NaNo - Day 1
I am feeling pretty good about this so far! It's been a hot minute since I've written NaNo (not since 2007, in fact), but I am really enjoying what I have thus far. It's under the cut, if you're interested! I would very, very much appreciate feedback, especially in these early stages. (just please keep in mind this is a draft and is not exactly meant to be sheer literary genius in novel form!)
There was darkness all around him - pitch black darkness, inky and thick. For a moment, he had thought he might be able to make out the shape of something, an outline. But though he squinted, he couldn’t come up with anything.
“Discouraging, hm?” a voice echoed from behind somewhere. He writhed desperately, but the pain his head was giving him made it nearly impossible to do anything but wince and moan, curl up in the fetal position and try not to vomit.
“Oh, Richard,” the voice said, drawing closer. Richard drew his knees up underneath his chin and tried to focus on the space in front of him, focus on anything for a singular moment. He was not going to vomit. Not him.
“It was all too easy, really. Your travel schedule is so predictable, and the cleaning woman was so empathetic when I told her I had to slip into this room to leave a gift for my,” here he chortled, a weird, girlish laugh that cut mockingly, “girlfriend staying here tonight.” He paused, seemingly for effect.
Richard took in a deep breath, leaned his head back, and spat forward in the direction of the voice, but nothing seemed to come out or work right, his mouth could not move. There was a momentary sharp intake of breath as the man paused. He threw back his head, and laughed. The shadows swam in front of Richard’s face some more, this time darker, more pitch-colored. A light came on overhead. Richard winced and threw his arms up to cover his face, slowly lowering them a moment later after he realized he hadn’t heard any noise from his captor.
“Tsk,” the voice said, though from where, Richard couldn’t see. “You really thought showing some bravado was going to save you now? Have you learned nothing?” Richard opened his eyes wider, taking in his surroundings. He lay on his side, squirming on an oily, slick hotel bedspread. His arms and legs were tied, though he could raise and lower his arms a bit he could not use them to do anything more useful than scratch his nose. His eyes fluttered shut for just a moment - he was so, so tired. Maybe he should just give in - that seemed to be what this terrible man wanted, anyway.
He peered ahead, fixating on a terrible faux-oil pastel attached to the wall - a day at the seashore. A smudge of a seagull wheeled across a sky punctuated by fluffy blue clouds and the tops of umbrellas as children frolicked in the surf and parents sat on the sand, laughing. Richard let his eyes drift shut, just for a moment. The image of the seagulls freewheeling across the sky stuck to the backs of his eyelids, for some reason. He saw them soaring and tumbling over his vision, murky at best, wavering with every intake of breath.
“Ah,” the man said, suddenly close by. Richard opened his eyes, fear overtaking his lungs, as he set out to scream and realized, belatedly, almost laughably, that he was gagged. “Would you like to know what is going to happen to you, Richard? Well.” For the first time, Richard caught a glimpse of his captor: tall, skinny, black sweat pants and a sweat shirt, but for some reason, nothing to hide his face. Large, green eyes, brown crew-cut hair. The man looked like your everyday cubicle-dwelling employee; if he had been wearing a shirt and tie instead of his archetypal “bad guy” getup, you might even suspect this was the man you joked with every day in line at the Starbucks for your mocha latte.
“I am going to kill you, Richard Burgess. I am going to cut your throat, right here, right now, and then I am going to take your body out into the woods and leave it for some very unhappy and very unkind bears. Perhaps some wolves. And do you know why, Richard?”
He struggled against his gag, trying to make words, to sound something, anything at all. Maybe if he could cry out, manage any noise at all, someone would hear, come running. His wife, his daughters.
“Because I enjoy killing people, Richard.” Richard’s eyes widened as he peered up into the man’s remarkably placid face, and he thought back to his oil painting, the way the parents on the shore seemed so blissfully unaware that their darling children were playing and skipping through surf that had the potential to kill, to hurt. To cut.
“Goodnight, Richard.” the man said. Richard turned his face back to the painting on the wall, taking it in one more time. The last thing he saw before the world went black was a mother running in the surf with her toddler, near the back of the painting - he had almost missed it. For some reason, this thought comforted him immensely.
----------
Vivian shot up in her bed, her hands rushing to cover her face. She scrubbed at her eyes vigorously, making irritated noises deep in her throat. The clock read “4:23” in bold, blood-red letters, and she moaned even louder.
“Fuck me,” she muttered under her breath. “I have class in 3 hours. There’s not even a point to this.” Sighing, she swung her feet out from under the covers and turned off the fan she kept at her bedside. For an early-Autumn night, it wasn’t nearly as cold as Vivian wished it was, and these things had to be supplemented.
She padded over to her door, taking her bathrobe off the back and tugging it on just so. Her boyfriend, Xan, always teased her about it, calling her an old woman, but Vivian just shrugged it off. She was warm and able to look classy at the same time when it got really cold out. Audrey Hepburn would approve, she was sure of it.
Sliding her feet into her slippers, she took the stairs down from the attic to the kitchen. “Gonna be up this early, might as well enjoy it.” A small mrowing noise came from her feet, and Vivian reached down to pat the ears of her landlady’s cat, Hortense, with one hand, while she fumbled a cabinet open to find the tea pot with the other. “I had another weird dream tonight, ‘Tense,” she explained to the animal. Hortense hopped up onto the counter top and padded her way to the sink, climbing in and curling up before resting her head on her paws and looking at Vivian like she understood everything coming out of her mouth, and then some.
“Yeah, it was crazy. This old man was being killed in a hotel room, and he didn’t know why, and the killer didn’t really tell him either. I’ve never had a dream where I wasn’t the main character. Isn’t that nuts?” Hortense made a noise that Vivian assumed to be sagely wisdom and flicked her tail back and forth a number of times. Vivian smiled and set the tea kettle down on the burner, turning the stove top on.
She lived in an old, old house, owned by a very sweet - if sometimes eccentric - older woman named Violet Potts. Violet rented out the attic of her house in exchange for $400 a month and some basic help around the house. In return, Vivian didn’t pay for any utilities, and was able to sleep in the beautiful attic window of a lovely restored home for considerably less than her friends. As an added bonus, Vivian was also able to make friends with Hortense, though some days it was less of a bonus than others.
“I hope that doesn’t happen again, ‘Tense. That was fucked up.” Hortense stood up and hopped down to Vivian’s feet, expertly weaving in a figure eight in and out of her legs before coming to rest a few feet away. Vivian flipped open a cabinet, surveyed her kingdom of tea choices - she and Violet were both avid tea drinkers, and always picked up a new box when they saw it. At last count, they had collected over two hundred varieties of tea, though half were deemed undrinkable by both parties.
Vivian tugged a tea bag out of a box and set it on the counter, pouring the boiling hot water into a mug and setting the tea bag inside, along the rim. “I wonder,” she reached up to the medicine cabinet above the stove, and removed the bottle of melatonin she had used before bed to help her get to sleep. “Nope, expires next May. What’s up with that?” she said to the cat, replacing the bottle. Hortense stood up and butted against Vivian’s leg several times before turning back toward the stair well and making excited cat noises.
“All right, okay,” Vivian picked up her mug of tea, tossing the tea bag into the garbage and running her free hand through her hair out of frustration. “I guess I’ll be going back to bed, huh, you little terror?” Hortense made a mrrting noise and hopped up the stairs two at a time, pausing at the landing to turn back to Vivian. “I’m coming!” she sighed, and shook her head. “That was the weirdest dream. Maybe it was the bedtime snack. I should never have let you coerce me into making that tuna fish sandwich just so you could lick the can.” She sniped at the animal, who demurred beautifully, flipping over on her side and wiggling adorably.
Vivian paused at the landing, scooped up the cat, and continued walking up the stairs to her bedroom. She plopped Hortense down on her desk chair, shrugged her robe off, and climbed back into bed, sighing. 4:51 in the morning. Fantastic. Hortense took the liberty of moving herself where she belonged, right into the divot between Vivian’s legs on top of the covers. Vivian idly stroked the cat with one hand, sipping on her tea with her free one. She peeled back the curtains and peered out into the night. A streetlight winked at her from its place across the street, and she sighed, replacing the curtain. So pretty out at night, but she just couldn’t shake this weird feeling that had developed in her chest. Who was this Richard guy, anyway?