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 Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 2:56 pm
Can I offer a challenge?
The challenge is the title - free write on this. smile
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Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 1:48 pm
At ten seconds before sunrise, she lay, dead, on the cold kitchen floor
Nobody knew how she had died. There was no blood to stain the tiles. She had no husband, no children, no family and no friends. She was a woman who did not seem to exist. Only the neighbours knew her, saw her in the second floor windows every once in a while.
"Her house was never decorated," recalled one lady, an old woman in her seventies who passed her days baking cookies and knitting sweaters for her grandchildren. "Not on the outside." New Year's and Hallowe'en and Christmas all passed, but no lights lit the trees on the lawn or the front of the old brick house.
Nobody had seemed to notice it, ever. Children pranced by the ancient house without so much as a glance. Cars drove through the streets but never turned onto her driveway. The postman did his rounds and never, never was there mail on her doorstep.
If it hadn't been for the kids, nobody would even know that she was dead. A trio of rambunctious boys, notorious for their trouble-making, had thrown a ball over the fence to the woman's yard. It had been an accident. They had rung the doorbell seven times before deciding to climb their way over.
The policeman's aunt had seen them. In three minutes the cars, with their blue and red insignias, pulled up. It was the first time anyone had seen a car in front of her house.
They caught the boys easily and knocked authoritatively on the front door. Nobody answered. They grew suspicious - she was never out. They knocked again. There was no answer.
Entering was troublesome, but their findings were more so. A woman, dead, on her kitchen floor. No weapon. No blood. No nothing. The autopsy said she was in perfect health.
Except she was dead.
In all the hustle and bustle, nobody found the diaries. They were battered and dirty, but every page was still bound between the covers. There were four books. A date was scrawled at the top of every page, and a number was written in the bottom right. The numbers went up to three hundred and sixty five.
There were dates, but no entries. Nothing written under any of the numbers, or the months, or the years. All empty - except the last.
On February 28, 1996, a single sentence was scribbled in pencil. It was barely visible, but did not seem to be erased. Instead, it seemed faded, as though it had been written a very long time ago.
He said it will come, it read, he said it will come ten seconds before sunrise.
And then it disappeared.
Wow, I really hate that ending.
But here it is - meeting your challenge. :]
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Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 1:50 pm
biggrin I liked the ending, myself!
Methinkies I should actually write my own bit. Give me a bit. smile
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Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 4:15 pm
Can I write something????
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Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:10 pm
((I accept your challenge!)) Tears fell. A seemingly never ending flow of tears fell from the tender cheeks of their holder. The eyes that held the tears looked out onto the sunset, just seconds away, she guessed at least ten, before the sun would leave her in the darkness.
Empty, lonely, and now cold.
"No one, I don't need anyone to hold me down. I don't need anyone." The comforting words she was whispering to herself became a chant, clinging to the few strings that held down her sanity.
It was so cold, so very cold. Snow was falling, but the girl hardly noticed.
"No one. I can be strong alone." Desperate pleas to her subconscious to forget past images. "Alone... all alone."
Slender fingers, painted a delicate color of red, clutched her skirt. The color rubbed off onto the fabric.
The watched the last ray of sunshine dip beneath the horizon, sucking away the tears and emptiness with it, but leaving behind the cold.
"No one will hold me down anymore." She turned to the person who had stayed silent the entire time, cupping his face, twisted in eternal agony as if he was already burning in the fiery depths of hell, and kissed his long cold lips. She pulled away, her palms covered in a new coat of the color
"I won't let you hold me down." She said, leaning against the corpse, placing his frozen arm lovingly around her shoulders, and together they watched the stars appear in the black sky. ((Its a tad macabre, sorry but the last one made me think death >w>; ))
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Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:52 pm
The household went like clock work. Starting everday at sunrise, when the mechanical c**k crowed and the husband rose to start another laborious day at work, whilst his fat b***h of a wife lay around waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for that one shot at acceptance. Waiting for her husband to leave the house so that every other bloke in the surrounding area could come bounce around her like the piece of filthy meat she was - leaving her dirtied, sweaty and her purse that little bit heavier.
So wrapped up in their own pathetic little world of routine, false smiles and a love so hollow it left no trace on their empty chests, that they didn't stop to think. Think about the trouble they'd caused only a few years before.
Of course not.
No one cares about anyone elses past but their own. Freddy was no different.
And eighteen years is a long time to just sit back and let the cobwebs begin to obscure the darker half of whats been and gone. Enough time to forget.
Freddy hadn't forgotten. Hell, their mistake was all he'd lived.
Their mistake. But not them.
God how he wanted them. To be with them. As a child that wish was all he really had. Holding it securely to his chest and nuzzling it into his dreams in hopes of twisting out the nightmares of abandonned, hollow cells with no light or warmth - replacing them with a happier image. Three stick figures with red crayola smiles and geometric bodies, holding hands as a small blob of a creature - a cat? a dog? - ran motionlessly around a green scribbled yard. A box with four windows and a big red roof. Happy home. Happy lives. Happy dreams.
Of course, reality isn't the fairytale that kids are promised. Life is the cold slap of the truth when you could be quite sated with the lie. Life was hard, and it just got harder and harder until eventually you snapped. Thank God for little distractions. Freddy only had the one.
These two disgusting withered excuses for human beings. He'd dreamt of them so long he hadn't expected what he'd found. Damn near killed him. No crayola smiles or holding hands. Just bitter masks of habitual contenment, living seperate lives under the same roof. No clue, no sign that they had missed him, or even knew that he existed. That hurt him. Tore him down the middle and left him as hollow and as bitter as they were. Maybe he was more like them than either he or they dared imagine.
This thought always managed to bring that strange contorted movement to his lips. Something that was like a b*****d spawn of a smile and something else. Something hideous with mockery and self loathing.
Still - he'd watched them. He hadn't been able to help himself. He'd spent so long envisioning them and promising himself that one day, one day and it would all be over and he could be happy.
He had his eyes and jaw. Her lips, of what would have been her lips before thy became bloated and pink, set above numerous chins. It was like seeing his reflection torn into seperate strips and placed together in a jumble like some cruel homage to his own misery and dissatisfaction.
But still he watched. And waited.
He learnt their habits, their phrases, their favourite foods. The last thing they did at night the first thing they did in the morning.
He learnt that they door was never locked.
He learnt that they turned in at eight. The man tired from his day of soul destroying labour as a faceless corporate peon. Her - just tired from ******** and lugging her a** around.
They slept soundly. Not even the tread of a footstep on the creaky floorboard - third from their bed - woke them. Not the rattle of cutlery in draws, or the sound of the cellar door being swung too and fro. The occassional clang from the gas tank below.
But now he felt there was all there was to know. He felt they had long outlived their potential. They'd given him everything they could - even though they didn't know it. They may not have remembered him, but he remembered them. What they did. And he knew that they would pay.
From the top branches of the apple tree on the slope of the hill facing their small plot of property, he had a birds eye view of their unhappy little home. The home that was, by rights, his own but was never there to claim. He felt like God.
His eyes, shadowed by the weight of a life times dreams shattered, turned to the sky which had turned a dark pink in colour. The sky ran blood, begging for it below. Who was he to deny the heavens?
His lips worked again as he checked the watch at his abused wrist. The digital numbers were barely recognisable behind the large crack that ran through its plastic covering. But he knew just from the sky. He'd spent enough time from his perch to know that.
When the sun rose, his father would get up and head to the stove to cook three whole rashers of bacon, like a weak slave, and carry them in to Freddy's mother where she lay a pool of lard, monopolising the small badly bent bed. When the sun rose, his father would turn on the gas to cook.
When the sun rose, the gas igniting would set off little present that Freddy had left them from where it hid in the shadows beneath the gas tank. When the sun rose . . .boom.
Freddy settled himself in, his jaw aching and teeth grinding as he tried to work his face into the smile of happiness that he felt inside. But he didn't know how. Instead, he checked his watch again.
Ten seconds before sunrise
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