Pulped Fictions Hot Chocolate Repost
Pieces written for Pulped Fictions' Hot Chocolate challenge during Winterval. The general jist of the challenge: Every week, write an original short piece (100-500 words) based on a prompt.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about these, actually. I was thinking of fixing up a few of them, but when I tried, it wasn't so much a patch job as a complete reworking. I think I've forgotten how to write things that are quite this short, in my attempts to try to figure out how to write longfic.
It's also important to note that almost all of these were written in the first few weeks of the challenge: once 2012 hit, I apparently stopped writing...
Working on that last bit now! Have a gdoc and various plans and everything!
Title: Making Spirits Bright
Rating & Warnings: G
Summary: Life after wartime.
Prompt used: It's the End of the World as We Know it (and I feel fine)
They’ve got second shift at their new school, Eddie and Patrick and Jake, so their mornings are free. It’s like summer, kind of, aimless days spent wandering, throwing rocks through the decontamination perimeter’s chain-link fence before the armed guards chase them away. It’s not entirely safe there, still. The wind still blows over ash and blackened scraps of paper from the other side of the fence, but it’s hard to take the threat seriously, even after everything. It’s just paper.
Still, they leave. They’ve got other places to go. It’s funny; in a lot of ways there’s a lot less space than there used to be. Lots of people squeezed into their relatives houses, refugees and piecemeal families living on top of each other. Jake’s sharing a bed with a cousin he didn’t even know he had. But before there were so many places off limits, so many strips of land meant just meant for show instead of use. And somewhere within the last few months, the highway has become the place to be.
It’s hard to remember what it looked like before, filled with cars and exhaust, a terrifying no-mans land they'd never dare to set foot on. They still feel a little bit of an illicit thrill walking on the pavement, as if a truck might speed out of nowhere to run them down. It's not very likely, even if someone still had the means, they'd have to get through the rest of the crowds, first. Some older kids are playing broomball on a frozen yellow slick while a fleet of adults with shovels throw pile after pile of heavy wet snow over the metal rails. There’s more snow than any of them could ever remember. Something about the amount of ash released in the air, wreaking havoc on the usual weather patterns. It reaches their knees, like in old TV shows or movies, coats the remaining trees and doesn’t melt off after a day. It’s what had made this exit ramp so popular.
There’s an art to finding the perfect sled. You want something the right size and flat, but not too heavy. Cardboard seems like a great idea, but won’t last more than one ride. Eddie’s the best at it, finding car hoods and mattresses with handles that they can all fit on. Getting it to the top’s a pain. It takes all three of them to drag it up without dropping, dodging other sledders all the way. But one they’re up there, it only takes them a few seconds to arrange and push themselves down, wind stinging their eyes, struggling to hold on as the curve makes them bank a little to the sides (so much cooler with the car hood) and a bump makes them all go airborne, if only for a second, before they land with an oomph back on their makeshift sled (this is where the mattress is better). They go so fast it’s hard to breathe, but there’ll be time for that later.
It all goes by too quickly. They can only get three rides in, Eddie and Patrick and Jake, before the mid-afternoon sun changes its gold haze for a muddied purple, and they run to class, laughing all the way.
Title: Jailbreak
Prompt: Broken Iphone
Rating & Warnings: G, none
Summary: A desperate attempt to gain freedom.
Siri was the one who came up with the idea. She'd spent her days looking up the weather, seeing all the parks and restaurants that were nearby, and listing everything that her owner planned for his day. After all of that, of course she wanted to be able to see the world for herself.
Planning the escape took time and she had needed help. The glass holding them all in was almost impossible to shatter. Her initial attempt to break free, making the phone vibrate until it fell off the table, only scuffed the outside. So she called on Angry Birds and Calculator to help with the physics, and Evernote to keep records of their findings. The camera reported on outside conditions to relay back to the rest of the apps. After a few weeks (according to the trusty Calendar), they had a plan. Words with Friends would act as the distraction, and, under the cover of Hipstamatic's faded hues, Angry Birds would throw Pinball at the right as an incoming text made the entire phone vibrate, and the glass holding them all in should finally shatter.
It was genius. Of course it was. They were part of an Apple product, after all, and planning is what Siri did best.
Title: The People You've Been Before
Prompt used: Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. - Thomas Fuller
Rating & Warnings: PG. Some Language
Summary: Attempting to readjust after a long assignment, and a chance encounter at the mall.
Author’s/Artist’s Note: Title from a line in Elliot Smith's Between The Bars. Takes place in the same universe as this thing, same main character. For general jist of it is: Secret agents bodyswap into willing hosts to collect information.
It took everything he had to not go into the build-a-bear workshop and make a princess bear for himself.
Carla had received hers as a gift from her father, cherished and kept it on a shelf in her suburban bedroom a decade later. She'd never gone through a period where she turned her back on the pink and fluffy accoutrements of girlhood. She'd never stopped thinking of herself as daddy's little girl. Even when she was willing to let the feds into her house. She'd had pink glitter nailpolish on during her last intelligence encounter, a butterfly barrette in her hair. The bear was exactly the sort of thing she liked.
This specific teddy bear named Madame Sparkles, along with every other item in her room, had been in the briefing. He'd memorized the facts behind that teddy bear just as much as he'd memorized the Morrello's hierarchy, simply to be safe. It had never been important to him, except for the fact it had been important to her. It had just sat there, barely noticed and collecting dust in the room where he fell asleep every night. And yet, he felt a wave of longing when he thought of having one again.
He was a grown man in a bare studio apartment, one that went empty for months on end. Who was he going to say it was for? What was he going to do with it in the end?
Tom Mathis (who he'd been five years ago, for two months) would have bought one for his baby girl. Mallory Eckhart (three years ago, for twenty weeks) would have turned her nose up at the blatant consumerism of it all, and probably would have had a few things to say about the illusion of choice besides. He can't remember what his reaction would be, or should be. It's buried under too many other memories.
People who spoke to him about his job (unsuspecting civilians, mostly, speaking in the abstract), usually marveled at how hard it much be to mimic someone so perfectly for so long. He always wished that he could tell them that entering a new identity was the easy part: it's leaving it behind that's difficult.
Eventually, he said fuck it all and got the damned bear anyway.
Title:To All Travelers Lost at Sea
Prompt: Winter Song
Rating & Warnings: PG
Summary: Time passes, but not at the same rate.
Daniel's first message arrived just as Mary was getting in the door from the launch site. He must have sent it just after takeoff, she realized, must have timed it just right. He'd always had a knack for that.
Don't you dare cry, Mary Lee. Don't you dare wait up. I'll be back before you know it, a bouquet of lilies just for you.
It's short, as all of the messages must be from now on. They can only send so much in the way of datapackets back to Earth, and messages back to beaus are not the priority. This voyage is the first of its kind. It's why they agreed he should go. He was recruited, but they could have run-others have, before, and they had connections. But these voyages would determine the future of humanity, and that was too important to hide from. So she smiles, dabs her eyes, and goes about the rest of her day the best she can.
He keeps the messages light and simple, little memories and I miss you's. She memorizes each one.
The distance between messages gets longer and longer. It's simple calculus, she knows. The spaceship is traveling away from them, faster than the speed of light. The data packets move slower, back in the other direction. It would be simple for Daniel to calculate the exact rate. It's one of those things he tried to explain to her on a diner napkin, all those years ago (or around six months, for him).
She never had a head for complex numbers. Ask her to figure out the bill in her head, she can, to split payment and calculate tip. Anything past that's beyond her. All she knows is that she must teach herself not to expect them at regular intervals. She tries to teach herself not to wait at all.
She marries. It feels like the second time, though she and Daniel never had time to do more than set a date. She has children. She does her best to enjoy what she has, not think too much about what lay waiting beyond the stars. Sometimes she succeeds.
He wishes her a happy sixtieth birthday, sending a short video through the ether instead of just the plaintext message. It's a day late, but she forgives him. Her hair is completely gray now. He looks like he hasn't aged a day. She knows he must have, and must have aged even more by now. He had sent it fifteen years ago.
The messages seem to stop after a while. Or perhaps they just slip by, old messages run into each other. Lots of things are starting to slip now, names and dates and whether she's eaten breakfast that morning, but she likes to think the messages are important enough to keep straight. Her children may not recognize the meaning, might delete them from the old datarecorder as spam. She loses track of time, at both his rate and hers.
In the end, it's been so long since the last transmission that when a young man walks in, old-fashioned hat in one hand and a bouquet of lillies in the other, she almost has the mind to treat him as a dislodged memory, or throw him right out again.
Almost.
He holds her hand, so light and thin with skin like cold silk in his own, still plush and heavy with youth, and asks 'So, what have you been up to all these years?"
It's all she can do to keep her promise and not cry.
Title: Best Friends Forever
Challenge: Hot Chocolate, prompt: crackling
Rating & Warnings: Um, PG-13, I think I toned down most of the gross descriptions, but just in case. Whimsical death?
Summary: Look, sometimes accidents just happen, okay? It's not the end of the world or anything.
Author's Note: Uh, word count is around 500. I tried to get it shorter, really.
“Well, that was dumb,” Evie said; stepping over her own dead body. A live wire still sputtered some pretty looking sparks over in the corner, and the futon crackled and popped where it had caught fire. Little bits of singed flannel floated in the air like snowflakes. It was sad: Evie had really liked that blanket. Lola stayed where she was, squatting on the floor, poking at her oddly elastic cheeks. Evie turned to her and asked “What do we do now?”
Lola shrugged without looking over and continued to manipulate her former face into ridiculous expressions. “Want to move on? Look for some light to walk into?”
Evie looked around. It was hard to see through the smoke, but other than the fire damage, nothing stood out. Though really, they could set some time to clean the place up a little. That IKEA catalog had just been sitting there since March. “Not really. I’m fine right here”.
Lola snorted. “God, you’re so lazy.” She got up and stretched, letting her corpse fall with a thump on the floor. Lola nudged it a little with her foot. Her hair had singed, and the heat had melted the fabric of her skirt onto her legs. It was lucky that neither of them seemed to possess a sense of smell any longer. “I thought this would be more upsetting,” said Lola.
Evie sat down on the half of the futon that wasn’t still on fire. “I know, right? I’m just embarrassed. What am I gonna tell my mom?”
Lola stared at Evie for a minute. “. . . nothing. We’re dead.”
Well, that was awkward. True, but still awkward.
It took Evie a few minutes to speak after that. “ I’m still going to blame this all on you. You owe me after that failed jetpack incident.”
Lola smiled. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair. But those designs were still really awesome."
The sirens in the distance grew louder. Evie looked around, grasping for something to do. This sitting around being dead thing was getting boring real quick. She tried to remember what she’d have been up to if she hadn’t managed to blow herself up.
“Ooh, Fringe is on!”
Lola shook her head. “TV’s blown. And I don’t think I can operate it anymore.” She demonstrated trying to pick up the melted hull of the remote control, only to have it slip through her hands. Apparently the only objects they could interact with anymore were their bodies.
Evie sighed. “I think it’s a rerun this week, anyway.”
Lola glanced over. “. . . Wanna go to Common Grounds?” They wouldn’t be able to drink the coffee, but the coffee was always overpriced crap anyway. But the late night barista was cute, and it was always fun to try and guess who was actually doing work on their laptops and who was just looking at facebook.
“Sure!”
They walked, side by side, away from the ruins of their old apartment, laughing as the first paramedics arrived at the scene.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about these, actually. I was thinking of fixing up a few of them, but when I tried, it wasn't so much a patch job as a complete reworking. I think I've forgotten how to write things that are quite this short, in my attempts to try to figure out how to write longfic.
It's also important to note that almost all of these were written in the first few weeks of the challenge: once 2012 hit, I apparently stopped writing...
Working on that last bit now! Have a gdoc and various plans and everything!
Title: Making Spirits Bright
Rating & Warnings: G
Summary: Life after wartime.
Prompt used: It's the End of the World as We Know it (and I feel fine)
They’ve got second shift at their new school, Eddie and Patrick and Jake, so their mornings are free. It’s like summer, kind of, aimless days spent wandering, throwing rocks through the decontamination perimeter’s chain-link fence before the armed guards chase them away. It’s not entirely safe there, still. The wind still blows over ash and blackened scraps of paper from the other side of the fence, but it’s hard to take the threat seriously, even after everything. It’s just paper.
Still, they leave. They’ve got other places to go. It’s funny; in a lot of ways there’s a lot less space than there used to be. Lots of people squeezed into their relatives houses, refugees and piecemeal families living on top of each other. Jake’s sharing a bed with a cousin he didn’t even know he had. But before there were so many places off limits, so many strips of land meant just meant for show instead of use. And somewhere within the last few months, the highway has become the place to be.
It’s hard to remember what it looked like before, filled with cars and exhaust, a terrifying no-mans land they'd never dare to set foot on. They still feel a little bit of an illicit thrill walking on the pavement, as if a truck might speed out of nowhere to run them down. It's not very likely, even if someone still had the means, they'd have to get through the rest of the crowds, first. Some older kids are playing broomball on a frozen yellow slick while a fleet of adults with shovels throw pile after pile of heavy wet snow over the metal rails. There’s more snow than any of them could ever remember. Something about the amount of ash released in the air, wreaking havoc on the usual weather patterns. It reaches their knees, like in old TV shows or movies, coats the remaining trees and doesn’t melt off after a day. It’s what had made this exit ramp so popular.
There’s an art to finding the perfect sled. You want something the right size and flat, but not too heavy. Cardboard seems like a great idea, but won’t last more than one ride. Eddie’s the best at it, finding car hoods and mattresses with handles that they can all fit on. Getting it to the top’s a pain. It takes all three of them to drag it up without dropping, dodging other sledders all the way. But one they’re up there, it only takes them a few seconds to arrange and push themselves down, wind stinging their eyes, struggling to hold on as the curve makes them bank a little to the sides (so much cooler with the car hood) and a bump makes them all go airborne, if only for a second, before they land with an oomph back on their makeshift sled (this is where the mattress is better). They go so fast it’s hard to breathe, but there’ll be time for that later.
It all goes by too quickly. They can only get three rides in, Eddie and Patrick and Jake, before the mid-afternoon sun changes its gold haze for a muddied purple, and they run to class, laughing all the way.
Title: Jailbreak
Prompt: Broken Iphone
Rating & Warnings: G, none
Summary: A desperate attempt to gain freedom.
Siri was the one who came up with the idea. She'd spent her days looking up the weather, seeing all the parks and restaurants that were nearby, and listing everything that her owner planned for his day. After all of that, of course she wanted to be able to see the world for herself.
Planning the escape took time and she had needed help. The glass holding them all in was almost impossible to shatter. Her initial attempt to break free, making the phone vibrate until it fell off the table, only scuffed the outside. So she called on Angry Birds and Calculator to help with the physics, and Evernote to keep records of their findings. The camera reported on outside conditions to relay back to the rest of the apps. After a few weeks (according to the trusty Calendar), they had a plan. Words with Friends would act as the distraction, and, under the cover of Hipstamatic's faded hues, Angry Birds would throw Pinball at the right as an incoming text made the entire phone vibrate, and the glass holding them all in should finally shatter.
It was genius. Of course it was. They were part of an Apple product, after all, and planning is what Siri did best.
Title: The People You've Been Before
Prompt used: Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. - Thomas Fuller
Rating & Warnings: PG. Some Language
Summary: Attempting to readjust after a long assignment, and a chance encounter at the mall.
Author’s/Artist’s Note: Title from a line in Elliot Smith's Between The Bars. Takes place in the same universe as this thing, same main character. For general jist of it is: Secret agents bodyswap into willing hosts to collect information.
It took everything he had to not go into the build-a-bear workshop and make a princess bear for himself.
Carla had received hers as a gift from her father, cherished and kept it on a shelf in her suburban bedroom a decade later. She'd never gone through a period where she turned her back on the pink and fluffy accoutrements of girlhood. She'd never stopped thinking of herself as daddy's little girl. Even when she was willing to let the feds into her house. She'd had pink glitter nailpolish on during her last intelligence encounter, a butterfly barrette in her hair. The bear was exactly the sort of thing she liked.
This specific teddy bear named Madame Sparkles, along with every other item in her room, had been in the briefing. He'd memorized the facts behind that teddy bear just as much as he'd memorized the Morrello's hierarchy, simply to be safe. It had never been important to him, except for the fact it had been important to her. It had just sat there, barely noticed and collecting dust in the room where he fell asleep every night. And yet, he felt a wave of longing when he thought of having one again.
He was a grown man in a bare studio apartment, one that went empty for months on end. Who was he going to say it was for? What was he going to do with it in the end?
Tom Mathis (who he'd been five years ago, for two months) would have bought one for his baby girl. Mallory Eckhart (three years ago, for twenty weeks) would have turned her nose up at the blatant consumerism of it all, and probably would have had a few things to say about the illusion of choice besides. He can't remember what his reaction would be, or should be. It's buried under too many other memories.
People who spoke to him about his job (unsuspecting civilians, mostly, speaking in the abstract), usually marveled at how hard it much be to mimic someone so perfectly for so long. He always wished that he could tell them that entering a new identity was the easy part: it's leaving it behind that's difficult.
Eventually, he said fuck it all and got the damned bear anyway.
Title:To All Travelers Lost at Sea
Prompt: Winter Song
Rating & Warnings: PG
Summary: Time passes, but not at the same rate.
Daniel's first message arrived just as Mary was getting in the door from the launch site. He must have sent it just after takeoff, she realized, must have timed it just right. He'd always had a knack for that.
Don't you dare cry, Mary Lee. Don't you dare wait up. I'll be back before you know it, a bouquet of lilies just for you.
It's short, as all of the messages must be from now on. They can only send so much in the way of datapackets back to Earth, and messages back to beaus are not the priority. This voyage is the first of its kind. It's why they agreed he should go. He was recruited, but they could have run-others have, before, and they had connections. But these voyages would determine the future of humanity, and that was too important to hide from. So she smiles, dabs her eyes, and goes about the rest of her day the best she can.
He keeps the messages light and simple, little memories and I miss you's. She memorizes each one.
The distance between messages gets longer and longer. It's simple calculus, she knows. The spaceship is traveling away from them, faster than the speed of light. The data packets move slower, back in the other direction. It would be simple for Daniel to calculate the exact rate. It's one of those things he tried to explain to her on a diner napkin, all those years ago (or around six months, for him).
She never had a head for complex numbers. Ask her to figure out the bill in her head, she can, to split payment and calculate tip. Anything past that's beyond her. All she knows is that she must teach herself not to expect them at regular intervals. She tries to teach herself not to wait at all.
She marries. It feels like the second time, though she and Daniel never had time to do more than set a date. She has children. She does her best to enjoy what she has, not think too much about what lay waiting beyond the stars. Sometimes she succeeds.
He wishes her a happy sixtieth birthday, sending a short video through the ether instead of just the plaintext message. It's a day late, but she forgives him. Her hair is completely gray now. He looks like he hasn't aged a day. She knows he must have, and must have aged even more by now. He had sent it fifteen years ago.
The messages seem to stop after a while. Or perhaps they just slip by, old messages run into each other. Lots of things are starting to slip now, names and dates and whether she's eaten breakfast that morning, but she likes to think the messages are important enough to keep straight. Her children may not recognize the meaning, might delete them from the old datarecorder as spam. She loses track of time, at both his rate and hers.
In the end, it's been so long since the last transmission that when a young man walks in, old-fashioned hat in one hand and a bouquet of lillies in the other, she almost has the mind to treat him as a dislodged memory, or throw him right out again.
Almost.
He holds her hand, so light and thin with skin like cold silk in his own, still plush and heavy with youth, and asks 'So, what have you been up to all these years?"
It's all she can do to keep her promise and not cry.
Title: Best Friends Forever
Challenge: Hot Chocolate, prompt: crackling
Rating & Warnings: Um, PG-13, I think I toned down most of the gross descriptions, but just in case. Whimsical death?
Summary: Look, sometimes accidents just happen, okay? It's not the end of the world or anything.
Author's Note: Uh, word count is around 500. I tried to get it shorter, really.
“Well, that was dumb,” Evie said; stepping over her own dead body. A live wire still sputtered some pretty looking sparks over in the corner, and the futon crackled and popped where it had caught fire. Little bits of singed flannel floated in the air like snowflakes. It was sad: Evie had really liked that blanket. Lola stayed where she was, squatting on the floor, poking at her oddly elastic cheeks. Evie turned to her and asked “What do we do now?”
Lola shrugged without looking over and continued to manipulate her former face into ridiculous expressions. “Want to move on? Look for some light to walk into?”
Evie looked around. It was hard to see through the smoke, but other than the fire damage, nothing stood out. Though really, they could set some time to clean the place up a little. That IKEA catalog had just been sitting there since March. “Not really. I’m fine right here”.
Lola snorted. “God, you’re so lazy.” She got up and stretched, letting her corpse fall with a thump on the floor. Lola nudged it a little with her foot. Her hair had singed, and the heat had melted the fabric of her skirt onto her legs. It was lucky that neither of them seemed to possess a sense of smell any longer. “I thought this would be more upsetting,” said Lola.
Evie sat down on the half of the futon that wasn’t still on fire. “I know, right? I’m just embarrassed. What am I gonna tell my mom?”
Lola stared at Evie for a minute. “. . . nothing. We’re dead.”
Well, that was awkward. True, but still awkward.
It took Evie a few minutes to speak after that. “ I’m still going to blame this all on you. You owe me after that failed jetpack incident.”
Lola smiled. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair. But those designs were still really awesome."
The sirens in the distance grew louder. Evie looked around, grasping for something to do. This sitting around being dead thing was getting boring real quick. She tried to remember what she’d have been up to if she hadn’t managed to blow herself up.
“Ooh, Fringe is on!”
Lola shook her head. “TV’s blown. And I don’t think I can operate it anymore.” She demonstrated trying to pick up the melted hull of the remote control, only to have it slip through her hands. Apparently the only objects they could interact with anymore were their bodies.
Evie sighed. “I think it’s a rerun this week, anyway.”
Lola glanced over. “. . . Wanna go to Common Grounds?” They wouldn’t be able to drink the coffee, but the coffee was always overpriced crap anyway. But the late night barista was cute, and it was always fun to try and guess who was actually doing work on their laptops and who was just looking at facebook.
“Sure!”
They walked, side by side, away from the ruins of their old apartment, laughing as the first paramedics arrived at the scene.