It's been a while - ages, in the life of the internet - but I am making a return to blogging, particularly to fiction blogging...I hope the world is ready for it!!
Joking aside, I was actually able to write a lot of new stuff this spring, mostly because of a fiction class I took, which resulted in a whole bunch of fragments, or germs that could metamorphose into stories, if given a little time and energy. In order to narrow down the options, and decide for myself which little story stubs are viable options and which are not (mixing metaphors like crazy, here!). I am going to post what I think are my four best fragments from the last few months, and ask for reader feedback about which should get longer and more evolved. The challenge for readers, should you chose to accept it: read the following passage, and the next three that will emerge over the course of this week, and post back to me which you think it the best. I'm calling this "market research." I hope you tell me what you like!
Story Fragment 1:
At night she dreamed that she was underwater. The surface above her, like great translucent panes of marbled glass tinted in shades of steel and cloud-damp skies, wavered and buckled, bending the bars of light in oblique angles as they bored their way downwards. Piercing the aqua shadows, the rays of illumination seemed impervious to the shifting swirls of current. Where their light settled on her skin, though, it shifted and danced, so that patches of greenish glow fluttered over her limbs, revealing them, from moment to moment, as the pale color of abalone meat. The movement of the water tugged at her body, gently, but with a great inertia, as if the mass of the oceans moved around her, and the depths of that great, liquid space spread down and out beyond her perceptions, extending on and on, until the far reaches lapped at the shores of distant continents. Looking up, she saw a bright light flare and expand above the jagged glass ceiling of the sea. It reached long fingers of light down to her, turning the water to clear gold. It was as if the sun was sinking into the sea. Any moment it would break the surface and sink down, obliterating her in a rush of steam as the world’s oceans boiled away. She opened her mouth to shout in fear--or possibly just excitement--and the water rushed in, choking her senses.
She awoke gasping, and powerfully thirsty. As often happened, she had curled into a tight and protective ball in her sleep, her head tucked forward between bent arms. In this instance, she had even pulled the rucked and rumpled sheet over her head. The thin cotton pressed against her eyes and mouth like a shroud as she struggled awake. Finally free, she lay for a moment uncovered in the darkness, and then pushed herself upright, bare feet reaching for the dusty floor.
The hot, dry air felt as gritty as the earth against her feet after the cool illusion of her dream. She pushed though it as she got up, padding out into the empty front room. It was almost as dark as her bedroom, with only a faint, amber glow from the ancient, incandescent light in the parking lot faintly delineating the shape of the window and outlining the harsh, aggressive angles of the shriveled cactuses growing up from below the level of the pane.
She went to the door and opened it to another breath of acrid air. The grit was even thicker on the concrete walk outside, and it rasped between her toes as she climbed the cinderblock stairway with its superfluous, overly ornate, cast-iron handrail, whose curlicues and twists of metal seemed both effete and out of place adorning the siding of a pay-by-the-hour motel, now defunct.
She reached the walkway along the top floor, and went past the line of close doors, their once-white paint flaking and chipping, and their numbers hanging askew, until she reached the fire escape ladder at the end. Via that rickety means, she finally attained the roof, and stood erect on the flat expanse of gravel and tar, looking out over the desolate expanse of desert, broken only occasionally by the irregular shapes of ruined buildings, skeleton palm trees, and shrubby bushes.
In the east, whose side of the motel was distinguished by the empty cavity of a dehydrated swimming pool, now half-choked with dust, her line of sight was less encumbered. And what buildings there were were more fragmentary, piles of rubble that hardly interrupted the expanse of flat land stretching to the horizon. At that seeming edge of the world, the division between earth and sky, a red glow began to make itself visible.
With a sigh, she eased herself down onto the edge of the roof, and sat, with her feet dangling, waiting for the sun to rise and explode the world into nothingness.
