triangle completed by a jutting, cleft-less chin. John thought she looked a little like the Scream masks.
The trifecta was born in a row. Megan was 19, Sandy was 18 and Leila was 17. They all came to Germany to be part of a Christian photojournalism college of some kind. They weren’t exactly sure; it involved taking pictures of children in abject poverty and sticking the faces on pamphlets and fliers saying “Adopt a child; send him only 10 cents a day. Your contribution will save his life.”
The girls, John realized, were a product of their upbringings. They were of legal drinking age in Europe, but not in the US. And they drank. And drank. And were thrown out of a bar for being too childish.
And they spoke in English. They could only speak English. But this made them a target on the street for all the passing horny German men and boys. It was all men on the streets. Not a girl in sight. Men everywhere. Men and boys.

Next up (going in alphabetical order from saved files, minus the first) is a premise of a ghost story. Currently without a name:

The ghosts who haunted the forest surrounding the village Kirchdorf, or “lived in” as they liked to think, had a problem. The older folks in the village knew not to go into the forest at night. The kids in the village didn’t go into the forest at night because they was always an empty house or construction site to crash and the pub was usually open.
The ghosts could only interact with the living after sunset and no one went into the forest after sunset. It was an infuriating conundrum.
Until January 18th. January 18th is the night Jane Walker decided to take an evening stroll through the forest. Jane was an au pair who’d just arrived from America without being able to speak even a single word of German.
And there was the crux for the spirits who resided in the forest. They were all the spirits of dead Germans, pro-Germans or communicated natively in dead tongue and in German.
And Jane spoke no more than “Hallo!” and “Tschuss!” which she thought were bastardizations of “Hello” and “Chews” – almost like the Germans were shortening a Star Wars name.

The spirits observed Jane when she entered into the forest. They spied around the tree trunks, hiding their ethereal bodies behind the mass of the living, forgetting their etherealness. They whispered to one another. They commented on her boots, on her scarf, on her hair, on her complexion. They were excited to have a human back in their realm! The last person to come and visit was long since dead — a suicide in the forest. He’d hung himself on the very same tree that a _______________________________.
They didn’t know a single thing was amiss. They watched her. They waited. They allowed her to walk a small circuit inside of the forest, to walk back to the house. She’ll come back, they hoped. They’d taken the advice of a hunter among their group; not to harass to early. Besides, the last time, it’d just aggravated the poor soul.

Next up, “Blau Wunder Suicide”:

Paul’s mother drank a bottle of oven cleaner on May 5th. She died on May 6th. Paul’s father jumped the Blau Wunder, a bridge in Dresden, Germany on May 8th and died on impact with the Elbe.

Paul was as close to his parents as he could be. He was a late child – Paul’s mother was 35 and his father was 40 when he was born. He never shared the connection with his parents he heard his friends boast of. Sure, he knew he loved his dad, but they were by no means best friends. And his mother was his mom, but not his confidant or bud. His parents, before they “_____,” as he started calling it, were his parents. The ones who raised him and loved him and listened to him cry and whine and moan. But they were not his best friends and he could never see them as more than mom and dad.
Paul found himself scared – he was not a citizen of Germany, but he had grown up there. The only family he had left were a set third of cousins living in Canada and a set of fourth cousins living in Kansas.
His grandparents on both sides had died between two and five years after he was born and his mom and dad never sought God-parents for him.
He was 17 with two dead parents – by virtue of suicide – and in shock. He had five thousand dollars to his name, another twenty thousand bequeathed in his parents’ will which he wouldn’t be able to use another five months and an American passport.

Rain. Rain. Rain. It had rained for the last two weeks and yet again, rain. Paul was still in a state of shock – the water soaking his suit made no impression. The warm air made no difference. The words of the German Bible had no sway. He stared at the two headstones, side by side.
The gravestone carver had asked him what to put on the markers. He replied, their names, their births, their deaths. The carver asked Paul if he wanted any more.
“Nein. Was werde ich sagen? Sie waren mein Eltern. Mutti and Vater. Sie haben mich aline verliess.”
It was two in the afternoon and yet it looked like the land was preparing itself to take a long, deep winter sleep. But it was summer and the sun would stay up for a long time, dampened by the perpetual clouds.

Next up, “Coyote and the kids.” I’ve got two Coyote stories. Hurrah?:

Coyote had been bored for a very long time. He had no want to go outside of the valley. Yet, there was nothing in the valley. The people, he thought of them as his people, had long since been moved off, killed, found other pastures.
The military had been here briefly, but, they’d not found what they wanted, or they’d finished what they came to do and too were off.
Coyote was, to say the least, bored. But, boredom requires time and Coyote and time did not always see eye to eye. Coyote and time often did not recognize the existence of one another so time tended to pass coyote by.
One day, two cars came flying into the valley.

Next up, “Coyote and the traveler”

Coyote sat in the branches of a lone tree next to a flash creek, thousands of years old, cracked and caking, made of all hard edges despite its age.
He watched the man walk across the desert. He watched him take step after step through the sage brush. Coyote looked to the sun, then back at the man.
I wonder what he’s searching, Coyote thought. He jumped down from the tree and was off.

The next day Coyote found the man still walking through the desert, climbing hill, trying to get into the next valley. Coyote watched him from the valley floor, sitting in the same tree he had before.
Coyote watched him until he crested the hill and went down the other side. Coyote jumped off the tree and into the dead sea bed.

On the third day, Coyote found the man in the middle of the new valley. He continued to walk as he had before; the sun pouring its light and heat down on him, on the sagebrush, on Coyote. Coyote looked to the sun for a cue, a warning, an encouragement but found his energy to come down as before.
Coyote watched the man walk the entire day. He walked and walked and never said a word to himself, to the desert. Coyote watched the sun swing behind the mountains, filling the valley with dusk light. The heat of the day radiated from the ground, the air becoming chill.
Coyote watched the man make camp and build a small fire. He watched the man prepare a meal and watched as he positioned himself between the fire and his cooking flame, gravitating towards the only heat sources, the ground long since cold and the atmosphere as unwelcoming as its pallor.
Coyote assumed a form he thought would not scare the man. He chose to look like a fellow of the land; his skin so aged burned over a lifetime he was indistinguishable to the red, white and brown men. He could be any or none.
The night air made his features indistinct. He looked like a person of the desert, nothing more and nothing less. He walked towards the man slowly, making noise as he walked, leading a horse he’d convinced into coming with him.
“Evenin’” Coyote said.
“Hello, stranger. Would you like to break bread?
“Don’t mind if I do.” Coyote patted the horse and tied him to a sturdy piece of sagebrush and sat across from the man.

For good measure, a dream.

Night of: Sept. 14, 2009

I dreamt, after some shenanigans involving metal statues hitting each other with sticks (and emitting bell sounds at each hit,) that I was walking down a street. I’m with two of the green statues. We’re rough housing with the sticks. I break one of the sticks in half and throw it into some trees in front of a house. It lands in dirt.
A older woman comes out of the house, screaming that I’d hurt it or broken something. I say the stick landed in the dirt. She continues screaming at me; we continue walking. We notice a window repair van up the street. We continue walking until we’re on a main street that runs next to and connects the strictly residential areas. A man comes up behind me and grabs my shoulder.
I ask him what he’s doing, he says I need to come with him. I saw no. He tries to grab me, I resist. He tells me I broke the lady’s window. I say no, I didn’t. Maybe she broke it herself. Get off.
He continues to try to detain me.
I don’t know if I said this to him, or if I thought this: only the police can detain me, although he can make a citizens arrest. But surely not in this kind of situation.
The man trying to detain me is wearing a light baby-blue casual button-up shirt with white horizontal, and possibly vertical, stripes. He has blond, very short hair and a blond scruff bordering on beard.

I’m in what I believe to be a police interrogation room. An interrogator and I are engaged in seeming stretching activities. I say that I haven’t done anything; the lady probably broke her own window.
The interrogator (or detective) expresses lack of knowledge and I realize he knows nothing of why I’m there. He says it would be too bad if this goes on my criminal record. He says to prime ministers, presidents, etc. have no criminal records and can’t be elected if they do. He communicates premonitions of large quantities of money. I agree that it would be a shame were this to make it on to my record.
On the wall behind me, an oversize check for $150,000 appears, signed. Dream ends.

I’m at the top of a small cliff leading down to a beach. The beach is possibly at a lake, possibly Lake Tahoe. Xzibit and a girl he’s with are behind me. He says something to the extent of skinny dipping. I continue to walk down to the beach while he stays with the girl.
I get down to the beach and start walking. A walk past a woman who says something. I don’t think she’s talking to me. She says it again, this time to me. I turn to her and ask her to say it again. The woman is old, probably in her 50s with a harder than normal life. She wears blue circle glasses but does not look directly at me.
She repeats: “Entschuldigung, aber haben sie zwei Jungen gesehen? Ich weiss nicht wo sie sind.”
I say I don’t know where they are, nor have I seen them.
I continue walking down the beach; it is crowded. I’m surprised at how crowded it is.
End dream.

Next up: “Flying”

Summer breeds a kind of temporary madness. It’s especially acute in teenagers. And the teenagers themselves change the nature of the madness and its hold. The location changes the means of the madness and the setting.

Ike was 17. He had a car (a hand-me-down from his mom) and had 2 very close friends.

Next up: “With a shotgun in a trailer”

The visuals of the case didn’t disturb John Stuffers. He had already seen shotgun suicides, accidental asphyxiation and men beaten to death.
A boy in his bed, his sheets soaked in blood, a multiple bullet wound nearly winking at Stuffers. The murder weapon looked to be a .45 caliber pistol. Stuffers wasn’t sure. He’d have to wait for the coroner’s conclusion.

The visuals never bothered Stuffers. He’d seen gun suicide corpses, ground-rotted corpses, bloated corpses, desert-rotted corpses, animal-consumed corpses, hanged corpses. He’d literally seen a lot. And it was literally his job.
His job always separated him from his work. “It’s my job,” he’d say after being questioned about the rigor of his stomach.
“I don’t think you run to the toilet after looking at a spreadsheet for six hours straight but I have to. I don’t bend over when I see a corpse, but I’m pretty sure you would,” he told his neighbor.

Next up: “Graffiti”

John couldn’t sleep. This wasn’t the first time he’d been watching the ceiling for unexpected movement. After an hour without indication of life, he eased his portion of the sheets back just enough to allow silent passage from the bed. He stood and put all his concentration into rolling from his heel to his toes. He took one look at the sleeping Lacy, and closed the door.
He pulled a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, poured himself a glass and walked to window. He looked down at the darkened street, made orange by the phosphorous street lights.
He watched as a bevy of young men dressed in white shirts and jeans stood around two wearing ski masks spray painting his apartment’s mailboxes. John pulled on a pair of pants, called the police and ignored the command to stay inside, put on a shirt and walked down to his landlord’s apartment.
He banged on the door for a minute until Geoffrey opened the door.
“What the fuck d’ya want man? It’s three in the morning,” he said, light bluish light reflecting off of the walls behind him. The sounds of late night television crept behind his voice.
“There’s some fuckers spray painting our mailboxes. I called the cops but they’ll be gone by the time the cops arrive.”
“What the fuck do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to go down there with me, man. Go confront them.”
“With what? They’re probably a bunch of dirty fucking spics and what are we? A young, scrawny white boy and an old, fat white guy. What the fuck can we do?”
“Man, you complain every single time those bastards tag our shit and now we’ve got them in the act and you don’t want to do a single fuckin’ thing about it? What the fuck is that shit, man?”
“Fine, let’s go.”
They walked out the front door, 200 feet from the mailboxes. The apartment complex sat 100 feet away from the sidewalk, the intermediary filled by grass. The mailboxes sat to the right side of the entrance.
John and Geoffrey walked towards the men.
“Hey, what you guys think you’re doing?” John called out.
“Hey! What the fuck man! Get the fuck out of here!” a short, slender teenager said, sporting a menacing clown on his shirt, his pants hanging half off.
“Those’re our boxes. Leave ‘em alone.” The pair stopped twenty steps from the boxes.
“Amigos, the chico speaks for all of us. Go back up. This is ours.”

Next up, I call it: “Thinly Veiled Author Digesting A Moment”

She didn’t know how it started – but that’s the way it always was. She never knew how it started. How could she after all? So many things happened in a night, mixed with alcohol, low lighting. A melody for a fugue,
The boy – and it always was a boy, wasn’t it? It appeared without meaning to even mention that it was a boy – had short, almost curly hair. He spoke with an American accent, she noticed, with a hint of a twang. He wasn’t from Wyoming, her home, she thought for sure.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

She wandered off, or he wandered off, or some combination. But they drifted back. The music forced them near to screaming, the light blurred, cajoled, conjoined, fused the details.
He asked her to dance. But, he couldn’t dance. She put her hands on shoulders, forced him to only move his hips, again and again.
“I can’t hear a single word your saying,” he shouted. After some miming, they walked outside after exchanging their glass cups for plastic.
She asked how old he thought she was. He said 23, she guffawed and put her arms around him.

Next up: “The Murder of Lora Jane”

Jane heard the heavy bass line creeping closer. It’d been audible for the past five minutes and was getting louder and louder. She looked over he shoulder but couldn’t see anything. The city never installed street lights in her neighborhood. It was useless – she couldn’t see a thing more than ten feet behind her.
She could hear the words, every so faintly. Not close enough to make out the lyrics, but she could her the singing. So close to home, she thought. I can make it in time. She took a cursory glance behind, looked ahead and pumped her arms and legs into a jogging rhythm.
Hup-two-three-four she said to herself. One step for each beat. The music was not just closer now, it was louder, increasing in its decibels faster than before. She matched her gait to the music and caught sight of her house.
She started hunting in her purse for her keys

Next up: “An Instance of Pain”

Brian had one daughter, aged 17. He had a wife, aged 47; a brother aged 52; a sister, aged 48; a mother, aged 80. His father died in a car accident when Brian was 25. The day have changed to had, Brian, his wife and daughter were on a road trip to Bend, Oregon. They were to visit friends. They had stopped at an unnamed creek for a break. Samantha, the daughter, walked up stream. Brian and Joanna, the wife, walked down stream. They talked idly about the drive: Joanna had been driving because Brian wasn’t feeling well enough to. His medications had been taking a toll recently.

Brian’s psychiatrist diagnosed him with a cocktail of non-violent mental illnesses after he began crying in the middle of a meeting about what to do with a batch of wine that had turned out to be a lower quality than promised to its buyer.
Brian started a winery when he was 26 with the money his father left him in his will and from his life insurance. He’d been producing wines in California of taste and quality that made him into a star in the California wine community.
The meeting half-way through when he broke out into tears. It started as a trickle, a single tear sliding in halts and jerks down his face from his left eye, falling from his chin to the papers in front of him. No one noticed.
A tear began in his right eye and then another in his left. Still no one noticed. He scrunched up his eyes, put his hands to his face and began to cry, sobs shaking his body. His best friend and cofounder, Bobby, put his arm around Brian’s shoulders and asked what was wrong. Bobby waved the rest of the employees out the room and tried to get from him why he was crying.
He tried for 20 minutes but Brian just sat there, crying into his hands, sob after sob. Bobby called Joanna and told her that her husband had been crying for the past two hours, that she should come pick him up. That he hadn’t said a single word; he just sat there sobbing.
No, he said, I don’t think he even knows I’m there.
What started it, she asked.
I don’t know. Listen, just come pick him up. I think he needs you; I’ve done all I can.

Joanna took him to the psychiatrist the next day; he’d never been in to seen one before. His countenance exuded resigned defeat. His eyes were ever-so-slightly closed, his hands folded in his lap, his great mane of hair a tangled mass. He still hadn’t said a word. After two hours, the psychiatrist come out and asked her to come in.
He’s had his first and I don’t think last breakdown. He’s a wreck and I don’t know what’s caused it. He’ll need to start coming into therapy every day.

She sat on a rock on the stream, what she really thought was more of a medium-sized river, and he walked down a ways. She put her head down on her arms, resting on her legs. The driving had taken a toll on her, the family had taken a toll.
She looked up to find him standing on a rock, looking down at the river. He had moved down to the fast, deep part. She watched him. And she watched him as he took a step off the rock and into the snow melt rapids.
She screamed for her daughter and ran down along the bank, trying to catch a glimpse of him. She couldn’t see him. She kept on screaming for her daughter and wedged her hand into her pocket, grasping for her cell phone. She called 911, she said her husband had just jumped into the unnamed creek, she said which road they were on.
The sheriff’s deputy came down to talk to her and the daughter; the search and rescue team was farther down the river, trying to search for his body.

Next up, a super short, “The suicide of young men.”

Samuel Johnson put a revolver to his temple in his parents’ garage on July 18th, 1974. He pulled the trigger. I won the bet and over a thousand dollars. He shot himself. The five of us left living grabbed our cash, our betting papers, cleaned up our chairs to make it look like he’d been alone and walked out of the garage, heading in five different directions. We met at an abandoned lot twenty minutes later.

Next up, a poem, entitled, “Time sways”

Time finds a way to sway
In beat with the metronome
Trying to measure, to quantify, to capture it.

Time finds a way to sway
From the swift air currents
From the electrons firing in the brain

Until the last moment;

It sways back and we don’t know

Sighing.

Next up, “Drink the whiskey”

It takes a special kind of person to really appreciate the desert, he thought. To take in its contours, to smell the sagebrush in all its seasons. Yes, it takes a special kind of person.
Larry’s eyes dark blue eyes imperceptibly roved over the sprawling valley, shored by my mountains and hills. So many that they had no names. He’d been overseas once, in some European country, and they named almost all the hills. And called them mountains. He chuckled at the thought.
Larry kept on looking out at the desert, at the dry sagebrush, at the cheat grass working its way into the soil. The cheat grass! They named it cheat because it literally cheated all the other plants out of the chance to live and thrive. So apt.
That’s why he’d done it, he thought to himself. Because those people. Well, they just couldn’t understand it. They had to have air conditioning. They had to have lawns and fountains and swimming pools. They wanted to turn the land into giant aquifer farms, like they had down in Arizona. The beautiful land. The basin and the range. But, it wasn’t just any basin. It was the Great Basin. And they wanted to destroy it; to kill the life of the humans, of the plants, of the animals. To take away what they needed, to sink the land.

So, that’s the end of this short story beginning dump. I hope, I pray, I can make each one of these into a full fledged story and do it soon. Suggestions? Lay them on. Lay them thick like peanut butter on a fried PBJ sandwich.

Entry Filed under: Wheeler's Posts, General Posting