dckingsfan wrote:Have you thought about becoming a writer... really.
For what it's worth, I pay my mortgage with storytelling of a sort.
It's one of various hustles I'm always in the middle of. I'm restless. I have um 9 zoom sessions a week right now running storytelling games and teaching art etc.
No I haven't tried to publish. Writing is something I enjoy, but you know me, I eschew rules of grammar. Beat punctuation to death. So while I enjoy the writer's workshop I participate in, so far I enjoy the process. Then too at times I am overtaken by events:
Ha! I had to abandon an Escape from New York zombie apocalypse story where a container ship from China was offloaded with trafficked immigrants infected by a fungus that caused a rage inducing infection. It had hopped from a cordyceps fungus in a poultry plant in Brazil to mammals to humans to destroy a port city in china...
And the story I was writing after that was a Rapture diary, told by a girl living in DC when the Biblical apocalypse hits. I'll probably come back to her when the Pandemic is over, it's just less fun to play with when the world is actually falling down.
Here's a piece of it:
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Alice in the Apocalypse.
I.
BUGS BUG ME
The worst thing about the apocalypse is the damned bugs. Literally. Okay not literally the worst thing about the apocalypse, but the literally damned bugs.
Think about every time you ever swatted a mosquito, every horsefly that buzzed you at a swimming pool, every **** yellow jacket that chased you away from your soda at a picnic, you hate them, right? You shouted or swatted at them, you ran away. You cussed em out probably, right? Well every curse you ever threw at a bug, guess what? It worked. Bugs don’t really have a defense against that sort of thing. The ordinary Bad Will of a normer is enough to blow them away when they die. Poof like a flake of soot. You cuss them: they go direct to Abaddon and join the locust horde.
I mean unless someone blesses them too, you know. That works. But who blesses a bug, right?
The thing is: eternity echoes, you know. Like I could go into the details, but believe me, you don’t want to know. It’s just that everything you do has a sevenfold ripple. Like sevens folded within sevens. All seven dimensions of the Hepteract. Wait, I know you have no idea what I mean. I mean: okay, let me see if I can simplify: basically you are connected to everything that “Is” and “Is Not” in all seven dimensions of possibility. And all it takes is an act or intention to change everything that ever happened will happen or won’t happen. I mean, never mind, it would take too long to explain.
And anyway It will drive you crazy if you think about it. Like you should live intentionally with good spirit. But sometimes you just want to tell a bed bug to die, die, die die die. Die with poison and fire and walking through glass. Believe me. I caught bedbugs from Shauna’s brother’s couch when everyone crashed there last New Years and as far as I’m concerned an eternity of damnation is not enough for those things.
Except, well, now they came back. And they kinda got a grudge about it all.
I woke up this morning and it was dark outside. Nowadays I never know what to think but, stupid me, for a second I had a dream of hope that it was raining. Like **** me for being an idiot, but -- dim light? that rushing sound that drowns out the world? I even slept late for a change, No screaming or thuds and rumbles. I mean, yay! must be rain! Finally! The garden needs it, and maybe i’m abnormal but I always loved rain since I was little. I’m completely in love with it. Grey mist, thunderclouds, a week long monsoon. Bring it to me. Alice is happy.
But no, of course it wasn’t raining. Because nothing is ever allowed to be happy for me.
I got up. I opened the blinds and and aw what the hell, the windows were black with something, so I ran downstairs to open the front door and there they were. The entire screen door was covered with them. Bedbugs. Some the size of watermelons. Some with long bodies thick as pythons, or with horns or stingers or wings or tentacles -- all of them huge with a nasty attitude. All trying to get back in and get in my bed. And that whisper I thought was the rain was their million clicky legs all over the house and screens. And their hisses.
The apocalypse has a lot of “Oh **** That” moments. Every day is a new “Nope. Nope. Nope.” This one sent me back to bed for the Rest of Everything. I went back upstairs, sat down on the bed, and pulled the covers over my head like a fort. That’s it I quit. Done. You win.
But like anything else, Bad Things don’t **** off, uh sorry, ‘go away’ unless someone does something about it. And most of the time nowadays that someone seems to be me.
What I did was this. My dirty laundry, I made a pile. I pulled a handful of hair from every brush I had, which is easy because: curly hair. I rip a pile out every morning, and always seem to wake up with even more. I stuffed sweats and a hoodie with the pile of odd socks and holy t-shirts and granny panties I don't wear. I made another Alice and curled her up in my bed.
I tucked her in. Then I anointed her and the bed with consecrated oil, surrounded the bed with candles, each placed in a saucer of nail polish remover, and piled aerosol cans under the blankets. Then I whispered a prayer to her while wrote it on her little bundled head with eyeliner: שלא יידעו את האמת. “Let them not know the truth”. When I finished the symbols for truth “EMET” she breathed a deep sigh.
I left the laundry golem sleeping. Then grabbed my backpack, threw open the windows and front door. Critters fell inwards with a sound like slush falling off a roof. They started crawling. I paused to let them smell me, then I ran up the stairs, climbed up the attic ladder and out the raccoon hole in the roof.
Then I just walked away, rooftop to rooftop. I mean hey, a row house is good for something. I used to hate our neighbors because everytime they bombed for roaches we would get swarmed. In a row house whatever your neighbors have, you get too. But in this case I hope I did ‘get’ all my neighbors bugs. I could see the fire from my new squat ten blocks away. A rosy glow, a column of smoke rising up. Hopefully every bug in the world being carried away to another world in that pyre. I dunno.
Anyway, so far, knock wood, fingers crossed,
n'shallah, it seems like it worked. I think I fooled the bugs and burned them out of my life. Or afterlife, or whatever all this mess is.
Sigh. Anyway, its late, I’m going to go to sleep. So, you know: Good night. Sleep tight… And you know the rest of that incantation…
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That's a snippet of chapter 1.