The first piece is the one I alluded to a while ago, the dystopic fiction I was trying to flesh out into a tangible idea.
Elias still marveled, as people unabashedly buffaloed their way past him and into the shelter, at how damn efficient the whole thing was. Not five minutes earlier he had been sitting quietly at his kitchen table, paying his bills while the Animals gently crooned about how their father had been a tailor. Steam was lazily wafting from his mug of coffee, spiralling away in long curling tendrils of heat before dissipating into the kitchen air.
Then he heard the unmistakable static crack-pop of a loudspeaker turning on, followed by the rising wail of the air raid siren, urgent yet detached, almost uninterested. It wasn't until he looked out his window and saw entire buildings flooding people into the street that he knew this was no drill.
The crowd was silent. They had run this scenario so many times it had lost any novelty or urgency; it had become a matter of routine. Innumerable rows of shoulders slouched forward. Countless dull eyes, soft and lamblike, watched countless worn feet tramp across the asphalt. There almost seemed to be a resignation, perhaps even a grateful thought or two that the damn thing was finally decided.
Elias straightened up, stretching his back with a groan. Exhaling deeply he let his arms fall to his sides as he looked around the apartment he'd called home for nearly a decade. Almost lazily he conjured an image of the entire place engulfed in flames. He watched red-orange fingers as they scrambled up his aged parlor drapes, growling and snarling across the shag carpet, hissing through his heating ducts.
A low rumble was beginning to gather itself to the north, a single guttural noise slowly snowballing into a great swath of fearsome droning moving closer and closer.
Not too shabby. In my opinion, anyway. But I'm biased.
This other piece didn't really stand for anything larger; it was just a sort of snapshot I sketched out while at the doctor's office a while ago. A nice little moment with some imagery I really like.
"Did I ever tell you about the man I once saw in the laundromat? Of course I did. I did! He came into the laundromat and without a word stripped down buck naked and threw his clothes in the washer. Poor guy just stood there in front of the machine shivering. Scrawny little guy. He got arrested, of course. A mother came in with her daughter, took one look at him, and turned around so fast you'd think she'd been slapped across the face.
"But only one set of clothes, can you imagine? Isn't that something?"
Mitch had no response. Snow continued to fall in great thick heaps, like feathers pouring from a goosedown pillow. The sky was slipping into a blue-black, chasing away the last red hues of the sunset like air rushing out from under a falling blanket. The interstate was thick with cars returning from the airport, families briefly united as they gabbed incessantly to kill the time.
The long black scaly leech of traffic lurched forward in segments. Mitch briefly thought of longitudinal waves along a slinky, drew the connection back to school, and immediately abandoned his train of thought.
Joan was growing increasingly uncomfortable. Mitch's forehead hadn't left the window since they left the airport, and he just carried an aura, an ennui she couldn't seem to penetrate.
Thanks to Juliana's mother for the anecdote that not only led off this story, but was also responsible for what there currently is of it.
So that's that. Incredibly brief and rough works that hopefully satiate you for a while. I'll be putting up more as it gets written, but that novel's becoming pretty promising. I can't escape it, especially considering I'm in a class that deals specifically with the Apocalypse and humanity's response thereto. Hopefully the novel will have an outline within a couple weeks, soon as I figure out how I want the characters to be. I'll also need to do some research for factual accuracy. I'm so excited!
Take care, and come back!
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