FIC AT LAST
So I've been away for awhile, or at least...I haven't been writing much. I've been spending my summer laying around the house reading books (I'm rereading Atlas Shrugged again. Why am I reading this book again? But Howard Roark, for reasons unknown, is starting to remind me a lot of Spanner) and...watching movies with my sister (I saw Hellboy II the other day with her and my father, which sucked in terms of plot and dialogue but had really cool creatures and the elf prince had abs like a Greek statue, so I was entertained!) and also RP-ing (dropped EverNoir, but I'm playing Envy from FMA, Dino Cavallone and Lloyd Asplund at Conscripted, so THAT'S AWESOME!) while trying to get into new series, like D.Gray-Man, which I just finished yesterday.
But I've also been taking a class on creative writing for something to do, so this story is actually an assignment I had to do last week as a writing sample. It had to be based on your personal experience, or on somebody else's personal experience, so let me say right now--most of this happened to me. Only one thing is borrowed from somebody else, and even then, not much.
Untitled
The summer began with the smell of mold.
“I swear,” Chloe’s mother had repeated almost daily. “I swear I smell mold in this house. It has to be in the walls; there must be a leak somewhere.”
“Nobody else smells a damn thing,” her father snapped. “You’re just imagining things.”
Chloe couldn’t even have begun to identify which smell in their house was the one that belonged to the mold. How could she? She had never encountered mold before, and there was always something new arriving with its own peculiar assortment of sensory stimulants, to replace the “junk” her mother was frequently purging in the moments she spent at home. The mold could have been any number of the odors in the air, any of the scents tracked in from the forest in the backyard or the fields next door.
“Rick,” her mother complained. “You have to do something about the mold. We could get sick.”
“Would you shut up? There is no mold in this house!”
Chloe and her sister exchanged glances as their parents argued, shrugging slightly at each other. Since their father had insisted on being the one to install all the plumbing in their newly remodeled home, he would know whether or not there had been any mistakes made or tiny cracks for water to seep through. The question was, would he admit to it? Not likely, Chloe thought, as she imagined fuzzy growth inching slowly between the walls, making its slow march throughout the entire house until they were consumed in spores. It could almost be one of those old horror movies-Attack of the Killer Mold-or something.
In early April Chloe began to cough. At first nobody thought this was unusual; Chloe spent a great deal of time being ill in some way or another with every cold that passed through the house. But even when the fever went away the cough lingered in her throat and chest to surface at random moments.
“How long are you going to make us stay here, watching your daughter get sick,” her mother shouted. “Until you realize that there is mold in this house?”
“FOR THE LAST TIME, THERE IS NO MOLD.”
The next day her father took a hammer to the wall by the pool bathroom, where her mother swore the smell was strongest, revealing the carpet of mold that had spread along the walls and beneath the floors of the entire house, turning the entire structure into a biohazard zone.
One week after summer started, they moved out.
~ - ~
The rental sat just inside a suburb sitting squat and full near a crowded and busy street, where the sounds of the traffic echoed all day and night without end. It was a throwback to the seventies, the kind you might see on an old sitcom, with shag carpet, wood paneling, and more shades of yellow wallpaper, glass, and light fixtures than should ever have been allowed to coexist in one house. The blinds didn’t work, the backyard was without grass, the oven either undercooked food or reduced it to charred ruins in the pan, the sink linked, the fridge could hardly keep a chill, and the doors would open themselves. This last happened most often at night, while Chloe was reading books in bed, and it never failed to send her scrabbling for the teddy bear she hadn’t used since elementary school. And it had a smell that pervaded the entire house, the scent of numberless cigarettes smoked, old age, and heavy illness. Both the previous owner and the one who came before her had been elderly, smoked, and expired in their home.
“You could at least try to pretend that you’re okay with living here,” her mother snapped frequently. “We were lucky to be able to rent this house on such short notice.”
“Lucky isn’t the word I would use,” quipped her younger sister from the couch; she barely managed to move in time to dodge the pillow their father threw at her head.
“This place is depressing,” Chloe added. “How soon until we can move back?”
Depressing was not the right word either. The house radiated a sense of sickly gloom that left a feeling of tension high in between her shoulder blades. No matter what the task, what the moment, it was there. She spent her time constantly roaming the house, constantly checking over her shoulder, constantly sitting down, standing up, finding any little task as an excuse to keep in motion. The place gave her a constantly gritty feeling; she became obsessed with washing her hands and her face, and a day didn’t go by where she didn’t take at least two showers.
She was becoming paranoid about every sound in the night-of which there were many, many, many sounds that could not be explained. The tapping on the window around midnight, someone scrabbling at the glass to break in might have been the bushes outside, but that was about all that she could explain using rational means. Chloe could have sworn that she heard whispers, sometimes, as she passed from room to room. Or when she sat at the computer, absorbed in the internet, there might be a touch on the shoulder or the faintest stirring of sound in her ear that belonged to the voice of no one. Because she was alone in the room.
“Katherine, this place gives me the creeps,” she told her younger sister, as they sat on the front steps drinking grape soda and watching the parade of cars go by.
“Yeah, I know,” Katherine admitted. “Me too. But it’s only for the summer, right?”
They sat brooding for a moment, passing the soda back and forth silently.
“Hey, Chloe,” Katherine said. “Didn’t that car just drive past us?”
~-~
The road that they lived on seemed to be some sort of shortcut between two more important roads, because cars passed their house all the time. Well, during the day, that was expected. But at night?
“Mom, that isn’t natural,” Chloe argued. “Why do they need to be speeding down the road at midnight?”
“What I can’t understand is what you think you’re doing up at midnight,” her mother said.
Chloe didn’t tell her it was because of the ghosts. There may not have actually been any ghosts in the house, but the idea was real enough to Chloe that she took no chances with going to sleep. Especially since it was her room that seemed the most active at night. The damn closet door wouldn’t stay closed, no matter how tightly she shut it; and when she put a heavy box of books on the floor to keep it shut, she woke up in the middle of the night to find the box exactly where it had been before and the closet door creeping open on her with a creak that begged for WD-40. She had stormed into Katherine’s room to demand an explanation, shouting angrily about practical jokes gone too far…only to remember that Katherine was spending the night at a friend’s house and couldn’t possibly have moved the box.
After that, she decided she would be safer in the living room with all the lights on at midnight.
It was much easier to ignore what may or may not have been a haunting under the safe blanket of late night programming. Infomercials drowned out the sounds of whispers or the air conditioning system, and lying on the couch protected the back and shoulders from phantom touches or air drafts. It was just a question of ignoring the white blurs that sometimes reflected in the glass (which may or may not have been the hallucination of an overly-paranoid and tired mind) and really, that wasn’t so hard, either, not when there were so many varieties of non-stick frying pans to choose from-at least seven different brands, all promising the same perfectly cooked omelet and pancakes. And past 3 A.M. it was hard to tell whether the dry, gritty feeling came from the house or from too much television.
Sometimes, when it came to be too much for her to take, she would turn off the T.V. and listen to the cars on the road outside. It was odd, really, she thought, that there would be so many cars so early in the morning, especially on a street that was not that large-ten houses on either side-and where her neighbors all worked during the day.
Watching the cars at night turned out to be far more interesting than reruns or infomercials. For one thing, it always seemed to be the same cars passing at one in the morning, first going one way, and then coming back the same way. And once she started watching she noticed, too, that there was an awful lot of foot-traffic at night. These people must be drunk, she thought, to make so much noise-laughing and shouting and pushing and turning failed cartwheels on the lawn. A lot of them were her age, traveling in packs with a ravenous, haunted look, coming back subdued or lunatic, depending on the occasion.
They seemed less real than the household phantoms.
~-~
Two weeks from summer’s end, in the middle of Full House reruns, there came a knock on the door.
Instantly she froze, huddled down low on the couch so she couldn’t be seen, secretly glad that she had kept the blinds closed tonight.
“Hey!” a slurred voice had shouted from outside. “Hey, let us in!”
She knew who it was; probably the same crowd who came at least every Saturday night, sometimes more during the week. They were the loudest of everyone who passed on the street, and they were the ones who threw rocks and ran screaming through yards. They were the ones who knocked over the mailbox next door with their car and nearly crashed into the branching oak at the far end of the street, where she walked the dog the next day through the muddy tire-tracks they had left behind.
“Come on, hurry up!” they begged. “Let us in!”
She pulled the covers up over her head and waited, holding her breath. It was too late to pretend that somebody wasn’t up; she could only hope that they were so messed up that they would quickly lose interest and go away to do something else.
“BITCH!” they shrieked. The door shuddered under the force of their blows; they were desperate to break into the house, and she didn’t know what to do beyond hide and hope that they went away.
But now the dogs were awake, snarling and barking at the front door, clawing at it as they tried to reach the attackers on the other side. She heard them cursing, tripping over themselves as they ran off, and the sound of sharp pings against the house, a hail of rocks throw in anger. They must be really drunk, she thought, or really stoned, to miss the window-she was extremely lucky that the glass hadn’t shattered and broken all over her. Huddled under the covers, she heard them retreat, cursing and shouting, until their voices faded into silence and there was only the flickering sound bytes from the T.V. and the ever-present hiss of air conditioning as the dogs continued barking.
“What the hell is going on?” her father shouted, stumbling out into the blinding living room. “Chloe! What’s the matter with these dogs?”
Chloe didn’t answer. She was too busy rushing to the bathroom to throw up from fear.
~-~
When school started there was no way for her to stay up into the night; pure exhaustion drove her to bed every night regardless of ghosts or revelers. In November they moved out of the rental and went home to new floors and some new drywall and things picked back up as they usually did, which is to say that nothing happened. Outside of the suburbs life was quiet and private and uninterrupted, a sort of ageless isolation where change was slow and unnoticeable until someone found the time to look back far enough and see the beginning again.
A year later, Chloe found herself at her friend Melissa’s house, which was also ordinary and usual, in the neighborhood across from the one holding the haunted house. They were bored, and isolated; the houses here were close together but hidden by tries, each lot an island of its own.
“You know,” she said to Melissa, as they crossed the road to go wandering through the twilight. “I used to see all sorts of people and cars out here in the middle of the night. It was the strangest thing; they were all drunk or something, just wandering back and forth on the streets.”
“Ohhh,” Melissa said, laughing a little. “I know why!”
“You do?”
“Yeah, come on, I’ll show you.”
Shortly inside the neighborhood Melissa stopped at the corner and pointed out a small, unassuming house of brick with a For Sale sign in the yard. “You see that house?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, come on.”
They turned on to Chloe’s old street and walked past her former house, whose flower beds were filled to bursting with color. Through the open windows she could see it had been remodeled-no more yellow glass or paneling or outdated chandeliers-and she was shocked that, were it not for the address, she would have passed it by without recognition. It wasn’t really the same house anymore.
At the other end of the street they stopped, and Melissa gestured to the house directly across from them, with an overgrown lawn and leaves piled in the driveway like burial mounds.
“And that house,” she said, pointing. “Both of them were busted as part of a drug-dealing racket two months ago. That’s what all the traffic was. Your house used to be part of it, too, before it was bought out and rented.”
They both stood staring for a moment as Chloe contemplated this, the break-in, the blurs in the windows at night.
“But what about the ghosts?” she asked finally. “This doesn’t explain them.”
Melissa gave her a weird look.
“There are no ghosts. What are you talking about?”
Chloe paused, hesitating over whether or not to explain to Melissa about the summer midnights.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
They walked back, past the houses bursting with families and happiness and normalcy, and crossed the road back into their less-than-suburban, safe lives.
Author's Notes: I really hated this, actually.
But I've also been taking a class on creative writing for something to do, so this story is actually an assignment I had to do last week as a writing sample. It had to be based on your personal experience, or on somebody else's personal experience, so let me say right now--most of this happened to me. Only one thing is borrowed from somebody else, and even then, not much.
Untitled
The summer began with the smell of mold.
“I swear,” Chloe’s mother had repeated almost daily. “I swear I smell mold in this house. It has to be in the walls; there must be a leak somewhere.”
“Nobody else smells a damn thing,” her father snapped. “You’re just imagining things.”
Chloe couldn’t even have begun to identify which smell in their house was the one that belonged to the mold. How could she? She had never encountered mold before, and there was always something new arriving with its own peculiar assortment of sensory stimulants, to replace the “junk” her mother was frequently purging in the moments she spent at home. The mold could have been any number of the odors in the air, any of the scents tracked in from the forest in the backyard or the fields next door.
“Rick,” her mother complained. “You have to do something about the mold. We could get sick.”
“Would you shut up? There is no mold in this house!”
Chloe and her sister exchanged glances as their parents argued, shrugging slightly at each other. Since their father had insisted on being the one to install all the plumbing in their newly remodeled home, he would know whether or not there had been any mistakes made or tiny cracks for water to seep through. The question was, would he admit to it? Not likely, Chloe thought, as she imagined fuzzy growth inching slowly between the walls, making its slow march throughout the entire house until they were consumed in spores. It could almost be one of those old horror movies-Attack of the Killer Mold-or something.
In early April Chloe began to cough. At first nobody thought this was unusual; Chloe spent a great deal of time being ill in some way or another with every cold that passed through the house. But even when the fever went away the cough lingered in her throat and chest to surface at random moments.
“How long are you going to make us stay here, watching your daughter get sick,” her mother shouted. “Until you realize that there is mold in this house?”
“FOR THE LAST TIME, THERE IS NO MOLD.”
The next day her father took a hammer to the wall by the pool bathroom, where her mother swore the smell was strongest, revealing the carpet of mold that had spread along the walls and beneath the floors of the entire house, turning the entire structure into a biohazard zone.
One week after summer started, they moved out.
~ - ~
The rental sat just inside a suburb sitting squat and full near a crowded and busy street, where the sounds of the traffic echoed all day and night without end. It was a throwback to the seventies, the kind you might see on an old sitcom, with shag carpet, wood paneling, and more shades of yellow wallpaper, glass, and light fixtures than should ever have been allowed to coexist in one house. The blinds didn’t work, the backyard was without grass, the oven either undercooked food or reduced it to charred ruins in the pan, the sink linked, the fridge could hardly keep a chill, and the doors would open themselves. This last happened most often at night, while Chloe was reading books in bed, and it never failed to send her scrabbling for the teddy bear she hadn’t used since elementary school. And it had a smell that pervaded the entire house, the scent of numberless cigarettes smoked, old age, and heavy illness. Both the previous owner and the one who came before her had been elderly, smoked, and expired in their home.
“You could at least try to pretend that you’re okay with living here,” her mother snapped frequently. “We were lucky to be able to rent this house on such short notice.”
“Lucky isn’t the word I would use,” quipped her younger sister from the couch; she barely managed to move in time to dodge the pillow their father threw at her head.
“This place is depressing,” Chloe added. “How soon until we can move back?”
Depressing was not the right word either. The house radiated a sense of sickly gloom that left a feeling of tension high in between her shoulder blades. No matter what the task, what the moment, it was there. She spent her time constantly roaming the house, constantly checking over her shoulder, constantly sitting down, standing up, finding any little task as an excuse to keep in motion. The place gave her a constantly gritty feeling; she became obsessed with washing her hands and her face, and a day didn’t go by where she didn’t take at least two showers.
She was becoming paranoid about every sound in the night-of which there were many, many, many sounds that could not be explained. The tapping on the window around midnight, someone scrabbling at the glass to break in might have been the bushes outside, but that was about all that she could explain using rational means. Chloe could have sworn that she heard whispers, sometimes, as she passed from room to room. Or when she sat at the computer, absorbed in the internet, there might be a touch on the shoulder or the faintest stirring of sound in her ear that belonged to the voice of no one. Because she was alone in the room.
“Katherine, this place gives me the creeps,” she told her younger sister, as they sat on the front steps drinking grape soda and watching the parade of cars go by.
“Yeah, I know,” Katherine admitted. “Me too. But it’s only for the summer, right?”
They sat brooding for a moment, passing the soda back and forth silently.
“Hey, Chloe,” Katherine said. “Didn’t that car just drive past us?”
~-~
The road that they lived on seemed to be some sort of shortcut between two more important roads, because cars passed their house all the time. Well, during the day, that was expected. But at night?
“Mom, that isn’t natural,” Chloe argued. “Why do they need to be speeding down the road at midnight?”
“What I can’t understand is what you think you’re doing up at midnight,” her mother said.
Chloe didn’t tell her it was because of the ghosts. There may not have actually been any ghosts in the house, but the idea was real enough to Chloe that she took no chances with going to sleep. Especially since it was her room that seemed the most active at night. The damn closet door wouldn’t stay closed, no matter how tightly she shut it; and when she put a heavy box of books on the floor to keep it shut, she woke up in the middle of the night to find the box exactly where it had been before and the closet door creeping open on her with a creak that begged for WD-40. She had stormed into Katherine’s room to demand an explanation, shouting angrily about practical jokes gone too far…only to remember that Katherine was spending the night at a friend’s house and couldn’t possibly have moved the box.
After that, she decided she would be safer in the living room with all the lights on at midnight.
It was much easier to ignore what may or may not have been a haunting under the safe blanket of late night programming. Infomercials drowned out the sounds of whispers or the air conditioning system, and lying on the couch protected the back and shoulders from phantom touches or air drafts. It was just a question of ignoring the white blurs that sometimes reflected in the glass (which may or may not have been the hallucination of an overly-paranoid and tired mind) and really, that wasn’t so hard, either, not when there were so many varieties of non-stick frying pans to choose from-at least seven different brands, all promising the same perfectly cooked omelet and pancakes. And past 3 A.M. it was hard to tell whether the dry, gritty feeling came from the house or from too much television.
Sometimes, when it came to be too much for her to take, she would turn off the T.V. and listen to the cars on the road outside. It was odd, really, she thought, that there would be so many cars so early in the morning, especially on a street that was not that large-ten houses on either side-and where her neighbors all worked during the day.
Watching the cars at night turned out to be far more interesting than reruns or infomercials. For one thing, it always seemed to be the same cars passing at one in the morning, first going one way, and then coming back the same way. And once she started watching she noticed, too, that there was an awful lot of foot-traffic at night. These people must be drunk, she thought, to make so much noise-laughing and shouting and pushing and turning failed cartwheels on the lawn. A lot of them were her age, traveling in packs with a ravenous, haunted look, coming back subdued or lunatic, depending on the occasion.
They seemed less real than the household phantoms.
~-~
Two weeks from summer’s end, in the middle of Full House reruns, there came a knock on the door.
Instantly she froze, huddled down low on the couch so she couldn’t be seen, secretly glad that she had kept the blinds closed tonight.
“Hey!” a slurred voice had shouted from outside. “Hey, let us in!”
She knew who it was; probably the same crowd who came at least every Saturday night, sometimes more during the week. They were the loudest of everyone who passed on the street, and they were the ones who threw rocks and ran screaming through yards. They were the ones who knocked over the mailbox next door with their car and nearly crashed into the branching oak at the far end of the street, where she walked the dog the next day through the muddy tire-tracks they had left behind.
“Come on, hurry up!” they begged. “Let us in!”
She pulled the covers up over her head and waited, holding her breath. It was too late to pretend that somebody wasn’t up; she could only hope that they were so messed up that they would quickly lose interest and go away to do something else.
“BITCH!” they shrieked. The door shuddered under the force of their blows; they were desperate to break into the house, and she didn’t know what to do beyond hide and hope that they went away.
But now the dogs were awake, snarling and barking at the front door, clawing at it as they tried to reach the attackers on the other side. She heard them cursing, tripping over themselves as they ran off, and the sound of sharp pings against the house, a hail of rocks throw in anger. They must be really drunk, she thought, or really stoned, to miss the window-she was extremely lucky that the glass hadn’t shattered and broken all over her. Huddled under the covers, she heard them retreat, cursing and shouting, until their voices faded into silence and there was only the flickering sound bytes from the T.V. and the ever-present hiss of air conditioning as the dogs continued barking.
“What the hell is going on?” her father shouted, stumbling out into the blinding living room. “Chloe! What’s the matter with these dogs?”
Chloe didn’t answer. She was too busy rushing to the bathroom to throw up from fear.
~-~
When school started there was no way for her to stay up into the night; pure exhaustion drove her to bed every night regardless of ghosts or revelers. In November they moved out of the rental and went home to new floors and some new drywall and things picked back up as they usually did, which is to say that nothing happened. Outside of the suburbs life was quiet and private and uninterrupted, a sort of ageless isolation where change was slow and unnoticeable until someone found the time to look back far enough and see the beginning again.
A year later, Chloe found herself at her friend Melissa’s house, which was also ordinary and usual, in the neighborhood across from the one holding the haunted house. They were bored, and isolated; the houses here were close together but hidden by tries, each lot an island of its own.
“You know,” she said to Melissa, as they crossed the road to go wandering through the twilight. “I used to see all sorts of people and cars out here in the middle of the night. It was the strangest thing; they were all drunk or something, just wandering back and forth on the streets.”
“Ohhh,” Melissa said, laughing a little. “I know why!”
“You do?”
“Yeah, come on, I’ll show you.”
Shortly inside the neighborhood Melissa stopped at the corner and pointed out a small, unassuming house of brick with a For Sale sign in the yard. “You see that house?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, come on.”
They turned on to Chloe’s old street and walked past her former house, whose flower beds were filled to bursting with color. Through the open windows she could see it had been remodeled-no more yellow glass or paneling or outdated chandeliers-and she was shocked that, were it not for the address, she would have passed it by without recognition. It wasn’t really the same house anymore.
At the other end of the street they stopped, and Melissa gestured to the house directly across from them, with an overgrown lawn and leaves piled in the driveway like burial mounds.
“And that house,” she said, pointing. “Both of them were busted as part of a drug-dealing racket two months ago. That’s what all the traffic was. Your house used to be part of it, too, before it was bought out and rented.”
They both stood staring for a moment as Chloe contemplated this, the break-in, the blurs in the windows at night.
“But what about the ghosts?” she asked finally. “This doesn’t explain them.”
Melissa gave her a weird look.
“There are no ghosts. What are you talking about?”
Chloe paused, hesitating over whether or not to explain to Melissa about the summer midnights.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
They walked back, past the houses bursting with families and happiness and normalcy, and crossed the road back into their less-than-suburban, safe lives.
Author's Notes: I really hated this, actually.