Flash fiction: Paralysis

Autumn arrives early at Camp Lakehill. The tree leaves seem sadder, like they shrink in on themselves a little bit every night. It smells differently too, or maybe Lucinda’s nose doesn’t work quite the same way in the cold.

Lucinda has been reading an ecology blog and knows the leaves fall away in the cold because the trunk and roots go to sleep, and the sunlight is not intense enough that it’s worth it for the tree to keep them alive, but she aches for the dying leaves anyway. If she could, she’d gather the trees in her thin arms and share her warmth.

Not that she has much warmth to share. None of the girls at camp do. They’ve been pairing up at night and huddling together in their narrow bunks beds. Lucinda’s bed partner is Maria Gomez, another girl between ten and eleven.

Maria’s bigger than Lucinda. Her mom has said that Maria blossomed earlier than expected. Last school year, she shot up almost a foot and her thighs, arms, hips, and chest filled out nice and soft. Lucinda thinks Maria is getting the short end of the deal in their partnership. She doesn’t think her body is large enough to offer Maria much comfort.

Maria spoons her most nights. Lucinda burrows in, her head just under Maria’s chin, her back pressed to Maria’s chest, the back of her thighs cradled by Maria’s hips, and two thin white blankets covering them both. It’s nice in an odd way. At night, Lucinda’s back is warmer than her front. And the familiar, lilac-soap scent of Maria’s skin chases the stink of a dying forest away from Lucinda’s nostrils.

Lucinda’s not sure if she’s asleep when Maria lays a hand over her mouth. She thinks Maria must have dozed off, otherwise her hand would be nowhere near Lucinda’s face. When Lucinda opens her mouth, her neck tensing to nudge Maria’s hand away, Maria slips two fingers inside. They taste like the twigs in the wet forest floor smell like.

It’s too strange to be scary. Maria somehow spreads her hand inside Lucinda’s mouth, one fat finger inside each of her cheeks and another holding her tongue down so the tip presses against her bottom teeth. It doesn’t hurt but Lucinda thinks it should.

A noise too strangled to be a proper scream gets stuck somewhere in Lucinda’s chest.

Lucinda’s heart starts rustling, a crackle reminiscent of the sound dried leaves make when cold wind passes through thin branches coming out her nose. She would cry, but her eyes are as dry as her throat is silent. She would struggle, or maybe just squirm, but her limbs feel as heavy and dead as granite. Her chest expands with every breath she takes, but she still swears she’s drowning.

It takes Lucinda hours to pull away from Maria. The hand is out of her mouth, but Lucinda struggles with the weight of dead meat on her tongue. She thinks she should scream, shake Maria’s shoulder, maybe hit her like an upset boy might punch a friend who played a bad joke on him.

At least, she should escape the narrow bunk bed.

Maria is back on her before Lucinda can make a decision. Except it can’t be Maria because the leg that falls over her hips is that of a grown woman, and Maria’s still a kid even if she’s grown rounder. The leg morphs into a tree and Maria wants to scratch her thigh as she does when she dozes in the forest ground and wake up with twigs and branches rubbing the skin of her calves.

A keen wail, something a dog might let out before a pack of hyenas, escapes Lucinda’s lips before there’s a big hand back in her mouth. It spreads its fingers again, so wide that Lucinda is disturbed when her jaw doesn’t ache. She’s stuck under the weight, her limbs as hollow and immobile as rusty pipes.

She doesn’t know how she stays under the massive tree-woman, terrified that her chest will stop expanding and letting in air. Maybe she squirms out from under it, but it doesn’t matter because she’s back under the warm boulder in seconds.

“Lucinda, come on!” It’s Maria that shakes her. “We’re gonna be late.”

The light, the words, or the hand on her shoulder; something makes Lucinda’s synapses blink, and her mind and body are awake, struck by a thunderbolt.

Though Lucinda feels like a storm swept through her, it must be a quiet affair. Maria’s warm brown eyes do not focus on her and instead frown at the tangle of sheets by their entwined legs.

“Last day at camp,” Maria mutters to herself. “Better make the best of it.”

Daredevil on Netflix: Episode Two

• I forgot this one started with the flippy timeline thing where the first shot is of the hero all bloodied up . . . in a dumpster in this case.
• Opening credits are still cool, and still boring. The music manages to be both soothing and anxious at the same time.
• You know, technically, hot nurse shouldn't be moving Matt without first checking his neck, but he's unconscious so technically, he'd need at minimum a head/neck/spine CT scan. He needs a C-collar. I'm wondering why hot nurse didn't call 911, and I recall from my first watch that this is never explained to my satisfaction. 
• Yo, those were blown pupils they showed on screen. Her first though wouldn't have been "blind". It would've been brain herniation.
• Now she tries to call 911, after the shittiest trauma survey ever.

Daredevil on Netflix: Episode One

You know how people liveblog and livetweet and livewhatever TV shows? I was gonna try that with Jessica Jones, but that comes out next month. By then I'll be back at the hospital, so instead I'll do this with Daredevil. Full disclosure, I already half-watched this once while on internal medicine service. Which means I remember like 30% of it. And I don't know how this is supposed to work with a show that's on Netflix. But here we go.

• I like the poster. The cane, the bloody knuckles, the smirk/smile thing the actor has going. Kudos to the art people, make up people, and him.
• I thought the scene with the little kid and the toxic spill was going to be the major gist of backstory, but I know from my previous binge-watching episode that, sadly, that will not be the case.
• Matt's monologue with the priest went on like 95% too long. Cut the story, keep the "what I'm about to do" line.
• During that first fight scene, there's a dude sitting in a chair with some junk food the entire time. I don't know what that was about. Like, why didn't he run? Pull out a gun? Called 911? Dropped the sandwich? I feel like I missed something about that dude.
• They were trying some artistic, noire, Game of Thrones deal with the opening, and it's pretty and everything, but just like with the GoT opening credits, I get bored.

Guns and writing gunmen

Is there an action story set in the even vaguely modern world that doesn't in some way feature firearms? Guns, especially fictional guns and the badasses wielding them, are everywhere. After a while, they become white noise and even someone like me, who's never touched one, can be fooled into thinking they know how the things work. Maybe not the specific technical details, but how difficult is it to point at something and shoot?

And then I tried to imagine writing an expert gunman, a typical action hero or heroine. It did not go well. Though I know (vaguely) that revolvers, shotguns, and rifles are different, I do not have the words to describe how they are different. I couldn't even say the difference between the handgun that has that rolling thing in the middle where you slide in bullets one by one, versus the other gun that cops use in all those TV procedurals that has a thing in the handle were you slide a rectangular bullet-holding thing. Which might or might not be called a magazine.

From the paragraph above, you can probably imagine what a disaster it would've been if I'd tried to write a scene from the point of view of any character that knew anything about guns, never mind the point of view of the typical action hero/heroine badass. Clearly, I had work to do.

Enter The Cornered Cat.

On Amazon.

A friend of mine with extensive knowledge of firearms recommended Kathy Jackson's website and book. He said it was an excellent resource for people like me, who've never touched a gun. This weekend, I spent some time reading some of her entries on gun safety, and I thoroughly agree with him.

Usually, I don't recommend any books or websites until I've spent significant time with them. This is the first time I feel compelled to recommend anything before I'm well into the material. I found this website that useful.

I've tried to research guns before and was put off by the use of esoteric terminology, confusing diagrams, and the inevitable political discussions around guns that almost always seem to devolve into fruitless flame wars.

The Cornered Cat is the first site I've found on the subject that organizes information on gun maintenance, use, and safety in a way that's palatable and welcoming to a beginner. From what I can tell, Kathy Jackson is not approaching the subject from a writer's perspective, but from the perspective of a responsible gun owner. Nothing I've seen in the site has anything to do with writing, and everything to do with handling firearms with the respect they deserve.

Just from reading a couple of entries, I've learned to think of weapons in a way that I never have before. I'm now analyzing the way I see them presented in fiction, and I've decided I never want to include them in my story in such a careless way.

Take a moment to read and understand The Four Universal Rules about handling any firearm, as presented by Mrs. Jackson:

1. All guns are always loaded. (Treat them so!)
2. Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target (and you have made the decision to shoot).
4. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it. 

I can't recall many books, TV shows, or movies with expert gunman who followed even a single one of these rules. Now that I have a slightly better understanding of gun safety, I can look back at many stories I enjoyed that had their supposedly responsible gun experts treating their weapons like toys.

Reading this website/book has inspired me to do better. If I ever include an expert gunman in my fiction, I'm going to do my damnest to present this expert as someone who respect their weapons' power.

Flash Fiction: Foreclosure

Wreck

The bank will have to claw every last penny out of my bitterness.

I take a sledgehammer to every wall that’s not facing the outside. I wrench out as many pipes as I can. The wall jacks I rip out with my bare hands. I hammer away at the kitchen sink, the one I renovated last year as the mortgage payments seemed to get steeper and steeper. Cement is cheap. I pour it down the bathroom drain, down the toilet, spill it all over the floors.

Putrefy

Meat stinks faster in the summer. I spend the five hundred dollars I have left on chicken, ribs, pork, veal, meat, meat, and more meat. They cut off my electricity a week ago, so it might be just as well to leave it all in the fridge.

But not as effective.

I stuff pieces into every nook and cranny I can find in every room in the house, inside the wall jacks I took out, into the holes I made in the walls. The rest I leave in the fridge, hoping for a fungal universe to flourish.

Decorate

On the one wall I spared, the wall in front of the bed I shared with my husband until a year ago, I use the last of my colors. I don’t have the time to create the kind of image that would end up in a museum, but I’ve got more zest now than I’ve had in years. I paint a dying sun, a flame collapsing in on itself and absorbing an entire world.  

Clean

Appearances are important.

The lawn has not been mowed in months, and that’s no way to greet important people. The flowers have all dried out, but the brown foliage remains. I uproot the weeds, clean the dirt stuck to the wall behind the small patch of flowers. If I had enough money left, I’d have bought a new coat of paint.

Shock

I thought long and hard about how to set this up just right. A gun would’ve been faster, probably painless, but the neighbors might have heard. Can’t have the police here before the bank, so it’s gonna have to be the rope. The living room’s ceiling fan lines up nice with the front door so if I play it right, my corpse will be the first thing the bastards see.

Hope my neck breaks instantly.

Crimson Peak: a romance novel and a ghost story

I watched Crimson Peak with my mother, who speaks very little English and thus missed the . . . uh, nuances of the dialogue. She still loved the movie, because it is awesome. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a passable 68% rating, which just goes to show that professional critics don't know what they're talking about. Because, I repeat, this movie is amazing. 

I expected I would love the hell out of this movie because I've loved Guillermo del Toro's entire cinematography, Pacific Rim included. Especially included. Anyway, at this point, del Toro could take a dump on camera, film it, call it a movie, and I'd be at theaters on opening day. I didn't see Crimson Peak on opening night only because I had to travel all the way to Richmond for an interview.

I'm going to spoil the hell out of this after this great poster:

Sleep deprivation enrages me in ways I can't describe

I'm on an amtrak train halfway back home from my first residency interview,  and there's a dumbass behind me having the most inane phone conversation I've ever been subjected to. It's almost midnight and no one else on the cart is talking, which means that I cannot tune out his insipid commentary on the quality of cutscenes in some Xbox game.

I'm not sure how many hours I've slept in the last forty-eight hours,  but it hasn't been enough to keep me from praying that this imbecile chokes on his own spit so I can get a moment of blessed quiet.

Doesn't this idiot know of text messaging?

I'm am very close to using the kind of language I told myself would be too vulgar and unprofessional for the blog I want.

Oh my God, it's a dumb college student talking about cramming techniques for tests.

Social media the future of literature studies

When I started college almost a decade ago, I planned to major in English or History to become a teacher. That didn't last long, but I do remember my handful of comparative literature classes I took to meet my humanities requirements. The author I remember the most is Kafka.

I loved learning about Kafka and his life, and how it affected the subject matter and tone of his work. And for a while now, I've been wondering who in our generation is going to be a "classic" author two, three hundred years from now. Specifically, will they have kept a blog, a Facebook, or any other kind of social media presence? And if so, how will that affect the way readers interpret their work?

Right now, classic literature students have history, maybe a handful of letters, and speculation about what an author's life was like. A century from now, they might have an author's blog to peruse and speculate about. The sheer volume of entries a dedicated blogger can produce in a lifetime would be staggering, and that's assuming all their social media entries are just about writing.

Most of these entries will be dated, right down to the time of day/night this future classic author posted the entry. For some people, social media has no boundaries. Political and religious views are shared. Funny selfies, drunk selfies, fashionista selfies . . . just selfies in general. (To clarify, I have nothing against social media, though I choose to keep my involvement superficial).

Imagine that a blogger somewhere is writing the next epic tragic romance. Now imagine that at the same time, they're blogging about their feelings are they struggle through a painful divorce from the person they assumed was the love of their life. Assuming that both survive the inevitable Google apocalypse, there will be bright-eyed students interpreting that epic tragic romance as they read the author's heartbroken blog entries.

I'm not sure what this will mean for literature, but I'm a little sad that I won't be around to see it play out.

ETA: Christ help me I think he finally stopped. If he opens his stupid fucking mouth again,  I'm going to lose it.

Flash Fiction: Magic Fever

Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie had to read the blog’s title twice before she grasped the words, and two more times before she understood it. She glared at her phone, then closed the window and went to check CNN.

There it was. Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie skimmed the article.

Skinny girls hear that AHDS patients never gain weight. They kidnap a twelve-year-old boy from the projects, starve him because they read that AHDS patients are most infective when they’re stressed out, cut his neck open a few times, and drink him down as best they can. They get sick, convulse, then die, and the kid “recovers” in a psych ward.

“It’s a tragedy,” the article quoted one of the skinny girls teachers, “they were such bright, promising young women. Things like these wouldn’t happen if we didn’t push such unrealistic standards of beauty on our young girls.”

“Come on, you’re next.” Sho’s annoyed voice startled Marie away from her phone screen. “I don’t wanna be late to class again.”  

Marie shuffled to the nurse’s office, swallowing a comment about Sho knowing more math than their teacher anyway. It was hardly an insult. Another girl in their class once asked him if Virus X made him smart. 

“I was smart before I was sick,” Sho had told her, dark eyes not moving from his textbook, silencing the nasty giggles around them.

The school’s pale green hallways seemed narrower than ever as Marie navigated through her day, trying to strike a balance between looking down at her shoes like a mouse and glaring at everyone around her. Her eyes met their head cheerleader’s at the end of the day, and the striking blue gaze forced Marie to remember a picture of the young black boy who’d been tortured for days by cheerleaders worried that they were getting too heavy for the top of the pyramid. His sunken cheeks and hooded eyes had glared from the bottom of the article, right after the cheerleaders' teachers lamented about her bright student’s wasted life. 

Marie looked away from the head cheerleader and stepped out into the hot city summer. Her family had moved to the city a month after Marie was officially diagnosed with AHDS. She hated it. The cement streets absorbed sunlight and then spat it back up, until Marie felt like she was inside a pressure cooker. Trees were few and far in between, trapping the smog in the air that Marie had no choice but to inhale, though not breathing wouldn’t kill her permanently. The first few weeks, she’d cleaned huge, black boogers out of her nostrils every single night. Her sister Sarah, who didn’t have Virus X’s sentinels in her blood, got one of her eyelash follicles infected and clogged up. She needed a month’s worth of eyedrops.  

“Everyone was talking about those cheerleaders at school,” said Sarah that night. They shared a room because their dad couldn’t afford a big house in the city.

“Marie?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “At least they won’t get fat.”

Stupid girls they’d been, no matter what their teacher said. Out of 100,000 people infected with Virus X, 99,000 didn’t survive the first twenty-four hours. Of the remaining ten-thousand, nine-thousand didn’t survive the next twenty-four hours. Of the last thousand, nine hundred cleared the virus and became immune for life. And the last hundred . . . the last hundred never got fat, and maybe those were good enough odds for some people.

If Marie had been given a choice, she’d have risked getting fat.

Next day was the same as always. She got in line for her pills in front of the nurse's office, and she even remembered to stand behind Sho to avoid annoying him. Her classes were a daze, as usual, and the cafeteria food was staler than normal. Marie didn’t technically need food to taste good anymore, but there weren’t that many AHDS kids at her school. Did no one care about the healthy kids shoving grainy pizza down their throats?

Marie liked the small bathroom hidden behind the janitor’s lounge a few feet away from the cafeteria’s back entrance. Though it tended to get dusty, it never got stained by pee droplets from girls who were too afraid to sit on public toilet seats. The water at the sink never got warm, but it wasn’t like the cold could hurt Marie anymore.

A knife could, but only for a moment.

A moment was all the head cheerleader needed.

When Marie turned away from the sink, flapping her hands to help dry them, an arm slashed at her chest. Marie gasped, a scream trapped in her throat, and reached for her chest as she stumbled backwards. Sticky blood touched the pads of her wet fingers before she felt a brief flash of dull pain, then her skin started knitting close. 

Marie wiped her bloody hand on the white sink, gagging as though a little cut could hurt her. The sight of blood had always made her dizzy, and Virus X hadn’t cured her of that.

The cheerleader made a strange noise, forcing Marie to remember where the real danger was. She looked up, then stopped breathing when she caught the cheerleader’s hungry stare. The girl’s blue eyes, perfectly outlined by kohl, widened before she brought the stained knife up to her lip gloss-shiny lips. Marie tasted vile when the cheerleader’s tongue wiped her blood from the knife.

The cheerleader dropped the knife on the floor and whirled around, flying out of the bathroom like there were hyenas on her heel.

Marie stared at the knife, then at the mirror over the sink. A red stripe had bloomed in the center of her chest, highlighting how small her breasts were. The cheerleader’s looked bigger, so she wouldn’t have to worry about looking like a kid forever on the very slim possibility she caught Virus X, survived, and then became a vamp.

Marie zipped up her sweater and went about her day.

~~~

This is another of my very early stories. The theme of a magic disease plays a big part in the novel I'm working on now, though it's completely different than what I imagined here.

Fire Emblem: Awakening; like Pokemon but with shipping

With multiple residency interviews coming up, an rotation through the pediatric emergency room, and a cold, I haven't had much time to write. Or read. Or the energy to exercise. Basically, I've done little that can be called productive all week. I haven't even played videogames, though I've been eyeing the game systems scattered throughout my apartment, all of them collecting dust.

Being a videogame fan is expensive. I own a PS3, a 3DS, and a PSVita. All of them I bought for like one specific game. I made each purchase in a moment of impulsivity, with my frontal lobe screaming you don't have time for this anymore the entire time. The 3DS I bought to play Fire Emblem: Awakening. 

I started playing Fire Emblem when I was a freshman in high school after a recommendation from my childhood BFF. I played with my brother and our favorite character was a little mage called Erk. At every sequel, the game mage was always "the Erk". We played the sequels religiously, usually saved pennies to buy them and begged our mother for money when they came out to the store. We couldn't afford pre-orders and they were usually sold out by the time we got to our local Gamestop. Ah, the early 2000s.

I like to think of the game as chess for people with short attention span. It's easier (unless you play the game "seriously"), and it usually has pretty funny characters keeping you engaged. It's divided into chapters that take place in a big board like this:

You pick a unit, move it up close to a enemy unit, and engage in a one-to-one duel. Whichever unit is stronger wins. There are several rock-paper-scissor type games within the game: sword beats axe, axe beats lance, lance beats sword; a magic thing with thunder, wind, fire that I don't remember off the top of my head; special units with bows, special support units that help other units move twice in one turn, and special flying units riding pegasi and wyverns.

Terrain and movement also play a big part. Horsed units can move much father than units on foot, unless it's a desert or mountainous map. Mages aren't perturbed by difficult terrain, but they usually need armed units to defend them. Archers can attack from more than one space, but they cannot defend themselves from close-up attacks. Also, units can form support relationships with each other that increases their defense and evasion.

And the more I talk about this game, the more complicated I realize it is. Still, it's simple enough that children can easily play it. Awakening, especially, is very welcoming to new players. Older entries in the series were unforgiving about letting units die in battle. If your favorite swordsman got ambushed by a cavalry of lance-armed horsemen, then you either restarted that map or accepted that the swordsman was dead forever. In Awakening, there's a casual mode where characters only retreat until the next map (barring death of the main character).

Awakening also lets you marry almost any two units, then they have babies which travel back in time to join you in a battle against zombies and an evil dragon intent on universe destruction. It is as awesome as it sounds.

Batman vs Superman trailer: I kinda liked it

As I briefly mentioned in my recommendation of The Man from U. N. C. L. E., I thought Man of Steel was awful. I actually watched both movies with the same friend and I remember that neither of us was particularly energized after sitting through MoS.

So my expectations for BvS are less than enthusiastic (is that how Batman vs Superman is being abbreviated? I like it.) The trailer has made me cautiously . . . less pessimistic than I was before. I mean, I'm still burned from the disappointment that was Age of Ultron, especially after the great trailer.

Henry Cavill still looks constipated but I'm going to be lenient about that. After UNCLE, I know that's just the demeanor he's been instructed to adopt for Clark Kent. His face is still a work of art, for what it's worth. I can only pray he's allowed a moment of levity in the film. I'm not even asking for Marvel-esque Tony Stark quirks, but a moment of cleverness and sarcasm from Clark Kent would be appreciated.

I'm rooting for Batfleck. I've been rooting for him since the internet flipped out about his casting, as if this is more serious than a freaking superhero movie. He looks cool in the trailer. Good for him.

Wonder Woman has like a couple of shots and doesn't say anything. Lois Lane reassures Kent's constipated mug about his significance to the world. Whatever. This is a superhero movie. Female characters take the backstage, certainly during the promotional period.

The character who really grabbed my attention is Lex Luthor . . . who has been re-imagined as a scraggly millennial?

TVTropes tells me that the actor, Jesse Eisenberg, is known for playing obnoxious, socially awkward, genius types. He was in the Facebook movie that I didn't watch because there's nothing I care less about than Facebook.

Anyway, TVTropes also tells me that "fans" weren't happy with his casting because . . . who cares? Comic book fans are never happy about anything.

Personally though, I'm intrigued. What focus group, or which individual creative entity (I mean obviously, it was a focus group) decided that Lex Luthor, the embodiment of anti-corrupt corporate billionaire abuse and excess, should be played by a skinny, long-haired pretty boy?

I'm only a casual comic book fan (a fake geek girl, if you will), and even I picture a vaguely attractive but creepy looking middle aged white dude as Lex Luthor. And this kid looks like some English grad student stepping out of Starbucks in skinny jeans. I'm sure he's still a mogul of some type in the film itself, but the image that make up and costumes created for his character is fascinating. He's undoubtedly going to go bald in the movie itself, but I almost wish they'd let the character keep the messy hair.