Hostility (A Story in Under An Hour)

"Fuck."

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know if I can keep doing this. It's killing me."

"You can get over it."

"It's broken. All of it."

"What is?"

"My life. I can't fix this. Everywhere I go, this will follow me... It's God damn freezing in this place."

"Don't say that. Please don't say that. You can get through this. I can help you as soon as you get back on your feet. You'll never be without-"

"No, don't fucking say that, Anna. You don't know what the future will hold. People don't like drug addicts, even if they've gone through "recovery". I won't have a job, I won't have a house, my family won't fucking talk to me. I swear to God, there's just no way out. I'm going to start using as soon as I get out. I know it, because that's how I got into all of this. I don't have anything else to enjoy."

"You can stay with me and Thom. You still have friends. We love you and we're just waiting for a chance to help you."

"No, that's not how it is. You know it isn't. The friends I had when I checked in here just talked to me because they wanted crystal meth. The friends I had before that stopped hanging out with me the minute I started doing all this bullshit, and I'm not-"

"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 Thom. You have your sister. Don't be difficult. Just get through this. You know you're stronger than this. Stop being such an ass."

"You don't understand. You don't understand how much it hurts. Physically. How much it aches and burns. You don't understand what its like to be taking all of those pills. All I see here is white. Everywhere. When I wake up. 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 rehab. Your problem is that you want to act tough, but you're just making yourself out to be a stubborn sunofabitch."

"Yeah, that's me. Why are you 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."

"You have no other options. If you use any drugs one more time, you'll likely die. Is that what you want?"

"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 here for you. For as long as I've known you, I've been there. And up until five years ago, you've been there for me. I intend to keep doing this until the end. 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. Guilt won't see me through this though. 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."

"You don't mean that."

"I do. You can cry if you want, but death is better than this. I'd rather have sheer darkness than blank white walls everywhere."

"Fuck you."

Two minutes, guys. Let's wrap it up.

"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 going to come 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 underneath Tommy, 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 an asshole."

Anna turned and left in an instant, Jack's metal door slamming behind her. She walked briskly all the way down the hall without wincing once. She'd be in tears before she started the car. He knew it.

It was cold in that place. Most of the time, Jack curled up in 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 neutral. Everyone was in limbo. This was intentional. It was like they wanted all of their patients to experience birth once more. They wanted nothing to influence their state of being until somehow, miraculously, they came through. Or otherwise walked away to pick up where they left off. The latter was more likely the case.

Nothing had a taste or a smell. The doctors told Jack that he ruined a large portion of his sensory capabilities. 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.

When Anna left, Jack dragged his pale, meek body into the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror. Open wounds and bruises engulfed his flesh. His skin yellowed and fell from his bones. His eyes were dark and sunken in. His perception of this was, like so many other things in his life at the moment, indecipherable. Some days, he was proud of this. Some days, he looked into that mirror and smiled, laughed with his reflection. These were battle scars. He had fought and had won. Against what, he really didn't know. Other days, which occurred more frequently, this was simply what he had become. This was who he was, and none of it made any difference. No one who he cared to justify would be scrutinizing his behavior in the future.

On those days, he forgot about Anna. He forgot about how he had loved her madly so many years ago. How she had completely overlooked that fact. To this day, he was convinced that she had no idea. But he 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 the most important person in his life.

It was just so hard to think about Anna. So many memories of who he used to be appeared when he remembered Anna. All of his friends. All of the times they laughed together. When he spoke to her, he was never really there. He couldn't be. It hurt so badly.

That day, he was forced to be there when they spoke. The minute he looked into her eyes and saw compassion, he lost all ability to keep his guard up. It was a miracle that he didn't break down and cry in front of her. Everything in that room was stiff and unforgiving. There was no room for him to truly feel as he had expressed, and she knew it. Everything else was blank and lifeless, and his passions were thus magnified against the bleakness of their situation. Before she stormed out in her business suit and Prada shoes, he remembered the day that he and Anna skipped school together and spent the afternoon in the empty wilderness of Pennsylvania. That was all the way back in the fall of their Sophomore year of high school. They found a valley in the middle a dense forest and laid there for hours, lazily staring up at the sky and laughing with each other, chasing each other through the poplar trees, singing horribly out-of-tune melodies. It was hard to leave when the sun began to set.

He hated the monitors. He hated the time constraints. He wanted the 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 her to hold him and tell him he would be okay as he wept on her shoulders. But he was pulled away from this by the fucking rehab guards. Another reminder of what a horrible person he was.

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. They weren't loving or supportive parents. This was true. His mother was Schizophrenic. All of his early memories of home involved his mother and screaming. Sometimes knives were involved. Other times, demons were imagined. Nothing helped. Nothing made it better. His father didn't care. Jack thought he didn't care, because he was always gone. Jack would be 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 Ralph. He never really spoke to his mother. Without siblings, troubled little Jack learned to make friends quickly. As soon as age allowed, he'd spend most of his nights away at friends' houses. When Jack was nine, his mother gave birth to another child. Somehow, this child survived. Somehow, she led a normal life. But this and an age gap kept Jack and his sister Mary in a perpetual state of fear of one another. Jack couldn't comprehend how she lived through his mother's insanity, how she still loved her. He sensed there was something horrible brewing deep inside Mary, but he kept it to himself.

Juggling Tears ("Juggling", from Making Shapely Fiction)

A single, icy tear began to fall from her warm brown eyes. She kept her gaze focused on the glistening December snow clinging to the road and becoming liquid beneath the tires while she tried to find a way out. I can't do this anymore. Her lips froze shut from the cold and out of faked stability, her unsmoked cigarette leaving a trail of sad, blue smoke through the window and into the freezing winter air. It hurts. Suddenly, everything leading up to this moment became incomprehensible. Why didn't I run? She tried not to think about all the times he backed her into corners, breathing down her neck madly as he screamed incoherently into her face. A chill that ran deeper than December's cold crept up her spine. Being home for Christmas always did this to her. Still, she failed to turn on the heating. She tried to think of far more beautiful things. Tried to keep herself from allowing tragedy to become her own personal failure. Her fingers began to turn blue. She stared coldly through the frozen windshield.

I shouldn't feel this way. Pain meant that she wasn't strong enough. She should have been able to tolerate more, should have been more considerate. Her heart rate increased and blood rushed through her body. Her single, stubborn tear crept down her pale cheeks. Her eyes glazed over.

When she was little, he carried her through the snow when she was too cold. Once, when she forgot her boots at home, he carried her all the way home from school through a snowfall.Things were different now. There was only screaming and disconcert. He wouldn't listen when she asked for him for help. He became irritated when she begged for it. Somehow, when she was little and he cared for her, it was less noticeable when he yelled and pounded his fists and hurt people.

There was no whimpering. No heavy breathing. She at least could appear stronger. Her head pulsed and the skin on her knuckles cracked as she clutched the steering wheel, never turning or swerving. Every time things went wrong, she remained stoic. She faked strong.

Today, she fought back. He's right, I'm fucking stupid. At that moment, she had doomed herself. There was no reason to turn back.

Red and blue lights flashed brilliantly. A sound more beautiful than she could comprehend broke, and suddenly there was stillness. Peace. Blackness.

With her eyes closed and desolation surrounding her, that single, glorious teardrop fell from her face and landed on the ground beneath her.

Hoax Photos

The most convincing photos were those that were not too out-of-the-ordinary, but had subtle yet dramatic differences from the pictures that were real. The reason that photos like these exist is that photographers are required to have powerful images in order for their photographs to be published. Often times, reality does not provide enough intrigue on its own, and the photographers are obligated to shift things to make their pictures more eye-catching.

Writers are obliged to embellish their stories in very much the same way. Because reading is a considerably more involved practice, the most successful authors will attempt to create the same eccentricities in their stories at every chance they get in order to keep the reader interested. It's also important to stay within the realm of the reality. For example, the photographs where things were blown way out of proportion were not very believable to me, and a story with a ridiculous setting might have the same effect. The writer has to play with what he knows to be true and turn reality into something more extravagant, rather than just going off in wild tangents and describing impossible events.

It was a bright cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen. (Story Based on a First Sentence)

We knew we were doomed. All around us was the implication that we were no longer free. It was in the advertisements on the subways, in the monotonous voice that boomed from the speakers in Time's Square and in the way that no one's eyes seemed to speak anymore.

She was beautiful when we met, but now how her eyes too had clouded over with gray. A hint of lemon zest tickled my tongue as the sweet nectar of my last bottle of wine trickled into my throat, and I tried to remember how we as a race had doomed ourselves. She was asleep now, and I could almost hear her empty, lustful breathing through the thick concrete walls of our quickly deteriorating apartment. Years ago, this was different. She was different. Before all of this, I could see beauty in her eyes and in every muscle of her body when she smiled at me. Her gently floral smell and sweet, delicate form used to burn into my mind, and I would savor the feeling of her hands touching mine days after her departure. But that was all before the television came into our lives.

It started with the radio. We knew not to listen to the advertisements, and we rarely ever listened to the music or news. Then it became a requirement. Then, even on publicly funded stations, we were being sold a world of things. We avoided television as long as we could, but it quickly engulfed us into its world of consumerism, just as it had with everyone else. As the days went on, we were robbed of free will more and more. We weren't just told what to buy, we were told when and where to buy it. We were given hints and tips on what would be cheaper, and before we knew it, we believed we were saving money by spending more. Then came the dresses and the suits, followed by an array of shiny appliances and uniquely stylized furnishings. Every year, we acquired more and more. We tried to fill our lives with as many material belongings as we could.

And every time I looked into her eyes, I could see her falling away from me. I could feel her slipping through my grasp, and I began to resent everything we had become. The cold air flooded into the den through our broken window and began to nip at my face and burn into my eyes as a single tear fell from my face and froze on our neatly waxed hardwood floor.

Boston (One Hundred and One Words)

It's 4am and silence surrounds us. At 4am, the world is stagnant. There are no concerns or judgments. At 4am, when all the world is calm, I gaze down from hundreds of miles above. We are falling rapidly. Pressure engulfs us. We are told to remain seated, to fasten our seatbelts. Each inch becomes a mile, each second a test. I have never felt such apprehension. In minutes, I will be in Boston. There, my sister waits. Fear is everywhere. In Boston, there will be no peace or silence. I will smile. I will attempt graciousness. I will anxiously await acceptance.