The Drunkening 2: Pumpkinhead Boogaloo
You guys write amazing entries and I will read them all tomorrow AFTER I vote.
I did a lot of jobhunting today and decided to watch 'The Company of Wolves' for no particular reason. It's so good. It's based on Angela Carter's work, which I did not know at the time but read later. . .yeah.
I got drunk and wrote this tonight; I wrote this like 40- page story that was like this before, but I lost it. I have no idea where it is. onceupon read it, declared that she liked it and that I needed to finish it, and gave me an Angela Carter colllection for my birthday that year, so I must have been on to something. But like I said, it's gone, so I got drunk and was struck with the inspiration to Start It Over.
Here is what I have thus far. Please tell me what you think. If it doesn't make sense or sucks, well, I was pretty drunk.
In a wood, where paths were carved by generations of rag-wrapped feet, and trees stood silent judges as inhabitants played out their struggles of life and death in daily panoply, there was a small, rustic village.
Perhaps a dozen years had passed since anyone from the village had struck out on their own for The City, for it was the kind of home where one was born and knew their place from as young as three or four: your father, your mother, your grandparents’ trade was your own, and if it wasn’t, you robbed the heritage of your friends, your cousins, your enemies.
Adelaide was such a girl.
Her mother had no trade, outside of raising the family and running the household, enough work itself. Digging the root vegetables, planting the crops, churning the butter and dressing the odd kills the family traps brought home kept her busy enough. Adelaide’s step-father was a woodcutter, his back bowed by decades of thick woody stems and bristling branches carried home for firewood, to fuel the miniscule industry and warm the families. He supplied the carpenter, the blacksmith, the baker, but for all these connections the family never ate enough.
Of Adelaide’s father, her mother would not say. Some kind of traveling man he’d been, and disappeared only two months after the marriage. And a young woman with a fertile womb wasn’t one to waste time in this village, as raising healthy children was the strongest barrage of the townspeople against the ever encroaching village. Every death from accident or sickness a battle lost, every healthy child a victory hard-won, the people and the forest stood at odds every single hour God sent, and nothing was taken for granted.
“There’s Padfoot, and the fairy rings, and will o’ the wisps aplenty, but that’s just the magic that wants to take people away,” Grandmother Broggins warned, as she sat in the town center under an oak tree as brown and warped in bark and limb as herself, and told the saucer-eyed children who had not yet been given tasks to keep one and all alive.
“Wolves, and bears, the little fox, and the humble crow, would strip your flesh from your blood-raw bones if you gave them half the chance. Even the dancing and singing sparrow would take your eyes, for she has hungry mouths to feed and no scruples about who you are or what you matter to anyone. And bright, shining berries, in colors we’ve never dreamed of, to tempt the palate. Oh, they taste good at first, but you listen to your Granny. . .after you’ve invited them into your tummy, they drain the blood out through your mouth, and you feel like you’ve been set on by the haymaker, time and again, until you can’t straighten up and all you can do is scream.” And here she points to the pointed tines of the hayfork, as it leans against the side of a close-by barn, and the children’s eyes linger upon the jagged shadow it casts against weatherworn wood.
And their town is dull, the colors having long ago run along with the fierce spirits of the original few who carved it from the forest. Drab, sunbleached wood is everywhere, and only dim lights from the trees and constant scrim of smoke overhead to reflect in their eyes, never fresh sunlight. Their buildings are the color of ancient rags and bone, long-buried and twice long forgotten. Who would not refuse the unholy bright tones of a blood-red berry, or a mushroom so green and fresh as to make the mouth water and the eyes alight with desire?
“You avoid those, and you listen to your Grandmother, now,” said the old Witch, for that’s what she was and the children had no doubt: butcher, baker, candlestick maker, these were always in a small village; and always a witch to round it out. She might not travel with a broomstick nor with a black cat by her side, but anything you wanted to know about the substance of shadows, or the things people wouldn’t speak, she was the one to ask.
Please have at.
I did a lot of jobhunting today and decided to watch 'The Company of Wolves' for no particular reason. It's so good. It's based on Angela Carter's work, which I did not know at the time but read later. . .yeah.
I got drunk and wrote this tonight; I wrote this like 40- page story that was like this before, but I lost it. I have no idea where it is. onceupon read it, declared that she liked it and that I needed to finish it, and gave me an Angela Carter colllection for my birthday that year, so I must have been on to something. But like I said, it's gone, so I got drunk and was struck with the inspiration to Start It Over.
Here is what I have thus far. Please tell me what you think. If it doesn't make sense or sucks, well, I was pretty drunk.
In a wood, where paths were carved by generations of rag-wrapped feet, and trees stood silent judges as inhabitants played out their struggles of life and death in daily panoply, there was a small, rustic village.
Perhaps a dozen years had passed since anyone from the village had struck out on their own for The City, for it was the kind of home where one was born and knew their place from as young as three or four: your father, your mother, your grandparents’ trade was your own, and if it wasn’t, you robbed the heritage of your friends, your cousins, your enemies.
Adelaide was such a girl.
Her mother had no trade, outside of raising the family and running the household, enough work itself. Digging the root vegetables, planting the crops, churning the butter and dressing the odd kills the family traps brought home kept her busy enough. Adelaide’s step-father was a woodcutter, his back bowed by decades of thick woody stems and bristling branches carried home for firewood, to fuel the miniscule industry and warm the families. He supplied the carpenter, the blacksmith, the baker, but for all these connections the family never ate enough.
Of Adelaide’s father, her mother would not say. Some kind of traveling man he’d been, and disappeared only two months after the marriage. And a young woman with a fertile womb wasn’t one to waste time in this village, as raising healthy children was the strongest barrage of the townspeople against the ever encroaching village. Every death from accident or sickness a battle lost, every healthy child a victory hard-won, the people and the forest stood at odds every single hour God sent, and nothing was taken for granted.
“There’s Padfoot, and the fairy rings, and will o’ the wisps aplenty, but that’s just the magic that wants to take people away,” Grandmother Broggins warned, as she sat in the town center under an oak tree as brown and warped in bark and limb as herself, and told the saucer-eyed children who had not yet been given tasks to keep one and all alive.
“Wolves, and bears, the little fox, and the humble crow, would strip your flesh from your blood-raw bones if you gave them half the chance. Even the dancing and singing sparrow would take your eyes, for she has hungry mouths to feed and no scruples about who you are or what you matter to anyone. And bright, shining berries, in colors we’ve never dreamed of, to tempt the palate. Oh, they taste good at first, but you listen to your Granny. . .after you’ve invited them into your tummy, they drain the blood out through your mouth, and you feel like you’ve been set on by the haymaker, time and again, until you can’t straighten up and all you can do is scream.” And here she points to the pointed tines of the hayfork, as it leans against the side of a close-by barn, and the children’s eyes linger upon the jagged shadow it casts against weatherworn wood.
And their town is dull, the colors having long ago run along with the fierce spirits of the original few who carved it from the forest. Drab, sunbleached wood is everywhere, and only dim lights from the trees and constant scrim of smoke overhead to reflect in their eyes, never fresh sunlight. Their buildings are the color of ancient rags and bone, long-buried and twice long forgotten. Who would not refuse the unholy bright tones of a blood-red berry, or a mushroom so green and fresh as to make the mouth water and the eyes alight with desire?
“You avoid those, and you listen to your Grandmother, now,” said the old Witch, for that’s what she was and the children had no doubt: butcher, baker, candlestick maker, these were always in a small village; and always a witch to round it out. She might not travel with a broomstick nor with a black cat by her side, but anything you wanted to know about the substance of shadows, or the things people wouldn’t speak, she was the one to ask.
Please have at.