Here are pieces of three stories that I wrote years ago for class. I guess that I should copywrite this stuff before I put it into the world, but I am not too worried about having these stories ripped off.
***The first is from "Memoirs of a Superman"***
“When I was eight years old my mother and me moved from the inner city out into the country. Onto a farm. A place with chickens, cows, hogs, and even some horses.” After a few minutes of gazing out the window Arthur continued his dialogue.
“I wish I could remember a lot of exact things from that age but it was all so long ago. The folks who owned the place made it home to any who needed one. They were an old couple who never had a family of their own. My mother and I were a family that had no home. It couldn’t have worked out better,” he said.
“Was that nice, growing up in the country? I have always lived in the city. Never really had a care to be anywhere else,” I babbled. I felt compelled to say something. I couldn’t sit there nodding like an idiotic mute. Arthur turned out of his stare and for a moment looked at me with eyes that spoke distinctly. Shut your mouth, was their message and then he turned back to the window.
“My mother died after four years of living on that farm. Pneumonia. I ran away from that place, I think now I did it to get away from her death. As if running would have made the pain go away. I hitched a train that was going back to the city. On the way there was an accident that derailed the train. I should have been crushed under the boxcar that I was in. I should have died under the train but I didn’t. I was able to dig myself out of the wreckage. As I pulled out of the pieces there was an explosion from another car and I was thrown into the air but I didn’t come falling back down. I hung up there in the sky until I wanted to come back down to the ground. I found I could will myself back up and in any direction I wanted to. It didn’t make any sense, why I could do any of it, but I was twelve years old and it didn’t need to make sense.”
As Arthur spoke his story the anxiety that had been stabbing through me eased away. Rationally I should have been more nervous. Though he looked very old he also looked to be in very good shape. He would have probably been able to deliver a thorough beating if he wanted to and didn’t seem to have the disposition that would laugh off any commentary that challenged his story’s realism. When he spoke the implausibility of his story did not weigh as much as the passionate way in which he spoke it. I was starting to believe what he was saying, not as factual but that his truth was on a subtler level.
“Can you imagine being a kid with the power to take whatever you want? To be able to do whatever you want to whoever you want and no one could stop you. I could’ve walked into any bank and take all the money I wanted but why bother with money when I could just take the things I wanted from those who had them. But what does a twelve-year-old want from the world, toys, candies, comic books? I was a living comic book. What I wanted I was denied to me and what I was given was just a super consolation prize. I could’ve wrecked cities with my anger but what stopped me was the memory of my mother. I couldn’t have her back but the memory of her could never be taken from me. She taught me that God gives talents for the betterment of the entire world. So I chose to help whoever I could. I brought food and medicines to the hungry and sick. Whenever I showed up in a city the people swarmed to me, they called me their Champion. In those early times I never used my abilities to strike at another human being, but in later years it seemed the only way to use my talents.” As I sat there listening my mind was busy trying to figure out the puzzle of Arthur’s delusion. Why was Arthur retreating into his fantasy world? Why would a man who seemed still physically able to lead a life outside of Shady Pines choose to stay? I couldn’t reason Arthur’s actions so I listened and looked as he sat slouched in his chair looking back and forth at his each of his hands. One hand stretched open with palm up the other hand clenched in a tight fist.
***The second was called "She"***
As I walked into the field towards them I saw that they were not paying attention to my coming near them. They were looking into the trees. Jeremy and James were pressed against on large trunk with each of them sticking their heads out a different side spying at something. Russell was smoking a cigarette and grinning in a way that I knew good things were not going on in his head, he was leaning against his own tree looking in.
“Hey, what the hell are you guys looking at?” I asked coming upon the group. James turned towards me and looked as excited as if I told him that a NASCAR track was being built in town. He looked frenzied with enthusiasm at whatever held their attention.
“Shhh, get out of sight and get a look at this thing. It is something crazy, Ben,” Jeremy whispered pointing at whatever held their attention. I closed behind a tree of my own. I peered around the trunk and saw some sort of fantastic creature.
It was taller than a man of average height, maybe six feet two inches. It was a person’s figure with two arms, two legs, a torso, and head on top. It had silvery an appearance that seemed metallic but by the movements that the creature made the silver seemed more like naked skin. It did not appear muscular but had a firm and shapely body. It had its back to us the whole time I had been observing it so when it finally did turn around I was surprised to see that it was a woman.
I studied the silver woman closer as she faced herself towards our direction. Her entire body was naked of any clothing and glistened in an almost holy way from the silvery metallic skin that covered her seamlessly. She had bare feet that showed no toes. Her foot had the shape of an ordinary person’s but lacked toes and instead shaped like a rounded boot at a point. Her ankles were slender and poked out an abstract bony knob on each side. Her legs stretched as two full figures, shaped perfectly as if engineered by God himself. Her waist and stomach pulled in and her chest out. Her shoulders were broad and the arms attached thin. Her hands were small and dangled long fingers but no nails from them. Attached to her neck her head displayed a strange face. Her chin was small and eloquent, cheeks smoothed back to tiny ears that seemed tightly pulled to the sides of her head. Her lips glistened metallic light from their incredibly smooth appearance. Her nose was small and found below a pair of eyes that were rounded orbs, which existed as only a surface feature and lacked the depth that normal eyes possessed.
Her shape was definitely female and human-like but her appearance was abstract. She lacked clear feminine distinction. Her gentiles were non-existent with a smooth, bare silver surface in place of the normal features. Breasts lifted from her chest but came to smoothed points that did not present nipples attached. Her face was like a statue of so-called modern art, with nostrils that lifted but did not open into a cavity and a mouth that did not open into a throat. On the top of her head was a very amazing feature, her hair. Each piece was long and as free moving as normal hair. It pulled from her forehead, out of her scalp, down her shoulders to the middle of her back. The amazing part was that it was a mesh of metallic strands that shimmered and reflected the light in ways that made a display of light that seemed to defy science. I was content to study her as long as I would be allowed her oddity was beautiful.
We had all been watching her move about for some time, probably half an hour or a little less when Russell decided that watching wasn’t good enough for him. He stepped out into view and approached her. She had been stepping about the same circle of forest floor the entire time that we watched her. She would close in on the trees, rocks and grass and study it. She moved in such a way, delicately, like she was being very careful not to make contact with what she was looking at. Bringing her face close to the side of a tree or bending over to scan the moss of a rock. Every piece of nature she seemed to be cataloging.
“Russell, what are you doing? Get back here before it sees you,” Jeremy whispered.
“If we brought that thing back to town… I don’t know what we could do with it but we could get paid gigantic money for it,” Russell said and I didn’t notice at the time but something about the way he said it bothered me later. It was like he didn’t mean it, like it was being told to him to say it and he was absenting mindedly repeating it.
“Russell, seriously get back here before she sees you. You don’t know what you are doing. You aren’t thinking,” I yelled as he moved farther away from us.
“What does he mean by she?” I heard James whisper to Jeremy but at the moment I didn’t think of it. Jeremy didn’t respond because at the same time Russell had come upon the silver woman.
***This third one wasn't a story. It was an excerise that was mildly popular***
It was warm one mid-October afternoon in that period of the day just before nighttime comes. I was in the backyard and had just finished cutting the grass. The day had not been particularly eventful and was coming to a soothing end. I was sitting on the back steps enjoying the tranquility of my surroundings. Birds were chirping and some bees were buzzing. A more serene setting could not have existed when then suddenly it changed.
“Oh my Gawd!” The next-door neighbor’s back door swung open with a heavy slam and Mrs. Staple came rushing out in a disheveled state. Following came her son Jon and lastly her daughter Sarah. Jon was holding their golden retriever “Buddy” clumsily in his arms and quickly making his way from the back porch to the lawn. He rushed onto the grass and stood Buddy up on his four legs taking a few steps back watching the pet intently. Something about this scenario didn’t seem all that right to me.
As I walked to the chain-link fence that separated our yards Mrs. Staple began waving her hands franticly at the dogs face. She was teetering side to side quickly and very nervously. She started blowing on the dogs face. Large breaths of air were expelled from her lungs onto Buddy’s long snout. The entire time the animal didn’t move. He stood still on all fours with his back straight and his head held up, staring in front of himself, panting steadily.
“You better not have killed our dog, Jonny. He’s only a puppy,” Sarah shouted at her older brother. I had known Sarah for most of my life. We were the same age and had gone to the same schools. We got along well with each other. Jon I didn’t know very well. He was older than me and always seemed a bit of a goon.
“I said it wasn’t mine!” Jonny defended himself with a fairly obvious lie and chewed the nails off his fingers watching Buddy watch the fluttering Mrs. Staple.
“Right, Jonny I light up and get toasted in honors club after school,” Sarah retorted.
“You probably do you freak,” he came back at her and I was apprehensive to come between the two, as it seemed that they were getting into something serious, but I had to ask.
“What’s going on?” was the only thing I said. Sarah looked at me and came over to the fence. She was smiling sheepishly with one hand on her side like children do when they sing that teapot song. She was embarrassed to have an audience but not in a mortified way and took on more of a “Have I got a funny story for you,” sort of way.
“The dog ate Jonny’s weed,” she said plainly and after I heard her I bit hard down onto my lip and tried not to laugh. I looked at Mrs. Staple who was sitting down next to Buddy and beginning to stroke the dog’s head and the back of his neck, trying to console to animal. Jonny was still chewing on his nails anxiously watching his mother and his dog. I looked to Sarah and she was smiling widely at me, looking me and pleading to me with her eyes not to speak a word of this to anyone ever. I laughed hard and she did too.
We looked over at Buddy and he began to stir. He did not move suddenly but began to shift his stance subtly. He lifted a back leg up and as he did toppled onto his side in a similar way that a tall tree topples over, tilting slightly then crashing hardly with a thud to the ground. Then Buddy, high as the clouds in the deep blue sky, pissed himself.
***
All of these pieces were written years ago and I have no intention of coming back to any of them. Well I always thought that the Capatain Champion story had potential as some sort of parable for what faith means to believers, but at the moment i do not have any intentions for the character or the story.
