National Novel Writers Month (Guiness and Guitars)
This is an excerpt from what I've written so far for NaNoWrMo.
According to the Sodom Suggestion, the fire raged for no more than an hour. Like the many incidental incinerations dotting that copper August, the Flower’s fire was a simple matter of extinguishing a blaze. The firemen were called and the fire was smothered and the Flower’s farm now had the cluttered scorned façade of public disaster and private scandal. That is to say, everyone had seen it, but no one had actually seen it. Since the fire, no one had taken the bridge from Sodom proper to visit with the family, and it was understood that the junk shop was closed interminably. In fact, no one was even entirely sure if Elizabeth or Jerry even lived there anymore. I know what happened, but only up to the moths and the flames; beyond that, everything is relegated to town gossip and silly speculation. After what that young woman told me, I don’t have faith enough to even cross the bridge. It is a thing with these young women today, this desperate need to unburden their selves. I didn’t ask for it, I was only looking through the china to find something nice for company calling. She told me it began with a lightening storm or some nonsense, and everyone knows how it ends, or almost. It was the summer that those scientists came from Emory to study why there were so many moths and why they all were dying, just all over the place. The moths had appeared sometime near March, with the dogwoods and magnolias.
On Monday, she awoke in a curdling room into a bed which was on fire.. The lightening again, trembling around the corners of the 1870’s slatted queen bed, with its black palm frame and a mahogany headboard featuring Diana hunting on the Tiber. Her first thought was to secure the very expensive, very antique bed frame that had been in her mother’s family for three generations- until she located the source of the electrical storm. Spanning the cloudy declination of her eyebrows, abscessing south to the shallow plateaus of her collarbone before stewing in the tender fissures along her shins and calves, the nitrous crackling continued unabated from the focal point in the back of her neck. Without so much as deliberately flexing her pinky finger, her body was humming and taut, occasionally emitting a spark or a tentacle of flame. With her neck throbbing like a heart, she willed the storm system southward, to the egress of her toes and points beyond. Then in a totally accidental thrust, her hand flopped and floundered over a scent, uprooting it from its nesting ground in the indentation formerly belonging to her husband, and now only loose particles of oxygen and carbon. Airborne, the smell fluttered around her nostrils and in a tragic “glurp” she set in motion a singular fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a moth’s wing that had become mingled in the familiar distilled smell of her husband: cigarettes and oranges, cinnamon and something dark and hot like a trapped animal. This she inhaled, and the trembling and crashing fell out of her and blasted out the open window, to return the next night. She understood in a way she was unable to articulate this terror of sublaxation and in a more primitive way she understood the absence that chased it away. She was having trouble sleeping.
Fin.
This story is hurting me in ways i thought inaccesible. But I suppose thats the point, according to Betsy and other good writers.
Hmm.
According to the Sodom Suggestion, the fire raged for no more than an hour. Like the many incidental incinerations dotting that copper August, the Flower’s fire was a simple matter of extinguishing a blaze. The firemen were called and the fire was smothered and the Flower’s farm now had the cluttered scorned façade of public disaster and private scandal. That is to say, everyone had seen it, but no one had actually seen it. Since the fire, no one had taken the bridge from Sodom proper to visit with the family, and it was understood that the junk shop was closed interminably. In fact, no one was even entirely sure if Elizabeth or Jerry even lived there anymore. I know what happened, but only up to the moths and the flames; beyond that, everything is relegated to town gossip and silly speculation. After what that young woman told me, I don’t have faith enough to even cross the bridge. It is a thing with these young women today, this desperate need to unburden their selves. I didn’t ask for it, I was only looking through the china to find something nice for company calling. She told me it began with a lightening storm or some nonsense, and everyone knows how it ends, or almost. It was the summer that those scientists came from Emory to study why there were so many moths and why they all were dying, just all over the place. The moths had appeared sometime near March, with the dogwoods and magnolias.
On Monday, she awoke in a curdling room into a bed which was on fire.. The lightening again, trembling around the corners of the 1870’s slatted queen bed, with its black palm frame and a mahogany headboard featuring Diana hunting on the Tiber. Her first thought was to secure the very expensive, very antique bed frame that had been in her mother’s family for three generations- until she located the source of the electrical storm. Spanning the cloudy declination of her eyebrows, abscessing south to the shallow plateaus of her collarbone before stewing in the tender fissures along her shins and calves, the nitrous crackling continued unabated from the focal point in the back of her neck. Without so much as deliberately flexing her pinky finger, her body was humming and taut, occasionally emitting a spark or a tentacle of flame. With her neck throbbing like a heart, she willed the storm system southward, to the egress of her toes and points beyond. Then in a totally accidental thrust, her hand flopped and floundered over a scent, uprooting it from its nesting ground in the indentation formerly belonging to her husband, and now only loose particles of oxygen and carbon. Airborne, the smell fluttered around her nostrils and in a tragic “glurp” she set in motion a singular fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a moth’s wing that had become mingled in the familiar distilled smell of her husband: cigarettes and oranges, cinnamon and something dark and hot like a trapped animal. This she inhaled, and the trembling and crashing fell out of her and blasted out the open window, to return the next night. She understood in a way she was unable to articulate this terror of sublaxation and in a more primitive way she understood the absence that chased it away. She was having trouble sleeping.
Fin.
This story is hurting me in ways i thought inaccesible. But I suppose thats the point, according to Betsy and other good writers.
Hmm.