Where Do We Go From Here?

My five favorite writer's sites (in no particular order):

Writer's Digest.

Fringe Magazine.

Writer's Cafe.

The Writing Journey.

The Compulsive Reader.

Chapters 2-6 of Hostility - unrevised version.

--I'm just throwing this up here for people outside of Fiction Writing to read. An early, unrevised and incorrect version of chapter one can be found here.

2

A lanky gray-haired man entered the room wearing a grin decked with gray and black bristles. “Mr. Gorman?”

“What?” Jack answered with a definite tone of resentment.

“Hello, I’m your doctor.” Dr. Plaust’s grin widened to show a set of shiny metal-grayed teeth as he drew forth a bulbous, weathered hand. Jack remained as still as a pile of rocks and stared at the palm of his hand, noting every crack where the skin had broken apart and formed what he decided would be a spectacular setting for a tiny, melodramatic desert scene in an awful, histrionic farce.

“John– May I call you John? Well, I hope that your stay here has been as comfortable as possible. I trust Sarah has filled you in on the details of this situation. The surgeon sh–”

No, you may not call me John. No one calls me John, you asshole. “Fuck you.”

“I’m sorry?” The light bounced off Dr. Plaust’s balding head and formed a glowing ring around the room as he lowered his head and his smile faded along with the compassionate glint in his eyes.

“No, I’m not comfortable. I have better things to do right now. What kind of jackass feels comfortable with a broken neck and a purple face?”

Dr. Plaust’s voice transformed into a monotonous lull. “Ah, I can see why you would be upset. I don’t know how much you know right now, but we’re going to have to keep you here a little longer, so I advise that you make yourself comfortable. A very skilled surgeon, Dr. Cypers, will be with you shortly to disc–”

“No, I’m getting out of here.” The muscles in Jack’s face tightened and his jaw snapped shut while he readied himself for an altercation.

“–the operation with you. You will be transferred to a different wing of the hospital after your surgery. Although I can’t say for certain how long you’ll be staying here, you needn’t worry about a thing. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to notify Casey or Sarah. If you need to speak with me, just let them know.” With that, the doctor turned on his immaculately shiny heel to leave.

“Hey! I said I’m going to get out of here soon. So I don’t want to talk to your surgeon. Send him back. I’m not fucking staying here forever.” Jack glared at the doctor through his bulging, purpled eye sockets.

Dr. Plaust stopped in the doorway and turned to face Jack with a look of worriment across his face. “Mr. Gorman…”

He’s a terrible fucking doctor. They always put me with the most God-awful sons of bitches in the whole place, Jack thought, clenching his fists and chewing on the insides of his cheeks. “GET OUT.”

Dr. Plaust sighed heavily and stepped out of the room. Jack laid still, fists trembling, and listened to the doctor’s footsteps leading away from him. The footsteps grew too distant to be audible and Jack became aware of the beeping and lulled mumbling of the hospital. He frowned and sunk his fists into the bed. This Goddamned place! Why here? Fuck!

His temper subsided momentarily as Anna’s soft, smiling face appeared in Jack’s mind. He imagined her there, shoving him playfully and gazing at him with her soft rosy skin shining in the fluorescent lights. His eyes sank and wandered around the room as he dropped his fists. “You always have to have the last word, don’t you? You’re such a selfish ass,” she would have said.

She’s not gonna fucking visit me, he thought, gnawing at his cheeks with more vigor. She hates me. With a furrowed brow and a spinning head, Jack fell back into his bed and closed his eyes.

3

It was warm. San Francisco was always ten degrees too warm for Jack. The seagulls called out to each other in their jumbled, worried caws. Salt and fog filled Jack’s nostrils as his feet sank into the soft, forgiving sand and he paced across the beach, trudging along some distance behind Anna.

Anna turned and trotted backwards for a minute. “Hey, what are you doing back there? I thought you wanted to go for a run, not a crawl!”

“I never agreed to this!” said Jack, hanging his head and pushing his body forward.

“I’m lonely up here!”

“Jesus, could you just slow down? …I need a cigarette.”

Jack looked up as Anna flung her head back in a fit of laughter and turned to face forward once more. He quietly sighed and gazed at her from his distance. He admired the flecks of copper in her hair as they glowed in the sunlight. The wind grasped her chocolate hair and pulled it behind her in a long, wavy shadow, as fleeting and as delicate as a trail of smoke rising up from a shallow creek in a foggy forest’s morning air. He knew he would never be as happy, as beautiful or as quick as she was in that moment.

“We’ve only got ten more minutes. Don’t puss out on me now.” Jack recognized genuine resentment in Anna’s voice now, and he attempted to push himself forward one last time, his entire body rebelling and weighing him down.

“You know…you can hurt yourself if–…if you keep going like that!”

“Only if you’re not in shape!” Anna seemed only to grow farther away from Jack with each of his pleads.

Oh God, why do I try? Jack wondered as he gave in to his body and threw it against a browning, grassy hill. Jack gasped and the sand and salty ocean air filled his lungs again. He drew a collapsed paper package from his khaki cargo pants and his trembling fingers lunged for a cigarette. He heard the delicate sound of Anna’s voice again as he shakily lit it and took a drag. His thoughts slowed and his mind began functioning properly.

“HEY, where’d you go?! We’re not done yet!” Jack could hear Anna turn in the sand and begin to jog back.

Jack dropped his arms to his sides. Ugh. He doubted that his muscles would allow him to run another inch. “Not now, I’m tired. You go ah–” Jack’s voice exploded into a long, raspy cough. His eyes watered and his face turned a vibrant magenta. The cough continued on while he listened to Anna’s footsteps slow as she approached the hill.

“Jack? Are you okay?”

With that, Jack snuffed his coughing, mashed out his cigarette and steadied himself on all fours, slowly crawling to the opposite side of the knoll like a huge red spider preparing for assault.

“Jack? Jack?! God damnit, I keep telling you you’re going to kill yourself with all those fucking cigarettes… Jack, come on, what the hell!”

Not now, wait, wait a minute…

“Jack!” Anna began to panic as she paced around the hill. In his mind, Jack could see her lowering her brow and forming a cute little frown.

“BAAAH.” Jack emerged from above and blew a puff of ashy smoke into Anna’s worried, glistening face. He immediately erupted with laughter.

“You son of a bitch!” Anna pushed him down onto the grass and left him there writhing on the sand-coated grass, alternating smoky coughs with unceasing laughter.

4

A tightening feeling took hold of Jack’s chest. Pressure, pressure, pressure was everywhere. Jack’s breathing quickened. His head spun. He felt tiny pinpricks pulse up and down his spine. He felt fluid rushing from his skull. Pressure, pressure. Horrified, his eyes snapped open. He examined the room. It was glossy, gray and empty. He lifted his fingers and ran them against the sheets, hoping desperately that they didn’t exist.

Here. Still here. Another Goddamned failure. Jack watched the white lab coats drape down across his body as they poked and prodded with their little lights and needles. He watched the nurse’s floral yellow scrubs brush against his cheek. Damnit. Anywhere but here. It’s supposed to be fucking over right now.

“Mr. Gorman, we need you to stay awake. Just keep your eyes open – it’s going to be okay.” Jack recognized a look of feigned compassion as one of the lab coats peered into his eyes, prodding his own skull with cold blue eyes.

Jack felt wires pinch at his skin. He had failed himself. His eyes moved across every corner of the room, searching. For sharp objects; knives, pins, anything. Jack needed to know that this was not reality – he needed to test it. He imagined the feeling of the pain, the aching. He required it. Every cell in his body burned for it. His eyes widened. His breathing slowed. Everything continued in slow motion. He continued searching. Nothing. Nothing.

“Mr. Gorman…?”

“Mr. Gorman, can you hear us…?”

They were gone. His body ached for the adrenaline and the endorphin rush he craved so strongly at that moment. Desire pulsed through his veins like sap. His mouth dropped open. His body sank deeper and deeper into the starchy white sheets. His mind sank deeper and deeper into his body. He absorbed himself. Deeper and deeper. He wished all of it away. Deeper and deeper. He wished himself out of his drained body. Deeper and deeper. He closed his eyes and hoped.

5

“Did you ever write that research paper?” Paul’s voice was muffled and distant in the phone.

“Yeah…Why?” It was unusual for Jack’s father to be concerned about his class work. Jack tilted his head and squinted into a distant corner of the room with the phone pressed tightly against his ear. The sunset pierced into the room and grasped Jack’s face, shading it a brilliant orange and further agitating him. He sensed something was awry.

“I just want to know. Can’t I ask questions like that?”

“No, Dad, you can’t. What do you want?”

Paul sighed on the other end and the phone cracked. There was a long and uncomfortable pause.

“Did Mom have you call me?” Jack’s face grew hot and red at the thought of his mother. He felt his skin tighten. He wanted to leave the room, leave his body. He hated his father in that moment.

Jack could tell that Paul was trying to sound calm. Instead, his words came out anxious and uncertain. “No, just listen, Jack… Alana called us the other day…She’s worried about you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Your mother didn’t put me up to this. She’s not even here right n–”

“Alana? You talked to Alana? Why? Why, Dad? You know we’re through. Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Jack, just wait. Calm down. We barely talked. She just told me you were acting a little funny lately, and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help you.” “Oh, yeah, yeah I’m sure. How are you gonna help me? All you and Mom ever say about me is how much I’ve ruined this Goddamn family. When will you just leave me alone? How the fuck would she know if I’m–”

“That is not all what we say about you, John, and I’ll hear nothing of the sort.” Jack could hear his dad’s voice assume the authoritative tone he always took up when beginning one of his long-winded history lectures. His bitter son froze in rage as he remembered why he had chosen to move so far away in the first place.

“Oh, bullshit. Don’t fucking talk to old girlfriends of mine. And next time you think I fucked something up, maybe you could ask yourself why fucking I hate you so much before you call me up like this. Just leave me the fuck alone.”

“Come on, Ja–”

Click. Jack slammed the phone down onto the receiver and whirled around to face the kitchen door as footsteps approached the kitchen. Anna casually stepped in with a smile hidden behind her feigned look of concern.

“Woah, what was that about?” Her eyes smiled at Jack and his fierce scowl began to fade in the reddening sunlight.

Jack collapsed forward and released a sigh, grabbing her in a firm embrace and sniffling, eyes watering, fingers trembling. “I’m just so sick of them. I don’t wanna have to deal with them anymore.”

Anna returned the embrace and looked into the sunset over Jack’s back from their rotting wooden windows. “I know…” She held Jack for a moment and Jack could feel her soft, warm breath against his shoulders. “Look, you’re gonna be okay though, alright?” She nudged him forward enough to look into Jack’s face. “We’ve got finals coming up, so you’ve gotta focus. Don’t let them win and slack because of their bullshit. You can get through this. I fucking know you can.”

Jack slumped against Anna’s rigid but comfortable body. “I can’t.”

Anna pulled him up, staring deep into his eyes once more with a stern but understanding expression. “You will.”

6

“Jack, get up.”

Anna?

“Jack.”

No.

“Jack!”

No.

“JACK.”

The woman at the side of Jack’s stale white bed grabbed Jack and shook his frail, bruised shoulders.

“Ma’am, I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” a timid voice warned from a distant corner of the room.

The woman paid no attention and continued shaking Jack’s skeletal frame. “JOHN DAVID GORMAN, get up right this instant.”

No, it wasn’t Anna. It wasn’t her at all. Jack reluctantly forced his exhausted, wet eyes open and gazed at the ceiling. The ceiling spun and swooned as the woman continued shaking him. She peered over him and Jack caught a glimpse of her thin, pale face. Her thick black hair hung in spirals from her face, consuming it, cloaking it in darkness.

“Jack, you’re scaring your mother. Come on now, get up.” The shaking persisted.

Tears welled in the corner of Jack’s eyes and formed straight little streams down his face. He laid still and stared at the ceiling, waiting for her incessant shaking to come to an end.

“Mrs. Gorman! I’d like to have a word with you out in the hallway.” This time, it wasn’t the timid voice that beckoned Jack’s mother away; it was the happy, gray voice of Dr. Plaust.

Jack heard the woman burst into hysterical tears as she slid out of the doorway and into the hall. Tears streamed down his face and flattened the unruly blonde hair at the sides of his face as he forced back a slew of memories. He strained his body into rigid stillness and attempted to become invisible; attempted to leave the shiny gray hospital; tried to get out of his own brain. He felt like a child toying with existence on a lazy summer day. He was weightless, powerless. He was destructible.

Super-Automatic Again. (Cloud exercise.)

We were supposed to take out an old story for this, correct? I don't know, that's what I did at least.

Sarah gazed at the incessantly ringing phone, trembling, her tears dripping down onto his letter. The sound pierced her spinning skull and bore into her brain. She felt the familiar taste of vinegar and vodka lunging at the back of her throat. In a haze, she reached for the phone and collapsed onto the table in the blackened kitchen.

"Hey, what's up?" It was Jessica. Sarah's head began to throb as she collected what little cognition remained.

"Mmhey, Jess..." There was a pause. Sarah's head fell against the phone and she dropped the letter to the floor.

"Is something wrong?"

Silence.

"You weren't at work today. Terri's fucking pissed. We had to call in Clark and everything. ...I'm sure Patrick missed you too." Jessica produced a short, nervous laugh.

"Fuck that. Just tell her to fire me...fucking bitch..." Sarah's mumbling was hardly audible, but Jessica had gotten used to it. She had mastered the art of unscrambling Sarah's drunken slurs.

"Come on. What happened? Can you just tell me?"

"Whathefuck does it matter?" Her speech grew less and less coherent as Sarah drifted farther away.

"Did Bill try and fuck with you again? Is it your dad? What's happening?"

"It's the fucking letter. You should read what that bastard said to me. 'S fucking atrocious."

"Hey, come on. He's an asshole. You gotta stop doing this to yourself."

Sarah erupted into hysterical tears "I know but I just can't stop and it hurts so badly and I fucking hate him but I can't stop with this what am I supposed to do?" Her words came out suddenly and delicately like the string of saliva dripping from her mouth to the table. "He fucking told me he wants Sadie back. She's my dog, you bastard."

Jessica listened to Sarah sob uncontrollably into the phone until she couldn't handle it anymore. "Stop it. I'm coming over. Just unlock the door right now."

Hostility - All Chopped Up

“Well God damn it, you have me. Why would I be sitting here right now if I didn't care deeply about you? You have Toby. There are other people who love you and want to help. Don't be difficult. Just get through this. You know you're stronger than this. Stop being-”

“You don’t understand. You don't know how much it hurts. Physically. How much it aches and burns. You don't realize what it’s like to be taking all of these pills. All I see here is white. Everywhere. Every time I open my eyes. Everywhere I go. Nothing has meaning or depth or light. Everything is empty. Even the faces here are blank. You don't know how hard it is to push myself to stay in reality.”

"You haven't been living in reality for the past five years of your life, Jack! If you could somehow push yourself through that, you can get through this place. Your problem is that you always want to act tough, but it’s not what you need right now. You're just making yourself out to be a stubborn sunofabitch."

“No, don’t fucking say that, Anna. You don't know what this is like. People don't like suicidal maniacs, even if they've gone through ‘recovery’. I don’t have a job, I don’t have a home. My family won’t even fucking talk to me. I swear to God…

“Well, you have no other options. If you keep doing this to yourself, you'll likely die. Do you really want that? That’s not the person I’ve called my best friend for the last fifteen years.”

“Why should I push through this if there's nothing on the other side? What good am I, dead or alive?”

“You matter to me. That's what I'm telling you. Arguments or no, I've fucking been there for you. For as long as I've known you, I've been there. And up until five years ago, you had always been there for me. I intend to keep doing this until the end.”

“Yeah, whatever. Why are you really here? What is this going to do? Give me hope that I'll push through all of this? I don't want to fucking be here.”

To this day, he was convinced that she had no idea. So he had made compromises. For years, they were best friends. She was under the impression that this was still the case. Jack didn't admit it to himself, but Anna was still the most important person in his life. It was just so hard to think about her. So many memories of his former self appeared when he remembered Anna’s long brown hair, her bold blue eyes, or the sharpness of her gracefully contoured jaw. When he remembered her, he remembered all of his friends. All of the times they had laughed together. All of the times he had smiled at her. He missed the laughter and the shouting and all their snide, sarcastic remarks. Nowadays, when he spoke to her, he was never really there. Long ago, Jack had decided that he couldn't be – that it would hurt too much otherwise.

Jack watched his eyes moisten in his reflection on the floor. That day, he was forced to be there when they spoke. The moment he looked into Anna’s eyes and recognized her compassion, he had almost lost the ability to keep up his guard. It was a miracle that he hadn’t broken down and cried in front of her. He didn’t dare tell her all he felt in those moments, but she knew. Everything else was blank and lifeless, and his passions were thus magnified against the bleakness of their situation. Before she trotted away in her pressed business suit and spiky shoes, he remembered the day that he and Anna had skipped school together and spent the afternoon in the empty wilderness of Pennsylvania. He remembered all of the colors of that day.

It was all the way back in the fall of their Sophomore year of high school. They found a valley in the middle of a dense forest and laid there for hours, lazily staring up at the sky and laughing with one another, letting the greens and browns and blues completely absorb their flesh, chasing each other through the poplar trees and singing…

“Fuck.”

“What's wrong?”

“I don't know if I can keep doing this. It's killing me.” Jack’s eyes wandered across the linoleum-tiled floor until they rested on a dusty corner of the room.

“You can get over it.”

“It's broken. All of it.”

“What is?”

“My life. I can't fix this. Everywhere I go, this’ll follow me. …It’s God damn freezing in this place.”

“Don't say that. Please don't say that. You can get through this,” said Anna, leaning closer to Jack and struggling to make eye contact with the disfigured shell of her friend. Without detracting his gaze from his corner, Jack could feel her hovering over his pale face. He felt the cool breeze of her breath and the delicate essence of cherry blossoms at her neck. Hypnotized by the memory of better years, Jack looked up for a moment to meet Anna’s ocean-blue eyes. Immediately, he recognized a now-unfamiliar look of genuine compassion. Anger boiled up from his soul and colored his face a vibrant pink. She spoke again, “I can help you as soon as you get back on your feet. You'll never be without-”

“There’s just no way out. I’m going right back to the bruises and the scars as soon as I get out of here. I know it, because that’s how this happened. I don’t have anything left to enjoy.”

“You can stay with me and Toby. You still have friends. We love you and we’re just waiting for a chance to help you.” Anna tilted her head in the way Jack’s therapist always did when she attempted to fool him into “opening his heart chakra”. When he saw someone tilt their head in that manner, he almost never opened up. For Jack, there was nothing more insincere and alienating than that simple tilt of the chin.

“No, that's not how it is. You know it isn't. The friends I had before this stopped hanging out with me the minute I started doing all this bullshit, and I'm not-”

Nothing had a taste or a smell. The doctors told Jack that he had ruined a large portion of his sensory capabilities in the accident. He thought they were full of shit. They wanted everything to be fucking neutral, no tastes or sounds or enjoyment or pleasure. Not here. Here, you waited. You waited for comfort and love and light. And sometimes, you waited for darkness.

Once Anna left, Jack dragged his pale, meek body into the bathroom. He gazed at his reflection in the metal sheet that functioned as a mirror. Open wounds and bruises engulfed his flesh. His skin was yellowed and fell from his bones. His eyes were blackened and hung from folds of skin attached to his skull. His perception of his semblance was, like so many other things in his life, indecipherable.

Some days, he was proud of it; some days, he looked into that obscured mirror and smiled, laughed with his reflection. To him, these were reminders of who he was and where he had been – they were battle scars. He had waged a war against the universe.

Anna stood, flattened her blouse and turned to leave. In an instant, Jack’s hard metal door slammed behind her and he was alone again. With a fixed composure, she walked the length of the hall without wincing even once. Jack stood to watch her slip from his grasp once more. She’ll be in tears before she starts the car. He knew it.

It was cold in that place. Most of the time, Jack curled up in his thin, stale bed and shivered, closing his eyes to block out all of the white. White sheets, white walls, white floors, white lights. No windows. Here, everything was dull and baseless.

“And there’s just about nothing you can do to stop me. I care about you more than most people I know.”

“Mm. Yeah, that's nice. It’s just that guilt won't see me through this. I’m sorry.”

“You're going to get through this.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’re going to do it, and you’re going to do it for me.”

“I’d rather die.” Unable to allow himself to sympathize with Anna, Jack shouted back at her with more passion than he had let on.

“You don’t mean that.” Anna slowly tilted her chin and attempted a softer tone with Jack once more.

“I do. You can hate me for it if you want, but death is better than this. I’d rather have sheer darkness than these blank white walls.”

“Fuck you.”

“Two minutes, guys. Let's wrap it up.” The guard tapped on Jack’s door and peered in on the pair for a moment. His voice had retained its unsubstantiated tone of authority through the muffling effect of the thick glass window to Jack’s room.

Anna glared at the guard. After a brief, discomforting moment, she returned her gaze to meet Jack’s tired brown eyes. “I'm going to call you every day, and you're going to tell me how much it fucking hurts. How cold it is. How alone you are. If you don’t pick up, I’m coming here myself. If you refuse to see me, I’ll wait here until you get your shit together.”

“Jesus. Good luck.”

“Same to you. Get some sleep tonight, you need it.”

“You do the same. Don't stay up all night with Toby, like I know you kids do.”

“This is why you're going to get through this. My best friend shouldn't be this much of a prick.”

On other days, which occurred more frequently, it was simply what he had become. That horrible reflection was who he was, and none of it made any difference. In his mind, no one who he cared to justify would scrutinize his behavior, and it was all a matter of time until his existence came to a close.

On those days, he forgot about Anna. He forgot about how madly he had loved her so many years ago. How she had completely overlooked that fact on so many occasions.

horribly out-of-tune melodies. On that day, it was hard for them to go their separate ways, even once the horizon began to engulf the sun and fear crept over the dusty woodlands.

The sheer vividness of the memory forced the moistness in Jack’s eyes to condense and form eager little droplets of pain. He hated the hall monitors. He hated the time constraints. He wanted time to stay with Anna for hours and tell her everything. He wanted to share his memories and his feelings at a time when it was hard to feel. He wanted to play hide-and-seek in the Pennsylvania thickets again.

He remembered how this had happened as the tiny droplets in his eyes broke from his skin and fell silently onto the icy rotting sink.

Everyone was in limbo. Jack came to understand that this was intentional. They wanted all of their patients to experience birth once more. They wanted nothing to influence their state of being until somehow, miraculously, they pulled through – or otherwise walked away to pick up where they left off. The latter was more likely the case.

In this setting, troubled little Jack learned to make friends quickly, and as soon as age allowed, he spent most of his nights away at friends' houses, dreading his return to his miserable and confusing life.

Jack’s gaze grew foreign and distant in his distorted, metallic reflection. He removed his shirt and ran his eyes over his flesh like a doctor over a morgue-bound patient’s body; never acknowledging the disturbing nature of his appearance; never acknowledging his identity as a human. Jack ran his cold, bony fingers over the swollen, gaping scars on his arms. Today, these were battle scars. Today, he chose to remember who he was.

He wanted her to hold him and tell him he would be okay as he wept on her shoulders. But this was prevented by all the fucking nurses and guards and doctors swarming about in the halls – more reminders of the horrible nature of his character. More reminders of how deeply he had proven himself a fuck-up.

Every day of his life, he blamed his parents for his failures. He accepted his shortcomings as such, but they were never his burden. For this, his family resented him. But it was true that they were never loving or supporting of him.

His mother was schizophrenic. All of his early memories of home involved his mother and her screams. Sometimes, knives were involved. At other times, demons were imagined. Back then, no one helped. Nothing made it better. His father didn't care – or at least Jack thought that he didn’t care, on account of the fact that he was always gone. On most days, Jack was left with his mother, scared and sad. When his father came home, Jack would shut himself off in his room and refuse to speak to his dad. And aside from her frantic screams, his mother never really spoke to him.

The beginning of The Matrix' "call to adventure." (Trip to the movies exercise.)

The darkness of the Neo's basement apartment sunk in to every crevice on every shelf and every stack of dusty CDs. The light from his computer screen cast a greenish sci-fi hue upon his sleeping eyes. His pale face rested against a dusty white keyboard, and large puffy headphones encapsulated most of his head. The screen turned black and Neo's eyes shifted beneath his eyelids. Wake up, Neo... His eyes snapped open. He lifted his clamy stubble-covered face from his lanky arms and gazed up into the computer screen. Plain white letters against a plain black background read, "Wake up, Neo..." MS-DOS? he thought, his pale green eyes squinting from beneath their sleepy vail.

"What?" he uttered to himself, pulling the headphones from his head.

The screen responded, "The Matrix has you..."

"What the hell?"

"Follow the white rabbit," Neo's head began to spin. "Knock knock, Neo..."

A fist pounded against his chipped wooden door. He sprang back, his lingering state of cognitive dissonance looming over him and weighing down his body.

I chose to write this passage using The Matrix because it's one of the few movies that doesn't obviously and cheesily use mythic structure in its storytelling - at least in the case of the first movie. And even when the story's structure shows through, it doesn't seem to be so unattractive, just because the tone of the whole thing is so different from that of other movies that follow the mythic storytelling pattern. I also think it teaches us how tone and the details can really make a story believable and interesting, especially when it's a plotted story.

And I found it intriguing that all parts of the mythic structure are satisfied within this story, even though it's only the first part of a multiple-part story.

"The Date of Our Lives"

God, I'm SO BAD at writing in the first person. This isn't supposed to come off as some weird, self-conscious, crappy garble...

That girl burst through the door and I recognized her right away. She seemed so much more normal on her profile, but in that restaurant in the candlelight...God, she was hideous. I remember thinking, What does she think she's doing, showing up to a date with someone like me? I remember sizing her up. She was unbalanced, unsure of herself, uncomfortable, but she tried desperately to look calm and at-ease. She probably had never been on a yacht. She probably went to a public university. Or worse - a community college... Dear God, what if her parents were poor? That's probably why she went to community college. She probably hated businesspeople - and probably just because she resented us for making more money than her. Ugh, she was probably a writer or something. Just pitiful.

I decided right there that the date would not be happening. I couldn't be seen in the restaurant with that awkward, dark, creepy girl. What would the guys think if they saw me there with her? There were probably people from work. We were probably the only people in this town with the class to be able to dine here. I opened the menu and buried my face in it. This girl wasn't even worth the prices on that menu. She'll think I stood her up. It'll be fine, I thought. And it would have worked. She wouldn't have seen me if I hadn't looked up for a second to make sure she wasn't watching me.

Oh god, don't recognize me. Don't take one step closer to me. I could feel her disgusting presence. It felt like she made the floor shake. She was fat, not even shapely, and she lacked grace entirely. The silverware even began to tremble as she approached me.

"Hi.." She said, trying to get my attention. She came closer, staring right at me. I didn't respond.

"You're Evan, right?" God, even her voice was disgusting. She was from some Midwestern town. Probably not even a city. She's probably some blank, mindless organic-farm-type liberal.

"I think you're mistaken," I glanced up at her, annoyed, and promptly buried my face deeper into the menu. God, I hoped no one saw her with me.

"Hahaha..don't be silly. I remember you! From your profile picture. I'm Kat," she was loud too. People could totally hear her. She jerked her wrist forward at me, expecting a handshake. I stared blankly at her, making clear that I did not care for her presence. This girl was not worth my time. She wasn't worth the fresh polish on my shoes. She wasn't worth my clean shave, my navy blue suit coat, my perfect hair cut. I wanted her to just get away from me.

She sat down anyway. Just like that. I didn't even ask for it, didn't even say it was okay. She just did it. That's when I knew that would become the worst night of my life.

An Hero Exercise.

Rrring.

Rrrring.

Sarah clutched the phone in her hand and sat up, staring at Joel's picture on the vibrant little screen.

Rrrrrring.

He was wearing a bright pink safety vest and posing with a cardboard cutout of a cop.

Rrrrrrrring.

She didn't want to answer. She didn't feel like she could endure it. But she knew she needed to hear his voice. Without that, nothing would get better.

Rrrrrrrrrring.

Joel's breath quickened and his head throbbed. Each moment became heavier and heavier. With each moment, every somber, static ring on his end of the phone grew longer and louder. He waited. He couldn't let his mind produce thoughts. He just waited.

"Hey..." Sarah's voice was muffled. Had he not known any better, Joel would have assumed the sniffling and the rustling of bedsheets on Sarah's end were just static. As tears broke to the surface of his rich, hazel eyes, he wished he could assume it was static.

"Why weren't you at school today?"

"..You didn't have to call. I'm fine."

"Yeah but, why were you gone?"

"I'm usually gone now. You know that." Sarah faked a light-hearted laugh.

"...Can you just tell me why?"

Sarah broke out in tears again. He could hear her pushing the phone under her pillow and burying her face in the warmth of her crisp red bedsheets. Her cries grew muffled and even more distant. Joel knew a lot about Sarah. He knew more than he had ever wanted to know. He knew she had been lying in her bed and sobbing for most of the day. He knew that Sarah wouldn't have let him ear her cry if she could have helped it. And he also knew that Sarah had probably hurt herself again, and that it was probably getting worse. He let Sarah sob into her pillow for a while. There wasn't anything else for him to do. But he was there.

Sarah gritted her teeth. Stop crying. Please stop crying. She tried desperately to stamp down all of her tears and terrible thoughts. She knew Joel could hear her. She knew he wouldn't hang up, no matter how much it hurt him. She knew that he had probably gone into his room immediately and buried his face into his old orange bedsheets, and she knew that now he was waiting to hear her speak again. She also knew that she wasn't ready to ask for his help, so she stalled. She kept telling herself to be quieter, to stop hurting.

"Did you ask Sam about Precalc?" Sarah produced at last, sniffling and sobbing the whole way through.

"Yeah, he said they'd let me drop it. I just have to have Karlbiner write a thing about it.." Joel knew he was being distant. He didn't want to talk about math classes or school or other friends. Sarah was hurting, and he didn't know how to help. The essence of rosemary and grilled chicken drifted up from the kitchen and found its way into this nostrils. His stomach churned, and he wished he could vomit. He didn't want to go downstairs and live his happy life. He didn't want to eat dinner with his brothers and tell his parents about school. He wanted to stay right where he was, nestled in his worn old sheets, listening to his best friend sobbing and trying to breathe for the rest of eternity.

"You're smart. I should've dropped it. Mr. V was right in not recommending it for me." Sarah successfully averted her attention to math for a while. She remembered screaming into her pillow and throwing her phone to the ground when her esoteric, sweater-vested Trig teacher had calmly denied her request for a Precalculus recommendation. Instead, he recommended she enroll in Jr. Review, a remedial course for only the most dim-minded of North High.

"Dude, Mr. V is not the authority on math abilities. He has no sen-"

"Yeah but, come on, I've failed all three of his tests so far. He must've had a point."

"He couldn't have seen that this would happen. You'll do fine, you're fucking smart."

"Not psychopharmacological engineering smart."

"...Yeah y'are."

Sarah smiled slightly and warm, heavy tears rolled down her cheeks again.

"I overslept. I don't know what happened."

Joel stayed as quiet as possible. He tried not to breathe as he listened to the gentle hum of the static.

Sarah's breathing grew heavier as she restrained herself. She couldn't start sobbing again. She just had to do this.

Failure ("Explosion" from Making Shapely Fiction)

Justin shivered in his bed, staring off at some point in the distance. She should have known. A breeze swept into his room and wrapped its icy fingers around his neck, shaking him and choking him. She should have known.

He's gone. He's really gone. Cara's breaths quickened. Her eyes widened. She stared at the mirror and fear crept into her throat and filled every crevice of her organs. She missed him. She loved him. She wanted her life back.

"I don't care if you have somewhere to go! I need the car!" Justin stared daggers into his mother's calm, forgiving eyes. I wonder how long this will last, she thought, prepared to play the game she had always played with her little boy.

"This is it, then. We're done?" Asked Cara, a snide smile hiding in her face. Justin's eyes welled with tears. Temper tantrums were always his specialty. He could cry for hours and hours as a child, and even if he got what he wanted, he might not stop. Cara left before Justin had the chance to begin his melodramatic, sob-filled tantrum.

Justin stood outside the art museum wringing his hands and, with tears in his eyes, searched desperately for a familiar face somewhere. She was never there on time. He was always the last one there after class. She doesn't love me. She never loved me.

"Justin, this is too much for me. I can't always listen to you cry like this. I need there to be happiness in this too. I need to feel like I'm not always taking care of you."

"No! I don't wanna go! No! No!" Justin hated doctors. He hated being pushed around. He just wanted the freedom of choice. He wanted to feel like he could do this on his own. He wanted to feel loved enough to be given those choices.

The Tide (just for fun)

Cecilia stood at the edge of San Francisco's foamy ocean waves. Her soft, peach-colored lips parted slightly as she closed her eyes, drew forth her delicately freckled hands, and absorbed the cold, clean, salty air. California's burning orange sun grew heavy with sleeplessness and fell slowly from the sky, leaving broad, pink ribbons in its wake. Its lingering rays grasped her hair as it fluttered through the wind, kissing its metallic golden hues. Her thoughts ebbed and flowed with the motion of the water, and she felt whole. Here, everything was sacred. Life took hold of meaning. Existence was beautiful.

She tried to remember a time in the past during which everything had so much weight. Everything was so vague and lost lately. Nothing was substantial. Cecilia's glistening brown eyes snapped open to their own accord. She stared out at the sunset. Perched at the very edge of the water, she saw nothing but ocean from all angles of vision. There are too many tests, she thought. Indeed, there were too many ways in which the universe allowed itself to determine the meaning of her life. The water responded to the sun's glorious submission and buried her pudgy little toes deeper into the sand with each of its broadening waves.

Lately, the tests had become the only way to prove her life was worth living. Her ability, or lack thereof, to find the limits of a function's graph determined her place in the world. The extent of her love for Amelia determined her future happiness. Her level of commitment to whole foods and jogging determined the timeline of her existence. Her toes sank deeper and deeper into the sticky, viscous sand. The waves slowly climbed up her calves, engulfing her weightless linen pants. She closed her eyes once more and drew in a deeper breath. The denim fabric of her jacket wavered in the breeze and flew open with the insistent crash of each wave. Enraptured with her own thoughts, it seemed as though the universe, in all its intricate workings, had written out the course of life at conception, and once borne into it, one was not allowed an escape from the plan. The tests only revealed the workings of the universe.

"Fucking existence..." she muttered aloud, as seagulls sounded their harmonious mess call and took up the laborious task of dropping unsuspecting clams onto looming black cliffs and rocks from high above. She wondered if it was all worth it. She wondered how the universe could be so predictable; how so many people could live with the knowledge that their lives were already decided for them.

The waves buried her thighs momentarily as she remembered that she did not believe in destiny. Destiny is an archaic design of the Church, she reminded herself. It was an emboldening thought, but it lacked substance. Her only evidence of the world's workings was that she was perpetually being tested, and she had grown weary from it. She couldn't escape it. It was all too much. My only option is to wait it out and watch the tests, she had thought on so many occasions previous to that evening. Tonight, that was not sufficient. Tonight, watching the sun set over the unchanging ocean horizon, she had to know that life had more meaning.

Cecilia stared down at her legs. Her pants were floating in the water high above her calves as the sea embraced her and pulled her farther under. The water beckoned to her. It felt limitless and weightless against her skin. She felt so at home in the ocean's grasp. A clam shell drifted past her ankle, brushing gently against her with its mossy exterior. A thin smile graced her freckled face. There's just so much more beauty in simplicity. If there was a way to escape the inescapable workings of society, Cecilia would have jumped at the opportunity. This is the only way, she thought, as she watched waves pulse against her midsection and move up her spine as they continued in their brilliantly impending path. Flecks of water splashed against her cheeks. She closed her eyes once more. Here, at least, she was at home.

Chai Tea ("Character On A Mission" Exercise)

It was cold outside. Snow began to condense atop the cracked brown grass of Wisconson's dairy pastures. Kathy smiled over at the site of it. Her fingers warmed at the thought of childhood memories while she sped east down the dusty gravel road.

Watching snow fall gently onto her windshield, Kathy was eventually seized with an intense desire for a warm, creamy, spicy drink. A chai tea latte would be so perfect right now. She looked at the clock on her dashboard. 12:17. I still have some time! Caron said there'd be a nice little coffee shop just outside Madison. I think I'll try and find it.

A half-hour had passed. After a frenzied search along the gravel roads of the countryside, Kathy finally found the little nook Caron had spoken of. A weathered whitewashed sign outside read Coffee & Pastries. She could smell the sweet, spicy aroma of her beloved tea as she shakily arose from the driver's seat of her car. Her mouth was salivating at the thought of the drink, making her thin red lips glossy and her bright green eyes rabid.

Like a zombie, she wearily approached the counter of the little shop. "Hi! It's chilly, isn't it? I think I'll take a medium soy chai." She said, feigning perkiness.

The teenager behind the register looked at Kathy with a crinkled expression of disapproval. "Yeah, we don't have chai tea. Or soymilk. Sorry."

Kathy blushed and lowered her eyes to the counter. She fidgeted with her purse for a moment, embarrassed by the whole ordeal. "Okay..thanks. I'll go somewhere else."

Back in the chilly leather interior of Kathy's Sudan, her desire for chai grew more intense. She waited in the car for a moment, deep in thought. She considered walking back into that place and asking where the nearest Starbucks was. The thought was choking. The stare of the hopelessly acne-ridden kid burned into her mind, hanging over her as she started up her car and went off on another search. 1:02...Caron won't mind if I'm a little late...