Serial Fiction Sunday
Hey. Remember when I endlessly name-dropped my current writing project, The Animal Machine, and never actually showed you any of it?
If you happen to be in Writer's Alliance you already got to help me tweak the second part of this story back when I was still fiddling with the unfinished beginning. Now I actually have a first part, a second part, and a whole half of a third part. An entire sequence! And that means I can actually start posting the rough draft in a coherent fashion.
The Animal Machine predominately explores the intersecting lives of two characters: the Bookgirl and Tim Blank. The Bookgirl is a spiritually exhausted retail clerk who is suffering from highly persistent archetypal hallucinations. Tim Blank is a cheerful paranoid with apophenia who claims to be on medical leave from his usual job of perpetuating conspiracies as an agent of a vast, shadowy organization. The Animal Machine is about the no man's land between sanity and insanity, between inner reality and outer reality.
As I said, this a rough draft, so if you feel like taking the time to critique it please do. My tendency to be impossibly perfectionist about my writing outweighs any sort of sensitivity I might have towards critism. I always want to make this horrible mess of words better. Input from others is helpful in this regard.
I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to end up giving the Bookgirl a real name or not.
[fiction]
The Animal Machine, Part 1
In her mind she always condensed the title into a single compound word. Bookgirl. She thought it sounded like a superhero.
A radio announcer with a 1940s Middle America accent and a voice full of static said
The amazing Bookgirl foiled yet another slew of evildoers today. Using her arcane powers of bibliomancy, the literate wonder--
"Book girl!" yowled the old man. He had a voice like a sick cat. She looked up slowly, straightening her hunched spine from the position in which she normally perched, vulture-like, on a tall stool behind the antiquated cash register.
The old man refused to keep track of sales with a computer system. After each ring of the cash register she laboriously wrote out a receipt with a ballpoint pen after each ring of the cash register. She gave the top sheet to the customer and impaled the other section, yellow contact paper with the grey ghost of her writing scrawled across it, on a menacing metal spike that stuck straight up from the surface of the desk. The customers liked that sort of thing. They thought it made their purchasing experience more authentic.
"Yes, sir?" She asked with the proper cringe of servility. The old man was the only person in her life she has ever called "sir". It was one of those words that quickly lost all sense and meaning she repeated it for long enough, becoming a babble of syllables. Sir sir sir sir sirsir sirsirsirsirsirsirsir...
"Close up shop, book girl," said the old man. She didn’t think he knew her given name. He smacked his gums a couple of times, glaring at her as though her very existence was intolerable. Then he turned and shuffled across the floor and up to his second-floor flat.
This is what she did every night after the store closed. She emptied the cash register into a metal lockbox and carried it up the narrow, frightening stairs at the back of the shop. The stairs were not blocked off by any sort of door, or velvet rope, or helpful sign. It wasn’t necessary. The customers seemed to know, instinctively, not to venture up those stairs in a misguided attempt to find another level of books. It was marked in some invisible way, with a scent that their noses are no longer able to interpret but still raised the vestigial bristles on the backs of their necks.
She placed the box at the door at the top of the stairs. She swept the broad wooden boards of the shop with a dilapidated broom, pushing the dust and grit into less noticeable areas. Then she stole a book. Bookgirl, bibliothief extraordinaire!
She always brought the stolen books back when she was through with them. In reality, this process of taking and returning would be more appropriately called "borrowing". "Borrow" was a pale, wormy word, however, without any of the clean dangerous hiss of "steal". So, in her whirring mind, Bookgirl stole.
She read her stolen book on the bus as she eavesdropped on her fellow passengers' conversations. She entered her apartment, a small studio filled with dim, yellow light and filthy wall-to-wall carpeting. She sat alone at a square laminated table and ate cereal. She read her book. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, she tried to sleep.
Bookgirl did not enjoy peaceful nights. At night, the dead gods that lived in her head became particularly insistent.
So she lay on her narrow bed with her sheets pulled up under her nose and screwed her eyes shut. "I just want to sleep," she thought. "I just want to sleep."
Instead she heard an ominous whoosh that signaled the sudden displacement of a large number of air molecules. She opened one eye, then the other.
Twisting along the ceiling of her room was a great emerald serpent. A mane of green, gold, and scarlet feathers ran down the creature's back; two wings of similar coloring sprouted from its sides. Each individual scale and feather glowed with an electric fluorescence. A neon god of bloody sacrifice.
The serpent opened its enormous maw, revealing glittering translucent fangs as big as stalactites. "GIVE ME YOUR HEART," it boomed, leaning its car-sized head close to hers.
"Go away," she sighed in response. Bookgirl turned over, pulling her sheets tight around her shoulders and closing her eyes.
The first time the buzzing serpent had attempted this display, Bookgirl had almost obliged. She had been in the process of opening her mouth to say, "Why, yes, of course you may have my heart. I'm not using it at the moment," when she was abruptly jerked from consciousness by another apparition that demanded her attention. She had found herself communing with another denizen of her head, Mr. Trench. Mr. Trench was a winding entity so immense that he held the soul of the word in his endless coils. The resultant experience of twisting infinitely through both time and space had been nauseatingly unpleasant.
Bookgirl took a deep breath. "Beat it," she growled at the glowing entity floating above her bed. The god obligingly vanished.
The flame of a silver lighter flared in the dark, followed by the cherry glow of a lit cigarette. The girl inhaled a familiar scent of burning tobacco and dust before a tall, elegant figure walked slowly to her bedside. He was tall and impossibly thin, wearing a Victorian suit and twirling a cigarette holder between his long, white fingers. He had the head of an ibis. He clamped the mouthpiece of the holder in his beak to take a drag of his cigarette and smoke dribbled out of the sides of his sharp mouth. Like all of her visions, Mr. Bird was distinguished from greater reality by his wavering, brittle mien. Sometimes she had the impression that the gods were made of papier-mâché and dangled on wires.
"I must apologize again for Mr. Strobe," said the apparition in his languid, reedy voice. "You know how he gets. Always trying to garner attention by any means possible. I do my best to keep things civilized, but..." He shrugged his fine-boned shoulders.
The girl let her bed sheets drop below her chin. "Mr. Bird, I think I may need to get some help. Like, a professional."
The bird-headed man pressed his long, pale fingers to his chest, as if staunching a wound. "My dear girl, I am a professional. I’ve been managing these sorts of tenants for millennia. All the vessels I’ve personally managed have been remarkably high-functioning.” He coughed and added, quietly, “...Considering the circumstances.”
The Bookgirl drummed her fingers rapidly against the edge of her mattress. "The circumstances. Yes. That's the problem. People aren't supposed to see things that aren't there. They aren't supposed to have a tangle of fading archetypes using their skull as a base of operations. I'm not a mobile home. I'm not a satellite. I'm a human being."
She paused a moment, as if remembering something. "They make pills for this sort of thing," she declared. Bookgirl imagined a veil of chemical static dropping between her and the dead gods, blurring their forms and muffling their voices.
The bird-headed man narrowed his beady black eyes. He took another drag of his cigarette and exhaled the smoke sharply through the cere at the base of his beak.
"I wouldn't recommend that," drawled Mr. Bird.
The girl raised her bristling eyebrows. "Well, no. You wouldn't."
He waved his elegant white hand dismissively. "For all you know, without us your life would be exactly the same, except significantly more lonely." He flicked the ashes from the end of his cigarette. "Really, my dear," sighed Mr. Bird, "You don't have any other options." He chose that moment to quietly disappear.
Bookgirl sat in her narrow bed, and ground the base of her palms into the sockets of her eyes. She ran her fingers up through her mess of wiry hair again and again and again until it stood up from her scalp haphazard, oily spikes. The she lay back in bed and stared at her window until light began to seep through the slats in her blinds.
[/fiction]
I'm hoping to post a new part each Sunday and thus force myself to hammer out a complete first draft in a month or so.
If you happen to be in Writer's Alliance you already got to help me tweak the second part of this story back when I was still fiddling with the unfinished beginning. Now I actually have a first part, a second part, and a whole half of a third part. An entire sequence! And that means I can actually start posting the rough draft in a coherent fashion.
The Animal Machine predominately explores the intersecting lives of two characters: the Bookgirl and Tim Blank. The Bookgirl is a spiritually exhausted retail clerk who is suffering from highly persistent archetypal hallucinations. Tim Blank is a cheerful paranoid with apophenia who claims to be on medical leave from his usual job of perpetuating conspiracies as an agent of a vast, shadowy organization. The Animal Machine is about the no man's land between sanity and insanity, between inner reality and outer reality.
As I said, this a rough draft, so if you feel like taking the time to critique it please do. My tendency to be impossibly perfectionist about my writing outweighs any sort of sensitivity I might have towards critism. I always want to make this horrible mess of words better. Input from others is helpful in this regard.
I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to end up giving the Bookgirl a real name or not.
[fiction]
The Animal Machine, Part 1
In her mind she always condensed the title into a single compound word. Bookgirl. She thought it sounded like a superhero.
A radio announcer with a 1940s Middle America accent and a voice full of static said
The amazing Bookgirl foiled yet another slew of evildoers today. Using her arcane powers of bibliomancy, the literate wonder--
"Book girl!" yowled the old man. He had a voice like a sick cat. She looked up slowly, straightening her hunched spine from the position in which she normally perched, vulture-like, on a tall stool behind the antiquated cash register.
The old man refused to keep track of sales with a computer system. After each ring of the cash register she laboriously wrote out a receipt with a ballpoint pen after each ring of the cash register. She gave the top sheet to the customer and impaled the other section, yellow contact paper with the grey ghost of her writing scrawled across it, on a menacing metal spike that stuck straight up from the surface of the desk. The customers liked that sort of thing. They thought it made their purchasing experience more authentic.
"Yes, sir?" She asked with the proper cringe of servility. The old man was the only person in her life she has ever called "sir". It was one of those words that quickly lost all sense and meaning she repeated it for long enough, becoming a babble of syllables. Sir sir sir sir sirsir sirsirsirsirsirsirsir...
"Close up shop, book girl," said the old man. She didn’t think he knew her given name. He smacked his gums a couple of times, glaring at her as though her very existence was intolerable. Then he turned and shuffled across the floor and up to his second-floor flat.
This is what she did every night after the store closed. She emptied the cash register into a metal lockbox and carried it up the narrow, frightening stairs at the back of the shop. The stairs were not blocked off by any sort of door, or velvet rope, or helpful sign. It wasn’t necessary. The customers seemed to know, instinctively, not to venture up those stairs in a misguided attempt to find another level of books. It was marked in some invisible way, with a scent that their noses are no longer able to interpret but still raised the vestigial bristles on the backs of their necks.
She placed the box at the door at the top of the stairs. She swept the broad wooden boards of the shop with a dilapidated broom, pushing the dust and grit into less noticeable areas. Then she stole a book. Bookgirl, bibliothief extraordinaire!
She always brought the stolen books back when she was through with them. In reality, this process of taking and returning would be more appropriately called "borrowing". "Borrow" was a pale, wormy word, however, without any of the clean dangerous hiss of "steal". So, in her whirring mind, Bookgirl stole.
She read her stolen book on the bus as she eavesdropped on her fellow passengers' conversations. She entered her apartment, a small studio filled with dim, yellow light and filthy wall-to-wall carpeting. She sat alone at a square laminated table and ate cereal. She read her book. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, she tried to sleep.
Bookgirl did not enjoy peaceful nights. At night, the dead gods that lived in her head became particularly insistent.
So she lay on her narrow bed with her sheets pulled up under her nose and screwed her eyes shut. "I just want to sleep," she thought. "I just want to sleep."
Instead she heard an ominous whoosh that signaled the sudden displacement of a large number of air molecules. She opened one eye, then the other.
Twisting along the ceiling of her room was a great emerald serpent. A mane of green, gold, and scarlet feathers ran down the creature's back; two wings of similar coloring sprouted from its sides. Each individual scale and feather glowed with an electric fluorescence. A neon god of bloody sacrifice.
The serpent opened its enormous maw, revealing glittering translucent fangs as big as stalactites. "GIVE ME YOUR HEART," it boomed, leaning its car-sized head close to hers.
"Go away," she sighed in response. Bookgirl turned over, pulling her sheets tight around her shoulders and closing her eyes.
The first time the buzzing serpent had attempted this display, Bookgirl had almost obliged. She had been in the process of opening her mouth to say, "Why, yes, of course you may have my heart. I'm not using it at the moment," when she was abruptly jerked from consciousness by another apparition that demanded her attention. She had found herself communing with another denizen of her head, Mr. Trench. Mr. Trench was a winding entity so immense that he held the soul of the word in his endless coils. The resultant experience of twisting infinitely through both time and space had been nauseatingly unpleasant.
Bookgirl took a deep breath. "Beat it," she growled at the glowing entity floating above her bed. The god obligingly vanished.
The flame of a silver lighter flared in the dark, followed by the cherry glow of a lit cigarette. The girl inhaled a familiar scent of burning tobacco and dust before a tall, elegant figure walked slowly to her bedside. He was tall and impossibly thin, wearing a Victorian suit and twirling a cigarette holder between his long, white fingers. He had the head of an ibis. He clamped the mouthpiece of the holder in his beak to take a drag of his cigarette and smoke dribbled out of the sides of his sharp mouth. Like all of her visions, Mr. Bird was distinguished from greater reality by his wavering, brittle mien. Sometimes she had the impression that the gods were made of papier-mâché and dangled on wires.
"I must apologize again for Mr. Strobe," said the apparition in his languid, reedy voice. "You know how he gets. Always trying to garner attention by any means possible. I do my best to keep things civilized, but..." He shrugged his fine-boned shoulders.
The girl let her bed sheets drop below her chin. "Mr. Bird, I think I may need to get some help. Like, a professional."
The bird-headed man pressed his long, pale fingers to his chest, as if staunching a wound. "My dear girl, I am a professional. I’ve been managing these sorts of tenants for millennia. All the vessels I’ve personally managed have been remarkably high-functioning.” He coughed and added, quietly, “...Considering the circumstances.”
The Bookgirl drummed her fingers rapidly against the edge of her mattress. "The circumstances. Yes. That's the problem. People aren't supposed to see things that aren't there. They aren't supposed to have a tangle of fading archetypes using their skull as a base of operations. I'm not a mobile home. I'm not a satellite. I'm a human being."
She paused a moment, as if remembering something. "They make pills for this sort of thing," she declared. Bookgirl imagined a veil of chemical static dropping between her and the dead gods, blurring their forms and muffling their voices.
The bird-headed man narrowed his beady black eyes. He took another drag of his cigarette and exhaled the smoke sharply through the cere at the base of his beak.
"I wouldn't recommend that," drawled Mr. Bird.
The girl raised her bristling eyebrows. "Well, no. You wouldn't."
He waved his elegant white hand dismissively. "For all you know, without us your life would be exactly the same, except significantly more lonely." He flicked the ashes from the end of his cigarette. "Really, my dear," sighed Mr. Bird, "You don't have any other options." He chose that moment to quietly disappear.
Bookgirl sat in her narrow bed, and ground the base of her palms into the sockets of her eyes. She ran her fingers up through her mess of wiry hair again and again and again until it stood up from her scalp haphazard, oily spikes. The she lay back in bed and stared at her window until light began to seep through the slats in her blinds.
[/fiction]
I'm hoping to post a new part each Sunday and thus force myself to hammer out a complete first draft in a month or so.