This is hard. They say when you are trying to change a habit, announcing the intention can do wonders for you chance at success. It’s not the support that does it; it’s the shame.
Shame is a powerful tool. The feeling that you didn’t live up to an expectation, the feeling that you failed, is an incredible motivator. If you keep a goal a secret, don’t announce it to the world, then nobody knows that you failed.
So, here I am, announcing my goal.
I don’t write enough. I think I do. I sit at my computer and hammer at my keyboard. I create stories and ideas. I write, but I don’t do anything with them, and I don’t write enough. My hard drive is littered with half started documents, story notes and treatments, scratch writing and poems. A half a dozen false starts for each novel idea and countless attempts at the same short. My head is clogged. I write but nothing comes out the other end.
So, I’m going to clear it all out. I’m learn to write faster. I’m going to learn to finish ideas. I’m going to learn how to silence the inner critic and just write. And here is how I am going to do it:
I’m going to write one story a day for one week. I’m going to write it and I’m going to share it. No locking them away (Though they probably should be.) These are going to be right off my head, and I’m not going to edit in the slightest. They are going to be bad. There are going to be spelling mistakes, grammar disasters, and childish cliche trite.
I’m not setting any rules for myself other than that I need to complete one story each day this week, from Thursday to Thursday. What constitutes a story really remains to be seen. I’m not setting any word count restrictions because then I’m writing to the word count and that just puts that inner editor right back in the driver’s seat, rather than locked and chained in the trunk where he belongs, the smug bastard.
So there we go, there is my goal, my challenge. And with that in mind, here is today’s offering: Help Me, Mister.
A Story A Day
Day One
There was the man, there was the motorcycle, and there was death. That’s all there ever was. The bike was hot and had the voice of caged thunder. He rode it so close the edge that he could feel the corners of reality peeling away. The night was cold and it was empty. He shattered both with his fire and his roar.
The motorcycle was a living thing. It pulsed and vibrated. It existed with the pure deviance and audacity of mechanical life, an artificial cock, a fetish for man’s self-conscious power and timid sexuality against the whole of creation, that infinite span.
He cut a corner, then another. Leaning hard into the turns, the dark trees of the empty valley blending and mixing into one blotted dark shape. He was alive and loud and defiant.
The crash happened fast. A shape, a shadow, a thought. He twitched and bike lost its purpose. The tires slipped from the ground and every inch, every pound, of the machine built for its purpose became useless metal. Became useless, devoid of purpose, hurtling towards oblivion, and dragging the man down with it.
Sparks flew from somewhere, meat flew. He tumbled, thoughtless, nameless, numb ,through the night. A puppet suddenly cut of his strings and left to its own devices. In the space of a heartbeat he died a thousand times, lives caught in a stuttering flashbulb, the quickening madness of a thunderstorm.
When he came to he remembered his name but it didn’t matter. He remembered pain, remembered each and every part of his broken flesh. He lay there and learned how to breath, staring sightless at the night sky as the trees waved a thousand bare fingers in front of the stars.
He sat up when he could, peeling himself from the road. His gloves were tattered, he tore them off and tossed them away with twisted and childishly clumsy fingers. The helmet followed. He stood and looked over the ruins of his altar scattered over the road. It ticked its final words as the heat bled away and the last trace of that living fire died.
He screamed. It was pain. It was anger. It was fear. It was defiance. He stood in the dark over his mortality and he screamed up through the waving fingers to the deafness above. He took a breath and screamed again, and again; and on the third, in between while he pulled air back into his lungs, he heard the crying.
It was the voice of a child sobbing gently in the dark. It froze his blood. He cursed and called out. The underbrush rustled. He walked closer and called again, trying to make his voice soft. Trying to reassure and apologize in the same breath. But his voice was still ragged from the screams, still angry, and his pounding heart kept trying to escape up his throat. The sobbing stilled and the rustling moved away, creeping back into the woods.
“Help me, mister.” A child’s voice said with feminine softness.
“I’m sorry, come back.” He followed after it, stepping off the road into the dirt. The earth welcomed him with her softness. He smelled soil and pine and was reminded of his mother’s kitchen. The rustling moved further, climbing up with the slope of the land into the dark of the trees, where the stars could no longer peer. He followed and the sobbing resumed.
“Come back.” He said and supplicant branches brushed his face. His feet sank into the spongy ground and something moved beneath his boots, something squirmed, a thousand somethings. He glanced over his shoulder and found that was no longer the way back, the forest had swallowed the road. He pressed forward, following the gentle slope up, following the gentle sobbing and the rustle in the underbrush that seemed at once inches from his blind fingers, and at once miles.
“Help me, mister.”
“I’m trying, please come back.” And yet it drifted on, and he pressed forward against the supplicant branches that brushed his cheeks with their polite questions. The slope changed pitch and he was descending. His foot slipped on the loose soil and he stumbled, feeling something vital tear.
Overhead an owl called and from elsewhere a different night bird answered with what might have been words. Then their conversation ended and the forest had no other voices. He pulled himself upright against a tree that bent down to stroke the top of his head. The rustling underbrush stopped somewhere ahead of him, the sobbing continued.
“Helpme, mister.”
A wave of moonlight washed through the trees and painted the area below in ghost light. Pale murky fronds robbed of their color danced softly; the trees swaying along. Again, something squirmed underfoot and he looked down to see earthworms pushing out of the soil. They climbed over his boots and waved out from between his laces with rapid jerks of a time lapse thrown into breakneck fast forward. Their cold naked bodies squirmed between his toes.
“Helpmemister.”
He looked up. The rustling came behind him now. Just out of the pale light of the moon. Overhead the owl laughed in a old man’s voice.
“Please.” He said.
The rustle became heavy, plodding rhythmically against hollow earth. The tree stroked the top of his head and the owl laughed.
“Please.” He said.
“Helpmemister.”
The tree bark shuddered and moved against his back. A thousand tiny feet crawled over his shoulders. He threw himself away from the tree, landing in the soft soil. He rolled onto his back and knocked something weightless from his chest, something with too many eyes. The ground seemed to pull at him. He scrambled backwards. The thumping continued slow and methodical, he could feel it through the ground.
“Please.” He said.
The moonlight danced and wavered and something huge stepped into the light. Its pale fur reflected the sickly light, its shoulders hunched and heavy. Its eyes were madness and its hands impossibly long. High above a thousand naked fingers danced in front of the stars and the owl gibbered.
It opened its too wide mouth and smiled and spoke in the voice of a child.
Help Me Mister.
Weasel Tea 