For You

I had an interesting discussion tonight with a fellow writer who had also run up against the ole brick wall.  Odd that we haven't spoken with each other in a week or so.  You see, while he has his own tales to tell, in his own writing style,

well,

he said that he appeared to be forcing the tale.


Now, it must be said that he also invests much brain work into each thing that he puts out.

He actually mentioned the word "emit" when he described it.

Ya know, like a fart.


After I laughed and he did after he smelled what he'd expelled, our communal discourse began to cover grounds that we had not before yet discovered.

Hell, it ranged from the idea of the muse, the subject of the subconscious and its function in our sleep: Dream State (and also lucid dreaming and how when one discovers that they are dreaming, that is when they awaken) and sleep paralysis and its own function in our brain's information processing,

and then on to particle theory and the recent discovery of a particle form another dimension from the Large Hadron Collider (yeah, old joke about misspelling that; we are juvenile in our enjoyment of writing)

And we came up with a final distillation, which I will share with you now, for what it's worth.


The reason that tales might sometimes be unsatisfactory

could be due to this consideration:


Consider your reader.




That might be it.



What does this mean?


Does it mean that we have to write toward a certain policy point?  Are we searching for a large audience?  Are we looking toward selling a million books?  Are we in this to make large cash?


I will leave it up to you for your decision about that for yourself.  You go and write however you will, for whatever your reason, and if you find that sort of thing to be your muse, then do what you will.


We did not worry about that in our discussion about the almighty muse (although we spoke at length about formulaic writing: such as romances with dirty parts in it, much as our grandmothers would subscribe to those little monthly books that spoke of

married doctors/ airplane pilots/ wealthy philanthropists

and the nurses/ airplane attendants/ Peace Corps volunteers who loved them)

no,

we spoke of the Muse.


Why do we write?



Well, it appears that our best friend, our Reader, our BFF

is You.





We decided that we must not pander to the prurient interests of the Reader for that sake alone.


Prurient is excellent, but it shouldn't be an ends to a mean.



We have to do two things, no matter if we write a comedy or a romance or a tragedy.


We have to give you closure, which is that point after the arc when you finally get to let your breath out and say, "Ahhhhhh."



Then your shoulders go down, you shake off the shivers, the tears, or the smile after it's all been settled.


And the second thing is:



We have to give you hope.



If you have followed this diatribe this far, then you know what such a thing means to us; we, as a collective.


We speak now not of formulae.  Fuck hacks.


We speak of being true our human intent.


We survive as a species simply because we wish to connect to each other, to communicate our experience with each other,


in the hope we have (innate in our DNA)

that we can survive bad things, rise above the horror that others might do, and help each other find the way out of the darkness.




However this happens, no matter what we each may have done,

we must believe that there is a reason to hope.


Ya know.



---willies out.






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Oh Baby

Inside the house it was worse.  

Her slippery man-shoes found no traction on the piles of regurgitated muscle and offal as she tripped over femurs and ulnae, so she slid her hands along the walls for balance. 

The walls were wet and sticky.

Here, this song will help offset the depravity.

Middle Of Nowhere   by Hot Hot Heat   

Emeralda felt her anxiety rise to the point of losing it all as she searched each room of the house for her little girl.  She stumbled back down the stairs from the top floor, over meaty skulls and ribs and such.  She heard the broken man scream awake in the back yard and then he began to laugh.  He was delirious, of course. 

She called out to her daughter and then the broken, eyeless man laughed louder and faster and in a higher pitch until he sounded like a police siren.  It frightened her and she lost her traction and fell into a mess of vomitus and hair.

Fuck this, she thought, this is the end for him.  She clawed her way over the jumble of bones and soggy clothing all the way outside.  She saw where she had left him.  His back was broken up high, his arms were loose from their shoulders, but still he laughed.

She heaved her heavy body from the stairs on the rear porch and landed on his legs and they sounded like chalk sticks breaking.  Of course, he felt no pain.

She twisted his body around even while she sat on his legs.  His breath began to hitch, for she was twisting his spine all the way around, and it sounded like autumn leaves underfoot when his spine came apart.

She saw him panic, even in his eyeless, toothless visage, for even in the last moments, the human DNA will cause us to strive to live, to survive.

He stopped laughing.

Emeralda pulled his head up to her mouth and screamed into his ear hole.  She said, “Where is my daughter?!”

He gasped, and then he began to laugh again.

Fuck you, she thought, as she bit into his ear with her teeth and then ground them together, sideways.

He screamed again.  “AGH!”

She pulled his ear away from his head and with it came the ear canal and those tiny bones; the hammer and anvil and such, which fell against her chin.  It had an interesting flavor.  She found that she was unable to control herself.  She chewed the gristle and the tiny bones and swallowed them.

She said, “Who are you?”

But he was too busy shuddering in pain to answer.

She remembered to not let him pass away at her hands, for he would become a Walk-In lest she do this. 

Yet, she swung his head all the way up so that he faced her, and as he gurgled his last breath, she said, “I will know everything you know now.”  Then she twisted his head around a few more times.

He went away.

She heard her baby crying in the vehicle at the front of the house.

What had she done?

What had she become?

God Help You.

God Help Us All.

---willies out.

Title 5  (at 1:46:36)   by The Rolling Stones  

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KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Her eyelids fluttered and opened.  Bright sunlight in the east cast shadows sideways through the fading evening mist.  She felt the cool breath of the desert night evaporate as the vengeful sun cast his accusing eye over the rim of the mountains. 

You Can’t Quit Me, Baby   by Queens of the Stone Age 

She lied on her back in the damp grass, and her tongue hurt.

It tasted like fresh blood in her mouth, as well as old, raw meat.  She could use floss and a toothbrush, she thought. 

Emeralda rolled over onto her side and her body felt like a sack of wet sand.  It was very heavy, with a lot of inertia.  It resisted change in position.  She would soon learn that it would also resist change in its motion. 

She inhabited the body of a large, heavy man with powerful musculature.  His hair was matted with the dried blood of his victims.

She saw two long tracks across the dewy grass, and they led to her vehicle, the one with the smashed-open rear end.  That eyeless bastard was going for her baby.  

Emeralda got up onto her knees and felt a bit dizzy.  Her jaw throbbed and her brain hurt.  She probably had shoe-sole prints on her chin as well.  She didn’t care.  She knew that this was a temporary vehicle for her soul now.  She was a Walk-In, according to her teachings.  She could find a new body to inhabit if something happened to this one.

But her baby.  The mother bear instinct in her soul rose to ire. 

It rose to rage.

She got up on her feet and looked down.  She was wearing large, cheap dress shoes.  They were slick soled and they slipped on the wet grass.  She followed the two slug trails to the cement walkway and saw the blind man down on his knees, trudging along with his hands out front, waving them about.  What a pitiful manner to navigate the world.

Emeralda walked up behind him and kicked him in the back.  He fell forward and smacked his face on the concrete.  His front teeth skittered across the walkway, making a sound like tiny dice.

She knelt down with one knee upon his spine and pulled the closer arm up behind his back.  He screamed out a gurgling word, which was this:  “AGH.”

She pulled his arm up high to the sky until the shoulder became tensed to the point of popping out of socket.  She whispered to him in English.  She said, “That is not your child.”  Her voice sounded like the one from behind the door that had invited her into this home a few moments before.  In her head, it grumbled deep and low.  The odor of feces sprang forth.

The eyeless man beneath her answered.  He said, “I will not touch the child.”  He added, in Armedmenian, “Just leave me the body of the bitch who blinded me.”

She relaxed her grip on his arm.  This threw her for a loop.  What was going on here?

She knew from her teachings that when a Walk-In kills someone, if he eats a part of the victim before they die, then he can gain their life-long knowledge. But what was this all-out feasting?  The carrying forth of knowledge was meant as honor to the life of the victim, for she understood that every life to be a precious gift from the creator.

She had been taught that Walk-Ins bided their time in the darkness of the eternal plane, awaiting the next moment they should enter a body and effect a change, or, very rarely, take a life.  In doing so, the dead one would become a Walk-In.  There were not very many of them at all in the whole chain of the timeline of the human plane.

She tasted the flavor of the blood in her mouth and it made her stomach grumble.  It made her hungry. 

Was this some part of the Walk-In principles that she had not been taught? Hunger for blood?  Blood lust?

She did not want to kill the animal-man beneath her knee.  That would only free him to search for a new, fresh body to inhabit.  No, she would need to incapacitate him, to make him weak, but able to survive.  A Walk-In commits suicide at his eternal demise.  Just needed to give herself time to get away from him.  He was deranged, and she did not think it would be good to turn him into a Walk-In.  If he passed away from starvation, then he would not turn.

She did not know that he was already a Walk-In, and a cannibal one at that, but her instincts were correct.  She slid her knee up further along his spine and grabbed his other arm.  She said, “I’m not going to kill you.  I’m just going to damper you.”

She pressed down with her meaty thigh and pulled his arms up, close to her.  The spine make a loud “POP” noise at the vertebrae between the shoulder blades, and his arms came out of their sockets.  He screamed a bit and then passed out in shock.

She dragged him to the rear of the house, to place him in the cellar.

Out in the rear yard, the grass was covered in blood and piles of red, chewed meat, and bones.  There were many bodies there. She dropped the broken man down on the ground and ran from one body to the next, to look for her daughter.  None of the bodies were children.  She held her tears back; tears of worry, of horror, of relief flooded just below the rim of her eyelids.  She held those tears at bay. 

Now was the time to find her daughter.  Her friends were here, she found them among the other bodies.  These two men had been very busy.  They had used this home as a base.  Somehow they understood that it was reinforced against attack with metal plates inside the walls.

The broken man had spoken Armedmenian to her.  What did this mean?  In her panicked state, she saw the pieces of a puzzle, and she understood that they bore great significance, so she filed them in her mind for later.  She also understood that she was in no frame of mind to put it all together.

Once she found her daughter, she would take the time, make the effort to understand what was going on.

She was too panicked to realize that if she put the pieces together, only then would she find her daughter.

God Help You.

God help Us All.

---willies out.

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Blind Hunger

Where No Eagles Fly   by Julian Casablancas and The Void  

He felt his teeth sink into her cheek as if in slow motion in a film.  Her blood flowed into his mouth and it tasted sweet.  He chewed it once and gulped it down, and then she-

She clawed at his face and dug into his eyes and he saw excruciating white light.  He pushed off from the grass about her head with his hands and then the worst thing happened to him.  He felt his eyeballs tear away from the inside of his skull.

He writhed in agony, rolling about on the side lawn, feeling his empty, spurting eyeholes with his fingers.

How dare she?

Rage erased his Walk-In cannibal hunger.  Vengeance burned in his brain.  He would tear her apart.

The pain in his face, inside his skull, burned like a face full of flaming oil.  He heard her scrambled off, making gagging noises as she tried to escape.

Fuck that bitch.  He reared back on his haunches and he screamed at the sky above.  He could not see, but he sure as hell could hear.  He bent over and dug his fingers into the dirt.  He ripped clods of sod out and threw it above, and then he went after her.

His scream was answered in kind.

It was close, but sounded far away.

A baby?

A soft, delicate, tasty little morsel?

Where was it?

It must be her infant.  She had brought it with her.  Stupid bitch.  Well, he thought to himself, I will make you pay in the worst way, vile woman.  Forget about wrestling with you anymore, angry cunt.  I can find my next meal, and it will be like eating veal.  Fuck you .

Oh

No

EMERALDAEMERALDAEMRALDAWAKEUP EMERALDAEMERALDAEMRALDAWAKEUP EMERALDAEMERALDAEMRALDAWAKEUP EMERALDAEMERALDAEMRALDAWAKEUP

Emeralda felt the world slip sideways, like a ship that sank in murky waters on a moonless night.  Her prophesies had held true.  The dark times had come.

Her life winked out like a tiny candle, and she floated about above her body, watching the two animal-men near her body; one unconscious, and the other rolling about in pain.  Before the final light dimmed to complete darkness, she saw the one without eyes stop and rear up, and howl..

Then she saw him stop and turn his head towards her vehicle.

Her baby girl.

The Prophesies spoke of the eternal plane, and she had heard of this all of her life, from birth.  All of the language of the Armedmenians were teachings of this thing. All words pointed to the dark times.

Now she understood that such a thing existed for a single reason.

She looked about and saw sparks in the blackness.

One was quite near, and it moved toward the furthest one away.  That tiny one, off a bit in the distance, well, it glowed with remarkable clarity, like a newly faceted gem.

There was another spark, and it was closer.

She went to it and peered into it.  It was the first attacker.  She understood that this one was unconscious, and it could be her new vehicle.

Yes.

She was now a Walk-In.

She would inhabit this new body.

What she did not know was that an evil man, the original cannibal,

-he had infected the Walk-In plane with his hunger.

She would have this infection as well.

She entered the body of her attacker.

She would protect her little girl.

She would search for her other daughter.

Emeralda understood what it meant to be a Walk-In.   

(This has always been Emeralda’s theme.)

God Help Us All.

---willies out.

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Emeralda: The Choice

What would you do?

It is a simple question, and it’s one that faces us each moment of the day.  The significance of the manner in how we navigate our lives, from one moment to the next, is contained within each decision we make as we go about our lives.

Your life is a course on a chart, mapped by you every moment.  Where will you end up?  It is not worth considering about free choice, if you are destined for a certain end.  The course is what this is all about.  We are all and each heading for a dirt nap.  How will you arrive to your own end? How will your journey have been? 

One extreme is to hide under the bed, avoiding engagement, and possibly missing true enjoyment as you age and wither and have no stories to tell after it’s all done.  Did you live well?

The other extreme is to crash and burn, but such a life is not long for the world, and there may be very few tales, glorious as they may be… 

However you go about navigating between the shoals and the storms in pursuit of living well on the map of your own life,

…at a certain point, in a very bad situation, you may be asked to choose between life and death.

In that place, you will find yourself to be all too human.

At the moment of TRVTH, you will flee.  That is in our DNA.  No fair calling coward on that. 

We are born to live, of course, and to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  At the final decision, we will opt to survive.

Hopefully, you will fight for your life with a chance to win, when there is nothing else left for you to do.

That is what Emeralda did.  Let’s see how she fared.

Reconsider, baby   by John Bonamassa  

Emeralda watched as the door slowly opened wider.  She should have fled.  Now it was too late for that.

Urine released from between her legs; an autonomic response to fear, perhaps to make the body less desirable to eat, and maybe to lessen the load for further action, so to speak.

She turned and ran down the steps for that was a weak location to stand and fight.  Her skin crawled and her knees trembled.  Adrenaline spurted into her arteries, causing her mind to flash images and her survival instincts to take over, to take command.

You will panic.

It is unavoidable.

Sometimes, it is necessary.

She tripped and fell, so she scrambled away on elbows and knees toward the side of the house.  Even in that moment, her instinct to protect her baby was with her.

She heard the footfalls down the steps and understood that there were two of them.

Oh.

No

She rolled onto her back and pulled her legs up to her chest, making herself a small target.

She heard the roar of delight from the first one and saw that he was covered in blood.  He was a large, powerful man, and he his hair dripped blood and chunks of flesh.  An odd thought occurred to her, which was this: He must not have very good table manners.

He dove down upon her and she slammed her feet up at his face.  She had tremendous strength now from adrenaline, for a very short time, and it worked.

His head snapped up and he bit his tongue and he went backwards, falling to the ground unconscious.

The second one was a blur.  He landed on her ribs with both feet and ruptured her diaphragm.  Her ribs pierced her lungs. Her stomach burst toward her throat and sprayed its contents out of her mouth.  She voided her bowels, along with prolapse.

She scratched at his face and dug into his eyes as he went for her face with his teeth.  She forced his eyeballs out and grabbed them, slippery as they were, and yanked with all of her might, ripping the connective muscles away from his skull.

She coughed and gagged, turning over on her stomach, attempting to swim up out of the depths, to find air at the surface.  She felt like she was drowning.  Her diaphragm would not intake air.

The world dimmed and became dark as she panicked.   

Emeralda left her mortal coil.

She had fought for her life and for the safety of her baby, until her last breath.

That is what any good mother would have done.

See you tomorrow.

---willies out.

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Emeralda THE WALK

All of the People    by Panama wedding  

Emeralda drove faster and easier on the major thoroughfares.  Down at the lower, western end of the ugly city, she encountered something she had never before seen.  It was a mass exodus of folks who appeared to be heading off for extended vacations, or else they were moving, relocating.  Rooftops loaded with luggage, chairs, mattresses, garbage bags.  Windows stuffed with silverware drawers, pets, and kids with bed head.

In the opposite direction, streaming into the city, were fancy automobiles of every make, with gleaming paint jobs and large rims, carrying men who flashed large jewelry and guns.  They were heading into the mean, dispirited city of Fuckno.  Rape, pillage and plunder.

A new surge of adrenaline entered her bloodstream, and this time, it cleared her eyes, opened her mind up from her own peril.  This was a shared escape, and although she had witnessed the reason for such a mass exodus at every turn, only now did she begin to understand. 

You see, a cocoon will protect, but it blinds you from the outside world.

She swung off the interstate freeway and onto the side street connection towards her little girl.  A new thought immediately entered her head.  It was this: What if the home was empty?

She tried to push the thought away.  Of course they had not left.  They would have…

…have done what?

Call her on the telephone at the Lilac Estate?  Alert them that she was not there anymore?

What if they’d decided to head there for protection?

What, what, what if… if what?

Did they leave the city?  Or worse?  What if they were indeed home, but they would never answer anything at all, ever again?

Emeralda kept her head. She did not slam down the accelerator, although she could feel panic sharpening its claws, preparing to rend her brain.  She hammered that feeling down.  She would not panic.  Do not panic.

She drove up from the major artery that connected the megatropolis to the coast, and within the smaller capillaries, she found more of what she’d witnessed earlier, outside the smashed rear wall of the Lilac Estate.  Some bodies were half-eaten, others were scattered bones.  All about them she saw regurgitated remnants from many huge feasts.  Eat and puke, lather and rinse, repeat as needed.

What the hell was going on?

She pulled up to the curb the opposite way, with her driver door facing the home.  The place was constructed in the style of the 1950’s mill worker, with walls painted purple, of course.  Armedmenian.  

The house had been fortified for war, but only the construction contractor and his subs would know.   They hired only their own.  The walls had heavy steel plating inside, and the windows were made from bullet-resistant Plexiglas. All of the homes of them Purple Robes were likewise reinforced, but more of the wealthy Armedmenians did not live so close to the curb.  They chose to reside in estates and compounds.

This was the reason that Emeralda had found connection to the couple who lived here, at this modest home.  They were from a previous era of the Purple Robes; they still held tenet to the laws and religion of the old country. They were less and less like the family, the rulers of the new, of her husband.  As this new nobility progressed, her friends were left further and further in the dust.

That meant that she could trust them. 

But would they answer her knock?

She looked around and saw that the whole street was still.  Nothing moved.  The air itself seemed to hold its breath.  Where were the birds?  Where were the dogs?

Telepathy   by Crosses  

She stuffed her car keys into her pocket and locked the door to the big vehicle.  Yes, she left the baby inside, but her instinct told her to do both of these things.  Always trust your instincts, when your nerves are flayed and they lay raw.  If you are heading off to a hair appointment or into the workplace, then fuck you.

*ahem*

She could hear the sound her shoes made as they connected with the concrete walkway.  She’d never noticed this before.  Always running in them, sweating and striving to run even further each day.  Unprotected, free, running and making herself stronger. 

She was born into a world of ancient history, and the language she knew from her first utterance contained words that always led back to the base of their knowledge.  All lines of thought kept mind of the Prophesies.  All words in Armedmenia hinted at the things to come.  The dark times.

She made herself strong because it was in her DNA. 

A superhero?

NO.

A mother.

All of this weight pressed down on her shoulders as she walked to the front door.  She held panic at bay and the thoughts that scratched at the door, wanting to be opened, clawing to intrude.  But here was indicated focus.  It mattered the most.

Her skin crawled.  She listened for any intrusion into the silence of the neighborhood and watched for any movement in the periphery of her eyeline.  (Keep your body soft, act like you are supposed to be there, do not panic.)

She reached the steps that led up, and paused, considering to look back and check on her baby.

Her mother’s instinct told her to do it, but her DNA told her to not.

She did not hear a thing, and as she took the first step up, she was aware that the silence appeared to be growing.  Was she deaf?  Had she lost the ability to sense?  Was she heading into an ambush?  Was someone right behind her?

Do

Not

Panic.

The door in front of her swung inward when she was halfway up the steps and a voice whispered.  It said, “Come in quick!”

She froze, yes she froze. 

Nothing here was correct.  She never spoke English to them, nor they to her.  She would knock a special knock, and then a response, and then her second knock, to declare safe.

No one was there anymore.  Her little girl was not there.  Someone else was there now. Something else was there, and it wanted her to come in.

She should not have frozen. 

She should have turn tail and then run directly for her vehicle.  Fumble with the keys, unlock the door, climb in, lock the door, ignite the combustion, race off with the monsters chasing after her down the street, in a vehicle with the back end all smashed open.

All of her life, she’d known that there would be a moment in time when she would face impending doom, and it would come down to a split second decision.  This was that precise moment.

And she had frozen.

Her teachings, her DNA, her training all spoke two things, which were these:

1       Do not run to the vehicle.  (Do not put your baby in harm’s way.)

2      Make a split second decision between fight or flight.

What would you do?

See you tomorrow for the next part.

---willies out.

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