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Aug 15, 2023 02:19
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| # ¿ Sep 14, 2024 08:38 |
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Theme: Travel and Travel (Week 576) City: Toronto, Canada Book: The Blind Owl, by Sadeq Hedayat Word count: 1,482 Fashionably Late This is what happened: I stepped out of the party and into the narrow street, where my phone told me it was twelve past two in the morning. The heat and humidity hadn’t gone anywhere. The haze made the streetlights even less effective than usual, and fog obscured everything more than five or six row houses down. Ours wasn’t the only party happening in Dufferin Grove. The night thrummed with other raucous college kids celebrating the first weekend back from summer break. Somewhere a few blocks from here, tired bar staff were sweeping up and sweaty stragglers were calling Ubers because the subways were closed. A few blocks away from that, downtown Toronto was asleep, buildings disappearing upward into the fog, roads empty, the waterfront abandoned by all but the homeless. I stood in the middle of the road scrolling idly, my phone’s dim screen still bright enough to shut out nearly everything else. I focused on it. Inside, the party wrapped itself around me. I wanted a bubble in space. A voice called my name over the throng of partiers as I stepped out, but thankfully, nobody followed. Outside, for a moment, I could breathe — but it didn’t take long before I sensed the wall of fog inching closer, the streetlights leaning in. My shirt was glued to me, cool and heavy, pressing with every breath. The phone stopped helping. I pocketed it and looked up. The fog had drawn closer from my left and right — and even began to obscure the party behind me — but my focus was straight ahead, as what should have been an opposing row of houses on the other side of the street was instead a cramped, poorly lit accessway lined on either side with shoddy garages in various states of disrepair. One of these alleys ran behind each row of houses in the Grove, serving as storage. I knew this alley. Our garage was in this alley. This alley couldn’t be here. I turned around. Our house was gone, replaced with another long, dark, impossible stretch of alley. A scream — a woman, somewhere in the distance. Surprise. Pain. Inconsolable terror. Sharp. Over quickly. I willed my weakened legs in her direction, slow, squinting, unable to see. The darkness was unrelenting. The garage doors, each their own shade of off-white, many adorned with crude graffiti, were the only semblance of light. The haze had simply swallowed everything else. After hours, days, weeks of pitiful shuffling, I could see it: a flashing orange-yellow light, rhythmic, reaching through the fog and guiding me forward. At first it was so subtle I didn’t want to let myself believe it was real. As I got closer and it became more pronounced, I moved more quickly. I closed in on the source: a flashing traffic light, a temporary fixture sitting atop a ROAD CLOSED AHEAD sign. A construction sign in Toronto was hardly an unfamiliar site, but here, no, none of it made sense, and where had the — I saw her then, in a tanktop and jeans, laying near the edge of the path, her left arm wrenched unnaturally up over her head. Her legs were crumpled underneath her in a way that suggested she’d landed here. They were shattered in multiple places. Her clothes were scraped and torn and soaked in blood that looked red-black under the pulsing light of the construction sign. Her face was obscured — her long, dark hair matted to it — and as I rushed to her side, hand digging in my pocket for my phone, I could tell she wasn’t breathing. Regardless, I tried to utter comforting words as I pulled my phone out and dialed 911. Immediately — too quickly — I noticed more flashing lights, these coming from behind me, red and blue and white. I turned away from the broken woman to watch them approach and found myself staring down the lane of row houses, once again in the middle of the street. Outside our party. It appeared to have stopped, people gathering on the porch and in the windows to stare out at me. Their expressions made me look down at myself, which is when I first noticed I was covered in the young woman’s blood. In shock, in panic, I turned back around to look for her — and instead only saw the other side of the street, the other row houses, all as it should be. No alley, no light, no dead woman. I turned once more back to the crowd, my confusion no doubt all over my face as the paramedics and police arrived. The former looked at me for just long enough to make sure none of the blood was my own before turning me over to the eager arms of the latter. Hours later, I could only assume the sun was rising outside. I was in a windowless room with sparse furniture, waiting for a detective. He walked in without an ounce of compassion or grace, tossed a legal pad into my lap, and demanded I write down the evening’s events. I was all too eager to do so. This is what happened: I stepped out of the Nightingale onto Bloor Street at 1:15, my ears ringing from the music, my eyes squinting from the sudden onslaught of light. The extra tabs in my pocket called to me but as the club’s crushing impact on my senses wore off I was awoken to the world as it was, a buzzing masterpiece of color and sound. Neons, yellows, oranges, whites, greens, the roar of passing cars, the breeze winding its way off the water and through the streets to rustle the hairs on my arm. I felt everything. I needed more. Ubers rolled up and down the street ferrying those too drunk or stoned to navigate the subway, which would be running for another 45 minutes. I considered each option briefly, but at that moment I decided I needed to feel wind hitting me through an open car window. I’d only parked a short walk away. If I hurried, I could even make the end of my housemates’ party. It’d be rude to do anything else. The car growled and spat under me as I hammered on the accelerator, the windows down, the stereo up, the world flying by in streaks of light. I flitted and dodged, my reflexes impossibly sharp, the car an extension of myself, a machine built for me, built for this road, this night, this drive. I do not know what distracted me. What I know is a construction sign — ROAD CLOSED AHEAD — with a flashing yellow light atop it was suddenly sitting in the middle of my lane. Hardly an unfamiliar sight in Toronto, but it snuck up on me all the same, and I jammed on the brakes. The tires gave a jittering squeal, and in the split second afforded me by the anti-lock brakes I chose to swerve away from the other lanes of traffic and into the sidewalk. Initially I heard her but didn’t see her. The first time we met, her face was cratering my windshield. I watched her body crumple against the hood, her face run into and partially through the glass, her limbs flail and shatter. It took hours. I came to a stop before she did. She hit the ground and rolled two more times before finally resting, her legs crumpled underneath her, her left arm wrenched unnaturally up over her head. I leapt out of the car and over to her shattered body. Her breathing was clipped and mechanical, her hair matted to her head, her clothes soaked in blood. I knelt down and cradled her, willing everything to be a hallucination, desperate for any kind of way out — and that’s when I looked around and noticed that, against all odds, the street was completely empty. The dwindling but steady traffic was nowhere to be seen, the late-night crowd, the Ubers — the entirety of Bloor Street was abandoned to the night, devoid of any witnesses. Without thinking, without rationalizing, without anything other than my basest and most animal instincts shrieking commands at my trembling frame, I dragged what was now her body over to the base of the construction sign and leaned her against it. I then got calmly back into my car and drove home. The party was, in fact, not over yet, but nobody seemed happy to see me. I stared down at the yellow handwritten pages. Alone in the barren room, pen in hand, they still felt as though they couldn’t have come from me. Fatigue pushed back as I tried to grapple with my memory of the evening. I looked up from the table. Darkness, pierced rhythmically by an indistinct yellow flash. Fog pushed in from the left and right. Ahead — and behind, I knew without even looking — stretched an endless, forlorn alley.
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Aug 20, 2023 17:46
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In, and I'll take a flash. Thanks!
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Aug 22, 2023 04:32
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The Cut of Your Jib posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZocDT3TmAE nah I'm good, this song fuckin rips. thanks for introducing me to it.
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Aug 22, 2023 13:45
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Theme: Eine Kleine (Week 577) Word limit: 1,750 Flash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZocDT3TmAE Word count: 1,371 Six Minutes at a New Jersey Diner He warmed his hands on a mug of coffee, huddling over it like he was telling it a secret. The heat radiated through his fingers, marking its advance with pinpricks. Outside, winter raged. He squinted at the window. Through the ghost of his reflection, swirls of heavy, hard-driven snow obscured whatever view the tar-black night was willing to relinquish. Somewhere in the invisible distance, the 9th Street Bridge stretched proudly over Great Egg Harbor Bay. At its peak, it was roughly 65 feet from the railing to the water. Not fatal, but not fun. Last he’d checked, the water clocked in at a touch over 40 degrees. Fatal, but not quick. One-thirty in the morning in the middle of winter would never be a particularly busy time for a barrier island diner, but the storm thinned the crowd out even further. He’d come in only a few minutes ago and done an immediate inventory while shaking the snow from his coat and boots. It didn’t take long. In one of the small corner booths sat a young couple, their hands and eyes glued across the laminate table, their conversation hushed. A few tables, an old jukebox, and a pastry display away — not very far, really, but across the diner nonetheless — sat a very drunk older gentleman who’d clearly stumbled in from the inexplicably open bar next door and was being given the leeway to sober up a bit. Each in their own world. Galaxies between. Just emerging from the kitchen had been the waitress. She pointed him toward his booth with a warm smile and was pouring coffee before he even had his coat off. Her voice, complexion, and fingernails — not to mention the weight of her perfume — all indicated a heavy smoker. Her jittering hands and the storm outside indicated it had been a while. Regardless, she couldn’t have been nicer getting him situated. He’d been left with a menu and his mug of coffee. He hadn’t even touched the former yet. He continued staring out the window. The waitress fiddled with the coffee station. It sounded like she was loading a new pot into the machine. Off to one side, some shuffling footsteps got his attention. The drunk older man had gotten to his feet and made it to the jukebox. He slowly and deliberately reached into his pocket, pulled out a quarter, and dropped it into the coin slot. Nothing happened. The box was unplugged. The old man grumbled something to himself, smacked the glass, and wandered back to his table. A few steps in, he turned slightly, waved, and apologized to the machine for losing his temper before slumping back into his booth and resuming his stupor. Back in his senior year, there was very little reprieve from the loneliness of being a commuter. One time, torrential rains had forced him to be a few minutes late to campus. He pulled into a spot and checked his phone to find an email about class being canceled — then spent the next hour with the car off, listening to rain pound the roof. There was a serenity in that juxtaposition, that contrast. A feeling of safety. It ran through him, made him calm, made him content, drowned out the loud parts and stalled their progress. He found something similar there, in the dull glow of the diner’s recessed lighting, watching the winter punish Ocean City. The waitress finished up at the coffee station and walked down the counter to the register. She bent to reach under it and grabbed a few paper placemats for one of the unset tables. She licked her finger before peeling them off the pile. He smiled to himself and looked down at his own placemat, with its coffee ring off to the left from where the waitress had filled his mug to the brim as he sat down — and, on the edge of one side, the faint impression of what had been a damp fingertip. The placemat itself was nothing but ads for local businesses. Mostly construction. One psychic. Someone willing to buy junk cars. A landscaper. A masonry company. A gun range. Quick. Ostensibly painless. But firearm laws in New Jersey complicated things greatly. Not worth writing off entirely, but probably more of a last resort because of the time and expense involved. He sipped the coffee. It was bitter, a little burnt. Over at the young couple’s table, the girl laughed loudly. She surprised herself with it and took a sheepish glance around the room. For a fraction of a second, across the diner from one another, they made eye contact — then broke it and went on with their lives. The boy and girl whispered to each other and laughed quietly. They contrasted so heavily with the faded, worn red padding of their seats. He had to jolt himself away from watching them. Two booths away and four years prior, he and six other friends crammed themselves into those gross padded seats at 10:30 one night and didn’t leave until the sun started lighting up the eastern sky. They’d made the trip down from campus — this was when he still lived in the dorms — the morning before to spend a day at the boardwalk. They visited what felt like every single shop, weaving their way through the modest springtime crowd, making slow progress up and down the three-mile stretch. When night came, they grabbed an irresponsible amount of pizza and sat at a picnic table in a small food court laughing and chatting until a security guard ushered them away hours later. Unwilling to let the night rest, they’d found their way here — and, being young, decided stomachs full of pizza shouldn’t dissuade anyone from night waffles. Only six months later, two of those friends were no longer speaking because one had slept with the other’s ex. Another had dropped out because their alcoholism was no longer of the functional variety. The other three, perhaps feeling weighed down by the drama, perhaps growing as people, perhaps just in pursuit of more interesting company, all dispersed in their own ways. To the best of his knowledge, each — save for the one who dropped out — went on to graduate. Of those five graduates, one didn’t make it through the summer. He’d gone back to his small town to live with his parents while the job market decided what it wanted to do with him, and one night on a dare with some local buddies he tried to swim across the town lake and just … never came up. They wrenched the guy’s body out of the tangled vegetation about 12 hours later, overcast skies hanging low over a gathered crowd of shaken friends and neighbors. He thought about the dead one a lot. In part because that’s just what you do, sure, but in part because he couldn’t shake himself away from wondering what was going through the guy’s mind when the situation turned. Did he believe right up until his last second of consciousness that, bad as it looked, he was going to escape and laugh about this later? Or was there a moment, surrounded by pure blackness, where he realized what was happening? None of the others from that day in Ocean City showed up to the funeral. He sat all the way in the back and didn’t say a word to anyone else during the entire service. When it was over, he quietly slipped out the back, got into his car, and drove nowhere in particular for a few hours. “Been a long while since we saw one this bad,” said the waitress, staring out the window. It startled him, and the booth seat gave a loud, indecorous grunt. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Figured they were done with.” She glanced down at his still-closed menu, then at him. “You ready to order, or are you still deciding?” Two minutes to lose consciousness. Depending on who you ask, it’s either one of the most guttural and terrifying experiences imaginable or shockingly calm and peaceful. After that, it’s another eight or 10 minutes before the body succumbs. He shook his head and stared down at the coffee. “Still deciding.”
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Aug 27, 2023 16:21
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1) Thank you for the kind words and constructive criticism, I really appreciate it 2) gently caress, is it Thunderdome/CC policy to include trigger warnings? My sincerest apologies to anybody and everybody if that's the case. Even if it isn't, I should've thought about it.
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Aug 28, 2023 21:53
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Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. Still something I'll keep in mind if I'm fiddling around in that subject area again.
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Aug 28, 2023 23:15
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gently caress, okay, i was away on business all week and a story just now finally loving hit me so i'm in
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Sep 8, 2023 23:11
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| # ¿ Sep 14, 2024 08:38 |
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Week: DLXXIX (I [Rise/Fall], Only to [Fall/Rise]) Word Count: 1,493 Ad Laquearium On Monday, Steve and Esteban celebrated six years of working together. On Wednesday, Steve shoved Esteban to his death. It took Eteban 3.5 seconds to hit the ground from the top floor of the reinforced concrete silo in which they’d established their startup. Sounds brief, but Esteban had plenty of time to realize what was happening. He screamed in terror and anger, and when his mangled corpse was loaded into the cremation chamber Steve insisted they include Esteban’s rabbit’s foot keychain. “He went everywhere with it,” Steve told others, crocodile tears at the corners of his eyes. That was a convenient truth. Steve was sick of the rabbit’s foot. It came to represent everything he couldn’t stand about Esteban — so old-fashioned, so hokey, a millstone around the neck of Mag-Flite. When Steve and Esteban first collaborated on Mag-Flite — countless late nights surrounded by half-consumed coffees, huddling over pages and pages of calculations in their engineering school dorm — Steve had seen Esteban’s conservatism as a valuable trait. After all, how many startups crashed and burned because they got too far out over their skis? But now, six years later, with barely anything to show for it publicly, Steve was done with waiting. They’d poured their hearts and souls into Mag-Flite. It was ready. It could change the world. A set of boots utilizing magnetic propulsion to safely, efficiently, and noiselessly fly its users wherever they wanted to go? The potential uses were limitless. Even just the whispers of what they were up to had attracted attention from interested parties in construction, maintenance, and military applications. Steve relentlessly pushed for them to take Mag-Flite public, to finally bask in the fame and fortune they so deserved. But Esteban, once valued for keeping them both grounded, was, well, keeping them grounded. He wanted to hone, to perfect, to make the technology ever safer. He had confidence in it, of course, and had personally been at the helm of all their test flights — but always with his rabbit’s foot in hand. Steve took this and Esteban’s hesitance to go public as signs that he simply wouldn’t ever believe in the product enough. And even if he did, it’d probably be too late — someone else, maybe with one of those interested parties, would catch up and bring something to market before them. At night, Steve would toss and turn in his sleep, haunted by nightmares of watching some Mag-Flite ripoff steal the world out from under him. Some beaming jackass on Jimmy Fallon, hovering back and forth a few feet above the stage, grinning ear to ear and crowing about how the crew would never have to climb a ladder again to change the spotlights. It was the Friday before Esteban’s untimely demise — six years minus three days — when they had their final argument. Another tense discussion, this time over yet another safety feature. Esteban was paralyzed by the idea that somebody, anybody, could one day be injured by these devices. Adding the feature — a stabilizer that could detect user heart rate and compensate for twitchiness — would tack another four months onto the project. Steve pushed back hard, but Esteban was insistent. “Do you not trust the product?” Steve asked him as they walked the floor of their silo. “I trust the product,” Esteban said. “I do not trust your ambition.” And just like that, Steve snapped. Sort of. It was a quiet thing, a measured thing. This wasn’t a plot borne of fury or an insatiable need for revenge. Steve was an engineer. He had a problem. He worked a solution. Getting over the emotional weight of deciding to kill his former friend and current business partner was easy. The harder part? Logistics. Esteban didn’t have a family to speak of, so that much was simple, but regardless, there’d be loose ends. What do you tell the police? What do you tell your financial partners? And, maybe most critically to Steve: How long do you wait before taking the prototype public and finally reaping the adoration of a grateful world? The answers, in order, were, “He was clumsy,” “He was holding us back,” and a little less than one week. Which is how, only five days after the death of his partner and former friend — on a freshly painted floor covered with a thin carpet populated by an assembled crowd of technology reporters and industry representatives — Steve found himself at a podium on a hastily built stage, the prototype boots on his feet, finally making the speech he’d been dreaming of making for so, so long. “It goes without saying that I wish Esteban could be here with me today,” Steve said at one point. “We worked so hard for this, and I know he would be deeply proud to see such interest in what we’ve accomplished.” Steve looked out over the crowd, which for the moment was engaged in a respectful if somewhat performative moment of somber reflection. Internally, of course, his happiness was borderline uncontainable. The excitement, the rush of reaching out to every contact he had in order to make this sudden reveal happen had invigorated him. His only concern now was keeping himself from getting too showy. Esteban and Steve had designed the boots to be incredibly easy to handle through the use of a fob, roughly the size of a small remote. It made controlled flight an absolute cinch — so much so that even Esteban, with all his trepidation, control in one hand and rabbit’s foot in the other, would do uncharacteristically showy twirls and dives during test flights. Steve hadn’t actually taken the boots for a spin yet, but he’d supervised every test run and reasoned the ease of use they’d built into the product actually made that a selling point for today’s demonstration. Which, speaking of — Steve cleared his throat and stepped back from the podium. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll permit me, it brings me no shortage of joy and excitement to present to you: the Mag-Flite system.” He held the fob aloft for a few seconds, giving onlookers and media the opportunity to look at it and take their photographs. He then looked down at it, briefly fished for a button with one outstretched finger, and pushed. It’s not particularly hard to find video of what happened next, but you have to do some digging on sites of ill repute. Newsworthy as it was, it’s just not one of those things you’d see on YouTube. The most commonly circulated version was taken by a rookie reporter. Recorded vertically — classic rookie move — it depicts Steve’s full 1.3-second flight and roughly half a minute of the immediate aftermath. Owing to the panic that ensued, the former is easier to parse than the latter: The boots shoot upward with incredible speed and power, their gyroscopic controls keeping them perfectly upright. What doesn’t stay perfectly upright is Steve, who is taken completely off-guard and tumbles forward. From there, it’s simple physics: the boots are going one way, Steve is going the other, and his legs are caught in the middle. Going frame-by-frame, the video shows Steve’s knees folding the wrong way immediately before the bones of his lower legs — which, you’ll note, have no right way to fold in the first place — do the same. The sound is horrifying, and has by one creative Reddit commenter been compared to someone snapping a bunch of corn cobs in half through a thick pillowcase. We don’t see more than a few frames of Steve’s face, but what little we see seems to be twisted in surprise and agony. By then, though, the flight is nearly half over and Steve is some 60 feet above the crowd — which, as a group, has barely had time to register something is horribly wrong. A little more than a half-second later, Steve and the boots slam into the reinforced concrete ceiling at what’s eventually calculated to be 134.6 miles per hour. The body and boots — both destroyed on impact — fall back down to the ground. They’re given plenty of space to land by the panicked and rapidly dispersing crowd, which, Steve would’ve noted, have about 3.5 seconds to move out of the way. Because Steve and Esteban kept such a tight lid on their research and the boots were so heavily damaged during the incident, it’s hard to be precise about what went wrong. What’s known is this: The moment Steve hit that button on the fob was the very last moment he was in control of anything. Best as any investigator could determine, a proximity-based regulating switch, normally the sort of thing triggered by an RFID chip, simply failed to engage. Launching the boots without the chip nearby was a recipe for disaster. Subsequent investigations failed to find the chip, though technological experts have noted it could be small enough to fit into anything — a paperweight, a modified coin, a keychain.
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Sep 10, 2023 12:47
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