Words On A Pretty Page

Sorry for the lapse.  Was out of town for a bit and I know, no excuses.  Here's a rough little ditty I thought of on the bus this morning.

Re-Berth

The bus was late again.  I almost decided to walk back to my apartment and hop in my car, but I remembered that I had no gas and no money to buy enough gas to get to work, so I stuck it out and waited for the bus.

I wish to God I hadn't.

Had I only known.  It wouldn't have mattered whether I got on an earlier or later bus, it was all the buses in the city.  Every route, every shift, every passenger who set foot inside them.  All of us were taken.  

By the time I realized something was wrong, it was too late.  With my iPod on and my eyes closed in the sunshine, I had effectively zoned out, as per usual, for the half hour bus ride to the train station.  But when the bus stopped and I opened my eyes to leave it, I realized we weren't at the train station, we were somewhere else.  In confusion, passengers filed off the bus like lemmings, and I with them.  People asked the bus driver all manner of questions, but he stared resolutley forward and didn't answer a single one.

We stood in a dark, dank underground warehouse.  Several sets of double doors lined the walls.  People barked and crabbed and looked all around for an official to scream at, but there was noone there but us passengers.  I tried my cell phone and saw others were doing the same, but there was no reception wherever we were.  So we all poured toward the bank of doors, hoping to find answers beyond them.

The doors led us into another berth, where large grey vehicles waited.  They looked like some sort of military convoy.  At this point, people were starting to get freaked out, but still there were no officials to give us answers, and so we all pushed forward into the transports, into large holding rooms.  Surely someone was in there to give us answers. 

We got answers, when we awoke from the cryofreeze.  The had flooded the room with it the moment the doors had shut.  When the doors opened, and we thawed, there was bright sunlight pouring into the holding room.  We filed out as confused as when we came in, and found military personnel waiting with rations, clothes, and keys to housing.  They were friendly but didn't answer any questions.  Instead they told each of us to head into the conference center for briefing, and we'd get all our answers there.

The briefing was the end.  Or, perhaps, the beginning.  We were told that we had all been transported to an experiment, a planet that NASA had found in the Andromeda galaxy and had since been terraforming through a secret project with the United States Government.  It is a planet that orbits a star like Earth's own, but much younger.  This planet is the back-up plan for humanity, for when Earth's sun goes red dwarf and incinerates the planet.  We were the test group, sent to live on this new planet and see how humanity fares.  A couple hundred thousand humans, gathered from different U.S. Cities' bus routes during the morning commute, against our will.

People complained bitterly and begged to be sent back, but the officials swore there was no returning.  The cryoships were one-way ships, too costly for the U.S. to refuel on a regular basis.  And besides, they said, hundreds of years had passed on our trip here.  To go back now would not take you back to the arms of your loved ones, who would be long dead.

Why, someone asked, would they kidnap us?  Surely there are plenty of people who would have volunteered for the program.  The officials said that doing it the way they did assured a true cross-section of humanity and a volunteer program would not have.  The apologized for inconveniencing us, but assured us that we would enjoy life in the new system, and that we would have the honor of naming our new planet, being the first civilization to inhabit it.

Every day I pine for my family, for my husband, for my dog and my old life.  All I have with me to remember them with are the photos in my wallet, and messages left on my cell phone that I never deleted. Those I listen to sparingly, when my heartache is at it's worst, because the battery is draining.  Soon I will lose those messages too, and they're the only way I will ever hear from my loved ones again.  Some of the people here were glad to start a new life.  Some have a better life than they did on Earth.  But the majority of us are desolate.   We cast ballots for the new name of the planet. Three names were put up for a final vote, and one name won by an overwhelming landslide.

I am Gerianne Dover, and I live in the city of New Boston, on planet Hell.

Uninspired

Blank screen before me
Cursor blinks, impatient
Words stuck in my head 

Meld

Butt cheeks are numbing
Desk chair is like quicksand
From which I can't leave

Hunger

Oatmeal for breakfast
Leafy salad for lunch
Give me a doughnut!!

Departure

Five o'clock is nigh
To the train I must go
Freedom is at hand!


Procrastinate

Manuscript calls me
Can't seem to get to it
Rock of Love is on

(This one is rough - as most of my really short stories do, it started as a quick concept and then started to grow into something I actually wanted to spend more time on. I will have to come back to revise and add to this one in the future, but for now, here it is, as is.)

Dinner Party

I awoke on the cold, marble floor of a hall so grand in scale I could not see the ceiling. Marble buttresses arced up from columns along the walls and soared away into the diffuse shadows above, and I wondered where they touched. Gleaming white marble floor stretched on and on through out the room, flowing like milk under columns of the same stone. Light emanated from everywhere and nowhere, and seemed to cast weak shadows from every direction. The air was perfumed with incense, and I could hear the soothing sound of water trickling somewhere amongst the columns. So caught up I was in this majestic, strange place that it didn't occur to me to think how I got there.

In the center of the hall was a table, a long oval slab of the same white marble. A sprawling feast was laid out upon it, and gleaming candlesticks were scattered throughout the multi-leveled meal. Fresh fruits, cheeses, roast meats, baskets upon baskets of breads, and several different varieties of wine. My mouth watered, and I wondered if this whole feast was set out for me, or if I had just happened upon it. Only then did it start to dawn on me that I was outside of my reality, but I was so transfixed by the sights and smells that the tenuous thoughts of reality still eluded me.

I approached the table and found an envelope with my name scrawled on it, and A silver ballpoint pen. Inside the envelope was a seat place card with my name on it, and a note saying I should fill in the names of ten people, living or dead, I wanted to attend this meal with me on the other cards around the table. I looked around the hall, over my shoulder, feeling as if I were being watched, but the grand room was empty. A three-tiered cake virtually dripping with frosting caught my eye amongst the spread, and that prompted me to pick up the pen. I never can resist cake.  I went around to each place card at the table and wrote the first names that came to mind. As I returned to the head of the table and sat down, I suddenly realized I wasn't alone anymore.

Queen Elizabeth the first was the first name I wrote, and she looked decidedly baffled at her sudden transportation, but being the consummate queen that she was, she instantly assessed the situation, smiled at me, and reached for her wine. Beside her, her mother, Anne Boleyn appeared, and the two of them shared a gasp of astonishment and moments of silence before both beginning to talk at once.

One by one the appeared; the two English queens, Annie Lennox, Catherine the Great, Jim Henson, Leonardo DaVinci, J. R. R. Tolkien, the King of Gaul Vercingetorix, Jesus of Nazareth (who I was hoping would answer a lot of questions for me about the world in general), and my grandmother on my mother's side, who had died when I was nineteen.  I put my grandmother at the place next to mine, and when she appeared, I took her hand.  She looked as surprised as any of them did - except Jesus, who seemed to know exactly was was going on - but smiled warmly when she saw me.  I passed her the basket of rolls nearest me and told her they weren't as good as hers used to be, and she laughed merrily.

(and I am out of time, and cannot finish and elaborate on this story today.  Apologies, but I wrote something!)

 

(Not my best effort, but it's a kickoff.)

Equinox

I get off the bus and face the cold head on. The icy wind rips at my jacket and makes my eyes tear up. My eyelashes flutter, futile against the onslaught. I walk like a mime into the wind, and stray droplets of rain pelt me on a day when an umbrella would be of no use but the gloves I left on the kitchen table this morning would be. My hands are pink, immobile claws clutching tight to plastic grocery bags that flap and tatter as I walk toward my apartment.

It is the first day of spring, and the sun is finally shedding light over the tops of rain clouds that seemed never to lift today. To my wonder there are buds on some of the trees already. Despite the cold I can already see the ground thawing. The air smells wet, muddy, full of earth. The day's rain seems to have cleaned the air, and the blasts of cold wind seem almost refreshing. It smells like March, like finally getting to play outside in the yard as a kid after being cooped up all winter; like early seasons of track practice back in high school, where we bundled up to run in the cold but shed layers as we ran for an hour because it wasn't as cold as it seemed. I try to keep this in mind as I walk the uneven blocks to my apartment.

It is Ostara, the rebirth season, and Easter, the resurrection season, and I am feeling lighter, like the sky in the evenings. As I finally enter the lobby of my apartment building the heat is welcome on my frozen hands and face, but when I settle in for an evening of quiet reading I crack the window a bit to let in the scent of spring. I feel the balance of the Equinox today. As I watch the wind tugging at branches against the twilight sky I can feel the tug of the new season. The casual stroll toward summer has begun.

So I have this great LJ page and I've not used it in over a year.  I do most of my rambling over at Blogger on Playtime At Hazmat. But I got to thinking that perhaps I should have a page where I just write my very own fiction - no updates on my cat and what he's chasing, no what I had for dinner while watching reality TV last night, no goofy videos or pictures from the Ren Faire.  That's what Hazmat is for.  And our writers' group page is great for assignments and togetherness, but this page will be all my own.

So I am going to use this page for fiction, and attempt to write a small nugget - at the very least, a Haiku - each day.  I call myself a writer, and though I have plenty of disk space and rubbermaid bins of notebooks filled up at home with my big 'ol projects, I have little actually out there to show for it in the meantime.  At the very least, this will be a good exercize - a warm-up to working on my projects each day.  But who knows?  Something good might actually come out of the garbled letters strung into sentences that I am going to attempt to put on this page every day.  

Anyway, this will be an interesting experiment.  The word-a-thon will begin with my very next post, and barring vacations, will continue every day.  Stick around and I might produce something good - or at the very least, entertaining.

UPDATE - March 20, 2008

This was my first post on LJ posted over a year ago on January 25, 2007, with some nonsense about how I was going to use this page for short stories ...  uh, yeah.  OK.  But this time I mean it.  Really!!  :-)

Here is the first short story posted on this LJ on 1/25/07:

Broken Wings

I should be halfway to Los Angeles by now.

Instead I'm sitting in an airport terminal getting the stink-eye from a woman named Carmen who wants my seat. Who asks a man on crutches with a shattered ankle if she can have his seat?

Our flight was cancelled due to a malfunction with one of the wings. Everyone around me is pissed off and grumbling. I say we're better off not flying on a plane with a broken wing, but what do I know.

I'll miss the first day of the conference, which is disappointing, but I'm not presenting until tomorrow anyway. Hopefully we can get an intact plane before then.

I always read H.P. Lovecraft stories when I fly. Some would think that would be an interesting psychological case study. I find his stories soothing to the nervous flier; perhaps because he is so wordy and descriptive that one has no choice but to really, intently focus on what he's trying to say. The cover art to his collections tends to make fellow passengers unsettled, though. I suppose a picture of a corpse-like creature with no eyes hanging on a pole in front of a ruined, ancient stone edifice with a swarm of winged, vampiric inhuman monsters in the distance would have that effect on people. For me, it’s about the writing. Lovecraft’s work is engrossing.

An announcement states they've secured us a new plane but we can't take off for another hour. The grumbling begins anew, and Carmen glares at me like it's my fault. I'm not giving up my chair. At least we'll be on our way today.

There are worse things.

I open my book to page 23; "Rats in the Walls." And I hold up the book so Carmen can see the cover.