worth 1000 words

I thought it was about time to delve back into fantasy. Strangely, it’s one of my favorite genres, yet one I don’t read much anymore. I try to read broadly, as I’ve stated in my videos. I think it’s important to read a wide variety of genres so you don’t get mucked up in too much of the same thing. All that does is make you myopic and give you tunnel vision. On that note, let’s take a deeper look into a dark forest where a man appears to perish among women who seem to crawl from the very earth itself.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Artem Demura

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kDP2mx

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Sleep.

Said a shadow of a tree who was a shadow of an armless man. Not armless, but I thought so, with bow so lithe it was invisible, whispering that word once, then twice. I did not hear if there was a third.

What I heard was plate on plate on joint on flesh. On moss. Soft. A fire will help. It won’t. I prefer cold to hot, so why? Heat burns within me now, pumps out of me, collecting in my upturned hands, as if it knows it should be there, so I can hold it, feel how heavy I am as it empties from me.

Eyes and sparks and voices. I create them all. Impossibilities. I listen for the man or creature again. The forest listens. The forest knows. The moss and gossamer haze and roots and branches dripping with–

Blood. In my hands. My insides on the outside. A tributary. I could let go, but I don’t. I can’t. I know if I do, I will lose it to the bugs and the dirt and the fire.

It’s warm. I hate it. A beacon I wish I could snuff. There is time, though I don’t have much. I am an hourglass, bottom heavy now.

Sleep.

Says the voice. Closer. Farther. Somewhere in between. I listen. I let two handfuls of myself go, and I am lost, just as I imagined. My head is bowed, so I can see its absence. Only green. No red.

Sparks and voices. I no longer see eyes. None greet me at the forests’s floor. None weep for me. I don’t weep for myself. I can’t breathe. Because of the fire. Because I am dead.

Sleep.

I do. That is all I can do. Sleep, drift, flow. All of these things and none of these things. Fire hangs on the edge of my vision. I hate it, but I love it. It shows me fletching. Damp and split and ragged. As I am. They are the shadow of a branch of a legless bird. No, that’s not right. That means nothing. I mean nothing. I will mean nothing. Soon.

Wake.

No. I’d shake my head, if I could. I would answer, if I could. With a voice that would extinguish that fire, because I had a voice to command a legion. Had. I have been had.

My eyes are closed, but I can see. My ears are closed, but I can hear. In front of me. Behind me. All around me. It writhes under the skin of the earth, testing that thin layer between life and death, like a mist, like a veil. Like a flood from a scalp down a neck to shoulders to a spine. To hips and thighs and feet ending with delicate toes. A family of toadstools, shoulder to shoulder, embracing, gouging, to move forward, closer. To me.

Wake.

I scream for the shadow of a tree who is a shadow of an armless man. I scream for his third, his fourth, his fifth, so they can be a family of their own, to match in the toadstools’ number, growing from me, like those grow from the black soil. But they don’t grow. They crawl. They burrow. They exhume. I am not buried yet. I wish to be buried.

The fire. It persists, it lingers, it taunts. Licking my feet I cannot move, spewing its heat on my face I cannot feel. I want to see shadows. I want to feel shadows. Again. I was so close, but now I am so far. The voice is closer than the other had ever been, the one who ushered me to slumber.

Wake.

It is soft, flowing off lush hillocks to a height that brings it down like a spear, to stake me to this world, this ground, not letting me go.

The fire pops, embers parting the smoke. And I feel it. I see it. I hear it. Everything. I know I am wrong. I am not ready. It tells me. It shows me. I believe.

My head raises, but that is all. It is enough. They don’t need to speak anymore. I have heeded their call. I am at their mercy, which is pleasant. I also see the shadow that killed me. It watches from a shadow darker than itself. It does not speak.

Wake.

Wake.

Wake.

“I am,” I tell them with my voice. I know it is real. My throat vibrates with the two words, and I quell the itch it left behind with the back of my tongue.

She smiles at me, the woman with the flood of hair and the feet ending with toadstools. I smile back. A beauty she is, made of all the things we hold dear. Words I cannot find to describe these things because it is in a language that is made of sensations. Ones that unmask a world where there is no sleep. Ones that glide down from cloud-laden skies to breathe unfathomable joys on the back of your neck, which encircle it like a necklace. But when you see it, it’s not a necklace at all. Tresses of the woman who had been inching toward you but is already here, lips parting to tell you to wake again. But you laugh, because you are awake. Alive and well, enjoying the fire that rages now, showing you all of their detail. In front of you, behind you, beside you. They crest again and again, endless waves.

You lift you arms to hold them, all of them, while the shadow that killed you watches with envy. You’d curse that shadow if you were cruel, but you aren’t. You are here, transformed, reborn into–

Pain. I had forgotten pain. They remind me, and it spreads from my leg where she bites, the beautiful one. They are all beautiful. They tear. They feed. I look for the shadow. I listen for its command. To sleep.

It is gone, and I am gone.

Sleep.

The novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorites. This image reminded me of that story, which I haven’t revisited for some time. I didn’t attempt to capture his style of writing or storytelling, but what I appreciate most about his writing is the simple relationships between people that have so much weight.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Adam B.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kDRNDz

The Story

The scent of a campfire drifted through the broken window of the broken building Abe had spent the last two nights in. Breaking his own rules, but he was tired and hadn’t seen a soul in weeks. A man needed luxuries in a world that had none. Funny thing, calling himself a man. But Billy wasn’t here to tell him otherwise. He would be soon, though, or rather, Abe would be there. Why did grown men choose to keep their boy names into adulthood? He’d never asked Billy, never dared ask, because Billy had always said boys didn’t have the right to ask questions, just to listen, to learn, and when they became men, all the questions they’d been saving up for all those years, they’d know the answers to. From listening.

Abe listened. To the sigh of the building, of the wind, of himself. It was too loud. At least the snowflake the wind carried was silent, tumbling and twirling on air that Samantha might have breathed a few days ago. The direction was right. The smell was right. Pine and flowers. Abe didn’t know much about flowers, just that she was as pretty as they smelled. Soon he’d smell her again, pretending to dodge the smoke of the campfire that he smelled stronger and stronger, his memory of the clearing outside the cabin split by the creek with the unecessary bridge they’d built together, the three of them. So narrow that stream was. Barely a trickle, but that bridge had added a sense of home, a symbol of welcome for anyone passing by, saying “This is a home where we care so much if a stranger’s boots get wet that we built a silly little bridge across a dribble of a creek.”

Abe went to the window. The light was nice, so he took out his journal of questions he didn’t have the answers to, a dried flower pressed right in the center of it he didn’t dare use as a bookmark, even though it kind of was one. Blue and yellow with white flecks at the ends of the petals as if it were wise. Maybe it was. Maybe it had the answers to the questions he had. It would tell them to Samantha when he saw her, and maybe she’d tell him if Billy still gave him shit about having so many questions.

All this thinking, all this remembering, all this dreaming filled his mind with answers. Ones he was about to see come true, when he got through the city to that open space where there should have been roads but weren’t. A rare thing the people were who constructed it, leaving that picturesque slice of untouched nature untouched.

Abe closed the journal and drummed his fingers on it, then gave it a good luck pat after stashing it in his front pocket, where he always kept it, on the left side of his chest. Billy would call him a sentimental bastard. Samantha probably would, too. He smiled, hearing them enact a scene that had never been. Abe looked forward to the ones that would soon be.

His pack packed and his rifle shouldered, Abe left the building he’d called home for too long. He waved to it, sad to go, and it seemed sad to see him go. He turned to look at it again after he’d walked for some time, and it looked like all the rest.

He stuck to the middle of the road, which seemed like a bad idea, considering he stuck out like whatever stuck out most in a gray city growing a coat of white snow. Billy would say a thumb, because he didn’t have much imagination, and Samantha would say a fox, not a white one, but a red one, her favorite animal. Abe liked to imagine there was hidden meaning there about him being handsome even though usually women were referred to as foxes, at some point in history, anyway. He thought about jotting that question down in his journal, but he had enough for Billy to make fun of him.

He caught his reflection in an intact window. The very fact he’d found a window to see his reflection at the moment he thought about his appearance in a city of shattered windows gave him hope. Not that he needed it. The smell of smoke was stronger, the smell of pine. The sky was clear. He couldn’t wait to round the corner up ahead and see what he’d smelled since waking, streaming straight up from the trees until it disappated into a scribble.

He continued at a liesurely pace, because he wanted to savor that moment. Still, his heart beat faster. Would they remember him? Of course they would. It had only been a few months. Hadn’t it? He hadn’t kept track, something he hated himself for, but by the time days turned into weeks, weeks turned into meaningless cycles of hiding and scavenging for food, but always thinking of them and that silly little bridge across the stream to a cabin big enough for the three of them plus anyone who needed a roof for a night to give them the courage to go on. It was hard to go on, Abe knew. He was done with it.

Abe stepped around a barracade of shopping carts, logoed with the market he knew so well, through the parking lot of what had been his favorite burger joint, down a sidewalk Billy’d taught him to ride a bike on, because he told him learning on grass wasn’t for any blood of his, and that girls liked scars way more than tattoos. He’d see what Samantha had to say about that.

When Abe rounded the corner where the city opened up, he knew he’d never have the answer to that question, nor the one filling his journal. All he could do was watch as smoke flooded the sky, belched by flames that weren’t from a campfire at all.

I was fortunate that this story flowed. I’ve had some bumps in the road during this series, some taking over two hours to complete, so it’s always nice when something just comes out almost effortlessly. Horror is one of my favorite genres, but I don’t write in it often. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the pressures of genre popularity, or maybe it’s me liking too many things and never knowing where to go. Whatever it is, I’m glad I give myself the opportunities to write in genres I don’t normally write in for my longer-form works.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by David Bocquillon Carrasco

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/48QnW4

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Dear Sister. Do you remember the prairie that you called a pasture? The one with the scraggly grass that was more like inverted roots, thick and twisted? I didn’t know what the difference between a prairie and pasture was until later, when we were tucked in bed, moonlight streaming in through the open window by which I could read, even under my blanket.

I told you it was a prairie, an expanse of flat land with little to no trees, while a pasture was land for cows to graze.

“Why can’t cows graze in a prairie?” you asked.

You were always smarter than me, no matter how much I read, and you didn’t read at all.

All I could do was read the definitions again, hoping to find an answer. My finger became black with ink from stroking the definitions too many times.

“Go to sleep,” you said. “You look like a ghost with the sheet over your head.”

I wished I could have seen myself, as a ghost. My love of all things dark and mysterious was the one thing I had over you. So, instead of going to sleep, I made moaning sounds, whimpering sounds. I found words that made me cry. They made you cry, too, and you threatened to tell Mom, so I stopped.

Dear Sister. Do you remember when we snuck out at night to the prairie that you still called a pasture? Looking for hoofprints, cow patties, even inspecting blades of grass for bite marks, as if you could tell. Tears could be bites. You tore your dress that day, rolling on the grass down the only slope in the entire prairie. I knew that might happens, so I’d brought my sewing kit, the size of a matchbox.

“Just because you carry around a sewing kit doesn’t mean you can sew,” you said.

That made me sad, and I told you so. I also told you that I’d been sewing for some time, and if you cared enough about my interests you’d have seen the quilt I was working on. Sure, I kept it hidden under my bed, because it was for you. I was making it for you. Always spoiling surprises. Always ruining everything. How I wished you wouldn’t do that.

“I’m sorry,” you said. But I could tell you really weren’t. You were combing your hair with your fingers. You didn’t even need a real comb. Your fingers were enough, sculpting the bouncy ringlets that hung down to breasts. My chest was as flat as the prairie, the ribcage to my belly the only slope. Even though I was only a year older than you, and you’d had breasts for a year.

Dear Sister. Do you remember when I really scared you? When you woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, because you always had to every night? I was standing there, just behind the wardrobe door that was left open, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary, because we did it all the time. I wore my sheet over my head, the one you hated me wearing so much, with the sheep jumping over fences you said made scary faces when the lights were out. I didn’t need to cut eyeholes because I’d fallen asleep so many times with the sheet over my eyes that I had gotten used to seeing between the threads.

I didn’t yell. I didn’t jump. No “boos” or moans like you see on TV or hear from kids on Halloween. No, I said something in a voice I didn’t think possible. And what I said was I would kill you then eat your soul. I’d decided that’s what ghosts did in that moment. Pretty creative, huh? I don’t even read scary stories, so I know it was my own creation.

You stopped, so still I thought time had frozen. I couldn’t even hear you breathe. After a long silence came the sound of your pee hitting the floorboards. It sounded like a waterfall on rocks. It sounded like hail on the tin roof of the shed we don’t use anymore.

I felt terrible. “I’m sorry,” I said. But I really wasn’t. I was happy to have something over you. I still cleaned up the mess. With my favorite sheet, even. Your least favorite. I led you back to your bed, brushed aside the hair that should have been mussed but wasn’t, kissed your ceramic forehead without a single blemish, when I had plenty. I almost cried then, thinking of what it must be like to kiss my forehead. I sang to you until you fell asleep.

Dear Sister. Do you remember when you said you were tired of going to the prairie you still called a pasture? That you were too old for childish games now and had started hanging out with everyone but me?

I do.

“One more time,” I said. “For your sister.”

That worked, to my surprise. You even agreed to go out at night, my favorite time, when the ground was cool and the crickets sang, and we’d roll in the grass long enough to make our backs itchy and then scratch each other’s.

Those were the best times, weren’t they? Before you grew up and turned into something I for once didn’t envy.

Dear Sister. Do you remember the razorblade I kept in my sewing kit? The one I killed you with? I’m not sure if you saw it when I offered to mend yet another tear in your night gown. I did mend it, though. You probably don’t remember that. Maybe one day I’ll know if ghosts can remember. I do know they can fly, because you do, but can’t talk, because you never talk to me when I visit you, out in the night. It’s colder now, and the crickets don’t sing. So I sing to you, like I did when I scared you as a ghost. But you don’t scare me, dear Sister.

This was a great experience that I doubt will be often. Getting to write a story inspired by artwork and music by the same creator. I feel like more than ever the music really drove the narrative on this one.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Artem Chebokha

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8eNe4G

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Her love was a horizon lodged in my throat. Flat, with a pulse of steepled rooftops, but that pulse was rare. Always dead center, no matter how high or low you went. And I usually went high.

Slick aluminum shingles, always precarious, but so was she. Broke me out of equalibrium with more than her eyes gazing at me above a mask through which her hot breath puffed clouds more beautiful than the ones above. It smelled like the sun. Felt like it, too. When she leaned on my shoulder, face to my neck, angled up to aim at the spot behind my jaw and below my ear. Got me every time, skin electric.

“The best kind of sunsets are the ones that look like the end of the world,” she’d said.

That one had, a swirl of fire with a hot center. Like looking at a cross-section of Earth, that molten core bearing down on me. I shied away from it. She noticed.

“Afraid of heights?” she asked.

I shook my electrified neck. The brush of her soft chin that had escaped her mask made it worse. Made it better.

“You afraid of germs?” I shot back, stupidly. Her hand left mine, and the leaving made me remember that it had been there to begin with. That’s when I knew she was for me. That feeling of absense. A hole. I know that sounds fucking cheesy, but it’s true.

“Prove it,” she said and sprinted away across the roof.

My sneaker slipped on condensation before I even considered going after her. Maybe I was afraid.

Her silhoutte soon matched the rest in the dwindling light, head bobbing like a moon or a sun, bringing chaos to the skyline. In that moment, I felt like I could touch the moon, or the sun.

I went after her, skirting vertigo and chimneys and air ducts, telling myself that if I kept up my pace, not hesitating, I wouldn’t slip and end my life. Somehow I knew she was worth it. The hand she’d held was so cold it hurt, and I feared if I didn’t hold it again, it might shatter like ice. I know that sounds fucking cheesy, but it’s true.

“Hey slowpoke!” A call that came from everywhere as if she had ascended to the sky, became the earth and everything in between. But no, that was just my disorientation. I honed in on her location, standing with hands on hips in that sexy way, wet asphalt glinting like gold dust around her.

I found my way to a fire escape, and she laughed me the whole way down, clapping me to the finish line I did and didn’t want to reach.

She tugged her mask down and blew me a kiss before dashing down the street to anywhere I’d follow. Where I followed her was through a maze of piss-scented alleyways, home to a nation of cats who ruled homeless men in cardboard castles. They were scattered ball bearings that tripped me up.

“I was wrong,” she said gripping a light post with one hand, circling it. “You’re worse on the ground than on the roof.”

No kiss this time, virtual or not, before she made her way to the ribbon of water that looked even more majestic, slim and precise, bringing the sky to the ground in an illusion that made my eyes hurt.

I picked my way to the docks. She wasn’t among the crates crowned with rope and bird shit. I held my sleeve up to my nose to mask the smell. Nothing pretty about that.

Then something flew toward me, a bullet, a torpedo, a meteor. That frozen hand of mine was my dominant, so I brought it up to deflect the missle, but it was as heavy as a block of ice. My head took the impact instead, right on top.

The cutest laugh you could call a cackle flocked around me. Birds took flight as I stumbled back. I mentally thanked the deck hands for leaving so much rope. And so many crates.

She joined me then, to rub it in. Or so I thought. She glided to me and kissed the top of my head with her mask still on.

“I always hated football,” she said, picking up the object of her declaration. She tossed it from hand to hand. “But my brothers made me practice.” She nudged herself a seat next to me. “I always thought it was such an ugly shape. So I disassembled the one we had and reassembled it into a heart shape. I’m damn good at sewing.”

I should have laughed, but I didn’t, and I could see she waited for me to.

“I like it,” I said, and I did.

She punched me in the shoulder. “No you don’t.”

I looked into her eyes that were like staring into the sun. A crash sounded in front of us.

“Whale!” she said miming a telescope. She found it funny. So did I.

She held my hand, and it came back to life. We watched that lone giant breach once more until its waves were like all the others. She took my head in her hands, and I almost melted, unsure if I would be able to stand–no that was the wrong word–

She tilted it down to where I faced the ground, our feet touching, connected, and right where my cowlick exposed a hint of scalp, she placed her unmasked lips.

Remain whole. It was a phrase I’d needed, not a word. And I it blew my roof off. I know that sounds fucking cheesy, but it’s true.

“Tomorrow?” she asked.

She didn’t give me time to answer, because she knew the answer, another shadow lost among shadows.

I stayed there, my hand heavy again, but my head weightless, afire, never smoldering.

I never saw her again, but I still come back to that spot, where I am now, because I can never miss a “tomorrow.”