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Writtin' Thread

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phooey:
I want to be more a part of this community, so here's little something I wrote to make me feel better about my life. I guess you could call it the beginnings of a character study.

   The man on the first landing in the east staircase of the Saint George hotel in Winchester, the one standing perfectly upright, is a bellhop. He takes his job very serious – to a fault, even, if you ask his mother.  The customer takes priority in his life, and following hotel policy and excelling at his job is paramount.  A polished and painstakingly upholstered smile spreading his rosy cheeks apart, he eagerly awaits his impending tasks and takes each customer’s hand suddenly in a firm, sturdy handshake. When he does this, he first bows slightly, then widens his eyes as though something has gone agley, and nods, unintentionally parodying in the once popular, now kitsch perpetual motion birds.  A little bit of hair peeks out from underneath the flimsy bellhop uniform hat from the vigorous, tense head-shake, and the jagged outline of the slightly damp hair gives his face the odd impression of having stress-fissures at the top.  This odd effect, in combination with his tensile grin and the sheen indicative of a twice-daily skin care regimen, gives him the air of being under an inevitable strain in entirely opposite directions.
   
   His eyes are a frenetic blue and hardly lidded, framed by lashes that are too thin and too dark, widely and sparsely fanning out from his eyelid.  His brows, which fall under a smooth forehead completely free of blemishes, are too narrow and to be masculine, and follow the same general line of a drawn-on eyebrow typically found on abandoned elderly women.   He tends to arch them invitingly towards the ends of his sentences, giving everything he says a crushing sense of pathetic desperation and urgency.  His nose is remarkable in that it is unremarkable save for his constantly flared nostrils.  His lips and cheeks are rosy even with minimal exertion, and he is always the first to turn bright red at the first hint of lewdness or impropriety, the red climbing down his face, down his neck, into the burgundy collar of his uniform.  His cheeks are otherwise totally bare, any hints of a beard shaved off each morning and each lunch break.   His chin is round and juts out slightly, and when he works, the strap for his bellhop’s hat cuts into his soft jaw, though he is very thin in almost every other regard.  His sole insecurity about his appearance dates back to his discovery (via eavesdropping) of the phenomenon titled ‘cankles,’ which made him suddenly and suffocatingly conscious of the aesthetics of his lower legs.  It is for this reason he always wears pants in public and often envisions disaster scenarios that culminate in his crafting new trousers out of dinner napkins.

Try that on for size, 'Writtin' Thread'

Drambels:
They buried Billy today. I went through the service numb inside and out. Only part of it was the valium. I heard one of his aunts say that he looked like he was just sleeping. No he didn't. He looked like a wax doll. No amount of rouge and powder could hide the dead flesh underneath. They had a picture of him smiling next to the coffin. In the picture he was full of life, smiling. It seemed cruel. To remind everyone of what they had lost.

The shrink keeps telling me it wasn't my fault. What the hell does he know? It wasn't him they pulled out of the water. If I lean just a little longer out over the edge of the cliff I can see where it happened. Instead I take another swig of peach apricot brandy and look down at my feet dangling over the edge. Look at a car driving by fifty feet below. Hello little car. Did you know my friend Billy? Seventeen, going sixty, went over the side and sank seven feet. Billy walks among us no more.

I pick up the revolver and raise it to my head. I always thought I would feel some doubt at this point. Some flicker of remorse for my parents and friends. But all I feel as the cold metal presses against my temple is relief. Wait up Billy.

TheFuriousWombat:
A poem! I don't know if it's very good but I do know that Robert Kelley, whom I revere as a poet very much, liked it which does make me quite happy. Anyway:

Cyprian
Upright but rundown,
A girl gleaming with bright-red wine-red lipstick and
Cured leather as social vessels,
Illuminated in the church nook
As boys with clarinets and crossbows,
cabbages and wrenched knives pass.

She receives them, if they bristle at her,
In storage areas and subway entrances:
Gulfs of lost esteem and social limericks,
Trapdoors where Beelzebub might sing,
Where sky sight is blocked by screens of melting ice and acid stains.
At least the winter stays without.

They talk like zookeepers with razor response,
Metallic words like bells of thin metal ringing round-the-campfire,
Having a look-see for the police or figures in calf-length dresses
Who could disturb the coup.
They, eyes opening on the spot, gasping like a smoker’s sound,
(Nothing mechanical there, polite classical training with a scent of
Some musty apparatus), grip barber cut combed back hair with fingernails,

Perhaps a friend there too, a bundle of electric units (all of us), passing
Open eyes over like at a peepshow, thinking about some young goddess,
Some late-night star with a popular bed in some wild place,
But too to watch and sound would-be alarms.

This is her informal auction. Interruptions of necessity.
Pressure against drenched walls from agents, runners, actors, princes.
A waning sea that bruises her arm bone, stitches her foot with lemonlike lettering,
Records etchings of unwound buttons and close clothes for part of the evening,
Until she falls upon the exhausted floor like elephants fall for piano keys.
She views the E.P.A. with approval. Reads Shakespeare. Decorates the commonplace.
On Halloween she wore the make-up of Greek myths. Ate soup by the spoonful.
Designed goals: to beat the traps and nod away the hunters.
But how? She follows orders till knocked off kilter, silently indisposed,
Showing fright to the grinning likeness of bears.
No need to fight as they consume.
She goes home with the air-conditioning on,
Watches the stock responses of TV bands.
Sleeps and dreams of the ocean and being in the waves.

axerton:
Rise from your Grave to do my bidding.
Well I'm doing a creative writing course at uni, so I thought I'd post what I come up with here.

Beyond Hunger
It’s coming tonight. I can feel it. The hunger is building inside of me. No. Not hunger, something different, something more. You can deny hunger, you can fight it, you can ignore it. But not this, I can’t even try to resist this. I’M NOT A MONSTER! It’s not my fault, it takes over I can’t fight it, it takes me over. Literally.

It’s coming faster tonight, why didn’t I get as much warning as I normally do? I have to be somewhere with people. The more the better. It has to be satisfied. There’s no way I’m going through that again. It has to be satisfied or I suffer.

The car. The car. Car. START YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH! Ok – calm. Deep breaths. Where do I go? Somewhere with people. Where are there people at this hour? Oh, just drive! Left here, head to the city. There has to be people. If I don’t… no, it, not me - It. I’m not the murderer, I just a passenger. A host. This thing inside me is what does the killing. I don’t want to do it.

What’s that smell. Car fumes – from the exhaust. sweat – my own. Leather. The seats. Oh god it’s starting. Get out of the car. Paws don’t work door handles well. ARRGGHHH. There’s not a soul in – URGH! Please, let there be someone, somewhere. Not again. Not another month without feeding. I won’t surviARRGHH….

Free.
Power.
Hungry!
... Smoke. Petrol. Beer. Sap. Rubber. 
…Flesh! Distant. Sweet. Young.
This way.
Stronger scent....  Flesh! Two. Both sweet. Both young. One masked. Perfume.
…Close.
…There. Flesh! Two. Inside.  Locked. Window.
Sound - High. Movement. Chase!
Outside.
…Flesh! Sweat. Fear. 
This way.
…Separated. Sweeter. Slower. This way.
…Close. Hiding.  Fear.
Light. Sound - Blaring. Coming closer.
Pain.

Ahhhhh…. Pain. Oh my god it hurts. Arm? Neck? Head? Ribs?  Legs? No, nothing broken. What happened? Last night. Something hit me – it! That noise? That light? A car, it must have been a car. Wait, my car. I was in my car. I changed on the road side. I smelled. No! It smelled! It smelled flesh. No. People, not flesh, people! Two kids, they ran. Then the car came. No! No! No! No! They can’t have got away! It must have fed. It has to have fed. I need to have fed. Those kids can’t have got away. No! I can’t handle it. The hunger, or whatever it is. Damn it! Why did they have to run?  If it doesn’t feed the hunger isn’t sated. Two months in a row now – I was barely able to survive one month without feeding. Oh god. Oh god.

Gilead:
The clock flashes 3:27am on the bedside table of the motel room, it is 3 minutes fast. The room is bathed in a sickly green light from a neon sign across the street. In the room is a bed, the table and clock, a reading lamp, a small television which does not work and a couple engaging in intercourse. The word is clinical, it suits the act being observed, they are not making love, not coming together, there is no tenderness and warmth between the two participants, the act is devoid even of the raw animal passion that might inspire one to use a more vulgar term. It is simply a procedure, a strange necessity for both parties.

The woman is a call girl, the man of unknown identity at this point, his method of engagement is mechanical, almost businesslike, he thrusts at a constant even pace, his eyes filled with a kind of grim determination, not on the call girl’s body or face but on a point just past her left ear. The girl looks off to the side, a bored expression paying on her beautiful, gaudy features. She does not moan, there is no need, the unknown man does not care about her pleasure, he is focused only on the eventual goal.

12 minutes after it has begun, the man finishes, he grunts in a kind of half hearted satisfaction and rolls off the girl. He lies there expressionless, eyes fixed unseeing on the cracked plaster of the ceiling. The girl sits up on the edge of the bed, grabbing her clothes, which she has neatly folded on the floor, an idiosyncrasy left over from her childhood.

She turns to look at the man on the bed and requests her payment for services rendered. The man looks at her, meeting her gaze for the first time.
4 hours later she is found dead in an alley, 34 minutes after that I receive a phone call from the detective at the crime scene, an old friend of mine.

“It’s her.” He tells me.

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