rayalez

[rayalez]

Brass Tacks

Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash

Private First Class Greg “Sully” O’Sullivan was before a screen in the cool communications room, cordoned off with a woman on the screen half a world away. They weren’t strangers but the closest two people could be. Wetness pooled in his eyes. They weren’t talking as if thousands of miles were between them.

“Kate, I can’t think of anything else. I want to be back with you.”

“Sully get your head on straight. Stay safe out there, baby.”

“What’s the matter Kate? You look different.”

“Took you that long to notice, huh?”

“Umm.”

“It’s nothing. I’m pregnant that’s all.” Kate was cool. She didn’t care half the time, and people couldn’t tell when she did.

He knew enough to guess. How they’d been getting baby clothes in the mail. The way Kate was around kids. He knew, but her words wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be until they were together again.

PFC Sully walked to the humvees they were taking out for a drive across the scorching desert of a newly liberated Iraq. The city portion would be downright deadly. Sully was shaking with nerves, and that was status quo. It was enough that nothing had happened, yet. No one knew, but Sully didn’t show it either. He belonged there, and no one could say otherwise.

The Staff Sergeant commanding the Unit, “Rough Neck” Cochran patted Sully on the back. “Mounting up on the 50 cal. today, Sully?”

Sully didn’t have to think. In a mere matter of months, he would have a little person in his arms. And it felt alone as hell up there. A massive barrel in your hands and a tiny piece of armor around you — a target and unprotected at the same time. And the desolate streets had threats in every direction. Sully wasn’t the arrogant risk taker he once was as a young Marine.

“Not me today, Rough Neck. Give Keller the hot seat.”

“Your loss bud. Your loss.”

Sully was in the back across from the sweaty Private Vandorne. She was the only woman in the Unit. Sully was chatting it up with Rough Neck, shooting shit against a stiff breeze. The Privates weren’t buying their bullshit. The other members of their Unit followed behind in two humvees. That’s when it happened.

A IED on the street exploded. Debris flew everywhere. It was a tank shell that blew a hole in the ground. The entire block was on fire. There was no way through. The line of humvees backed up on Rough Neck’s orders. Another explosion cut off the way back. They were stuck.

Bullets flew through the air and in through the windows. The glass nicked and shattered under the barrage. They were in the crossfire from either side.

Vandorne groaned.

Rough Neck ordered everyone out.

Vandorne was hit.

Sully pulled her out through the door. Cover fire went up. Sully scanned the buildings. An empty courtyard was behind them. He dragged the injured Vandorne across the pale sand, leaving droplets of red in their wake.

Vandorne was gasping for breath. Sully pulled off her helmet. He had to do a double take. Sure, his wife had brown hair. And sure they both had pale, translucent skin. They looked a little alike. Sully’s heart stirred at the similarities between the two women.

The resemblance added panic to his actions. She was shot in the shoulder. There was a pool of blood growing on the ground. Sully pulled the coagulation powder and sprinkled it down. He pressed a compression wrap on the hole in Vandorne. She cried out in agony despite fast intakes of breath. Sully saw the life drain from her eyes. The hint of light became dull and disappeared.

Sully’s throat went hard.

Rough Neck was on the radio. “Positions go.”

Their Unit was all over the block. Sully chimed in.

“Sully, you’re the closest bud.”

“Copy that.”

“Get up those stairs and show the motherfuckers the force of nature that is a United States Marine. Nail those fuckers into the ground. We’re getting hammered on the south face of this godforsaken block. Everyone over there converge on Sully.”

“Vandorne’s KIA”

Everyone was quite for a moment.

“Get up those stairs, Marine.”

Sully had a moment of seeing his flag draped coffin. His wife crying. Their child wailing. Then it was gone.

Anger took its place. Nothing would keep him from seeing his family again. A few things needed to happen. And they would happen. Anything standing in the way would burn up faced down with Sully’s sheer determination. Fancy words held no consolation for Sully. Action was the only thing that mattered.

Sully stepped away from Vandorne’s body, saying a prayer. He set his helmet straight and cocked his gun. He walked with the weight of his mission to see his wife again. His mind was clear. Action, consequence. Vindication was coming on the back of Sully. He would show everyone that his name meant something. That there was justice in the world.

He kicked down the door. Walking the building, he threw open each door and swept the rooms clean with his gun sight. He went up another flight of stairs and combed the dusty rooms. No one was there. He went up the stairs.

One room was up there. Sounds wafted through the thin door. Hushed voices and gunfire. That was the place. Sully felt the aggression building in his body like an electric charge ready to break free — the clouds before lightening struck. His muscles were strung out, ready to snap into action. His grip tightened.

Sully burst through the door. Four people were inside. The person facing him opened fire. Sully dropped his weight to the floor. As Sully opened fire, the other people turned to face him. Shots echoed around the room. The wall behind him was blasted white. A few bullets went past him, and a few went through his legs. Until the bullets stopped flying, the pain was minuscule.

Rough Neck was trying to get through. “All wrapped up. How are things on your end Sully?”

“Sully?”

The sound of boots filled Sully’s head. The cavalry was there. The medic got to him. Medicine was injected through his veins. They took him down the stairs in a litter. The fire had gone out. They loaded up Sully in the back seat. A bottle of fluids hung above his head. Sully didn’t remember much from the blood loss. He was in and out for days.

Sully woke up in a military hospital somewhere in Germany. The room was empty and stark white. The sun came in through slits in the blinds and fell across the floor.

Nothing happened for what seemed like hours. Then his wife came in, filling the room with her cool smelling perfume. Sully was the happiest person in the world for a minute there.

“Sully.”

“Where have they been hiding you away?”

“That’s what you’re going to say?”

“Get over here.”

“I was so scared, Sully.”

“It was nothing Kate.”

“There you go again.”

“This will be the last time I ever leave you.”

“Bet on it, Mister. We need you.”

The experience could’ve taken Sully away from his wife forever. In the end, it brought them together again in a tiny hospital room somewhere in Germany.

Brass Tacks was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

Newborn — a poem

Every moment is a wonder.

Every laughter is a joy to remember.

Every word is a great knowing.

Thus is the life of a Newborn.

For whom life is a treasure box

that opens ever so slowly

to reveal journeys that will be taken.

Some will lead to nowhere special.

Others to places never dreamt of.

Ultimately they all lead to a point of return,

to a place where God calls upon the soul

to come forth and share its stories.

Thus is the life of a Newborn.

The End

Newborn — a poem was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

Remembered Pt. 1

My father died the day I was born. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything, but I think I could adjust to the idea pretty quickly; that’s what it felt like only hearing about someone that helped make you. 45 years later, my mother dies too. We have to clean out the old house before we sell it, and while I’m emptying their bedroom, I stub my toe on a piece of trim bumped out from the wall; I push the trim back into place, and a whole piece of the wall moves. By the time I’m done, I’ve probably pulled out a hundred sheets of paper; letters, notes to himself, little stories, and pictures — so many pictures. They all had his name on them, all in the same tight, narrow handwriting. I think I was confused more than anything else, I wasn’t choked up, just sitting there wondering why I’d never seen any of this before. Mom had stopped talking about him more recently, but she was just going at that point. When I was younger, I always heard about how everyone loved him, how good his cooking was, how funny he was. Honestly, once I saw the pictures, I half-expected to see another woman, maybe a whole other family. Funny thing was, they weren’t even of him. As best I could tell, they were of random people, just people he saw on the street, with written notes on the back like, “Man waiting outside restaurant for someone to call him back.” Really benign stuff, actually, but the pictures were beautiful. They all seemed a little worn, dirty. Not the physical pictures, but the images, the people and places, like they all had been forgotten too.

Remembered Pt. 1 was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

Whispers

It was a perfect summer’s day when Zoe and Jodie decided to go to a local county fair. And the reason for that decision was that that particular fair had recently introduced camel-rides. Neither of the girls had ever seen a camel in real life.

‘Drive carefully, won’t you?’ Zoe’s mother, Lynette, stressed.

It had been only a few weeks since Zoe got her driver’s licence. She was sixteen and wanted to drive a car, so Lynette bought her a small second-hand yellow hatchback from a friend.

Zoe did drive her car carefully, well at first she did, until she went over the speed limit and ended up getting a speeding ticket.

‘Mom’s gonna kill me for sure,’ Zoe grumbled.

‘I told you, you were going too fast, didn’t I?’

‘Shut up, Jodie,’ Zoe retorted.

All the same, they arrived at the fair safe and sound and the first thing Zoe did was to buy a pink cotton candy. Then the two of them happily made their way to the camel section, where Zoe bought a ticket and they got a fifteen-minutes’ camel-ride. They were on their way to another ride, when they passed a pink-and-red-striped tent with a sign at its entrance that read:

Have your palm read by Madam Selina.

10 minutes reading for $10.00

20 minutes reading for $20.00

30 minutes reading for $30.00

‘I’m gonna have my palm read,’ Zoe said cheerfully, then ducked her head inside the tent to see a red-haired woman, dressed as colorfully as the tent, sitting at a small table, reading a book.

‘Are you Madam Selina?’ Zoe asked.

‘Yes, I am,’ replied Madam Selina.

‘I’d like to have a ten-minute reading of my palm.’

‘Sure, come on in,’ Madam Selina said, waving her in as she closed the book and put it aside.

Excited, Zoe smiled and went inside.

Madam Selina smiled back and gestured for Zoe to come and sit at her table, but then her smile gave way to a thoughtful frown when her gaze settled on Jodie for a moment or two.

‘Right hand or left?’ Zoe asked, showing her palms.

‘If you are right-handed, then right,’ Madam Selina answered with a slight hint of hesitation, which did not at all register with Zoe.

‘Tell me everything,’ Zoe said, giving her right hand to Madam Selina. ‘I want to know everything, the good and the bad.

‘I shall do my best,’ Madam Selina returned measuredly, studying her. Then she ran her forefinger along Zoe’s lifeline and headline. ‘You have a very good imagination, but you must be careful not to be carried away by it too much.’ She then paused briefly as she eyed Jodie who was standing behind Zoe. ‘You are what is called a sensitive,’ Madam Selina continued, lowering her eyes back to Zoe’s palm, ‘this is a good trait, very good trait, if you learn how to use it.’

‘What do you mean by sensitive?’ Zoe asked, looking somewhat confused.

‘It means that you can see things others can’t,’ Madam Selina explained, glancing up at Jodie again.

‘Really?’ Zoe said, giggling.

‘Yes,’ Madam Selina said.

‘So what else do you see for me?’ Zoe asked.

‘You can be at times very reckless, so you must take care that you don’t become too reckless, otherwise you could end up spending a considerable length of time in some sort of confinement.’

‘I know what that is,’ Zoe shrieked, widening her eyes. ‘Mom’s gonna ground me for getting a speeding ticket.’

Madam Selina regarded Zoe for a long moment, then released her hand. ‘I am afraid, that is all I can tell you. You’re still very young and your lines are still forming.’

‘Oh!’ Zoe protested. ‘But you haven’t said much…’

‘Then you don’t have to pay me much. Five dollars will do.’

Zoe shrugged and as she got up she noticed a small basket on a round little table by the side of the tent. The basket seemed to contain some kind of trinkets.

‘What’s in that?’ Zoe inquired, indicating the basket.

‘Rings.’ Madam Selina got up and they both went to the table for Zoe to see the rings. ‘I sell charmed rings.’

‘Charmed!’ Zoe exclaimed. All the rings had the same exact design: two interlocking hearts. ‘How are they charmed?’ Zoe asked, half convinced, half wondering.

‘To wear them is to meet your perfect match,’ Madam Selina said without either conviction or enthusiasm.

Zoe picked up a ring and examined it. ‘Is this real silver?’

‘Yes,’ Madam Selina confirmed.

Zoe slipped the ring onto the forefinger of her right hand and saw that it was a perfect fit. ‘How much is it?’

‘Twenty dollars.’

‘I’ll buy it,’ Zoe said and handed Madam Selina twenty-five dollars for both the ring and the reading.

‘Take care now,’ Madam Selina said as the girls turned to leave.

‘What a weird woman!’ Jodie exclaimed, once they were outside the tent.

‘She was, wasn’t she?’ Zoe admitted, giggling.

‘Let’s go to a shopping mall instead of catching another ride,’ Jodie suggested.

‘Yeah okay, but I don’t have much money left to do any actual shopping.’

‘We’ll just do window-shopping then.’

Zoe nodded and they both walked to where Zoe’s car was parked.

While driving to the mall, Zoe started singing sweet dreams are made of this.

When she finished singing the song, Jodie advised that she should enter a talent quest.

‘Mom thinks that we should make a video of me singing and put it on YouTube.’

‘That’s a brilliant idea. Do that,’ Jodie encouraged. ‘If I had your voice I sure would want to become a singer. You have a fabulous voice.’

‘I’d like to become a singer too someday, but Mom says that I lack discipline.’

‘Well then, you have to get some, won’t you?’

Zoe giggled. ‘From where? I’m the most undisciplined person ever,’ she said, dragging out the ever.

‘Who am I to disagree?’ Jodie sang, though not at all amused.

‘Are you giving me attitude?’

‘Just drive,’ Jodie returned tightly.

The lights up ahead were still green and Zoe put her foot on the accelerator to avoid getting stuck in the red light.

‘Slow down! You already got one ticket,’ Jodie warned.

‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t!’ Zoe shouted at the lights. ‘Shit! It’s yellow now…’

‘Slow down — ’

‘Shut up, I can make it.’

‘It’s red for crying out loud!’

Zoe stopped the car suddenly and the car behind her ran into her.

‘Shit!’ the girls screamed in unison as their heads bounced forward first, then backwards.

Zoe got out of the car to confront the driver of the car that hit her.

The driver of the car too got out to check the damage.

‘The lights were red,’ Zoe cried, pointing at the lights.

‘I thought you were going through it!’

‘What, through the red light, and you were gonna follow me?’

The driver had nothing to say to that, except that he was sorry.

Zoe eyed the driver and his car. The driver was as good-looking and as sexy-looking as his red convertible. Well, maybe even better looking — he was gorgeous. He had to be very rich too, driving that car.

The driver introduced himself as Blake Jordan and said that his insurance will pay for all the damages done to her car.

The damage to the car was very minor — a small dent on the bumper. Shaken, but perhaps not too dreadfully stirred, Zoe got into her car and drove home. Going to the shopping mall after having a car accident, no matter how minor, might not be the wisest of decisions. Her mother would surely not appreciate it.

‘I told you to slow down,’ Jodie reminded her.

‘Shut up, Jodie,’ Zoe retorted in her usual way.

Lynette was more relieved than angry when she heard about both the accident and the speeding ticket. Zoe was safe and sound and nothing serious had happened, thank God. Though, she knew that Zoe would wake up in the morning with a terrific pain in her neck. Right now she was okay because her body was warm, but come morning, the whiplash would make her neck scream with pain and stiffness. She sighed and sighed, but bit her tongue at the thought of saying a harsh word to Zoe for getting a speeding ticket. Maybe this car accident would teach her to be more careful on the road in the future.

As Lynette expected, Zoe woke up with a stiff sore neck and a stiff sore body. But just as she was complaining, the phone rang.

Lynette answered the phone.

‘Who is it?’ Zoe asked, seeing a look of surprise on her mother’s face.

‘It’s Blake Jordan,’ she mouthed.

‘What’s he saying?’ Zoe mouthed back.

Lynette held up a hand for Zoe to be quiet, as she told Blake Jordan about Zoe’s whiplash. Then after listening to his response, Lynette grinned and thanked him profusely before putting the phone down. ‘He said that all your medical costs would be covered by his insurance. And that goes for Jodie too.’

‘If only his insurance could take away this pain right now,’ Zoe complained, while pouring milk over her bowl of cereal.

‘Be grateful to that pain. It is teaching you a lesson, you know,’ Lynette said by way of chastisement.

Zoe was wincing and moaning with every spoonful of cereal that she was putting in her mouth when the doorbell rang.

‘Who could that be this early in the morning? It’s not even eight o’clock yet,’ Lynette wondered aloud as she went to answer the door. Her jaw dropped when she opened it. A huge bouquet of red roses was being delivered. For whom? For Zoe. And there was a card.

Dazed, Lynette read the card as she walked back to the kitchen.

Beautiful roses for a beautiful girl. Sorry that I hit you, but if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met you.

Blake Jordan

Zoe stopped her wincing and moaning at the sight of the roses. She was as thunderstruck as her mother was.

Lynette quickly got the biggest vase she could find, filled it with water to put the roses in, then sat admiring them. Mother and daughter were still in a state of disbelief when the phone rang again. Lynette picked up the phone and again her jaw dropped. It was Blake. He had organised for Zoe to see his doctor and his physiotherapist.

‘My God!’ Lynette exclaimed. ‘This guy must be very rich.’

‘He is,’ Zoe confirmed. ‘He is super rich. He is the CEO of Jordan, a big pharmaceutical company.’

‘Really?’

‘Yup. I googled him last night.’

‘Did you now?’ Lynette said, lifting a brow, looking amused. ‘How old is he? Do you know?’

‘Twenty-six.’

‘I guess you googled his age too?’

‘Yup,’ she said, nodding, then winced in pain.’

‘We’ll get to his doctor today. In the meantime, try not to nod!’

Blake Jordan had Zoe and Lynette stumped. How could a guy like him be interested in a girl like Zoe? They couldn’t figure it out. He was twenty-six; she was sixteen. He was rich; she was poor. He was gorgeous; she was average. So the answer had to be the charmed ring. How else could any of this be explained! A perfect guy, rich and handsome, had entered Zoe’s life as if by magic. Well, perhaps the entrance was a bit too bumpy, since he ran into her and caused her a few weeks of discomfort, but wow, she couldn’t really complain about it.

And Zoe had fallen in love with him so hard that she wanted to announce it to the world on the top of her voice from every rooftop.

‘But he’s so much older than you,’ Jodie said in disapproval, when she came for a visit.

‘He’s not that old,’ Zoe retorted.

‘He’s twenty-six for crying out loud and you’re sixteen. He is a grown man and you are just a teenager,’ Jodie argued.

‘That doesn’t matter. In our state I’m of legal age and I can be with whomever I want to be. And I want to be with Blake. I love him. Do you understand? We are in love with each other. Wait till you fall in love and then see how you’d feel if someone criticised your relationship!’

‘Zoe, all I’m doing is trying to point out some obvious facts,’ Jodie returned.

‘Well, I’m not interested in your obvious facts. Nothing will stand between Blake and me. We’re inseparable.’

And they were.

Of course, Lynette was too wrapped up in Blake’s good looks and wealth to have any sort of sensible opinion about the relationship. She was a single mother and never had much money. She had to work really hard just to put a humble roof over their heads. So if her daughter was lucky enough to find a guy like Blake, she would have to be a fool to put a stop to it. Yes, he was older than Zoe; and yes, some people did look askance at the whole thing, but she approved of it. Blake was right for Zoe. He was a positive influence on her, not to mention that he did not interfere with her schooling. In fact, thanks to Blake, Zoe’s grades jumped from C to A.

‘Princeton. Go to Princeton University. That’s where I went,’ Blake encouraged Zoe.

‘What about my singing career?’

‘You can pursue that too. You can do anything you want in life.’

Zoe smiled brightly. Her future was a dream too good to be true.

At the prom night, Zoe was the envy of every girl when she brought Blake as her date. And on that same night, when they were dancing alone outside beneath a starry sky, he went down on one knee and proposed to her, placing a huge diamond ring on her finger.

That night Zoe came home and began singing I could have danced all night from her mother’s favorite movie My Fair Lady.

And Lynette joined in and sang along with her. So happy she was for her daughter.

‘It was the charmed ring that brought Blake into my life,’ Zoe said to Jodie, the next morning.

‘I don’t think so,’ Jodie returned, shaking her head dejectedly.

‘Why do you say that?’ Zoe asked, frowning.

‘Well, I have the same ring, but do you see me having my perfect match?’ When Zoe started dating Blake, Jodie went to Madam Selina and bought a charmed ring from her too.

‘You never know, you might meet him at my wedding.’

‘When is the wedding?’

‘Next month.’

‘That soon?’

‘What soon?’ Zoe returned. ‘We’ve been together for two years now.’

Jodie sighed. ‘So who’s gonna be your bride’s maid?’

‘Who do you think, silly?’ Zoe shrilled, her eyes twinkling.

‘Me?’ Jodie squeaked, placing a hand on her chest, feigning surprise.

Zoe laughed and punched Jodie in the arm playfully. ‘Don’t give me that look as if you didn’t expect to be my bride’s maid!’ She then threw her hands in the air dramatically and added, ‘We’ve been friends forever, so whom am I gonna ask to be my bride’s maid, if not you, my BFF?’

Jodie grinned. ‘It’s gonna be a huge affair, your wedding, with Blake being rich and all.’

‘I know, right? All his family will be there,’ Zoe said, giggling.

‘So, where are you going for your honeymoon?’

‘Paris,’ Zoe cried excitedly. ‘We gonna go to Paris first and then to Rome.’

‘Wow! I bet your mom is happy.’

‘She is.’

And Lynette was. In fact, Lynette was the happiest mother in the world because she had nothing to worry about. Her daughter was marrying a very handsome rich guy and was going to have a charmed life — the life of a princess.

‘But she is so young, Lynette. Zoe is only eighteen. Are you sure about this marriage of theirs?’ asked Carol, Jodie’s mother.

‘I am one hundred percent sure. Blake is the best thing that could’ve ever happened to Zoe. He is such a nice guy. Look at what he is doing for their wedding! The cost is astronomical and he is paying for it all.

‘All right,’ she said with a sigh, ‘I guess, you know best. But I had to air my thoughts.’

‘Noted, Carol, noted, but we know what we are doing. Blake is right for Zoe. They are soulmates.’

‘Whatever you say, Lynette.’

The wedding dress was exquisite, as was the cost at one hundred thousand dollars.

‘Wow,’ Jodie gasped when she saw Zoe in it. ‘My God! You look like a fairytale princess complete with a tiara.’ Jodie squinted her eyes. ‘Are those real diamonds?’

‘Yup. The tiara is a family heirloom.’

‘All the guests have arrived,’ Lynette cried, coming through the door in a hurry. ‘You ready, darling?’

Holding her breath, Zoe nodded. She felt like a princess. She looked like a princess. Surely, this must be a dream. Things like this just didn’t happen in real life. Guys like Blake Jordan didn’t exist in real life. She took a step forward, then another step, one foot after the other. Her knees were shaking. Her body was shaking. She looked at the door. Suddenly, it seemed so far away. She tried to lift her hand, but then noticed that she could only make slight movements of her fingers. Why couldn’t she move her hand? She tried to call her mother, but somehow her tongue felt thick.

‘Come, sweetheart.’

Zoe heard her mother speak, but she couldn’t quite make out her face. Her mother’s face seemed suddenly very blurry. What was going on?

‘Come out of it, darling.’

Zoe blinked. Come out of it! What a strange thing for her mother to say!

‘Open your eyes, sweetheart.’

Zoe blinked again.

‘Doctor, she’s coming out of it, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she is.’

Zoe groaned. Then her eyes blinked open. ‘What’s going on? Where am I?’

‘Oh, honey, honey, you are in hospital.’

‘Hospital?’

‘Yes, sweetheart,’ Lynette said, nodding and crying.

‘What am I doing in a hospital? Where is Blake?’

‘Blake?’

‘Yes Blake. I want to see Blake.’

‘Doctor?’ Lynette looked to the doctor for answers.

‘Do you remember anything about your car accident, Zoe?’ the Doctor asked.

Zoe nodded weakly. ‘Blake … Blake ran into the back of my car. But the damage was very minor. And I really didn’t get injured. I just got a whiplash.’

‘You got a lot more than a whiplash, I am afraid,’ said the Doctor.

Zoe frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You ran a red light and smashed into a van.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Lynette sobbed, ‘you have been in a coma ever since.’

‘H — how long?’

‘Nearly two years now…’

‘Blake?’

‘Doctor?’ Lynette looked to the doctor again for answers.

‘It is not uncommon for coma patients to hear people talking,’ the Doctor said.

‘Mom, where is Blake?’

‘Darling, the only Blake I know is Doctor Blake here … Doctor Jordan Blake. And he’s been taking great care of you.’

‘Doctor … Jordan … Blake,’ Zoe said slowly and hesitantly, looking at the elderly man in white coat standing by the side of her bed. ‘No, that’s not Blake.’

‘Honey, I don’t know anyone by the name of Blake, except for Doctor Blake here.’

Zoe’s eyes began to fill with tears and her lips quavered. ‘Find him, Mom. Find Blake. I want Blake.’

‘Darling, I don’t know who Blake is. Is he one of the boys from your school?’

Zoe shook her head and tears streamed from her eyes. It was all a dream. ‘Where is Jodie?’ she finally asked.

‘Jodie?’

‘Yes, Mom, Jodie,’ Zoe snapped. ‘You remember Jodie, don’t you? Where is Jodie?’

‘You can talk with your mother later, Zoe. I want to run some tests on you right now,’ Doctor Blake said.

Zoe opened her mouth to protest but then saw two nurses and an orderly with a gurney enter the room.

‘We’ll talk later, sweetheart,’ Lynette promised, watching the nurses as they put Zoe on the gurney and the orderly wheeling her out of the room.

Once alone, Lynette sat down heavily, thinking.

Jodie!

The disappearance of sixteen-year-old Jodie was all over the newspapers fourteen years ago. No one knew of what had happened to her. The police conducted a thorough search and suspects were questioned, but nothing turned up. Jodie’s parents made an emotional plea on TV for anyone who knew anything of the disappearance of their daughter to come forward, but no one did.

Then one-day Zoe said that she had a new playmate, a big girl by the name of Jodie. But Lynette didn’t pay much attention to it. Zoe always made up imaginary friends, so this one was no different. She certainly didn’t associate Zoe’s Jodie with the teenage girl who had gone missing. It was not until Zoe disappeared that Lynette came to know differently.

Lynette was out of her mind when Zoe went missing a year after Jodie’s disappearance. It took two whole days of intensive search by the police to find Zoe. She was sitting alone by herself near a creek five miles away from their home.

‘I had to come here,’ she told the police.

‘Why?’

‘My friend Jodie brought me here.’

‘Jodie who?’

‘Jodie Summers.’

It was this event that prompted the police to dig around the creek. Jodie’s remains were found not too far from where Zoe was found. She had died of a broken neck. Not long after, the police charged Jodie’s boyfriend with her murder. At first he denied any wrong doing and said that he was innocent, then changed his story and said that it was just an accident. He was breaking up with her and she got angry with him and started to attack him physically when she fell and broke her neck. His excuse of not reporting it to the police was his fear of not being believed and going to prison for a crime that he was not responsible. After a long drawn-out trial, the boyfriend was cleared of all charges and Jodie’s death was ruled as an accident.

Zoe was too young to be told the truth, of course. As far as Zoe was concerned, Jodie was her friend. As far as Lynette was concerned, Jodie, though a ghost, was one of Zoe’s imaginary friends. But Lynette, who was never at ease with the idea of having ghosts around, kept hoping that as Zoe would grow older she would move beyond the whispers of her imaginary friends, who may or may not be ghosts, and with that departure Jodie’s ghost would vanish too. And in fact, this is precisely what happened, for when Zoe entered her teens, she talked less and less of her imaginary friends and never spoke of Jodie again.

So, what changed now? Why was she asking for her now? It was both unexpected and curious, if not disturbing, to hear Zoe talking about Jodie as if she were a living person, as if Lynette could actually see her. When Zoe was young, at her insistence that her imaginary friends were real, Lynette often had to pretend that she could see them, but this all stopped when Zoe grew up. No pretending was necessary when there was no insisting that phantoms were real. And now, everything had come full circle. Zoe was asking for Jodie.

Then it dawned on her. If Zoe was asking for Jodie, it must be that she couldn’t see her. Maybe the length of Zoe’s coma had been long enough for Jodie’s ghost to end its earthy existence. The revelation was a relief for Lynette, but she knew that Zoe was feeling anything but relief. Zoe must have been seeing Jodie all along, even though she never spoke of her.

Confused, Lynette didn’t know what to do or what to think. And now there was this mysterious Blake. Surely, he couldn’t be a ghost! Or was he? Lynette sighed and sighed, wringing her hands, anguishing over her daughter’s mental health. Perhaps she should go and see Doctor Blake about it. Her reverie was interrupted when a nurse brought Zoe back to the room and help her to bed.

‘How do you feel, honey?’ Lynette asked, when the nurse left the room.

‘Tired…’

‘Tired, are you?’

Zoe nodded.

‘I’ll be right back, darling. I’m just gonna step out for a minute to see Doctor Blake.’

Zoe nodded and watched her mother leave the room. She was feeling very tired and was about to close her eyes when she heard her name being whispered.

Zoe turned her head around and smiled. It was Jodie.

‘I told you to never mention me to your mother,’ Jodie whispered.

‘Sorry, I forgot,’ Zoe whispered back. ‘I’ve been in a coma for the past two years.’

‘I know. I was there, remember?’

‘Well, so much for the charmed ring. Blake was just a dream,’ Zoe said in a voice broken by tears.

‘But life is a dream, Zoe, a never-ending cycle of dreams. You wake up from one dream, only to slide into another and then another and another until the end of time itself. Now close your eyes and go back to sleep to dream of another dream…’

When Lynette returned to the room, Zoe was sitting up on her bed as bright as day.

‘Did you see Doctor Blake?’ Zoe asked.

‘No, I couldn’t find him. How do you feel?’ Lynette asked, surprised at her daughter’s sudden cheerfulness.

‘Good, really good. I wanna go home now,’ Zoe said.

‘Do you? I thought you were tired.’

‘I am tired. Tired of sleeping. I wanna go home. Take me home.’

‘What, right now?’

‘Yes, Mom, right now. I’ve been lying here for two years. I’m tired of it. Tired of being cooped up here for so long. I wanna go home. Please, take me home.’

‘Darling, who is Blake?’ Lynette asked, narrowing her eyes, looking suspicious.

Zoe lifted her brow. ‘I have no idea.’

‘But you were so … so adamant to see him…’

Zoe shrugged her lips. ‘What can I say? I don’t know anyone by the name of Blake, except of course my doctor … Doctor Blake. So maybe I heard his name while in coma and had a dream about someone by the name of Blake. Who knows? Don’t worry about it!’

‘And what about Jodie?’

‘What about her?’

‘Well, you were asking for her.’

‘I have no idea why I was asking for her. Maybe I was dreaming about her too when I was in coma. I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m fine and I wanna go home. So please take me home. And no more questions.’

‘All right, darling, I’ll take you home,’ Lynette said with a sigh of relief. The ghosts were gone. ‘I’d better go and see someone about taking you home.’

‘Mom!’

‘Yes darling?’

‘I won’t be going back to school. I wanna pursue a singing career.’

Lynette frowned. This was so sudden. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home,’ Lynette said, slightly disconcerted.

‘There’s nothing to talk about. I wanna become a singer.’

‘All right,’ Lynette said softly as she turned to leave.

Once outside the room, Lynette paused by the door and pondered over the sudden change in her daughter. The Zoe that woke up from her coma was a different Zoe from the one that she just spoke to, then she heard Zoe singing sweet dreams are made of this. It was Zoe’s favorite song. Lynette smiled and put away her concerns to go and make arrangements to take Zoe home.

Zoe clasped her head in her hands and sobbed. Where was this place? How did she get here? The last thing she could remember was waking up in a hospital room and being told that she had been in a coma for two years. Oh, Blake, you were not real! You were never real! I should have known that it was all just a stupid dream. Why would a guy like you be even interested in a girl like me? She heaved a mournful sigh and glanced around with fearful eyes. The room she was in looked gloomy with every window barred by an iron grille. Hardly any light could penetrate through. Not that there was much light outside, for the sky looked just as gloomy. Blake might have been a dream, but this was a nightmare from which she had no way of waking.

‘Please, let me out of this place,’ she cried pitifully. ‘Mom! Mom! Please, someone help me! Mom! Mom! Help! Someone help me, please!’ She ran to one of the windows and tried to rattle the iron grille. ‘Let me out of here,’ she screamed. ‘Jodie! Jodie!’

The End

Whispers was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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[rayalez]

Without a Trace

Poor Aunt Maggie! How could someone disappear into thin air? When my sister, Trudi, called to tell me that Aunt Maggie had disappeared, I couldn’t believe it. Who could? She went to bed one night and by morning there was no trace of her. Nothing was stolen. Nothing was disturbed. Doors and windows were locked from inside. There was no sign of struggle. Nothing was out of the ordinary. The neighbors didn’t hear anything. And the bed seemed as if someone had slept in it. The police could not find any lead into her disappearance.

Aunt Maggie was a friendly old soul, although she was a bit of a loner. Never married and didn’t have any children. She lived in a small rented apartment and didn’t have much and what she had was mostly second-hand. She was a bargain-hunter and never bought anything new. She scoured the markets and second hand shops looking for good deal. I guess because she never had any money to buy anything new.

Three weeks after her disappearance, the landlord called Trudi and told her to clear the apartment. It was hard for us. Clearing her apartment meant we would never see Aunt Maggie again. She was gone. And we would never know what happened to her. So there wasn’t going to be any closure for us. This realization was very difficult for us to deal with. After all, Aunt Maggie was the only relative we had. She was our mother’s elder sister and when our parents died in a car accident a few years back, we formed an even closer bond with her.

But as upset as we were, we had no choice but to go to her apartment and collect all her belongings. Trudi decided to donate them to charity, except for one item: a painting on the wall over her bed. I took that. Trudi objected. Said the painting was crap. The canvas was badly cracked and the paint was so faded that it was as if I was looking at a ghost — the ghost of a man with wavy blond hair, wearing a nineteenth century outfit.

‘Why did Aunt Maggie buy this? When did she even buy it? Have you ever seen this before?’ Trudi kept asking.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. And no,’ I kept answering.

The painting gave Trudi the creeps. But I didn’t mind it. In some strange way I was drawn to it. So this morning, two months after Aunt Maggie’s disappearance, I decided to hang it on the wall above my bed.

‘Good night, Aunt Maggie,’ I say, before turning my bed-lamp off.

I am sure I have forgotten something, but I just don’t remember what it is. All I know is that something is nagging at me that I shouldn’t be here, that this place is dangerous. But where is this place? I am in the middle of a windswept field. The sky above looks pretty bleak. Gosh! What am I doing here?

‘Good morning,’ says a man, breaking into my thoughts about my whereabouts.

I turn my head around to see a man wearing a tan suit. He looks vaguely familiar, though I can’t quite place him.

‘Good morning,’ I greet him back.

‘I am Ash. Ash Hartford,’ he introduces himself to me.

‘I am Emily. Emily Wilson.’

‘Would you like a tour of this place, Emily Wilson?’ Ash asks.

I wonder for a moment whether I should or not, but then I see no harm in touring the place. ‘Yes, that would be nice.’

We walk for a little while until a grand mansion comes into view.

‘Is that your place?’ I ask, pointing at the mansion.

‘Yes. This mansion and all the land that you see here belong to my family.’

‘Wow! Then you must be fabulously rich.’

He smiles. ‘I guess you could say that.’

I look at his face. He is very good-looking — piercing blue eyes and wavy blond hair. But there is something else too, though I don’t know what.

He loops an arm around mine as he guides me towards the front gates, but then suddenly something pulls me away.

At 6.30am the alarm clock goes off as usual and I wake up. I feel tired and have a slight headache. It is as if I haven’t slept at all, but I can’t do much about it. I have to get ready. I don’t think Mr Carson, the pharmacist, would appreciate if I arrive late to work. I yawn noisily and scramble out of the bed. Oh, how I wish I could go back to bed and sleep, but I can’t. After a quick shower, I go to the bedroom and put on my pharmacy-issued blue uniform, but as I do so I suddenly get the feeling that I am being watched. But by whom? I look around. There is no one in the room. And I am on the third floor, so no one would be loitering outside my window. I sigh nervously. It must be my imagination. Maybe I fear that what happened to Aunt Maggie would happen to me too.

I look at the clock. It is nearly seven-thirty. Jeez! A whole hour?! I took a whole hour to shower and change! How did that happen? I must be out of sync with time today, I joke to myself. Well, there goes the breakfast. I tie my hair up in a bun quickly, put my coat and boots on, grab a muesli bar from the kitchen drawer and leave my apartment. As I run to the bus stop, a strange feeling comes over me. It is as if I have forgotten something, though for the life of me I don’t know what. I reach the bus stop and wait for the bus to come. Damn! I just missed my bus. I didn’t even see it coming. It just whizzed by me like a ghost train. I am going to be late for work now. The next bus won’t be here for at least half-an-hour.

A gasp escapes my mouth. It is a miracle. Another bus is approaching. Quickly I lift my hand up for it to stop. The bus stops and I get on it. I thank the heavens for its early arrival and give the bus driver a quick rundown of how I missed an earlier one. He looks at me as though I am crazy or something, then tells me that I couldn’t have possibly missed an earlier bus, not unless I was referring to the one that came half-an-hour ago. I am utterly miffed by his response, but I can’t see him being wrong. He must know what bus is running at what time. But then how do I go about explaining what I saw. Maybe I was hallucinating in the same way that I thought I had a quick shower, when in fact I didn’t.

It is 8.45pm and I am dead tired. I had a long day at work. The pharmacy was so busy today. With the flu season upon us, everyone was after some kind of medication to either hold the flu at bay or simply beat it. I sigh heavily as I get ready for bed. What happened this morning with the ghost bus is still weighing on me. Did I really see it or did I imagine it? Surely, I must have imagined it. It is the only logical explanation.

As I sit on my bed, I turn around and look at the painting. A shiver goes through me and I suddenly find myself frightened of the painting. A little voice inside my head says that I should get rid of it. Oh, this is ridiculous. It is just a painting. A lifeless object. To be afraid of it is like being afraid of your own bed. I dismiss the idea. Well, I am off to the land of nod.

I am running wildly across a windswept field, calling for Ash. Once again I feel that I have forgotten something, but for the life of me I can’t remember what.

‘Hello there,’ calls a man, waving at me.

‘Hello!’ It’s Ash. ‘Hello, Ash.’ I wave back at him.

‘Emily, you came back,’ he says, running towards me. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would.’

‘Of course I am back. Why would you think otherwise? You owe me a tour of your mansion, remember?’

‘I remember,’ he says, with a charming smile. ‘Shall we?’ He offers me the crook of his arm and I loop my arm around it.

‘By the way, what happened last time?’ I ask.

He frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you were about to show me the mansion when … when I don’t know, I left, but to where I don’t know. I don’t seem to remember. Do you by any chance know what happened?’

‘No. You just left in a hurry. To where? You didn’t tell me,’ he says, looking a bit uncomfortable.

I get the feeling that he knows more than he is saying, but for the moment I let the matter drop, mainly because my memory is so foggy.

‘Ah! Here we are,’ he says, just as we approach the front door of his mansion.

We enter the mansion and it is like nothing I have ever seen before. It takes my breath away, literally. It is spectacular. Victorian-style wine-red velvet couches, damask curtains, magnificent Persian carpets, delicately hand-carved mahogany furniture, huge crystal chandeliers, and paintings of various landscapes on the walls. And yet with all this beauty, something doesn’t feel right here.

‘Emily.’

I hear someone calling my name. It is a woman’s voice.

‘Emily.’

There it is again. I look at Ash. What is happening? It is as if he is fading.

‘Emily, Emily, wake up!’

‘What?’ I wake up, startled. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Mr Carson called to tell me that you didn’t turn up for work today,’ Trudi says to me.

‘What?’ My heart is pounding from waking up so suddenly.

‘Did you sleep all day?’

‘What?’

‘Stop saying what all the time. What happened to you? It’s nearly six o’clock in the evening. You don’t seem to have a fever,’ she says, touching my forehead with her hand.

‘I’m okay,’ I say with a scowl. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Just got here. Given that Auntie Maggie disappeared, your boss called me to see what happened to you, since you didn’t show up to work and didn’t call in sick either.’

I rub my eyes and do my best to focus. The alarm mustn’t have gone off or if it did, then I didn’t hear it, which means I must have been really tired. ‘When did he ring?’ I ask with a big yawn.

‘Around three. I rang your cellphone several times, but I kept getting your voicemail. So, as soon as I finished work and settled the kids I headed for your place to check if my baby sister was okay.’

‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ I say, somewhat, groggily.

‘You want something to eat?’

‘Not hungry … just wanna sleep. I’m so tired.’

‘Maybe you’re coming down with the flu. You want me to stay with you tonight? Jeff can handle the twins by himself for one night.’

‘No, no, I’m sure by tomorrow morning I’ll be fine.’

‘This is strange,’ Trudi says, looking at the painting.

‘What’s strange?’

‘The painting! It’s changed.’

‘Changed? Changed how?’ I ask, twisting my head to take a look at the painting.

‘Well, the color is not so faded. And then…’ her voice drifts away, as she gets up to her feet to take a closer look at the painting. ‘Look at the grassy field! And in the distance there is … some kind of a structure … like a mansion.’

‘You’re right. The painting seems to have changed,’ I admit.

‘But … but how could an inanimate object change?’ Trudi murmurs.

Something about the painting nags at me. Something about my memory nags at me. I want to tell Trudi about it, but I don’t know what it is that I want to say. And I don’t want to worry her needlessly. She has enough on her plate. Her husband is in between jobs right now and it is the first year of school for the twins.

‘Maybe we should take it to an art-dealer,’ Trudi suggests.

‘An art dealer?’

‘Yeah. I wonder…’ her voice drifts away once more.

‘Wonder about what?’

‘I wonder who painted it? There is no name.’

‘Well, maybe it’s faded.’

‘Maybe! Listen, you gonna be alright tonight?’

‘Yeah, I’ll be alright.’

‘Call me if you need anything. Take tomorrow off and rest. You look pale. I’ll tell Mr Carson that you’re a bit under the weather. I’m sure he’ll understand.’

With a kiss on my cheek, Trudi leaves. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I want to call her back. Because somewhere in the back of my mind I am terrified of something, but I don’t know what that is. It could very well be the trauma of losing Aunt Maggie so mysteriously. I mean, people just don’t disappear into thin air. Something happened to her and there is someone out here who knows what that something is.

‘Emily,’ calls a man.

‘Ash,’ I call out as soon as he comes into view.

‘I have been waiting for you,’ Ash says.

‘I have been waiting for you too,’ I say, somewhat, breathlessly and then wonder briefly if I have been.

‘Come, I want to take you somewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘There is a lovely river nearby. I have prepared us a picnic.’

‘Oh, I love picnics,’ I say and then I look at the sky and wonder why it is always so dull.

‘Every time you leave, I worry if you’d return again.’

I frown incredulously. ‘Every time I leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘But where do I go, do you know? I don’t remember being anywhere but here, and yet here is so … so unknown to me…’

‘You think too much.’

‘On the contrary, I don’t think enough, because I can’t seem to remember much about anything and I know I have forgotten something.’

‘All you need to know is that you belong here.’

Belong here?! I blink in confusion. What does that even mean? All I know is that I feel lost. But before my thoughts can go any further, we approach the river and I see a small bridge made of dove grey bricks just like painted bridges in fairytale books. I glance around. Everything is so beautiful. Flowers everywhere. Trees. The only gloomy view is the grey sky. If I don’t look up, then everything looks perfect.

‘Here it is,’ Ash says, pointing at a red carpet with a picnic basket on it.

‘What’s in the picnic basket?’ I ask.

‘Let’s see,’ he says, sitting down and opening it.

I sit across from him and though I am quite charmed by him, I am also aware that something is not quite right with this picture.

‘Well, we have red wine, crusty white bread rolls, cheese, olives, ham, two bowls of salad and some chocolate cakes.’

‘Did you make this picnic basket yourself?’ I ask.

He laughs. ‘I wish I could say yes, but no, I am not much good at these things. Jenkins organised it all.’

‘Jenkins? Who is Jenkins?’

‘My valet.’

‘Valet? Of course! What was I thinking?’ I remark, as I burst into laughter.

We start eating. Well, at least I am. He just plays with his food.

‘Aren’t you eating?’

‘Of course.’

I raise my brow. ‘Doesn’t look it!’

‘Emily, I am eating. Look!’ he says, pointing at the food.

I can’t help but gasp. The food is nearly gone, and I know that I couldn’t have eaten it all. Even the wine bottle is nearly empty, and I know that my lips never touched it. Something is not right here. But what is it?

‘Let’s go,’ Ash says, wiping his lips with a napkin.

‘Go? Go where?’

‘Home.’

I want to ask where home is, but I never get the chance.

The sun coming through the window is too harsh. I look at the clock by my bedside. It is 9.22am. Oh, shit! I am late for work. But then I remember that Trudi was going to call Mr Carson to tell him that I was taking the day off. I feel hungry, but as I try to get up, my body collapses like jelly. What on earth is wrong with me? I must be coming down with something. Then I notice something from the corner of my eye. I look up at the painting. The painting has changed. I can clearly see a mansion in the distance and a bridge over a river. Trudi was right. We have to take this painting to an art dealer. I am distracted when my cellphone rings. It is Trudi.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Very tired. I feel as if I haven’t slept in days.’

‘You wanna see a doctor?’

‘If I don’t get any better by tomorrow, then I’ll go and see a doctor.’

‘You don’t wanna go today?’

‘No, I think I just wanna rest today.’

‘Well, okay then. But call me if you need anything,’ Trudi says.

‘I will.’

After our phone conversation, I lie in bed and try to gather my thoughts. I feel strange. I don’t feel sick, but I feel weak … kind of out of whack. And I feel like that I must remember something, but I don’t know what. I haven’t forgotten anything. I am sure Trudi would’ve noticed if something was wrong with my memory.

‘Emily, Emily.’

I turn around. It is Ash.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Ash says eagerly, reaching to hold my hands. I flinch at his touch. It is the first time that I have touched his hands and they are colder than ice. I can’t help but withdraw my hands from his.

‘You are so cold,’ I say.

‘As cold as this sky.’

I look up at the sky. Jeez! It is even bleaker than before. ‘Well, I hope you are warm on the inside?’

‘I am. I am as warm as that blood that courses through your veins.’

‘I am more concerned about the temperature of your blood.’

He smiles. ‘Come. I have a guest at the house.’

‘A guest?’

‘I think you will be pleasantly surprised when you see her.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Who is she?’

‘You’ll soon find out,’ he says.

Upon reaching the mansion, a young woman with long wavy black hair, wearing a white lacy blouse and a long black skirt appears by the door. She is a stunning-looking woman, but there is something familiar about her. It is as if I know her. Or maybe I have seen her somewhere before. But where, I wonder?

‘This is Lady Margaret, Emily,’ Ash introduces her to me.

Margaret!

I know this face, or I think I know. I squint at her.

‘Hello, my dear,’ Margaret says.

There is something familiar about her voice too. Where have I heard it before? Then I gasp in horror and disbelief. I know both the voice and the face. Now the fog lifts and I remember everything.

‘Aunt … Maggie?’ I utter the words slowly and fearfully. I love Aunt Maggie, but this new version of Aunt Maggie is totally freaking me out. She looks about the same age as me — twenty. But how could that be? She is seventy-two years old. It can’t be her. ‘I … I … am sorry,’ I stammer, ‘you reminded me of my aunt.’

‘But I am your aunt, darling.’

I am completely struck mute. This is not real. It can’t be. This is just a dream. I have to wake up.

‘This is not a dream, darling. I assure you,’ Margaret says, as if reading my thoughts.

My heart sinks into the pit of my stomach when I think of Trudi. She would go right out of her mind if something were to happen to me. And I have a bad feeling that that something has already happened to me. Then I notice that the sky has gone from bleak to black, with a pale moon and even paler stars. Hardly any light anywhere except for what is emanating through the open doorway of the mansion. ‘I have to go,’ I say, with a voice trembling with fear.

‘Go? But you can’t go anywhere,’ Margaret says calmly.

‘Trudi will miss me,’ I cry.

‘She’ll get over it,’ Margaret says.

‘No, she won’t,’ I protest. ‘If you were truly our aunt, then you’d know this. And you’d never do that to her or to me. We grieved for you when you went missing. We thought you were dead.’

‘I am sorry for that, but as you can see, I am perfectly fine. In fact, I am better than fine. I am great,’ Margaret says, as she traces my jaw with the tip of her icy cold finger.

‘Let’s go inside,’ Ash says, gripping my arm.

‘No,’ I cry. ‘I have to go back.’

‘You can’t go back, my dear. You can never go back,’ Margaret says. ‘The portal is closed.’

‘Portal? What portal? How did I get here?’

‘You got my painting, didn’t you?’

‘You mean that cheap painting?’

Margaret laughs. ‘That cheap painting was a portal.’

‘Portal to where?’

‘Portal to here.’

‘And where is here?’

‘Let’s go inside and we will tell you,’ Ash says, his eyes darting around, looking fearful.

‘No, I want to go back,’ I cry.

‘You can’t. Now, let’s go inside,’ Ash insists. ‘It is dangerous to stay out here at night.’

‘Why? What’s going to happen at night?’

‘The wolves,’ Ash says, firming his grip on my arm.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, wincing in pain from Ash’s grip on my arm.

‘We have the day and they have the night.’

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ I cry. ‘Wolves! Where is this place? Let me go.’ I struggle in vain against Ash’s iron grip. ‘I want to go back … to go back to the life I had before.’

‘Trust me, my dear, this life is so much better,’ Margaret says, though with less composure. She, too, seems frightened of something.

‘Abandon yourself to this life, Emily, I urge you,’ Ash says.

‘And I urge you to let me go,’ I scream.

‘Hush, be quiet,’ Ash hisses. ‘They will hear you and they will come for you.’

‘Who?’

‘The wolves.’

‘The wolves? The only wolves are you two. Let me go,’ I scream again.

‘I said be quiet,’ Ash warns through clenched teeth.

Tears fill my eyes and I look at Margaret. ‘How did you become young again?’

‘It is the magic of this place, darling. No one ever grows old.’

‘But you were already old,’ I shout.

‘Be quiet, Emily. They’ll hear you,’ Ash warns me again.

‘I don’t care. Let them hear me.’

‘You don’t know what you are saying,’ Ash says angrily.

‘And you have no right to keep me here against my will,’ I shout.’

‘You can’t go back. We already told you that. The portal is closed. And you came here on your own free will — ’

‘Free will? I can’t even remember how I got here?’

‘Through your dreams.’

‘My dreams?’

‘The painting was a portal to another dimension, but the fact that you took it and then dreamt this place — ’

‘Stop,’ I shout.

‘No, you stop. Stop shouting or the wolves will come for you and if they do, then you will become one of them,’ Ash says.

‘One of them? What do you mean one of them?’

‘You will become a wolf,’ Margaret says.

‘A wolf?! Why are you doing this, Aunt Maggie?’ I ask, bawling my eyes out. ‘Why are you holding me here against my will? Why are you exposing me to the danger of turning into a wolf? Have you gone mad? You used to be so nice, so loving. What happened to you?’

‘She became one of us,’ Ash says, his face close to mine, his lips next to my neck.

‘One of you? And what is that?’

‘A vampire.’

Trudi stood in her sister’s apartment, completely grief-stricken and in total shock. People just don’t disappear into thin air. Someone must have seen something or heard something. But no one had. Trudi wiped her tears with a tissue paper. She had come to collect Emily’s belongings. Emily didn’t have a lot of stuff. She rented her apartment fully furnished, so aside from her clothes, some sheets and towels, she had nothing else for Trudi to pack. Only the painting. But the painting didn’t worth anything. It was cracked and the color had faded. She now wondered what did she see in the painting a week ago when she said to Emily that the cracks had disappeared and the color was sharper.

‘Excuse me, Ma’am,’ said a man.

‘Yes,’ Trudi responded, turning to face a short pudgy man with thick grey hair.

‘My name is Jenkins. I have come to clean the apartment.’

‘Oh yes…’

‘I am very sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you,’ Trudi said, with a sniffle.

‘Would you like me to get rid of that painting for you?’ Jenkins asked, gesturing at the painting on the floor.

‘Yes, if it is not too much of a bother.’

‘Not at all, Ma’am. It is all part of a day’s work,’ Jenkins said politely.

The End

Without a Trace was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

Poseidon.

I rest by streams and rivers, water is available and there is a chance of food as long as I am quiet and discrete which I try to be. I remember fishing the rocky coves of Kintyre, the soft sway of the ocean and my love of boats. To my East lies the humpbacked ridge of Kilbrannen, pale green and perfect in the early morning rain. To the west Kilkerran and the lands of the dead, I have to travel North. Through the rolling hills of Kintyre unto the spine of Argyll. Only in the mountains will an answer be found.

Poseidon;

I am old now and tired, weary beyond measure, I have walked the earth for an age and have seen the glories of humanity, the accumulation of a life’s toil seen to fruition, their glorious structures, magnificent art, the leavening of the world, I have seen much that even such as I has found surprising.

I have also been shocked, they gained the ability to fly and used that wondrous achievement to kill each other in ever greater numbers. Their ships grew mightier and stronger, larger than I had ever imagined that they would but those ships are rarely then used for safe passage but again to destroy.

They have ships now with craft that nest onboard that can fly faster than the greatest eagle and hover like a raptor. They have projectiles that fly faster than my eyes can see and can traverse the world in hours. They have craft that can even leave this world a thing that even such as I had not dreamt of, yet they called me a god.

I have had many names over the long centuries that I have lived but I have always liked Poseidon simply because I liked those rascal Greeks that sought to tame the waters in their little boats of kindling. I liked the tales that they told and some became my friends as I wandered among them taking their form. I was ridiculed for this at first by my own but then they followed suit and interfered with this race for many a year.

I had names Before Poseidon, I was portunus, fortunus, Nechtan and many, many others, most of the peoples of the world had their own names for me.

Later I was to be Neptune and they were to name a planet after me. They thought me a god but even at the height of my power’s that was always beyond my abilities. The god of the sea they called me but no one controls that huge ravening beast, even at the height of my powers, I could perhaps calm a storm, raise a wind to frenzy that was already rising, Give power or height to a wave that was already powerful and tall. They said I had the power to call the Leviathan and that is the only thing that they say of me that is true.

Poseidon. was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

My blog has moved

You can find my articles on business, productivity, rationality, and tech at Startup Lab, and my articles on writing and fiction at Fiction Hub. Follow me there. Also follow @StartupLabIO on twitter. More info about me is here.

Check out more of my posts at https://medium.com/@rayalez

[rayalez]

Fiction Hub

The best place to publish and discover awesome fiction

I have just launched Fiction Hub — the new platform for publishing fiction:

The goal of Fiction Hub is to make it easy for writers to master their craft and find their audience, and make it easy for readers to discover awesome fiction.

Write and Publish your stories

Use our awesome distraction-free editor to write your stories:

And publish them in a beautiful, easy to read format:

Find your audience

Our browse page makes it very easy for readers to discover the stories you have shared with our community. The best stories are also featured on our front page, suggested to the readers who liked similar stories, shared with our social media followers, and sent to all of our subscribers in the weekly email digest.

Readers who’ve enjoyed your stories can subscribe to your blog and receive the updates whenever you publish something.

This way, you don’t have to worry about building traffic and self-promotion, you can just focus on doing what you love — writing — and we will make sure that the audience of readers finds your stories.

Receive feedback

My goal is to build a friendly and helpful community of authors who share their experience, and help each other to get better at writing. Share your stories to receive useful advice and feedback, and give feedback to help others!

And don’t fogret to join the discussion forum where you can ask questions and talk to other great writers.

Become a better writer

We also have a great set of tools that will help you to develop good habits and practice your skill regularly, in a fun and engaging way.

On your profile page, you will find useful stats about your writing:

Besides subscribers/upvotes/views your stories have received, and your position on the leaderboard of our best writers, you can see a useful calendar of your daily wordcount. Brightness of the day depends on the amount of words you have written(0 — completely transparent, 1000 — completely white). Number to the right of it is your writing streak — how many days in a row you have written at least 100 words.

This brilliant tool is incredibly helpful for developing regular writing habits — at a glance you can see how many words you have written, and get motivated to continue your streak and keep writing every day!

Under the editor, you will find a neat progress bar:

It interactively displays the amount of words you have written today.(each mark represents a milestone of 100 words). This provides you an extremely satisfying visual feedback, motivating you to write more.

Finally, we have a Daily Writing category. It’s purpose is to inspire you to write more, to give you helpful feedback and encouragement. Stories submitted to this category are not displayed in the main browse page, so you can share your daily writing exercises without any pressure to keep them high-quality. Don’t be shy, feel free to jump in and post something even if it’s the first thign you’ve ever written!

Use these tools to practice your skills, become a better writer, and have fun interacting and competing with others!

Make money writing

The goal of this project is to help people to go from a complete novice to a professional writer. And a part of being a professional is making money with your craft. On Fiction Hub, you can start selling your stories very easily, with no barrier to entry. Once you have written a story you think is worth buying — just set the price, and your readers will be able to purchase it in one click.

Take your skill to the next level

We also have a category where you can find helpful learning resources that will guide you on your path to becomming a better writer and help you to take your skill to the next level.

So come in, join our growing community, and take the first step on your path to becoming an amazing writer!

At The Writing Cooperative, our mission is to help each other write better. We’ve teamed up with ProWritingAid to do just that. Try it for free!

Fiction Hub was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Check out more of my posts at https://medium.com/@rayalez

[rayalez]

You Want To Commit A Crime? Do It Alone.

Why You Need To Do Activities Alone Without A Partner.

Image: Author

You want to commit a crime? Try doing it alone! That ‘partner in crime’ is probably on a vacation.

Why do you want someone to tag along for everything you do?

You want to go jogging every morning, but you don’t have a partner to join you. Therefore, you don’t jog.

You want to watch that latest action flick, but you don’t have anyone to go with. Therefore, you don’t watch it.

You want to join language classes, but only if you get someone else to enroll with you. Therefore, you don’t join.

You want to try out that new Thai restaurant, but you can’t find anyone today to join you. Therefore, you don’t go.

Why do you always want a partner, a friend, an ally for all your activities? If you look closely, your best friend may have a newborn at home, your spouse may be out of town, your good friends may be busy with their daily life, your acquaintances are good being friends with you on Facebook. That doesn’t really mean that your life should stop.

It is true that, often, our motivation levels drop, and we wait for someone else to pick them up and put them back in us. It is true that we want to share the happiness of eating out with someone. It is true that we would like to have a friend do yoga with us.

However, you must have faced days when no one is available to support your falling motivation or eagerness to do something. On those days, it makes enough sense for you to do things alone.

You know jogging is absolutely necessary for you. Go ahead, wake up, and jog alone. You will make more friends along the way.

You have this one day free when no one else is available? Go for that movie, grab a packet of popcorn and watch away. Alone.

It is often good to spend some time with yourself. Take time off for yourself, speak to yourself, clarify your thoughts, and you will feel rejuvenated like never before.

Try eating at a restaurant alone. Try it and let me know how you feel!

If you like this story, recommend it so others can find it too!

You Want To Commit A Crime? Do It Alone. was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

The First Letter

Hi mum and dad,

Eric and I had a talk and agreed that he wouldn’t come to the house again. He understands that we’re separated. There’s no need to call the police or anything like that.

Sorry if he scared you last time. He’s just a passionate guy. He would never hurt us. I’m sure he means nothing but the best for our family.

Being away from the kids must be hard for him. We should look at his side of the story.

Actually, I’ve been thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to get back together. We used to be so happy.

Calling me all those horrible names in front of you and the kids was a bad thing. I’m sure he’s sorry for it. It was also my fault, in a way. I should stop interrupting and contradicting him in public. That’s not how a wife should treat a husband.

Keeping the kids and I locked up in the house for days like that was wrong, too. He would never do that again. He was just worried about losing us.

He’s a loving, caring husband. He has been through a rough patch, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. Maybe we should let this all go and try to be a family again.

Everything will be fine.

Love, Alice

P.S.: I hope you give a lot of thought to this first letter. In each paragraph, there are lots of reasons why you should give him another chance.

The First Letter was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

We Talked of Paris and Ice Cream

Day 66

Bekah Russom • Unsplash

“Tell me about Paris,” she said. Her delicate chin rested in her hands, and she looked at me intently, a playful smile dancing in her deep brown eyes.

We were in my bedroom, enjoying a rare late morning in our pajamas. My face was still flushed from the mind-bending sex that had wracked my body — now stretched languidly on the sheets — an hour before. The supple moments stretched on, like dandelion seeds floating in a warm breeze.

I rolled onto my back, feeling the softness of the pillow beneath my shoulder blades. I was young, my muscles bunched under smooth skin; I had no one else to attend to in the whole, wideness of existence except for this girl, and here she lay. There was nothing to call me from this warm, white sheet, dappled with the clear sunlight of a languid day.

She kicked her legs slowly, like a cat on a windowsill swishing its tail.

“What do you want to know about Paris?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose and pushed my leg playfully. “Anything. Everything.” And then — because she was more than vague generalities: “What surprised you the most about it?”

My mind wandered back to the summer before, when I’d spent an afternoon floating along cobbled streets and sipping wine at cafés, marveling at the waiters, who played hard to get.

“Probably… that I had such fun doing the things you’d expect: seeing the Notre Dame (though it closed just as I arrived), looking at the art hung on the iron fences along the Seine, stopping at random cafés and ordering a bottle of wine at each.”

She laughed. “You must have been very drunk.”

I laughed back. “No, it was…strange. There are so many things that surprised me about Paris, and maybe this was one of them: the wine didn’t seem to… you didn’t get drunk on the wine there like you do here. It was… warm and pleasant, instead of harsh. It soothed you, like a… like a lover.”

She laughed again, like hard rock music in a cathedral.

“I’m serious! It did, instead of pouncing on you all of a sudden like a crazy drunk monster.”

“The wine made love to you?” she asked huskily. “Was it…as good as me?” We both laughed, then, and I rolled up onto my elbow, leaning in for a kiss.

“Nothing is as good as you,” I whispered.

She pushed me back, hard, and snorted. “BS! You and I both know cookie dough ice cream in a waffle cone is better than anything else!”

My hurt surprise became a soaring joy. I propped back up on my elbow and looked into her eyes, in a way that I hadn’t before.

“I love you,” I said.

She fixed me with a serious gaze, holding my eyes in hers for a moment. There was, within those deep brown depths of hers, a flash of emotion I could not — dared not — discern. The laughter returned to them, and she pushed herself vigorously from the bed.

“Where are you going?” I asked, disappointment creeping.

“Ice cream for breakfast,” she said, an impish smile dancing.

I tamped the confused disappointment down — way down — and shut the lid; then, I smiled broadly. “Heck. Yes. You read my mind. Grown up perks!”

I jumped from the bed and moved to hug her playfully, but she wriggled from my grasp and, with a shriek of laughter, tore from the room, her dark scent lingering in my ears.

This is but a small piece of my lifelong daily writing practice. If you enjoyed this, you may also like some of my other writing, which includes short fiction, novel excerpts, and other essays.

We Talked of Paris and Ice Cream was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

The Anti-Vaxxer Sisterhood — Part 2

(Part 1 is here.)

The story of the sisterhood starts with Deb’s tragedy.

Deb wasn’t always anti-vaccine. She was married to a prominent physician, Dr. Harold Markowitz. Twenty years ago they bought 1889 Houston together and had two twin boys, Harold Jr. and David.

Although both boys were vaccinated, it was only Harold Jr. who started to have complications afterwards.

According to Deb, the day after both boys had their MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine, she had to wake Harold Jr. from his crib, unusual given that the one-year old was almost always awake by 6 am and his brother, David, had been playing noisily in the room for at least an hour that morning. Something was not right. Harold was extremely tired. He whimpered and moaned. Most shockingly, he had a red rash all over his body.

The young parents took Harold Jr. to the hospital. The doctors thought Harold Jr. must have had some allergy to something in the house, that or a virus. They prescribed some anti-biotics and sent the Markowitz’s back home, advising them to try new bed sheets in case Harold Jr. was having an allergic reaction. Harold Jr. perked up later that day and seemed back to normal by the next day. Unfortunately, the same thing happened the following week. Unlike his first episode, Harold Jr. did not bounce back so quickly. He spent a few days in the hospital before being discharged. Then, a week or so after that, he was re-admitted to the hospital, the same conditions present — extraordinary tiredness, discomfort, and the red rash.

For months this cycled continued. During this time, Deb began to notice that even when Harold Jr. was “feeling better”, he was showing almost a dulled existence. At this age, parents expect to see their children’s curiosity and mental vigor shining brighter and brighter with each passing day. With Harold Jr., the opposite was true. He seemed to be growing distant, uncommunicative, enervated.

One day, during one of his many episodes, Harold Jr. slipped into a comma and never bounced back, eventually passing a month later as his mother sat by his bedside. He was 2 years old.

For months, Deb laid in bed. She could’ve easily stayed there, but the heart wrenching loss of her child was compounded by the fact that there was no valid explanation for it. It was like the devil was playing a game with her. She needed an explanation, something that might give some closure.

People close to Deb call her a pit bull. In law school she placed at the top of her class, moving on to a large law firm where she displayed a tenacity in the courtroom that intimidated and impressed colleagues. She quit her job after marrying Harold, but she never lost her drive, often working late nights at her non-profit fundraising position and volunteering for a number of organizations on the weekends.

One day Deb decided to set her considerable persistence on finding an answer for Harold Jr’s death. No physician ever told Deb that vaccines led to Harold Jr.’s death. And for a long time, one or two years afterwards, Deb didn’t really give vaccines serious consideration. Still, though she was too embarrassed to mention it, since the first time she had awaken Harold Jr. to find that awful red rash, she had some suspicion, some nagging thought, that the vaccine might have had something to do with it. The events were just too close in time to ignore. Get a shot one day, get sick the next.

At first she didn’t’ necessarily think the vaccine itself had caused the sickness. Maybe the needle was the culprit. If it hadn’t been properly cleaned, it could have delivered an infection. Then, late one night at the NYU Medical School library, Deb spotted a journal article about the anti-vaccine movement. Her life’s purpose was about to come into focus.

The article reported on the work of Dr. Indiri Singh, an Indian-born Canadian who conventional science blames for establishing the modern anti-vaccine movement. The article was dismissive of Singh and his followers, but it peaked Deb’s interest. She ordered a copy of Dr. Singh’s most read book, Vaccine Nation, scouring it late at night when her husband, who would have disproved, was asleep.

Throughout his career, Dr. Singh posited that modern-day childhood vaccinations are at the root of a host of troubles, from inexplicable death (like with Harold Jr.) to — most famously — rapidly increasing rates of autism among children in the past few decades. Dr. Singh claimed to have performed dozens of studies showing that vaccines weren’t just correlated with increasing autism rates and other conditions, but were in fact the direct cause. None of these studies were ever peer reviewed and they’ve since been debunked by numerous researchers throughout the years. Still, Singh’s work held firm in a small, but strident subset of the population.

Singh gave talks around the US and Canada, often at Holiday Inns. Universities refused to host him. One day in early February 2002, after telling her husband she was going to do some volunteer work, Deb got into her car and drove to a presentation Dr. Singh was giving in Hoboken, NJ.

She was surprised to see a packed room, mostly made up of women but some men were in attendance as well. Singh was charismatic and convincing and Deb couldn’t help but approach him afterward. She told him about Harold Jr.’s story and they quickly bonded, keeping in touch through phone calls and emails. Singh was impressed by Deb’s intellect and, being a former trial lawyer, knew she’d make a good public speaker. He also thought his audience would appreciate seeing the “human” side of the issue, a real mom who had suffered infinite tragedy because of modern vaccination. Singh asked Deb to join him on the road.

It was a difficult decision for Deb, mostly because she knew Harold — who until then assumed his wife had only a passing interest in the safety of vaccines — would not approve. She was right. Harold was a mild-mannered man and never would have prevented his wife from doing something she wanted to do. But he had serious concerns, not so much about the presentations but more so the fact that his wife harbored such views. As a successful medical doctor, Harold thought the anti-vaccine movement was pure charlatanism and was troubled that his wife had apparently been hijacked by it. A gulf quietly started to grow between the couple.

Dr. Singh was right — Deb was a huge draw for audiences. She was a natural, but more importantly, she had a genuine story that connected the “science” to the human side of the story. She knew she was having an impact when audience members went from telling her how long they had driven to talking about how long their flights had been. In a matter of months Deb was being invited onto conservative radio and had signed a book deal with a small publisher.

The Singh-Markowski one-two punch was short-lived. In 2004, the co-presenters had a falling out. It wasn’t so much that Deb was stealing Singh’s spotlight (though that might have added a layer to it). Rather, in speeches and on radio appearances, Deb began to up the ante, espousing a new view. Not only were vaccines harmful, she said, they were made intentionally so by governments and the pharmaceutical industry. This was too radical, even for Singh. The two went their separate ways.

Deb wasn’t the first one to talk about vaccines and mind manipulation. The conspiracy theory had been floating around among the usual bunker-owning suspects for years. It’s hard to compute how an extremely bright and gifted cosmopolitan woman like Deb could start to believe it, but in some ways it’s futile to try to make sense of a person’s conspiratorial beliefs.

Almost by definition, conspiracies can’t be proven, either because they really are the just the conjuring of an overly-active mind or because the person behind the conspiracy — if it does in fact exist — has already taken steps to hide it from the light of truth. Why do people believe in the unknowable? Why does a person believe in some things that are unprovable and not believe in other things that are equally unprovable? It’s like trying to rationalize one’s faith in the divine; you can’t really make sense of it. People believe in God because people believe in God. God’s existence is not provable, yet people persist in their belief, probably because the divine is a sort of answer for them — the solution to a riddle, the centerpiece of an incomplete puzzle. To Deb, I assume, the global vaccine conspiracy was a piece that happened to fit well in the puzzle of her life.

In 2005, Deb launched her website, which quickly shot up through the ranks of popular anti-vaccine internet bastions. Very shortly after, however, another tragedy struck. Harold committed suicide.

Harold was never able to get over his son’s death, Deb says, and she knows it was this unending pain that caused him to take his life. Deb says she might have done the same thing, if it weren’t for their other son, David, and the anti-vaccine message she had been tasked to spread. She feels terrible saying it, but at the time of Harold’s passing, they had grown so distant that she found herself feeling guilty for not again experiencing the infinite sadness she did when Harold Jr. died. She was crestfallen, but her despair did not reach the depths she thought it should.

Deb continued spreading the anti-vaccine message after Harold’s death. She limited her presentations to be with David, but she put extra efforts into her book writing and webpage, all the while connecting with thousands of people around the globe, from India to Beirut. Many were like her, trying to explain the inexplicable. Why is my son autistic? How did my daughter go blind in a matter of weeks? Why was my child ripped away from me? Why aren’t doctors able to explain these horrible things?

Mothers and fathers across the globe needed an answer. In Deb, many found someone who at least purported to have one. Whether speaking the truth or not, at the very least Deb offered a culprit, something that could be blamed. For many, that was good enough.

From this congregation the sisterhood took root.

***

Deb often engaged in personal emails with people who contacted her through her website. One of them was a woman in her early 30s named Tara McConnell from Dover, New Hampshire.

Tara and her sister, Eve, had had a hardscrabble life. Their mother was an alcoholic and freelance druggy. Their father was a huckster, often in and out of the house as he pleased. He sometimes worked odd jobs, but often didn’t work at all. Around town they called him “gimp” because he walked with a slight limp. He attributed it to a Vietnam War injury; to this day, Tara has no proof he actually served. Twice she had to bail him out of jail before she could even drive, using money she had saved up while babysitting or having to borrow from aunts and uncles.

At 20 years of age Tara got married to a Brazilian transplant named Raul. Originally Raul had come to New Hampshire to marry another woman, but was promptly dumped when he lost his factory job and was unable to make the bundles of money he promised he would after opening his own chain of private gyms.

Tara and Raul met at the local community college. Tara was a night custodian; Raul had just started working as a night security guard. On the first night they met each other, they’d made love in the college library.

Like her mother, Raul was a drunk and, worse yet, possessive. He railed against Tara when he thought she had looked at another man or another man had looked at her. Sometimes he’d hit her.

Besides her sister, Tara didn’t have anyone to turn to. Her father was living on the couch of an old friend, starting to die from cancer. Her mother was still an addict, sometimes coming over to grab a bite to eat.

Tara remembers one night her mother coming over and noticing a black eye she had.

“He hit you?” her mother asked.

“No,” Tara lied.

“No, he goddamn hit you,” said her mother.

For a moment, Tara thought she was about to see something from her mother that she’d never seen before — concern.

Instead all she got was a half-drunk, insincere “tell that goddamn mother fucker to knock it off.” She then left, sandwich in hand, getting into the crappy car of some guy Tara had never seen before.

Tara got pregnant, had a baby they named Felipe after Raul’s grandfather. For a time, Raul limited his drinking and showed some hope of becoming a decent father. But then Felipe started to have issues. He grew distant and didn’t speak. He would have epic tantrums that left the young couple feeling exhausted and bitter, at the situation, at the life, at each other.

The trips to the specialists became more frequent. Tara began to take more time off work for Felipe’s visits. This was a financial double-whammy. Tara was losing hours of pay to bring Felipe to specialists they already couldn’t afford.

Raul began drinking again, eventually losing his job after showing up inebriated one too many times. The couple then lost their home. Worse yet, Tara’s sister, Eve, her one well of support, had to move to Texas with her husband who’d just been re-stationed by the military.

Tara spent many nights thinking about how she’d leave Raul, and when. She’d run over the logistics in her head a thousand times. Where to put the note, what friend of hers they’d stay with for the first few nights, whether to leave her tiny engagement ring on the table or not. But she didn’t leave Raul. With no money and a child with special needs, and with her sister being thousands of miles away, a drunken partner was better than none at all.

Without a place to live and with no other good options, Tara, Raul and Felipe packed up and moved to Brazil to live with Raul’s mother and grandmother. (They sold almost everything they had to afford the plane tickets, keeping just some clothes and toiletries.)

Brazil wasn’t so bad. Raul got a job at a local school, and his drinking seemed tempered by the presence of his mother and grandmother. Felipe was enrolled at a pre-school that could support children with autism in a half-way decent manner. Though they mostly communicated in smiles and nods, Tara got along well with Raul’s mother and grandmother, finding in them a maternal connection she’d never experienced before. Soon, Tara had the couple’s second child, Ana.

It was in Brazil that the anti-vaccine spark first went off in Tara’s head. During Ana’s visit to the doctor to get vaccinations, the doctor posed a question that you’d rarely hear from an American doctor.

“Are you sure you want the vaccinations?” he asked Tara, speaking English in a thick Portuguese accent.

Tara was taken aback. “Of course,” she said, “What, do some people not get them?” Heretofore, she had never even thought to ask the question.

“Yes,” the doctor said, “Some mothers choose not to get vaccinations.” He explained the common reasons why, which intrigued Tara, given her son, Felipe, and the claimed link to autism. The doctor didn’t seem to actually believe the theories, but he said his patients deserved to be able make an informed decision.

What the doctor said gave Tara some pause and she told him she’d wait a day or two to think about the vaccination. The doctor put his needle away and said he’d see her some other day.

Tara had never before questioned why Felipe was born with autism and, frankly, she didn’t think the answer was all that important. But if autism was man-made, if it was in fact some pharmaceutical company’s fault, something they should have warned her about, she wanted to know.

She went online. In almost no time she’d happened upon Deb Markowitz’s anti-vaccine website.

Ana never got vaccinated, and neither did her new baby brother, Thomas. Tara grew into an anti-vaccine true believer, connecting with other parents of autistic children and posting frequently on the forums of Deb’s website. She calls these posts her “rants.” It was like the vestiges of her Scotch-Irish heritage, long dormant, had begun to burn bright. Tara was a forceful writer, and no doubt a fighter.

Eventually Tara and Deb began emailing each other directly. Deb was impressed with Tara’s disdain for the pharmaceutical companies, and occasionally posted Tara’s emails prominently on her anti-vaxxer website.

By 2009, Deb was becoming an anti-vaccine media empire. She needed some help, someone who could regularly post and edit content for her website. She gave the American lady in Brazil a job offer.

Tara was flattered but didn’t want to uproot her family from Brazil. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to afford New York City. No matter, said Deb, Tara could work remotely.

And that’s likely how their relationship would’ve stayed — confined to the cloud — if Raul hadn’t got arrested. Life back at home wasn’t all pluses. It was like yin and yang, coming back home to Brazil. While Raul’s home life had improved, his social life had darkened. He started hanging out with old friends and cousins who had spent their whole life in the favela, growing up to become low-level drug dealers.

Raul, made vulnerable by years of just scraping by, easily succumbed to the allure of making some side cash by dealing cocaine and other narcotics. One summer night in 2010, he and several of his friends were arrested for drug dealing and thrown in jail. His plea deal called for a 3 year sentence.

Tara remembers the night he plead guilty. As she tells it, she went down to the local beach at sunset and just stared off into the distance, a bit like a Lifetime movie. She could wait it out, wait three long years for a man who use to beat her, who she wasn’t sure she loved. In the meantime, she’d be in a country that wasn’t hers, raising three children with her imprisoned husband’s family. Or she could move back to the states, separating her children from their father for good. It wasn’t a decision she took lightly.

She confided in Deb, who kept in frequent contact with Tara during these times. Having lost her own husband, Deb could speak to the pain and advised how difficult it was to raise a child without a father. But she also spoke to the relief Tara might feel if she separated herself from Raul and made a clean break. In one email, she told Tara that poison is all around — sometimes it’s injected into our bodies, sometimes it comes in the form of another human being. What was Raul to her — a loving husband or a poison?

Two months after Raul’s plea deal, Tara packed up the children and boarded a plane to New York City. She arrived on Deb’s doorstep that night, 3 suitcases in hand and 3 children at her side.

The sisterhood had begun.

The Anti-Vaxxer Sisterhood — Part 2 was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

A Crack in the Window

№ 8 in a series of stories on their way to a novel.

A Rainforest Monday ©2011 Ronald C. Flores-Gunkle

“He doesn’t care,” Blanca said aloud. She pretended she was talking to little María Amalia, whose big black eyes stared at her through the bars of her crib, but even when the crib was empty, after the Nanny carried the girl off to her playroom — out of sight, out of mind, Blanca spoke to it.

“He doesn’t,” she repeated. She repeated nearly everything she said, for emphasis or to fill the void. Alfonso said that it was because she used to teach toddlers, that schoolteachers always repeat things at least twice so their little charges would be able to bend their minds around the unfamiliar words. “Like talking to pets,” he said.

She tried to stop doing it because it annoyed him, but stopping would be like yanking out flowers instead of weeds. She prayed to the Virgin to help her stop, but as usual, the Virgin was mute. “Anyway, mother repeats everything and no one tells her to stop. No one tells her. Anyway, let him be annoyed.”

She adjusted the new wave in her hair in the kitchen mirror. “Thank God I had time to go to the Beauty, nena, with the girls coming over later. Thank God for small miracles.” She polished the already gleaming surface of her Italian espresso machine, pouting at her reflection. She reached for her Hermes handbag, extracted lipstick and retouched her already perfectly painted lips.

“Look, nena, look at that ugly crack in the window. Look at that crack, isn’t it ugly! I’m going to have to call someone myself, and get it fixed. I’ll call someone. Your papa won’t do it. He doesn’t care. He says he has no time, but how much time can a supermarket take? It’s not as if there weren’t all those boys running around shuffling cans and bags around. He has time, alright, but it just isn’t time for us. That crack will be the death of me. Imagine Mia and Flora sitting right over there at the table and seeing that crack, right next to my new kitchen curtains. I have to seat them with their backs to it, but they will notice. They won’t say anything, of course, but they will notice and they will talk about it for weeks. They will talk about it for weeks, how our house is falling apart. They have perfect houses and perfect husbands and I have a house falling apart and your papa, who doesn’t care.”

Blanca filled a glass with ice from the door of the refrigerator, surveyed the liquor in the cupboard and chose a squat bottle of cognac. She poured a hefty shot into the glass and topped it off with cola. “Must be 5:00 p.m. somewhere in the world,” she thought, putting the bottle away.

The baby plopped down and let out a soft cry. “Are you pipi, María Amalia. Are you pipi or caca? Where is Nanny? Can you wait for Nanny?” The baby reached up.

“Por favor, amorcita, Nanny will be here any minute and she will change you and give you your bath. Can’t you wait a few more minutes? You know I can’t bear smelling your awful poo. I can’t bear it. You’re supposed to smell of baby powder, not caca. I really can’t bear it. Can’t you wait, dear?” The baby threw herself back and started crying in earnest, as the kitchen door opened and Doña Fernando, the Dominican nanny, strode in, ignored Blanca, scooped up the child and carried her off.

“I don’t trust that woman,” Blanca thought. “I’m sure she tells Dona Amalia everything. About the house falling apart. About her precious Alfonso not sleeping with me. She cleaned enough of his shit when he was a baby. The woman should retire. I never should have let them foist her on us. They have money, but no class.”

Not like her, she mused. Not much money but plenty of class. Everyone at the U.P. said so. When she entered a classroom, everyone knew something special was happening. The way she dressed. The way she always had the highest heels, the nicest shoes. The way she held herself, upright, elegant, precise. The way she pronounced every syllable, every vowel. She never dropped a “d” or said “Usté” instead of “Usted.” She always used the formal form of address, even to her friends. It was an affectation, of course, but she decided that the informal “tu” was vulgar and the last thing she wanted to be was vulgar.

At first they tried to make fun of her, especially the caserío types. They had no ambitions, no goals but to get a government job, an assistant to an assistant at the Autoridad, the state-run electric utility or Acueductos, the water and sewer company. Sure they made ten times what other government workers made, but they were funcionarios, digits in a dead-end sinecure. She had higher aspirations. She was gente. She married money. Money that was sitting in her humanities class. Miguel Alfonso Villanueva Mendoza. A little electric current had traveled from her heart to her thighs every time Dr. Almodóvar had called the roll.

He was, as the gringa exchange students said, a hunk. Hot. Curley dark hair, movie star features. Slim, muscular. She admired the way his biceps pushed out the short sleeves of the shirt that he never tucked it in. And that smile that never seemed to leave his face. Gleaming white teeth… and his father was Don Miguel, hugely rich, owner of an entire mountain in Cayey — his house could be in Architectural Digest.

The teasing stopped after she made friends with Salvi, the caserío boy who sat next to her in class. Her bookends, she called them: Alfonso — he preferred to be called Alfonso — on one side and Salvi on the other. She called them bookends but they were really books. Both men seem to absorb everything they read and everything the prof said. Soaked everything up like those paper towels in the commercials, while she had to read and re-read and listen and question until even then she forgot half of what she thought she knew.

She knew one thing, for certain. Both boys were handsome. She would shove her pupitre slightly back so she could look them over during the lecture. The bright light from the wall of windows behind Alfonso made it hard to see him clearly. It added a magical quality to him — besides his signature tight plaid shirt and snug fitting trousers, and that package in his pants, a halo formed around his head, making his hair sparkle but obscuring his face. She suspected that he would look at her when she was not surveying him, but because of the sunlight, she couldn’t be sure.

Salvi, on her right, might just as well have been sitting in a spotlight. She admired his perfect complexion, thinking why is it that some men have such flawless skin while women need makeup — the gringas called it ‘foundation” — to smooth theirs out. Blanca wouldn’t be seen dead without makeup and bright red lipstick.

Salvi’s hair was almost the exact same color as Alfonso’s, but it was straight and he wore it slightly long. She assumed it was the style in the projects where she knew he lived. Her friends warned: “He’s trouble,” they’d said, meaning poor, low class. She had no intention of getting mixed up with someone like him. The purpose of life was to aspire to greater things and Alfonso was the greatest she could imagine.

But Salvi couldn’t be very poor. He wore Air Jordans and a decent gold chain over a tight black t-shirt. She had no idea what his baggy black shorts concealed, but the way he walked and held himself contrasted with the aristocratic Alfonso. He didn’t hide his interest in her, often looking straight at her — sometimes she thought he could look straight through her — until she blushed and had to look away. He always had something to say, punctuated with profanity. He was cool, but she had to keep him off her radar.

Until that day they bonded in the student center. Salvi spotted her, pulled out a chair beside her and plopped down to devour his lunch. Alfonso sidled up carrying his tray and asked permission to join them — a true gentleman, Blanca thought. There she was with her bookends, hoping her makeup was perfect and her hair — oh why didn’t she go for a recomb this morning — looked good. She wished she hadn’t made the rare decision to wear slacks and flats. She tugged at her blouse to reveal a little more cleavage.

*

Blanca rode in the front of Alfonso’s sports car while Salvi straddled the back seat, the wind doing wild things to his hair. She hesitated before accepting their crazy invitation to cut class and explore a special spot Salvi knew of in the rain forest. She could hear herself explaining to her mother: “We were just college students having fun — and I was never alone with one of them. You told me never to be seen alone with a man and I was not. We were never alone.” Her mother didn’t seem too convinced, but Blanca didn’t care. She had to keep her goal in sight.

The road through the rainforest had barely enough room for two cars to pass, but people rarely visited this side of the mountain, and never early on a Monday afternoon, so there was no traffic. Following Salvi’s directions, Alfonso parked in a small clearing next to a narrow concrete bridge. The jungle growth had nearly covered the trailhead, but Salvi found it in a moment. Blanca looked at it askance. It was steep, rocky but climbable.

“Consider this a biology field trip. Think about this,” Alfonso said, “El Yunque is here because our Spanish ruler, King Alfonso, had the good sense to set this land aside as a preserve. Before them, the Taínos worshipped it as the home of the god Huracán. We are climbing in the footsteps of great caciques, conquistadores and kings to sit on the throne of Yuquiyú.”

Salvi chimed in. “And before the Taínos were the coquis and after the Spaniards annililated the Taínos were the African slaves, plucked from their huts on the dark continent to serve the fucking conquistadores, plant their crops, and work their mines. They called this mountain Furidí, which sounds to me like they were justifiably furious. But they were poets not fighters and Furidí means ‘mountain in white clouds’ in their language.”

Blanca looked at both boys in wonder. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“We read a lot,” they said nearly in unison and laughed.

They started up the trail, Salvi ahead, Blanca in the middle and Alfonso behind, ready to help her if she slipped.

“And we also have to thank the americanos for this forest preserve,” Salvi shouted back. “Your Spanish king set the land aside all right — but as his private property. He didn’t want his greedy countrymen stealing his timber to build their haciendas. He wanted it for the ‘crown,’ so he could sell it for the highest price. The americanos made it a National Forest, a public park. Then they went and cleared nearly every inch of the rest of the island. First it was sugarcane and now it is Levittown.”

The trail widened and evened out as it followed a noisy stream for a few hundred yards. Alfonso moved to the front. “So the gringo invaders are to be thanked for saving El Yunque and then bombing Culebra and Vieques?”

“Así es,” Salvi said. “And don’t forget Utuado. They — or their minions — bombed Utuado, too. Had to wipe out a half dozen nationalist cucarachas before they infected the whole colony. American citizens bombing American citizens. Another moment in history to be proud of.”

“Is any of this true?” Blanca asked.

“All of it. None of it. History is written by the survivors. If there were such a thing, what do you think a history of Puerto Rico would have been if it had been written by Taínos?”

“Very short,” Salvi said. “Genocide didn’t take long.”

“I’ve never met a Taíno,” Blanca said.

“My point, exactly.” Salvi said.

They came to a steep rock climb. Salvi once again took the lead and Alfonso gallantly helped Blanca when she conveniently slipped. The group was mute at the sight of a sliver of a spectacular waterfall, its steady roar and cool wind rushing through tree ferns and Sierra palms to greet them. They ran the last ten yards and gathered around a pool of crystal clear water that stretched back to the unseen bottom of the waterfall, nestled in a long narrow canyon carved from the rock.

As if on cue, they sat, pulled off their shoes and dipped their feet into the cold water. Blanca reached out and held the hands of the boys on either side of her. They sat in silence until Alfonso spoke.

“We have so much beauty on this island and so much ugliness. We have the beauty of nature and of our race and the ugliness of half a millennium of colonial subjugation. The slaves freed themselves of their yoke and their ultimate descendent, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, tried to free us all. But we smothered pride at La Princesa prison and mortgaged freedom for MacDonald’s milkshakes.”

“And don’t forget the fucking coquís,” Salvi said, getting on his feet and taking off his shirt. His friends watched him carefully. He was perfectly proportioned, his chest hairless, light bronze skin shimmered off his six-pack gleaming in the sunlight. Blanca caught her breath.

“Coquís?”

Yes, Señorita Blanca, the coquís. No one has written the history of our tiny tree frogs and they were here before any of the invading hordes of Caribs, Arawaks, Taínos, Spaniards, Africans or MacDonalds. I will write it. I will be the first Puerto Rican amphibiologist specializing in coquís. I will solve the mystery of their origin, their social order, their sex lives, their suicidal tendencies, etc. etc. etc. But in the meantime, I am going to swim.” He dropped his shorts, waded nude into the pond, and screamed. “Fucking cold!”

“Válgame, Diós,” Blanca said, pretending to avert her eyes. Alfonso contemplated his classmate, took Blanca’s hand and helped her stand up. “Do you want to go in? He asked.

“But I have no suit,” she said.

“You have a birthday suit,” Salvi yelled.

‘Blanca is a lady and she is not going to go in if she does not want to. There is such a thing as modesty,” Alfonso said.

“She’s a woman and she doesn’t have anything our sisters don’t have. Let her be free. I don’t think she’s a prude. I won’t look with lust. I have five sisters, I’m immune.“

Blanca blushed.

“Do you mind if I go in?’ Alfonso asked.

“Do I mind?,” Blanca thought. “This is an answered prayer!” She shook her head. In an instant Alfonso had shed his clothing and stood in the sunlight, contemplating the cold water as Blanca and Salvi contemplated him. He was a magnificent specimen, Michelangelo would have been dismayed if he had seen him, knowing that Alfonso would have been a better model for his David — and he was better endowed than the famous statue. He screamed as he hit the cold water and Salvi screamed in imitation, both of them laughing. Salvi playfully attacked him; they played like kids in the water splashing each other, knocking each other down. They decided to explore the channel leading to the foot of the falls, their slender bodies radiating light as they disappeared into the chasm.

Blanca stretched out on the flat rock. The sun was now much warmer, sweat beaded on her breasts and ran down into her bra. She pulled off her top. She was no prude but she wasn’t about to let Alfonso know that. A women sunning in a bra is no different than one in a two-piece bathing suit, she reasoned, weighing the effect on her boys of seeing her like that when they returned. She would not take off her slacks, she decided. Showing panties would be too brazen. Anyway, her breasts were her best asset. The breeze from the falls cooled her. If the boys were still yelling, she could not hear them above its steady roar.

When she awoke the boys were sitting near her, dressed and ready to go. White clouds coasted across the mountain, obscuring the sun. They were no longer playful or talkative; they were uncharacteristically serious: tired, she assumed. The trip down the trail and back to San Juan was quiet. She sat in the back, giving Salvi a turn next to Alfonso. From time to time Alfonso stole glances at her through the visor mirror. She smiled back. She knew she had him.

*

Blanca placed the cognac bottle, a clean crystal tumbler, a bowl of ice and several cans of Coke on a tray and headed for the sunroom. She paused between the double stairs that mimicked in more modest scale their majestic model in the Ponce Museum of Art. Her eyes scanned the paintings that lined the wall high above the staircases behind the hall that led to the east and west wings of the house. She thought she heard what could have been the baby’s laughter and the Nanny rummaging about in the nursery, but she couldn’t be sure. She also didn’t care.

The sunroom was a welcome sight. Floor to ceiling windows encased it. Except for the plants, everything was white: white walls, white furniture, white marble floor, white curtains that diffused the sunlight.

The air conditioning hummed almost imperceptibly. Vague green shadows from the gardens did a slow dance behind the soft undulating fabric. Blanca loved it, even if her mother-in-law insisted on Valbuena as the decorator. Blanca was proud that she was able to stop her sister-in-law Victoria from tossing in her horrid floral cushions.

A few flawless ferns and perfect palms gave just the right feeling. The plants were her own contribution to the decor, of course. She gloried in injecting her own personality into the Villanueva’s fancy world. OK, so the first ferns died and the palms turned a sallow shade of yellow. The silk and plastic replacements were perfect, and no one had to water them. She cuddled her second drink of the morning between her trembling hands.

“Perfect,” she thought. “A perfect room. A perfect house. A perfect car. Even the pool was perfect. Why couldn’t people be perfect? She thought Alfonso was perfect the day she began pursuing him in that classroom at the university. They had perfect times together, she and Alfonso and Salvi. In that first year, before the wedding, we were inseparable. Salvi made us laugh. Salvi intoxicated us, not only with rum — he insisted on our drinking Puerto Rican rum, that we were traitors to our race if we drank anything else. After Salvi was gone, Alfonso drank Scotch, single malt. He rated bars on the quality of the whiskey they had on their shelves and kept in special cabinets for him.

“And now I drink this,” she thought holding up her empty glass. Her hands trembled less. She placed some ice into her glass with silver tongs, poured Courvoisier into it, splashed in some Coke and drank.

“People aren’t perfect, of course. If they were perfect, they wouldn’t have to eat or drink and if they didn’t eat or drink, they wouldn’t need bathrooms. Well, they would need bathrooms to bathe… or would they? If they were perfect there would be no B.O. Santo Cristo, I must be losing my mind. Heaven must be like that, perfect houses with no kitchens and no bathrooms. No plumbing, no sewers. Perfect windows and perfect people with no cracks.”

It had been a long time since she thought about Salvi, crazy Salvi. He and Alfonso had been such close friends, so different but so alike. It is all for the best that he was no longer around. It wasn’t good for them to be seen together. What would people think? Thank God he only saw him on Social Fridays and never brought him into their home — or God forgive — into Don Miguel’s or Victoria’s. I thank the Virgin and San Alejo for that.

She liked that Alfonso kept Salvi a secret and included her in the confidence. Who wanted people to know her husband was hanging out with a hood? Even a hood as witty, gritty and — she had to admit it — as sexy. She refreshed her drink. “I’ll have just one more, a daycap.”

Alfonso found her asleep on the white divan, her lacy white bra visible through the thin material of her blouse. It reminded him of that day in El Verde just three years before. She was a vision, asleep in front of that infernal waterfalls, immune to the drama that transpired in the canyon pool. She was like a fairy queen, who would wake up and wave her magic wand to make him a man.

Of course, Salvi had tried to seduce him. He half expected it, half desired it. He made it seem natural, beautiful, like a movie romance. An idyllic setting, water crashing behind them, cool waters rushing below, only a sliver of blue sky as a witness. A kiss and a promise. A trick and a trap.

“A mouth has no sex,” Salvi said. “Mine is a masterpiece. Just close your eyes and think about Blanca.”

Alfonso looked at her again. “Blanca and Salvi, my Ying and Yang, the two poles of my soul; one masculine and mad, dark and dangerous; the other feminine and fearful, light and loving. Salvi sucked me dry.”

Blanca stirred. “Oh, you’re home, amor. I was just dreaming about… never mind. Remember that terrible crack in the kitchen window? I hope you remember to get it fixed. It is such an embarrassment. You know, the crack in the window? I do think the whole place is falling apart. A house needs to be maintained. A house that is neglected can simply fall apart. It’s called atrophy or algeny or something like that. I read about it in Imagen…or was it in Buena Vida? Did you know that they don’t sell Cosmopolitan in Spanish any more. Not at Walgreen’s or at CVS, anyway. We can’t have cracks. A house that is neglected will simply fall apart,” she said.

###

Note: This is one of a series of stories about my fictional character Kenneth Houser and the people he knows, loves or kills. Each story focuses on one character and (hopefully) eventually, they will all come together to form a single narrative. 1. Angels and Monsters (Introduces Kenneth, Salvi and Tito). 2. Graves and Graven Images (Kenneth’s Story; Introduces Victoria.) 3. Mineral Memories ( How Kenneth and Victoria Meet; Introduces Alfonso.) 4. Knowledge and Respect (Introduces Don Miguel, Victoria’s Father.) 5. Jesús, María y José (Alfonso and Kenneth bond) 6. Remember the Sabbath (Alfonso and Salvi’s Story) 7. Bearing False Witness (Renza, Kenneth and Tito interact) 8. A Crack in the Window (Blanca’s story; how she met Alfonso and Salvi)

Links will be added as stories are posted: More to come!

Please comment in private message or public: I appreciate feedback to improve this serial fiction as it (hopefully) develops into a novel.

A Crack in the Window was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

Fundamentals of Story Structure

(a summary of everything I have learned during the first 3 years of learning to write fiction)

Story Structure

Story is made out of series of events. The sequence of all the events is called a Plot.

Event is a meaningful change in character’s life, the thing that happens during a story that transforms the world from one state into another.

During a story, the main character(protagonist) goes through a series of events, each of them taking him closer to, or farther away from his Goal.

This series of events culminates in Climax — the major, most important event of a story, the moment when protagonist achieves his goal(or, less often, fails to achieve it).

Climax is what the story is about:

Frodo drops the ring into the Mount Doom

Luke destroys the Death Star

Neo defeats the Agent Smith

Story is divided into 3 Acts.

The first act is about protagonist’s normal, regular life being disrupted by some event. This event is called Inciting Incident(IInc).

IInc is the main reason the story has happened, the thing that kicks off the series of events that lead to climax.

IInc gives protagonist a challenge, creares a Goal — the main value for the character, the thing he will be trying to achieve for the rest of the story. Usually, it is the result of a problem created by antagonist.

Gandalf gives Frodo the Ring he will have to drop into Mount Doom

Luke hears the message from Princess Leia about the plans he will have to use to destroy the Death Star

Neo meets Morpheus, who will tell him about the Matrix, which he will have to destroy to liberate humanity

The first act culminates in the First Turning Point (TP1).

TP1 is the moment when hero decides to go on adventure. Makes a conscious decision to engage with a story, and begins striving to achieve his goal.

Frodo leaves the Shire

Neo takes the red pill

Second act is about the series of escalating events(successes and failures) that happen as protagonist struggles to achieve his goal.

Hero pursues his goal, and overcomes the obstacles set by antagonist. From his victories and mistakes he learns lessons about the world, and gains powers.

As hero moves further, the stakes rise, his commitment to the goal increases, he has to apply more effort and take bigger and bigger risks to move forward.

In the middle of a second act, protagonist goes through the Mid Point (MP) — the point of no return. He swims past the middle of the river, and now turning back is harder than reaching the other shore.

Stakes continue to escalate, until he has to risk everytning in his biggest attempt to win. He engages in final battle against the antagonist, and puts everything on the line.

Second act culminates in the Second Turning Point (TP2) — the moment when hero’s biggest attempt fails, when all is lost, the goal is no longer attainable, when antagonist seems to win and the protagonist is defeated.

The third act is about the final battle and it’s outcome.

Defeated, half-dead hero learns his biggest lesson from his worst failure.

This is usually when the biggest twist happens. Hero sees the truth. Comes up with a brilliant creative solution, understands his mistake, finds the mega weapon, realizes who was the murderer all along, etc. This is what will enable him to turn lose into win.

Harry has a basilisk fang

Neo sees the Matrix code

Unnamed narrator holds a gun

Armed with this knowledge he gathers all of his strength, and takes the final effort to turn things around, to win the battle.

Hero defeats the antagonist and finally achieves his goal.

Story Essence

What is a story? Why is it told? What lies at it’s core?

When the world undergoes change from one state to another we call this process an “Event”.

The point of storytelling is to relay an experience of an event. People listen to stories to gain an experience of a (big and important) event, understand it’s reasons, and learn from it.

Story is a description of an Event (change of value) and the underlying reasons of that change.

Climax

Story consists of series of smaller events, leading up to and culminating at Climax — the big and important event, the reason for telling a story. Climax is the moment such Event happens.

Climax is the key to the story.

When you are writing a story, climax is the biggest thing you are looking for, and the most challenging thing to figure out. Once you know the climax — you have your story, because all of the key story elemnets are connected to it.

Protagonist

We experience the story through the eyes of protagonist, he is our avatar into the story world.

Climax is a direct result of a deliberate action by protagonist. Protagonist is a person who had a goal and made a chose to pursue it. Climax is the moment when protagonist achieves(or fails to achieve) his goal.

As he struggles to pursue his goal, he gains experience. He understands the way the world works and the reasons for that. He learns lessons, and we learn these lessons through him.

Controlling Idea

Controlling Idea (CI) is the underlying reason for the change that happens, the underlying nature of the world we are trying to explain through our story. It is the answer to why the event has happened.

CI is an abstract idea, that is being expressed through concrete events and actions.

To put it simply — it is a “moral”, a philosophy that is being expressed. For example, children’s fables are simple metaphors for expressing simple ideas(“lying is bad”, “be nice”, etc).

CI is a “lesson” that protagonist learns about the nature of the world that enables him to accomplish his goal.

Usually, CI is expressed as a flaw that prevents protagonist from achieving his goal, and it is a “lesson” he learns during a story.

Relationships between story elements

So when you are writing a story, climax is the key element you are looking for. When you know the climax — you have a story, and until you know it — you don’t.

All the other elements of a story are connected to climax, they add up to it, and are defined in relation to it. If you know the climax — you know all of the crucial elements. Here’s how elements relate to climax and to each other:

Climax is a moment where the story’s main Event happens, that makes it the most crucial scene. Story is written about the Event, thus Story = Event = Climax.

Climax is a moment when the protagonist achieves his Goal. That means that if you know the climax — you know the protagonist’s goal, and vice versa. Climax = Goal.

Inciting Incident (IInc) is, by definition, the moment when the character acquires his goal. Usually, it is a problem created by the antagonist, that character will struggle to solve during the whole story, and will finally solve by defeating antagonist at climax. That means that if you know IInc = you know the goal, and you know the goal = you know the climax.

And when you know IInc, goal, and a climax — it is easy to figure out everything else:

At Turning Point 1 (TP1) the hero makes a decision to pursue the goal he acquired at IInc and starts on his journey.

At Mid Point hero has a better chance of achieving his goal than going back to the way things were before.

And at TP2 hero seems to fail and lose his goal, it is simply the reverse of what happens at climax.

Now antagonist is a character who’s function is to prevent hero from achieving his goal by throwing obstacles on his way.

Character’s friend/sidekick is a character who’s function is to help hero to achieve his goal(and to be a source of information — talk to the hero to provide exposition, explain to us what’s going on, render his thoughts, etc.)

Love interest is an extra motivation for a hero to achieve his goal, a source of extra complications/conflict, and a reward he gets for winning.

Hero’s internal Flaw is a mistake he makes, an internal quality that prevents him from achieving his goal, and creates internal conflict.

The Controlling Idea (the “moral” of a story) is a lesson hero learns by overcoming his internal flaw, the lesson that enables him to defeat the antagonist and achieve his goal.

That way, as you can see, all elements are connected through the goal to the story’s climax. Any can be discovered if you know the climax, and when you know only some of the elements but not all — you can discover climax by following these connections.

Story Writing Process

Now that I’ve talked about story structure, story essence, and connection between climax and other story elements — I will talk about story writing process.

Story elements

There are 4 crucial elements you need to know about your story:

Setting — the world of a story.

Characters — protagonist, antagonist, others.

Event — what happens, event the story is about.

Contrilling Idea (CI) — the “moral” of a story, philosophy you want to express.

Together they form a High Concept (HC) — the main story idea, original and interesting concelt you can express in a few words.

When you know what these elements are — you can find the key structural points (IInc, TP1, MP, TP2, Climax) of a story, and develop a Plot.

That will give you a pretty clear and straightforward idea of what your 3 Acts are about. Once you know that — you can break the acts into scenes , and create Outline. And then use that outline(list of scenes) to simply expand it into writing.

Process

You find these elements by asking and answering questions. In practice any of the elements can be an initial idea/inspiration, the process is chaotic, it involves jumping back and forth between questions, tweaking, randomness, serendipity, imagination, etc, but more on that later. The following is an idealized, orderly version of a process.

Character in a situation

It makes sense to begin by finding an interesting setting, and once you know where your story takes place it is easier to find an interesting character.

I also call it “SciFi Premise”, because SciFi/Fantasy tend to revolve around worldbuilding and unusual characters in interesting situations.

Problem

Once you know the setting and characters, your biggest goal is to find your climax.

It is difficult to come up with climax on it’s own, but as I’ve said, all elements in story are connected, and you can unrawel all of them by starting with one.

In my experience, the easiest one to begin with is IInc, or, in other words a problem.

Because once you have your character in a setting, you can answer the question “What can go wrong?”

Usually this problem is caused by the antagonist, so if you can figure out who that is it may help you to find the problem.

Goal

Once you have your problem — you have your IInc, you know where your story has started.

And obviously, you immediately know that the character’s goal is to solve this problem.

So even if you don’t have a very idea of your climax — you know that your character will solve this problem at climax.

TP1, MP, TP2

Next — you can find TP1 — it is simply the point when character decides to achieve his goal.

Once you know that, you can imagine what difficulties may arise, and how things can escalate, and as they escalate more and more — you know your MP, and as they escalate even further — you can figure out the big final attempt at achieving his goal, and how it can go horribly wrong and fail.

Climax

Finally, once you know the TP2 — the lowest poit for the character — you can figure out how he will turn things around and solve it at climax.

Steps

Here’s a convenient list of questions to summarize it:

Setting. What is the world of my story?

Characters. Who are the characters?

Problem (and Goal). What can go wrong? What problem will my character need to solve?

Engage. How does the character start pursuing his goal?

Escalate. How can get more difficult? What obstacles will he face?

Lose. What is his final, biggest, highest-stakes attempt, and how can it fail?

Turn How can I turn lose into win? How does character solve the problem?

Explore

Once you know the things you are looking for, the main steps you need to take — you search for them by asking questions, thinking, writing.

Usually it is hard to write the story completely top-down(start from outline, find key points, and break things down until you have individual scenes), and it is hard to do it bottom-up(just sitting down, writing, and going wherever it takes you). So I think that the best way is to combine both options and jump back and forth. You think about the outline, you ask questions, you sit down to write, then go back to correcting outline.

If you find yourself unable to answer some of the questions, I suggest to write a list of 5possible options, not the best ones, just somethig that could barely fit, and then pick the one you like the most.

Another useful idea at this point is to just set yourself a goal to write a certain number of words(250 or 500 works well). When you are doing that, you should not think about the outline ormstory structure or theory, just type words, that will help you to find the answers and new ideas.

Resources

I have developed a story template based on these ideas — a tool that allows you to organize all of this information, and takes you through the process of writing a story using this method. You can read more about using it to write stories here.

To go deeper into this subject and learn more, I highly recommend the book Story by Robert McKee, this incredible lecture on screenwriting by Michael Hauge, and a series of lectures by Brandon Sanderson.

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Fundamentals of Story Structure was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Check out more of my posts at https://medium.com/@rayalez

[rayalez]

Home Alone Men IV

(Click here for Home Alone Men I. Click here for Home Alone Men II. Here for Home Alone Men III.)

Tom retreated into the kitchen, sipping his berry wine and staring at the clock on the microwave as it played chicken with him. The wind grew heavier, disdainfully whipping rain at his windows and flailing about the giant limbs of the oaks like ragdolls. Loud thumps started to echo through the house — branches falling onto the roof.

At 5:37 Tom made his supper — three plain slices of toast. He brought the toast to the living room and flipped on the TV, putting his feet up on the coffee table. The TV was playing the same thing it always was — the Safety Message. He knew it by heart. All the men did. Tom wondered if the women did too. Occasionally, the Safety Message would be interrupted by a News Bulletin. Those were always exciting times. But today, Tom would get nothing but the Safety Message — images of smiling men and their All-American sons remaining obediently indoors, dawning their standard-issued gas masks as they greet the well-armed men dropping off the weekly Provisions Boxes; women and their jubilant daughters well cared for in pristine, undisclosed camps, not a sorrow in the world. At the end of the message, it cut away to a black screen with the words Reunification in Due Time fading into the background.

By 6:08 Tom was deep into a game of odd-ball and realizing he’d had a bit too much berry wine. He wouldn’t be setting any records tonight. He went to the kitchen and poured what remained in his cup down the drain. He glanced out the window above the sink and saw a glimpse of a grayish brown object moving quickly through the ferns and over the wooded hill in the back. It was too rainy and the object was too quick for Tom to know exactly what it was, but he figured it was a deer. Odd, however, that a deer would be out in such a storm. Poor thing must be lost and alone, he thought to himself.

At 7:00 the house lost power so Tom got out his lanterns and set them around the house. The neighborhood had been losing power more frequently as of late, so it wasn’t a surprise that it happened again during a violent storm. In a way, Tom prided himself on his lanterns — their size and the number of them. He’d found them on the day of the Official Announcement. On his drive home from the firearms store he’d avoided the major highways, instead traversing a mishmash of rural county highways he knew most people wouldn’t think to take. He had been driving by a clear lake with a small farm on the other side of it when he noticed a car overturned on its side in a small ditch. He pulled over and inspected the car, finding no one inside. He yelled — Is anybody out there? — wondering if the driver or a passenger might be ambling around the nearby farm fields or forests, perhaps dazed and severely injured. He got no reply. He noticed the trunk was ajar, the corner of a small moving box jutting out of it. Tom pried the trunk and then the box open. Inside he found the lanterns and a large portable flood light, the kind you see on coast guard boats searching for drug traffickers at midnight on the high seas. There was also a small children’s flashlight made for a girl. It didn’t have batteries but Tom thought that probably didn’t matter, maybe it was never intended to. Its purpose wasn’t utilitarian — its purpose was to make the child who owned it feel secure, feel like a part of her family. He took the flood light and lanterns and piled them onto the passenger seat next to the baby doll. He then carefully laid the child’s flashlight on top of the overturned car and drove away.

The evening grew into full darkness and the storm showed no sign of losing its intensity. Tom felt even more isolated than usual, having not communicated with Ed or Gary or Lonny for the past few hours. He looked out his windows. He saw only black, as if the world had been swept away by a mop dipped in tar. The other men were either sitting in complete darkness or, more likely, were using their candles and lanterns in a part of their house where the glow was hidden from Tom’s sight. Usually at night the men would communicate with flashlights using Morse code. The storm was too fierce for the light of a puny flashlight so Tom pulled out the flood light and set it up in front of his large living room window. At times he’d done this before, though its brightness pissed the hell out of his neighbors.

He aimed the light at Gary and Lonny’s houses.

Hello?

You there, friend?

Hello?

Hello?

Tom grew bored and started aiming the flood light around the neighborhood. He swept slowly past the mailboxes on his side of the street and then around to the mailboxes on the other side of the street. He studied the rooflines of Gary’s and Lonny’s places. He shined a light at Gary’s garage, thinking perhaps he was in there working on some carpentry project.

Eventually he turned the flood light onto Dan’s house, though this made him feel awkward. Since the day they’d been locked away, he hadn’t communicated with Dan, or even seen him for that matter.

Dan’s drapes were cinched shut. Like always. Tom noticed that a rather large pool of water was collecting on his front lawn, the result of a poorly sloped yard. Tom swept the flood light across Dan’s garage and counted the holes the militia men had patched in the garage door. These were holes chipmunks and small birds use to fly in and out of. After the Announcement, they’d been deemed potential hazards and were quickly boarded up. Losing steam, Tom beamed the light to the side of the garage and saw nothing remarkable — just a bunch of ferns crushed to the ground by the driving rain. Tom switched off the flood light and took a deep sigh.

Had Tom’s beam lingered here a little longer he would’ve seen that the man door on the side of the garage — the one Dan use to slip into whenever he’d pull his car into the driveway after work — was open. But he did not notice this. Instead, irritated and lonely and annoyed, he took a sleeping pill and laid in bed, closing his eyes while thinking of the time he’d won the Bar League Softball Tournament by pelting a homerun in the bottom of the 9th.

It was a very disturbing sound that woke him up.

Home Alone Men IV was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

Fireworks of War

Photo: Hiroyuki Takeda

Jules stared at his right hand until a delicate layer of light purple flames could be seen a few millimetres away from his skin. He then slowly twisted his hand watching the fire turn from purple to blue. Before the flames grew bigger, he closed his fist and finished the exercise — only to repeat it again a few seconds later.

He knew he had to be patience in order not to end up like the other apprentices. They were enthusiastic, yes, but too excited for their own good. The thrill of using magic for the first time was so overwhelming that many of them ended up with severe burns before even leaving the training ground. Jules had seen the scars. It was common for apprentices to have their hands covered in bandages, to disguise the marks of their carelessness.

Jules had never been in a battle, but he had heard those were much worse. Even apprentices who seemed to have a firm control over their powers would lose their concentration and, under the stressful conditions of a life or death struggle, would spontaneously combust before the first enemy spell could hit them. Their final act was always the same: desperate not to take the entire guild with them, they would make a last effort and channel their energy into the sky, disappearing into a light purple firework show.

It didn’t seem to be a bad way to go. There were those who even secretly desired the feeling of an ancient power emerging from their beings and consuming their bodies from within. An enviable death, yes, but not one Jules wished upon himself. Other recruits were happy to be apprentices, to work under a true magician and try basic spells. To Jules, those were just a means to an end. He wanted to become a master.

He had just closed his fist again, extinguishing a flame that was slightly bluer than before, when one of the veterans delivered the message to him.

“The guild leader wants to see you.”

He had been waiting for that moment with fear and excitement ever since he saw the first sparks coming out of his fingertips. Could this be the day he was finally recruited for battle?

Read chapter 1 here: Thin Purple Flames

Fireworks of War was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub

[rayalez]

High Tea

Photo: Hiroyuki Takeda

The room smelled like burnt human flesh, but everything else about it was impeccable. The table was set for high tea, with a variety of scones, cakes and nibbles that Jules thought only the royal family could enjoy. The master poured two cups of earl grey as the young apprentice entered the room.

— Sit.

Jules kneeled down and sat on the white granite floor. The master pointed at the empty chair at the table, barely containing a hint of laughter. Jules got up and took a seat, making an effort not to touch anything.

— Do you know why I called you here?

Jules was startled for a second. He was used to people telling him what to do, not asking him questions.

— Hm… you want me to fight in the next battle… sir?

Before he finished the sentence, just by looking at the master’s face, Jules knew he had given the wrong answer.

— I never meet new recruits before sending them to battle. It’s a waste of a lesson. I’d rather wait and talk to those who come back alive if I do want to talk to them.

Jules stared silently at the cup of tea in front of him, trying not to show signs of disappointment. The master continued.

— It has come to my attention that you have been practising on your spare time. It’s time for you to learn about control. Could you show me what you were doing back there?

A direct order from a superior. Jules was good at obeying those. He repeated the same exercise, extending his hand and letting the flames grow around his hand until they almost touched his skin, then extinguishing them by closing his fist.

— Can you use the same spell to warm your tea?

For the first time, Jules felt at ease to touch something on the table. He held the cup and created a gentle flame around his hand until the tea boiled.

— Good. Now, what about my tea? It’s getting cold.

Jules reached out to grab the cup, but the master stopped him.

— No touching. Do it from where you are sitting.

The distance wasn’t impressive, but it was harder than anything Jules had ever attempted. He extended his hand again and watched as the purple flames increased in size, trying to direct them toward the cup. Before he could reach it, the fire got too close to his skin, and he instantly closed his fist.

— Yes, that’s what I thought. Now, was that control? Or was that fear?

Jules couldn’t bear to look up. He had embarrassed himself in front of the master.

— Answer. Control or fear?

— Fear.

— Good. Now, can you show me control?

Jules extended his hand again. This time, when the flames approached his skin, he kept going. The smell of burnt human flesh became even stronger. He only stopped when he could hear the tea boil.

— And that is the difference between control and fear.

Jules nodded in agreement, holding the napkin against his burnt skin. Blisters were starting to form around his knuckles.

— It will never stop hurting. You will never get used to it. Every time you cast this spell, it will hurt exactly like the first time. Stronger spells will be even more painful. The question is: will you fear them? Or will you stay in control?

He nearly opened his mouth to answer, but the master’s eyes told him this was the kind of question that makes you think, not speak.

— You can keep training this spell on your own. Don’t skip general practice, too. And think about what I just said.

The master took a sip of his boiling tea, then started spreading jam on one of the scones.

— Sir… does this mean I am ready to go to battle?

The master smiled.

— Finish your tea. It’s getting cold.

Read the previous chapters here:

Chapter 1—Thin Purple Flames

Chapter 2—Fireworks of War

High Tea was originally published in Fiction Hub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover more awesome fiction at https://medium.com/fictionhub