Fiction Relay Part 41

Ah, here we are, with our latest installment of The Fiction Relay, details about which you can find here http://thereclininggentleman.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/fiction-relay-homepage/ , and/or the Summary of this fascinating tale can be found here http://thereclininggentleman.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fiction-relay-summary/  the following is my humble contribution, and to find out who’s up for the next chapter, you have to scroll to the bottom of the page so you may as well read it while you’re scrolling anyway….so please, enjoy.
******
Two red glowing eyes were laser-focused on Melissa sleeping the sleep of the damaged.
After the visions first played out in her head, she couldn’t fall asleep. Her mind was trying to process everything that had been revealed to her, trying to decide what her next move would be.
She continued to focus on the wooden coyote with the strange piercing eyes until she eventually drifted off.
As she tossed and turned, mumbled words in an ancient language slipped from her lips and that piercing red glare intensified.
Raj was not happy.
Melissa had betrayed him in more ways than one.
Although there was a little piece of his remaining mind that was almost impressed with the depth of her anger, it didn’t come close to the rage inside Raj.
She had killed him once back in the cave then left him for dead again by leaving him imprisoned in this cookie-cutter cheap motel room.
Raj had allowed her to believe he was as dead as she intended him to be, but he was far from finished with her.
Raj and rage were never far apart when he was alive, the stolen power Melissa used to reanimate him had done a better job than she could possibly imagine, at least as far as his mind was concerned, and now the only thing in his reanimated brain was rage intensified.
His body, on the other hand, was a rotted mess.
Melissa had literally stabbed him in the back, repeatedly plunging her blade into his body long after Meagan teleported away from him. His back resembled an old leather sofa shredded after years of being used as a cat’s scratching post.
He would get his revenge on Melissa, on all of them somehow, but for now Raj remained trapped inside his own unmoving body, slumped and tied to an uncomfortable cheap motel chair while she continued to sleep.
The strange wooden carved coyote was set on the bed table beside her sleeping body, quiet.
Raj rested his gaze on the carving, his own rage-filled eyes locked on the inhuman eyes of the mystical totem. The visions that had slammed over Melissa eased soft and slow into Raj’s mind, filling in the blanks between his rage, leaving Raj full of ice cold fury and a strong desire to make his way to the ice caves revealed in the totem’s visions.
His inability to seek out the icy underground cavern served only to increase his anger and while patience had never been one of his strong points when he was alive, Raj’s death at the hands of that traitorous bitch Melissa left him with a strong desire to do some major damage.
Let her sleep the sleep of the dead, thought Raj, she wasn’t long for this world, not if Raj had any say over the matter.
~
Blue was on a mission.
She had a Mother to find. The hell with her so-called Father, he could fend for himself as far as Blue was concerned.
Blue instantly felt the exact moment her Mother left the Club. As tough of a front as Blue kept up, sometimes she couldn’t hide her worry about her Mom from Spence.
He knew Blue well enough to let her go alone as she wanted.
She was perfectly capable of taking care of herself and she was determined to get to her Mother.
And they could always and without fail get into each other’s head anytime, anywhere. Besides, Spencer had a few more irons in the fire than even Blue was unaware of.
He had a few things to take care of, a few things which, well, the less Blue knew, the better.

At times, Blue’s own memories would get patchy and tangled, fading in and out sporadically, but there was one thread that was woven through every single thought she had as far back as she could remember; her biological Father abandoned her and her Mother before Blue was even born.
She imagined he must have taken off the minute he found out her Mom was pregnant, and although no one ever told her that, deep down, this is what Blue carried with her each and every day of her life.
She’d hopped on her bike as soon as Spence admitted he’d already had her motorcycle brought back from the Jack-Ass Coffee bar.
A flash of that waiter’s face transforming earlier, all fangs and claws, eyes spitting fire as he scrambled after her in the bar sent a chill down her spine.
She increased her speed as if she could outrun the memories she wished she could forget and catch up to the memories that eluded her.
Part of her wanted to pay a quick little visit to Tyrone to have a few words of the non-verbal kind with him, let her fists do the talking, but the pull of Meagan, the Mother she wanted so badly, was becoming stronger the further on she drove.
There was something else though, something nearby that felt as if it was tugging at her. It began to feel as if her motorcycle was driving her instead of her driving it.
There was a scent in the air. Putrid. Rotting. Like driving by the city dump on a hot summer day, the air was heavy with the stench.
Blue knew the odor was undetected by the normal human nose but Blue didn’t have the normal human nose, if she let herself, she could differentiate and track each and every separate smell in the air.
Just one of the many powers she had, it was something she could turn on and off at will.
But as she flew down the deserted back roads, as she slammed into the nearly tangible smell of Evil with a capital E, Blue’s heart began to pound nearly out of her chest.
There was something frighteningly powerful and ancient, dark and evil mixed amongst the mélange of stink, but that wasn’t the cause of Blue’s sudden dread.
Her Mother was there.
Wherever there was, whatever the ever-strengthening stench was pulling her toward, Blue could feel her, smell her essence mixed amongst the quickly approaching dire.
If Blue’s instincts were right, and they usually were, something big was about to go down.
If Blue’s instincts were right, sometime in the very near future, things were about to go from bad to worse.

to be continued, as the baton passes to http://kyotzeta.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/three-2/#comment-1891

Guilty

I can’t not feel guilty.
Oh, I didn’t do anything to feel guilty about, and therein lies the problem: I didn’t do anything.
That’s a lie, let me rephrase that, I didn’t write nearly enough over the last eleventy or so days due to circumstances beyond my control also known as my very best friend in the world came to visit for eleventy days and it’s been over four years since we’ve seen each other due to the fact that it’s a long ride from Florida to New Jersey and vice versa.
I feel like I’m in confession so let me just get it over with so I can do my penance and move on:

{Deep Breath}
Bless me dear Readers for I have sinned. I allowed myself to spend time just being with my very best lifelong friend and in doing so I neglected my writing. Yes, I know, I have written a bit, I tried to write at least something here and there, but not nearly enough. And I have definitely not done anything remotely resembling enough reading of your words which, in truth, bothers me as much, if not more, than the writing.
Ok, maybe it’s a fifty/fifty split on that last one, if I’m confessing I must confess truthfully, unlike the confessions I made in Catholic School where I always began my list of sins with “Bless me Father for I have sinned…I lied ten times”, because I usually wound up making up sins because I was kind of a non-sinner back then. The way I saw it, I was covered because I already told Father Joseph that I lied.
I’m going into babble mode aren’t I?
I shouldn’t go into babble mode when I have real writing to do, as well as real reading, but I do tend to babble when I’m exhausted.
I also probably shouldn’t go into babble mode when I’m confessing my sins.
Except the truth is, that’s the extent of my confession, unless you want to count the fact that I allowed myself to eat a bunch of junk food but that shouldn’t really count because I’ve already been punished for that one; fibromyalgia and junk food are not in any way perfect together, so today, after getting back from the airport, all my intentions of writing collapsed with my own damn self because I crashed enough to have to lay my body down and sleep a few hours.
I feel guilty for those wasted hours sleeping but in truth, my mind was unable to do anything other than shut down for awhile.
To recap: me guilty for not writing and reading equals a blog-like post thingy because I miss you all. See? I get all kinds of corny when I’m fighting the fibro slide and say things like “I miss you all”, but ’tis true, and this is a confession so, truth.
Thank you for letting me unburden my soul. For reals.

Tomorrow (or today to all you time travelers living in the future) I will be finishing up my Super Secret Chapter of The Awesome Fiction Relay Of Awesome http://thereclininggentleman.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/fiction-relay-homepage/ then continuing on with my Muse/Djinn series…oh and poetry because it spills out of my head without my permission sometimes so I have to go where my Muse leads me; if you’ve read any of the Adventures of me and my Muse (links and me, not perfect together right now) but the point is, my Muse is truly a harsh Mistress and I’m really babbling so I shall end this little missive with a final official apology and a very heartfelt Thank You, for reading, for commenting, for writing wonderful words I get to read and for truly being exactly who each and every one of you are.
And since you already got the Corny Alert, allow me to say thank you all for sharing pieces of yourself and making me feel comfortable enough to do the same.
Because, in my final Corny Thought, we are all connected, and for this, I feel truly Blessed.

Ok, tomorrow I’ll be less corny and more write-y. I have some twists and turns I need to get out of my head and on to the page, so we can catch up with Suzi’s Saga and find out what the hell is going on with Catt.
Boring words over, sleep now and writing like a fiend tomorrow.
Roger that.

That Holy Place

there’s a spring in your step,
magic in your eyes
that lets you see right through me
all my secrets are nothing more than urban myths i was warned about
lessons i needed to learn on my own
but i learned it all wrong,
crossed the bridge and got stuck on the wrong side,
sometimes you appear like a genie in a bottle
when you’re rubbed the right way your wish is my command
with the power of your mind you control me,
your voice steers me around the curves
and guides me to that holy place
the place where we can breathe easy
safe in the arms of a rowan tree
where you lay me down
invisible
feasting on me
nobody watching
as the world around us goes on

The Palm Of His Hands

She finds him haunting her thoughts more and more each day regardless of all the clutter she throws in his path.
If she keeps herself occupied with minutia she can go a full five minutes without a trace of him crossing her mind.
But even the slightest little thing can set off a chain reaction bringing her right back to him.
He’s always with her even when he’s not.
It’s been that way for quite some time despite her attempts to keep him far away from her imaginings. She knew she shouldn’t let him have such free rein over her thought patterns but she was powerless when it came to him.
He’d unknowingly trained her that way and she eagerly followed his lead in the game they’d been playing for what seemed like forever, but somewhere along the way the lines blurred.
Sometimes it became difficult to separate fantasy from reality but one thing remained clear; she belonged to him.
Whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Nothing more and nothing less.
He made the rules and she followed them.
Of course it was all made easier by the simple fact that her wants were the same as his.
She fought against the primal connection between them and tried to keep her emotions to herself but he knew. Somehow he always knew when she needed him most despite her attempts to prove otherwise.
She’d ignore the fire in her belly when his name came up in conversation in an attempt to keep herself under control. She was able to hide her unconscious reaction from everyone but him.
Now she finds him slipping into her dreams each night, so vivid and clear that when she awakens each morning the first thing she does is reach for him.
He’s never there.

Impulsive Unexpected

i can write a song or bake a cake
without batting an eyelash,
downshift around an S-turn or beat you at chess without cheating,
hold a firefly in my hand without flinching and live to tell the tale,
but i can’t make you think of me before you fall asleep
or star in your dreams if i do cross your mind,
wouldn’t count,
not if the cards are stacked,
better to feel the dice in the palm of your hand,
a snap of the wrist and just let go
the impulsive unexpected always tastes sweeter
although actually, i will think of you before i sleep,
just a tiny little past-peek, your tongue hungry for my mouth,
your eyes greedy as my own, blue fire surprise,
i’ll sleep into my own invisible, the one where you wait for me
and we remind ourselves why
this is,
that’s where we remember

The Way You Knew

it shouldn’t have surprised me
the way you knew I had the sads
even from a distance with your eyes closed,
i forget sometimes,
the way you mean what you say and say what you mean
i mostly imagine i never cross your mind
years of training will do that you know,
and you know too, that where i’m concerned, it doesn’t take much,
one little ‘you ok?’ out of the blue kicks me hard,
or maybe it’s just my heart beating again,
it shuts down frequently these days, until you shock me back to life,
distance has taken on a new meaning,
fluctuating between literal and figurative,
but there’s a portal nearby, hidden to most,
i think we can make it there if we time it right,
when everything around us freezes
we burn

Intermission ~ Muse Series

AUTHORS NOTE: Our Catt is poised to dive into the Apocalypse, although she is unprepared at this time. Time has momentarily been frozen as an Ancient Observer fills us in, or does he?
A hush has descended over the Earth.
It may last a millisecond. It may last an hour. It may even last for years.
However long it may be is meaningless. For now, everything has come to a complete halt.
Time itself has stopped. Frozen.
At least, on the surface.
You see, the normal average human eye notices nothing. The normal average human goes about their everyday business completely unaware of what really goes on underneath the surface of their limited comprehension.
This, I believe, is a blessing for the normal average human.
Who am I, you may be wondering?
Who I am is not important for the telling of this tale.
In the Grand Scheme of things, not everything needs to be Named in order to understand. Names have Power.
There is no need for you to know my Name, my Power is just that; mine.
There is no reason to give anyone Power over me, in fact as of this moment, no single being, human or non-human has ever held any Power over me and I will not allow this to change.
For the purposes of storytelling, think of me as a Scribe.
I prefer the term Wordsmith.
Some might go with Narrator but that is not my role in this case.
There already is a Narrator for the purposes of this tale.
I am merely an Observer.
While this tale belongs to another, the time is growing nearer.
I have frozen everything, for I fear for her.
Events have been accelerated before she is ready.
Something has upset the Balance, what was to be is no longer written in stone.
What was to be is no longer a certainty.
This troubles me, for this has never before happened.
Even if I desired, there is nothing I can do but Observe, and carefully offer a little bit of information in case she fails. It is unfortunate, but I can not directly interfere.
I can steer lifelines in her direction. Whether she takes advantage is only for her to decide.
She is our only hope yet she must discover this herself.
I can only watch, although our Fate is in her hands through the power of the bloodline, she is on her own, and she must prove herself worthy.
You see, events are about to happen.
Big, potentially World changing events of the Apocalyptic kind.
In truth, they have already begun.
As I record these events, Final Battles are on the verge of exploding.
Forces are already gathering, Forces unseen to the average human eye have been here on this Earth longer than humans have been on this Earth.
It has been to the benefit of humankind to remain unaware, at least up until this point in time.
For the most part, what will be, will be.
Throughout History, as I have travelled through Time and Space, there have been rare occurrences when what was to be has been changed.
Variables can change everything.
Or nothing.
As an Observer, I am not meant to take sides. Much like modern day journalists used to do, my job is to record events as they happen. No opinions, no editorializing, just plain unvarnished truth.
In the World as it exists today, factual reporting has gone the way of the dinosaur.
Truth telling is extinct and the human race is poised to follow.
Part of my reason for being is to see that this does not happen.
But now I feel it.
Change is coming. I will be there as always to keep the records.
As I wait, I ride the carousel feeling the approaching change.
Wooden creatures are beginning to come to life beneath me.
Grimacing horses, snarling tigers, enslaved for eons, are finally beginning to morph.
Awakening.
Awaiting their call to action as the time grows nearer.
There is a painful beauty in witnessing the transformation of carouseled creatures returning to their true selves.
The tigers seem to snap and snarl the most. One of the wooden lions roars in agony as sharp paint chips flew in every direction from the force of his thick mane taking back it’s rightful place.
It might have brought a tear to my eye if I were capable of such wasteful emotions.
They are all anxious.
Wild-eyed horses stomp their hooves angry. A dragon spewing plastic sparks, restless to turn those fake sparks back into real flames.
But they all knew they had to wait.
What had long been foretold was about to begin.
~
It isn’t their time yet, but oh they can smell how near it is. The scent of death and destruction is in the air, permeating through their temporary man-made jails.
Even I can smell it in the air and if truth be told, after all this time the odor still makes me nauseous.
I catch bits and pieces of potential events on the carousel mirrors as it continues to spin, increasing in speed slowly. Perhaps the slowly building speed would look much faster to the normal human eye, if it were visible to the normal human eye.
Perception can be a tricky thing.
The carousel continues to spin, the glass mirrors continue to flash horrific scene after changing scene, slowly building to the momentum that would free them from their enforced imprisonment, heading to the Final Battle.
Which side they would take is anyone’s guess. There was no certainty, no allegiance, nothing preordained as to who they would assist. They had been given freedom of a sort; only in the most extreme, near catastrophic Events were they Called. This menagerie could change the outcome of What Was To Come, together with the girl child and her slow gathering of potential allies.
It must be difficult, I imagine, to walk in the shoes of that girl. She is lacking comprehension of what she needs to understand, inside and out, but she is one of the few remaining carriers of the true bloodline.
Going up against Asmodeus and Her is sheer madness, even one such as I recognize that.
~
As the carousel begins to pick up speed I feel a snap ripple through the air.
Something new catches my eye, something inside the carousel mirrors is shifting. There are new, unfamiliar faces etching themselves onto the mirrors from the inside out.
Events are changing even as I have frozen time, and the carousel itself is gaining speed at an incredible pace. Fast and faster, fast enough to blur the mirrors, distort the images.
This has never happened before.
I have to grab on tight to the horse’s rein as we fly.

to be continued…

Am I Blue? ~Sunday Stills ~ Shades Of Blue With Special Guest Billie Holiday

So although I do play well with others, sometimes rules evade me, which is another way of saying I don’t know if this picture is ok to post for this lovely blog http://sundaystills.wordpress.com/about/ I stumbled across, but “Shades Of Blue” http://sundaystills.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/the-next-challenge-shades-of-blue/ made me think of this picture I took of myself, one is just the original picture, the other one is me playing with a new app on my phone.
And how could I not share a lovely song by a lovely lady, “Am I Blue”, as sung by the one and only Billie Holiday?

Self Inflicted Deadlines

all these deadlines nagging at my brain
are self-imposed for the most part,
some things seem to work out better that way
except when it comes to you,
i can put words together sometimes
but i can’t seem to put myself together
where you’re concerned
all my flaws rise to the surface,
i ebb and i flow
you come in like the tide only less predictable
i drown in the blue on blue when you crash down around me
then you rush away dragging pieces of me with you
leaving me exposed and raw,
tender to the phantom touch
aching,
i keep it to myself and smile for the camera,
from a distance the picture is clear as a close-up,
yet i doubt myself more than i doubt you
my concerns whisper to me nightly
sounding silly and mundane to me,
without my permission
my words tumble out uncensored
giving you access to all that i am
although it’s unnecessary, for you always see right through me
it enters my mind that all these time constraints are mine alone,
there are no deadlines, no clocks ticking,
just you
just me
personal ports in a stormy existence
always there and never deviating from the pre-existing plan
set in motion long before the world began,
when i see that dashboard glow seep through your pores
bright enough to blind me and remind me,
i  toss those deadlines overboard, let them sink to the bottomless sea
for all i care,
time strings rubber-band like and we always come back to that place,
where nothing more than an accidental brush of your skin on mine
melts me like lava headed straight for you,
so we can both burn

Fiction Relay – Part 40

In the off chance you’ve missed this, here’s your chance to catch up, I’m next my lovelies, make sure you’re up to speed! You won’t be sorry!

The Reclining Gentleman

Those who follow me on Twitter will probably call me a liar. I said I would post this tomorrow but I have managed to polish it sooner than I expected so here I am and here it is.  As is traditional I was nervous about following the last few awesome chapters and wasn’t sure if I could match them – I hope I have. And as is also traditional, I am amazed at how much we have written of this story. FORTY chapters, 33k words and still going. If you are new to the Relay, you can find out more about it – who takes part and what they have written – by clicking on the Homepage. Or you can study-cram on what has gone before by reading the Summary. And once you have done that, you can read the latest events in Suzi’s Saga…

 

PART FORTY

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