WWWP's Writing Journal Take Two
 

My other one was shit.

Untitled 7.26.13

She said, "What is it?"
"A hole," he replied.
"But what happened? How did it get here?"
"I don't know," he shrugged. "But watch your step."
"Will I fall in?"
"Only if it wants you."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know," he shrugged. "Some things fall in and some things don't."
"May I drop something?" she asked.
"If you'd like."
"I'd like to see how far down it goes."
He shrugged. "Be my guest."

She laughed, "Some hole."
"It doesn't care much for keys," he mused.
"But why not? How does it choose?"
"I don't know," he sighed. "But it only takes what I love."
"Did you love someone?"
"Very much."
"What happened to them?"
"I don't know," he sighed. "She just fell in and never came out."
"Was she your wife?" she asked.
"My daughter."
"Have you tried falling in after her?"
He sighed. "Every day."

This is really great Steph, really sad but really well done and very succinctly written, but you really get the deep sadness from it, especially the last stanza

(I'm terrible at critiquing writing)

I love, love, love this. You are very talented, my dear.

Thank you both, I really appreciate the feedback. I've been on a creative streak lately, wrote that on my a break at work on a whim. Hopefully there will be more to come. :)

Holy **** WWWP. This is fantastic, I seriously love it. It reminds me very much of some of those older English Victorian authors... not any one specifically, just the general style of the period. Which is great, at least for me, because that's one of my favorite places and times for good writing.

Thank you :D

The Feeling Seller

The Feeling Seller stood at the intersection of Murphy and Lynch, twirling a thick cardboard sign he had designed himself that read “HAPPINESS® BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND.” In the window of his modest shop in front of which he stood rested against the fingerprint smudged glass a Help If Wanted sign. He was a successful man for a man in his trade, and the Feeling Seller’s integrity was a feature in itself that brought in loyal customers again and again. His patrons often requested Integrity® from the Feeling Seller, but were consistently sent away with a prescription of Temporary Disappointment® to be taken with a light dose of Pride® and a hot meal. In his integrity, the Feeling Seller was careful not to over-medicate: he took every case seriously and attached a great deal of import to his work.

There were people in the Feeling business of course, with less integrity than the Feeling Seller. These were people aptly referred to as Feeling Dealers. Feeling Dealers were only in it for the money, and would commonly, dangerously, prescribe their customers large doses of Positive Feelings without taking care to balance out Joy® or Contentment®, for instance, with Humility® or Melancholy®. Those customers tended to lack, on a general level, any Empathy® and would more often than not end up back at the Feeling Seller’s small shop where their Feelings, if repairable, would be returned to their respective default settings after being given careful amounts of Introspection® and Optimism®. The Feeling Seller knew the harm of giving a person too much of a good thing, and subscribed to the notion that less, especially when in regard to feelings, was more.

Please publish something WWWP; I will buy it.

Very much looking forward to this thread.

:love: I don't even know what to say. That's awesome.

I thoroughly agree with this. Hell, I'd read an entire short novella or short story about the Feeling Seller alone. Or even the entire Feeling business.

By the way, this little piece reminded me HEAVILY of The Phantom Tollbooth, which is by far one of my favorite children's books. Have you ever read it?

I told you already but I love this so f*cking much.

I intended to make the Feeling Seller into a longer piece, but I like the idea of people wanting to read more about it and imagining what else might have happened. I want for my stories to spark interest and curiosity but I don't want to indulge reader too much in that respect. I enjoy the idea of reading blue balls, in other words.

I haven't read Phantom Tollbooth in it's entirety, but I've very familiar with it and I'm flattered to know anything I wrote would remind anyone of such a classic.

Thank you. It may be my favorite thing I've ever written.

This is perfect. Absolutely love it.

wow wolfpigeonweasel that untitled 7.29.13 story was terrific

The Day I Ate The Town

I stole the town’s color, but only one time
The first act a mistake and the second a crime

Guilt: the incubation of admittance.

I started in sadness, attacked all the trees
I ravaged them all, sucked the green from the leaves

Gluttons: producers and feeders of none.

I pressed on in anger and consumed the homes
The ochres and crimsons of buildings I’d known

Residence: womb of dissatisfaction

I ended in hunger and licked palates clean
Alone in my grayness, immersed in the scene

Restoration: the most difficult work.

Hey, it works. And if you were ever to publish a compilation of short stories (or very short stories) you've already got a name! Blue Balls.

The Time I Solved a Murder Mystery

When I was a child I believed I could communicate with ghosts. I do not recall how this ability first manifested itself or when I developed an interest in the paranormal, but what began as an innocent curiosity soon turned criminal.

I remember spending many summer hours sitting with my cousin on the top of the bunk bed in our grandmother’s spare bedroom, conjuring spirits. We DIY’d Ouija boards on cardboard scraps with magic markers, covered the windows with blankets taken from the bunk and lit our battery powered camping lanterns (we weren’t allowed open flames and I couldn’t even light a match until I was fourteen – the same year I learned to snap my fingers). In my infinite wisdom I would call out commands to my cousin, telling her how to arrange the lanterns, which way to face the board, and to lock the door – all while inhaling deeply and rubbing my temples, preparing myself for the journey ahead. We settled in and I began unraveling a murder mystery like our town had never seen: one that was never publicly reported, covered up by authorities on all sides and known only to me and my cousin as I spoke the words aloud.




“Her name,” I prophesied, “was Alex.”

The modest town in which we lived contained only one haunted house, a disappointment to all, but it stood its ground and established itself as the scariest haunted house that side of the Continental Divide. After school my peers and I would congregate on the sidewalk outside its front gate, daring one another to walk up and ring the doorbell. Rumor had it the last kid who was brave enough to do so mysteriously died of diarrhea-ing to death two days later. But the town covered this up as well, moving his body from our local cemetery to a different county to get the feds off their case. The overgrown grass in the front yard undoubtedly hid dozens of dead bodies. A house just doesn’t look that sinister without somehow, at one time or another, hiding a body in its bowels.

It was in this house that Alex was murdered. Throughout the weeks that followed my discovery of her name, I saw signs of her everywhere. She was trying to communicate with me in the only way a ghost knew how: through patterns in the gravel of our school playground that I was luckily able to decipher and by showing me flashes of random color when I pressed my thumbs into my eyelids long and hard enough.



“It was her father!” I remember exclaiming to my cousin. “Her father is the one who killed her!” Adrenaline filled my prepubescent body. It came together in my head that Alex, born in the 1850’s, was asked to prom by the most handsome boy in high school. She spent hours and hours sewing her own dress and picking the perfect wildflowers from around town to make the flowery thing that gets pinned to the boy’s tuxedo in all the movies. On the night of prom, however, her plans were thwarted. Her father, a drunk who had driven Alex’s mother away when she was just a baby didn’t want Alex to go to the prom. He didn’t want her to have any happiness ever because he was irrevocably sad and needed someone to be sad with him.

“That somone’s not me!” I was sure Alex screamed. “Let me live my life like an adult, dad!” With that I saw her pivoting out of the kitchen and heading toward the front door to meet her date. It was then that her father sneakily tipped the refrigerator onto poor Alex, crushing her to death on prom night. I knew he killed her kitten too, just for good measure.

The burden of this hideous crime heavy on my young shoulders, my cousin and I discussed what should be done with the information. We knew we couldn’t go to the police. We didn’t know what going to the police entailed. Could we talk to our DARE teacher? No, he only knew about marijuana, not murders. We came to the most logical conclusion we could find. We would have to break into the house to gather evidence, and then present the case to Grandma.

We picked the date. We gathered materials. We filled the air in the tires of our bikes. We were ready.

The day we infiltrated the haunted house my cousin and I took my little sister along. When we arrived we knew immediately that she would come in handy. In broad daylight we snuck around to the backyard and climbed over the barbed wire fence. “Ok,” I told my team, “If anyone asks we’re just playing hide and seek.”

We approached the back door and found it was locked. Without hesitation I shattered the window to the right of the door in one strike with my flashlight. My cousin and sister looked at me, their fearless leader, in shock. “Come on,” I said to my sister. “You have to climb through.” My cousin and I each took one of her legs and lifted her to the small window that we learned was positioned over the kitchen sink of the haunted house. She unlocked the door from inside and we marched into the house, ready to investigate.

The house was dark, a darker dark than I had ever known. My flashlight had shattered along with the kitchen window and was rendered useless. As the leader I knew it was up to me to develop a plan and delegate tasks to my team, who were, at the moment, cowering behind me, but I was terrified. I couldn’t admit this, of course, but I felt my bladder pulsate and was legitimately worried for the first time in years that I might have an accident. “Um,” I said.

“That’s the refrigerator!” My cousin pointed out. “That’s the refrigerator that killed Alex!”

“Mmhmmm,” I affirmed.

“Sister, I’m scared,” my little sister whimpered.

“Shut up. We have to solve this.” With newfound courage I stepped forward, and in the sliver of light the shattered kitchen window allowed the room we could see a large antique case acting as a partition between the kitchen and what looked to be the living room. I opened one of the glass paned doors. There, among the pieces of silver utensils and strange collection of glass thimbles was a large chunk of blonde hair tied with a blue ribbon. “IT’S ALEX’S HAIR!” I bellowed. I turned and ran out the backdoor, tripped over the tangle of weeds in the yard and began sobbing. My cousin and sister ran out screaming behind me.

“AHEM,” I heard in the distance. I peered up out of the grass and saw an adult with his hands on his hips disapprovingly standing on the porch of the next house over.

“WE’RE JUST PLAYING HIDE AND SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK” I yelled. My cousin, sister and I scrambled through the barbed wire fence, gathered our bikes and sob-screamed the entire ride back to Grandma’s house.

—

Days later we had more or less recovered from the trauma. I had stopped receiving messages from Alex, telepathic, encrypted or otherwise, which, I assumed, meant that all she had wanted all along was for me to uncover the story of what happened to her. Now her soul was free, all thanks to me and my bravery.

Hilary, the babysitter immediately hired to look after us after we told our Grandmother what had happened in the haunted house, was the one to answer the door when the cops arrived. “Stephenie!” I heard her call from the porch. “Stephenie and Katie, get out here now!” We moodily abided.

“What do you want, HILARY?” My cousin asked with disdain.

“Yeah, WHAT?” I cleverly added.

“Did you two break in to the haunted house?”

We played dumb. We played innocent. We pretended we didn’t know where the haunted house was, or what is was, or that it existed. “It was probably Logan and Lewis,” I stated, matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen those two throwing rocks at houses before.” Logan and Lewis, the town’s notorious hooligans, I knew, were blamed for many wrongdoings around town, and it wouldn’t be hard to believe that they, and not I, young, blonde, thespian that I was, had vandalized the house.

“That’s true,” said Hilary, classmate of the two boys. “They do stuff like that a lot.”

And with that my cousin and I were removed from the list of suspects. We had successfully solved a murder and set Alex’s soul free, and gotten away with shattering a window with the intent to break in to an abandoned house. We were unstoppable. We were stupid. We were imaginative. We were ill-supervised.

I have a sore on my lip
And it's not even herpes
It's the disease of being lonely
While seeking solitude

You should write more in this thing.

I forgot about this one but when you originally posted it I thought it was excellent (still do).

Yeah that is pretty nice.

whoa, what a surprise to see this thread bumped. thanks, guys. unfortunately I haven't written anything in literal years.

Yeah you should change that. This is your motivational wake up call.

Gotta jump on the train here.
That hole story is amazing. I wish I had written this.

omg **** yourself that's a barely-above-me joke

That wasn't a joke, just a happy coincidence I hadn't even noticed.

Is that worse or better? Probably better. It's usually better.