Writing

An intriguing title I should have looked up the meaning of first. However, that would have yielded a different story I’m sure. And I discuss this at length in the video, but one of my favorite things about storytelling is that you ever only take one possible path when infinite ones are available. I always wonder where those other paths lead.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Igor Galkin

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bKn4Rk

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

The candle’s flame was cold. It flickered, and a thread of smoke lifted into the air, so Merryn knew it was real. She thought to touch it, but she couldn’t bring her hands from the sheet eaten by time. Barely there, it was. However, she enjoyed the hearty threads on her palms, and she sent her fingertips to explore its surface.

It was dark here, except for the faint candle light, but after a time, the moon showed itself, and when she saw what it revealed, she nearly screamed. Walls, high and coarse with stone were dressed in foul whispers that came from dark places tunneled within them. If she could only bring her hands to her ears to silence those whispers. If she could only bring her hands to her eyes to hide what the moonlight revealed. It showed her more than walls festooned with empty holes that breathed horror. It brought the truth of what lay before her. No longer were her hands or the sheet caressed with the warm tones of the candle. The silver moon struck her naked with its frigid gaze, leaving her alone but for the emptiness of a mausoleum.

She dropped to her knees, because it would at least limit her view, and she pressed her face into the hanging sheet. She would bring it back to its former glory. She was good with her hands, with a needle and thread. She would repay it for the comfort it had given her in this terrible place.

Comfort didn’t last long, for she saw through the sheet to see nothing beneath what she had assumed was a table. This was not a table at all but a box without legs. It had to be the dust, her reeling mind, that conjured such illusions. Perhaps she needed to stand again, allow the blood to flow where it needed.

So, she did and was greeted by a ghostly face. It hovered there, expressionless in the gloom. Still, she could not move her hands to run away. They wanted to remain, grounded to the only thing she could feel, and soon the rest of her was possessed by their desire.

The face belonged to a woman, smooth of skin and gentle of eye, her beauty not sullied by the sharp rays of the moon. She did not speak, merely touched the wick of an unlit candle opposite the other Merryn had not noticed. When the woman removed her finger, a flame sprung to life, as cold as the other.

“These fragile things will do nothing to warm you up,” the woman said. “Here, let me.” And she went to Merryn, took the shawl from her shoulders and draped it over Merryn’s.

“Better?” the woman said into her. Her breath smelled of nothing.

Merryn nodded, unable to trust her voice.

The woman returned to her spot opposite Merryn, hands mirroring her own.

“This place is not to be feared, child,” the woman said. “It’s dark and cold and smells of both, but you will find comfort here. Soon.”

“I don’t want to find anything but the way out,” Merryn said, surprising herself. She pressed her lips together and swallowed her tongue.

The woman glanced at Merryn’s hands, smiled softly before gazing back into her eyes. “This place isn’t always so dreary, child. The skylight there, it welcomes the sun when the time is right. I am sorry that time is not now. You will love to bask in her glory, hear her laughter. Her secrets. Feel her touch.”

Merryn felt something at that moment, as if the sun had found its way here, through the candles’ flames. Warmth, growing from her fingernails, over her knucles, to her wrists, burrowing up her sleeves to reach–

“Her heart,” the woman said. “The sun is a she, didn’t you know?” The woman chuckled distant wind chimes.

“When?” Merryn said.

“Oh, it’s difficult to tell anymore. She is a tricky one. Generous but fickle at times. More than anything, you mustn’t fear her brother, who wraps us in his steel blanket now. Only when the family is complete, shall she show herself and take you into her arms.”

“I don’t understand,” Merry said. “Why am I here? Why can’t I move … my … hands?” Tears squeezed from her eyes.

“Look there,” the woman said nodding behind Merryn.

Merryn saw a cloaked man, his hands arranged similarly to hers atop what she now saw resembled the legless box before her, floating, unquestionably housing a corpse. The man blew out the single candle there and was one with the smoke left behind. The coffin rose higher and higher, its shadow moving across the ground toward her like a pit to consume her.

Merryn wept, tore her hands from what she knew now was a coffin beneath her own hands, stumbled back a few steps until the gaze of the woman found her and brought her back.

“Good,” the woman said. “She accepts you. You accept her.”

“I accept no one!” Merry shrieked. “Show me from this place.”

“If only I could. But that is not my duty, child. It is yours.”

Merryn ran away from the woman, into the darkness, guiding herself along the walls, but no matter how far she went, she always came back to where she started, her hands where they started.

“All roads lead to home,” the woman said.

Home. Merryn’s hands revisited the peaks, the valleys. The imperfections that were perfect. Like family.

Merryn felt the candles’ flames. Their invitation. She blew out one, then the other. Around her, other coffins rose toward the moonlight to where she would shortly go. And hope to find the sun.

“Beautiful, no?” the woman said, admiring the display. “I never tire of it.”

Merryn watched her fingers swirl into gray tendrils, then her arms, then all of her until she could watch no longer. Her heart, though, she could feel, and it burned as warm and as bright as the sun.

An amazing style you don’t frequently see in contemporary commerical art. I love the combination of the old world style with the modern themes. This artwork led me to a strange place, one I feel could be expanded upon. Who know, one day I may revisit it.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Morten Vlademir Motsar

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0nW3dK

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

No other trees grew there, so they were easy to find. If they were trees at all.

Leafless, nearly branchless, he could make out all of their detail for some time. The walk had been long, and he had dreaded the gnarled forms growing into view, but the walk had to be made. He didn’t know why, nor thought to question why. It was a walk they had all made, his many fathers and mothers, none of whom were truly his own, but they loved him all the same. They told him he’d know the answer when he arrived, and that he’d find joy. He played the voices over and over in his head to search between them for meaning until they deteriorated into the scratch of an old record.

He stopped because his foot was sore from the walking, but also from something else. Pebbles somehow always made it into his boot no matter how tightly he tied the laces. Untying them now would take some time, and the pain wasn’t so bad, so he made his way down the meandering path that led right between the two trees, through a space that allayed the fear and the mystery that he’d carried since leaving home.

Birds darted in discordant flocks, and he expected them to land on one of the few branches, but they never did, choosing flight over rest and perhaps a grub lodged in the old wood. He thought about this concept, of labor over rest, and how he had been granted the latter ever since he had been a child, told the mind would always outlast a body. Another thing he had never questioned until now, and he had seen many of them deteriorate in mind before body. Perhaps it was the years taking their toll. Unbalanced strain.

His pace quickened at this notion of unbalance, that pebble nipping his sole more and more. Even though they had allowed him the most mimimal of activity, he had exercised in secret. Rearranging cords of wood, digging holes, then burying them again, careful to remove the upper layer of grass first so no evidence of a hole would be left.

So why were his joints sore, fingers stiff? It was cold, and the walk had been long. The trees didn’t look so ominous anymore, the scoops of their trunks inviting.

He smiled, felt the vibration of a sigh across his vocal cords as his boots found pleasure in uprooting stone after stone to keep the path clear, an activity he hadn’t realized he was doing until he looked back the way he had come.

That smiled sigh again, followed by a tickle at the back of his throat. He couldn’t clear or cough it away. Must be the mist again, the clouds that prefered the ground to the sky, the very ones that turned the forest beyond into a hazy memory.

He decided he was close enough for whatever he was supposed to see, a dozen paces or so from the trunks. The space between the trees had been deceptive during his approach. They had created an overlap, which made the trees appear much closer to each other. But they stood a good distance apart, one in front of the other, the shorter one leaning across that distance with branches outstretched.

The area at the base of the trunk did indeed look comfortable, and now would be as good time as any to remove that pebble from his boot. He slipped it off but found nothing. He looked at the trees above. The branches looked even more barren. No fruit. No sap. No answers.

He put his boot back on and tested his weight. Still the bite of that damn pebble. He stripped his foot bare. It looked so pale in the sunless sky. There, on the ball of his foot, just below his big toe was a series of holes, so deep they looked black even in the daylight. His fingertips hesitated over over them, and he half expected something to come out, wondering where the darkness had gone. Even more surprising than the discovery was the realization that he wasn’t surprised. He’d never had these holes before, but they were as plain and ordinary as a toenail, not even a blister or wart. He had the desire to take the other boot and sock off, to feel this smooth path on his bare feet, so that’s what he did.

He traced the bark of the nearest tree, the smaller one, peeked into its many knots for the answers they’d said he’d find. Finding nothing at all but wood and moss, he moved to a nearby spot to feel the grass on his feet. It fanned between his toes, and he held on to it. The grass and earth had soothed his pain.

He stretched, wiggling his fingers as if conducting the birds’ flight above. Fine droplets spattered his eyes, making everything prismatic. He went to wipe them but couldn’t. His hands. He felt his connection to them, but was unable to command them. His arms, too. Shoulders, elbows, wrists. All of them were locked. Mentally moving down his body, he found the rest of his joints were the same. His neck allowed him one more turn, and that was to look at the two trees behind him, which appeared to have slightly changed their configurations. The branches of both reached toward him, lower than he had remember them being, and his own arms reached back.

His eyes, thankfully without joints, frantically scanned where they could for the answer they had all promised him, his false mothers and fathers, who he would curse their name if he had been able.

Then he saw it, from a swollen knot on the smaller tree, something as pale as his foot. It spilled from that hole to the earth, with toes of its own, fingers of its own, eyes of its own, a voice of its own, and very alive.

Another departure from the fantastic, mostly. It is vaguely set in the future and explores a woman approaching her twilight. How small things we hold on to affect our final days.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Swang

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8egg3R

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

The building was white and flat and clean, and Grace hated it. But it was home now. It was bad luck to hate your home before you entered it. Someone must have said that once. The sight of it even made the box in her arms heavier, though it was only full of flowers.

“The first step is the worst step,” Grace said, her sunglasses doing nothing to block the bleached concrete.

Cole weaved in front of her, without rubbing against her leg, sat, yellow eyes boring through her. He never looked at her.

“I know,” she said.

“Well isn’t he a darling–or she, my instinct in that regard faded ever since Maeve was born. What do you call that magnificient feline?” A woman shuffled onto the synthetic grass with a miniature parasol shading her swoop of a nose.

“Cole,” Grace said.

“So cute. You must have been a bad girl. Coal and a box of dead flowers for Christmas.” The woman’s face pinched into a cone. “Let me take care of those for you.”

Grace looked into the box of wilted lack of color. The ride hadn’t been long. Had it? The heat on the bus, her seat in direct sunlight, because no one respected their elders anymore.

Grace shook her head, disagreeing with herself about the first step being the worst as she made her way inside.

The walls were white and flat and clean. She cried, surrounded by a lack of color.

Cole glided his way to the window, hopped onto the sill and did as cats do.

“You don’t care, do you?” Grace said.

Cole looked at her. He never looked at her.

Grace made the best of things in the place where she would die. The flowers were an sign. And this apartment was the size of a tomb.

The next day, Cole was gone. The last thing to lose. She’d told him she couldn’t live without him, and that’s why she specifically bought him when she had. He hadn’t seemed to listen.

Grace went to the patio with two pairs of sunglasses to fend off the morning. A little warmer out there, but no furniture, so she had to stand. Touching the antiseptic building was the last thing she wanted to do, but her rickety legs never gave her much of what she wanted anymore.

She took comfort in the less-ugly horizon, with its highs and lows, much like her garden. No matter how much she planned the planting of those flowers, the rascals never seemed to harmonize. A painful memory, trapped in a tomb without a grain of soil for miles. A dog walked by on the sidewalk below, considered the synthetic grass, then decided it wasn’t good enough for his urine.

Grace snorted a laugh, which brought more tears than joy. Sweat gluing her arms to her sides, and her thighs feeling like a battlefield, she returned inside. There, in a patch of four squares of light, was Cole, an orange flower in his mouth.

“Where’d you get that?” she said. Her heart fluttered like the butterflies in her garden.

Cole didn’t answer, just dropped it at his feet like a dead mouse. Her cane was no good, just pushing it around, so she braved squatting. A chair for support would have been a good idea, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, as if she had ever known what that looked like. On her back, body a sea of spasms, the ceiling was an unfocusable nothing. If there had only been something to concentrate on, maybe it would have dulled the pain.

The flower’s scent made it to her. She closed her eyes and used that. Time was meaningless, but she supposed it had been hours. Hours were what she needed.

The flower kept the pain at bay. She couldn’t reach it, but she pretended she could, delicately gripping the stem before give it a respectful sniff. Then Cole snatched it away and pranced to somewhere she couldn’t see. She rattled off all the curses she’d bottled since the swear jar that she fucking got rid of first before coming to this cell.

Sometimes anger was what you needed. The thought came to her as she got to her feet, hunched like an invalid, which she was. She limped to the door, where Cole continued to taunt her, holding the flower all wrong. Two of the petals were missing already. How could he do this to her?

The door opened by a sensor, with a hiss, and Cole darted outside. She gave an encore of curses to the stupid, dead, robotic room, and hauled her flesh fire after him.

The path to the road was hot coals. The kind the lady thought her worthless cat was named after. Cole had dropped the flower as he crossed the street, just in time for a car to flatten it before she got there. Someone shouted behind her. She didn’t care.

At least she had remembered her cane. Her mind may be going, but she still had that. The cane propelled her after Cole, and she hoped it was picking up all kind of filth, because she would bop him on the head with it when she finally caught him. She tracked him to a tunnel, which she entered with fervor, this dead place finally have some use.

After an eternity of darkness, she was reborn again into light, and felt like screaming like a newborn. Doubly so when she saw Cole in a slant of light, the back of his head to her, like back home.

She followed his gaze up to a wall, not lacking color at all, arcing like a crashing wave. She separated from her body, the planet-size pain left behind in another solar system.

The flowers grew with enough irregularity to make her smile, to make her cry.

“Thank you,” she said to Cole.

Cole flicked a ear, his back to her, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

I’m disappointed to say that I haven’t thought about Isaac Asimov in some time. He’s the writer that got me back into reading. So I was pleased to discover this art that transported me back to that time, to that place, where I discovered the wonder of reading again. I’ve never looked back since.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Zezhou Chen

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1AOno

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

Alman scanned a horizon bereft of jagged lines and clusters of buildings, looking for hoofprints. There were none. He took in the view from atop a dune, noting the plump foliage that spread across it. Pieces of emerald candy.

“It’s yummy.”

Alman turned in response to the phrase. An echo. They had been happening more lately. This one was always in the corner of his memory’s eye. An expression he’d gleaned from. . . .

An implanted series of frequencies. Not a person. There were no more of those. He would have found some by now. His journey had been long.

Wind hit him, stirring sand around his legs and up his body to reach his exposed neck. The grains trickled inside. If he turned his head just right, it almost sounded like a voice.

The ocean was blue because the sky was blue. Another implant sprung into existence.

Eyes. One blue, one gray. A most unusual combination. Pixels converged, shifted, colorized. She had black hair with a hint of red.

“You can’t eat it,” Alman said, looking at the ice plants. He had recalled their description.

“Why not?” she said. “They’re called ice plants.”

He could not retrieve the answer.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said and took his hand, urging him down the dune.

“I do not have the ability to fear,” he said.

A gull perched on Alman’s foot, his hand empty of the girl’s, the beach empty of her. He went to greet the bird, and it glided away to join the others gathered at the place where the ocean folded over to become thin and foamy, leaving behind a reflection.

“I thought you weren’t afraid,” she said. “They’re just waves.”

Waves. The birds appeared frightened of them. Perhaps it might make them flat like the sand, and that is what they feared. He hadn’t had the opportunity to touch a gull, but he hypothesized they weren’t malleable.

She twirled on the reflective sand. Her white dress was too big for her, so it collected mud and water at the hem. “It’s easier to walk here. Come on, Alman.”

“That is not my descriptor.”

“A number isn’t a name. And I gave you a good one.”

“It’s too short to be of any significance. There aren’t enough combinations to make a quality identifier.”

She threw a clump of sand at him.

He walked toward her, noting the difficulty. The sand changed shape when his ankle registered the proper rotation for equilibrium.

He would have asked her why if she would have been there. The color was different now, the sun in a different location.

From here he could see no hoofprints. Why was he looking for hoofprints? He had never questioned a directive before. Curious. He was sure the answer would become clear when he found them. At least he had an image, or a representation.

“Like this,” she said, presenting a canvas.

It depicted a mammal with four legs, hooves, a billowing mane running down its neck, twinned by the one on its tail. “I understand.”

She was taller now. The hem of her dress didn’t reach the ground. She collapsed the easel and returned to where it was dry, beside Alman.

She gathered her dress around her legs and sat. “I see you’re still afraid.”

Alman had already told her he didn’t have the ability for that emotion, so he didn’t repeat himself.

“They’re aren’t any more, you know,” she said. “There used to be so many. When I was young, I was able to ride one once. On the beach like this. Dad had said it was expensive and would be my birthday gift for the next twenty years.”

She smiled and traced her finger in the sand. “See, this kind is no fun. It doesn’t have a memory.”

Alman knew sand was incapable of information storage, but she would be displeased if he corrected her. Her posture and expression told him she was in a good state of mind. The slow pulse at her neck.

She leaped to her feet and held out her hand. “Come on!”

He took it as instructed. When she pulled, however, he did not move.

“Alman?” she said. “Have you ever wondered why I named you that?”

He had run through all the permutations before her lips completed the phrase. There was no logical answer.

“It’s silly, but I was a kid. Alman, short for Almost Man.”

Strange. He had not reached that conclusion through his calculations.

“Told you it was a good one.” She pulled him toward the water. A wave flattened a short distance away, thinning to a transparent sheet netted with foam. It stopped just before his toes and retreated back to sea. His foot displaced the sand slightly, but it indeed positioned his joints at a sufficient angle. He tried his other foot. She was, indeed, correct.

“Told you,” she said with a smile and a wink. She danced closer to the water, saw something there and dropped to her knees with excitement.

“Hurry!” she said, waving him over. “I haven’t seen one of these since that day.”

Alman studied the creature. A flat shell with short spines and a long protrusion he supposed might be a tail of some kind.

“A horseshoe crab,” she said. “Their hoofprints looks like this. Horses.” She blushed. “Of course you knew that.”

Alman did not, but he agreed that the description was accuate. “A good name,” he said.

She chuckled, looked at him, smiled. “It is.”

The water reached them. She yelped, but stayed where she was, leaning into him. When the water receded, the crab was gone. She was gone.

Alman was left alone, looking at his reflection, bubbling with foam, and then even that disappeared. He held his head low, eyes to the sand, waiting for the crab to resurface. Waiting for her to come back.

When neither of them did, Alman got to his feet, and continued his search for hoofprints, wondering when he’d see her again.

Back to modern western noir. There’s something about this genre I’m drawn to. Novels like No Country for Old Men and Devil All the Time evoke something in me that I never tire of. I think some of it is the simplicity in the archetypes. They’re familiar and powerful, and somehow never feel played out. I had a good time with this one, and I hope you do too.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Davison Carvalho

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

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what is 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

The squad car lights lasered the roaring fragment of Hell that coughed halftone smoke into a dead sky.

Deputy Madison Clement had never thought such poetry. The letters that made words that made sounds seeped through his jacket that still smelled of Barns’s cheap cologne. Jeanie would smell it when he got home. Through the smoke, through the dirt, through the screams.

The dirt as his feet parted for him as if sand buffeted by an ocean breeze. He was far from any ocean. He stopped becuase he couldn’t stand the sound of it. The dirt. He wanted to hear what he should be hearing, but for some reason, the sorry bastard had gone silent once they’d left the car. Resigned to what was to come, Clement supposed. Like a fucking hero.

“Like a fucking hero,” Clement said. It tasted like a shot of shoehorn whisky. And shoehorn whisky tasted like shit.

If he kept walking, he’d make it to the treeline, where the trees would overshadow what he left behind with their shadows. Night shadows were the darkest. Cut from the reflection of something far hotter than the blaze that consumed the silent hero.

Goddamnit, Clement needed to stop calling him that.

But Clement couldn’t walk. Locked to the earth like dock posts, cemented with barnacles. Where were these thoughts coming from? He patted his coat pocket for his notepad. Might as well capture something of worth tonight. All he’d caught was a man who was a man.

“Wish I had a camera,” Deputy Crawford said from the next county over, one made of embers and heat. Crawford had never given in to smartphones. He’d barely adopted a flip phone last year, and was adamant about one without a built in camera. Good thing.

Clement let his shotgun slip from his hand and stake the ground. It served him better as a cane now, the stock cold despite his grip, despite the fire.

How long would it burn? He burn? He’d watched a movie about the witch trials about a month ago. Jeanie loved horror movies. He hated them, but he supposed the vows he’d said at the altar twenty-five years ago included watching a horror movie to keep his wife happy every now and again. Maybe it had been the Lord telling him something. An omen of some kind. A warning. “The road you’re headed on only leads to Hell.”

Hell yes he deserved it. Clement grimaced, wanted to ask forgiveness but couldn’t bring himself to look at the sky, because that’s where the Lord was, not within as Pastor Downey liked to say. The hearts of men were no home for the Lord.

A pop broke the stillness. Then Crawford’s laugh broke that. “Think his heart burst,” he said. “Could’ve been his head. Empty of everything but sour farts. Hey, you hear that stuff about cow farts ruining the environment?”

Clement flinched at the squad car’s red laser. It had found him. Hey, Clement. Ready for another?

“Clement?” Crawford said.

“Crawford?”

“Yeah?”

“Please be quiet.” Clement kept the “fucks” to himself. He’d sinned enough tonight. But sinning is all he could do anymore. And there were yet sins to be done.

Boots shoveled dirt behind Clement with the sound of sandpaper on skin. Crawford was ready for the other one.

A car door opened. Driver’s side. With that creak that sounded all too like the oiled pews under his backside Sunday morning. It was Friday. He had a day to figure out what Sunday would be like after all this. How long would they wait for–

“You gonna give me a hand or what?” Crawford called.

Clement somehow turned his head to see that portly bastard he couldn’t stand the sight of. Partners. No. He and Jeanie were partners. But would she still be if she found the blood under his nails that no amount of washing could clean? Probably not. But Crawford would. He lived for this stuff. Would do the work Clement couldn’t, and only asked for his help when he really needed it. Like–

“Now would be a good time, Madison.” His first name. Would he call Clement by his middle if he had one?

Clement’s lungs couldn’t find the sigh they so desperately needed, and he trudged to the squad car, and Crawford, who was hunched over the trunk, fighting off two polished loafers that kicked with the amount of force the duct taped ankles allowed.

Crawford squealed like one of those old TV show cops. Clement supposed he was one.

“Say your prayers,” Crawford wheezed between laughter.

Clement looked up to the sky, the stars, and what he knew was beyond, looking down at him, with judging eyes that would never forget. Because he had something to say.

“Fuck you,” Clement said. Not the poetry he’d expected, but it felt good.

“You hear that, preacher?” Crawford said and tore the man out of the trunk who had married Clement and Jeanie, forgave their lack of donation when cash was tight, prayed Jeanie to sleep every time she’d lost another baby.

“He’s a pastor,” Clement said.

“He’s a fucking marshmallow is what he is. And I like mine burnt. Real burnt.”

Clement ushered Pastor Downey down the aisle he’d carved when he’d taken Barns to the pyre first. It was smooth and deep and worthy.

Crawford threw him in, because it was the part Clement couldn’t handle, and Crawford went back to his spot, in the front row, and Clement went back to his spot, a short walk a stone’s throw from the treeline of everlasting shadow. Where he could get lost, if only he could move. Where the air was clear of smoke and screams, because out here was brimming with both.

The pastor did say his prayers. In shouts and then gurgles. When that was done, the fire finished them for him.

Clement found his notepad. He opened it to the light of the fire but had nothing to write.