My Writings

My King Project – Part 1

I have been reading Stephen King’s On Writing for a few days now, and an exercise he assigned (actually, it was the only exercise) in the original edition was to write a 5-6 page narrative derived from a story idea he presented.  Mr. King said to then send him that narrative, and he might be able to do some vetting.  Well, that offer has since expired (according to his website), and it has been asked of the publisher that the offer be removed from future publications.  I guess he was getting pretty smacked by these narratives.  But I didn’t look on his website before I started on the project, so I went blissfully and ignorantly ahead with my writing, dreaming of my future as a writer after being discovered by Stephen King.  Oh well.

This is the first part of the narrative that I banged out in about 2-3 hours.  There has been no editing no rewrite yet.  This is as raw as it gets.  Let me know what you think.  I have reread it a couple of times and want to change stuff already, but I wanted to present it raw first.

Oh, you’ll have to read his book to see what the idea was.  I can’t reproduce the whole thing here.  But hopefully this stands on its own anyway.  And forgive the character names.  Those were his names, and I just stuck with them.  Here it is.

Part 1:

Dick walked across the threshold with his little girl draped in his arms.  He was carrying her like someone would carry an infant, cradled and secure, even though she was 5 years old.  He held her this way for a couple of reasons.  One was because she liked it.  She often asked Dick to “carry her like a baby” when he took her upstairs to tuck her in for the night.  Sometimes he did so with a sigh and a creaking back.  Sometimes he did it with delight in his eyes and a quick scoop coupled with a squeal from his little princess.  But he did it almost every time.

But he knew there was a second reason for holding her this way.  He knew it because she was fast asleep right now and wouldn’t know if he was holding her upside down by her big toenail.  He knew there was another reason because he kept getting a gut-rumbling nervousness as he walked up the path to his house.  He knew there was a second reason because this home did not feel like home anymore.  The second reason was that he never wanted to let go of his pretty princess.  He wanted, with all he had and would have, to hold her securely and to protect her from all dangers.

The trouble was that he didn’t feel at all secure tonight.  And his ability to protect his daughter felt like something slippery and oily and wet-noodley.  He couldn’t grasp the right way to protect her.  His mind drifted and lapsed.  In his short moments of lucidity, he sought to find the reason behind his lack of concrete thought, but he fell back into numbness so quickly that he could never quite make the thoughts whole.

Dick closed the porch door as quietly as he could and tried to flick on the switch for the front porch light when he noticed that it was already lit.  He figured he had left it on when he left the house this morning and was somewhat relieved since he would have had some trouble since he was holding Grace so tightly.  He paused briefly to watch an oak-brown moth zooming in on the glowing beacon when he realized he didn’t notice the light as he walked up the path.  But he quickly chalked that up to his distraction all night and continued inside.  He climbed the stairs and laid Grace down in her bed.  He stroked her forehead and kissed her cheek.  She opened her eyes and woke up enough to perform the nightly bed-time ritual (a small finger-wave and blown kiss), then she went right back asleep.

Grace’s peacefulness broke through Dick’s haziness for a bit, and he reached and grabbed and held on to that moment of clear head and would not let go.  He forced his brain into activity.  He was NOT going to fall into the muck again.  He pulled and fought for control, pushed and prodded, hit and poked… and he won.  As he realized he was coherent once again, he decided to try to determine what in the hell was making him act and think like a sloth running through syrup.

As Dick walked downstairs, he reached for the remote control for the TV.  No, thought Dick, that is a habit I need to break.  TV was crumbling his mind, and he certainly didn’t need something to make him switch off again when he just got back into thinking mode.  So he turned on the satellite radio instead, knowing that the classical music station always helped him create a wall between his thoughts the sounds of the house and the sounds on the street outside.  A little of Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9 swam through the speakers on either side of his entertainment center and the sub-woofer on the floor, and his still somewhat-swimmy thoughts became even more solid.  Dick held on harder to this Gibraltar, and got down to doing some serious thinking.

What was causing this feeling of unease?  Why was his protection circuit turned up on high, while his brain kept refusing to turn on and let him figure out how to protect Grace and himself?  Damn, he couldn’t even figure out what was causing the circuit to turn on!  He had to get his process going.  He had to calm down and make his thoughts form a pattern.  He had to breathe deep and force this mystery into something he could chew on.  That first foothold will make it happen, he knew.  His brain worked like that.  The first step might be a slip and a fall, and a few after that might also cause a few bumps and bruises and aches in his shins.  But as soon as he got that first good firm footing, he would take off running and never look back.  He waited for that.  He pushed and prodded his thoughts, made them look at different angles, brought in all that he had observed.  He was surprised at everything that he could recall from the time he walked up to his aunt’s house (Grace had stayed at Aunt Trace’s house the last couple of nights while Dick got the final details sorted out for Jane’s incarceration).  The problem was getting all the details in an orderly timeline.

He knew for a fact that he had not been a fuzz brain when he got to Aunt Trace’s door.  He remembered thinking that the door to his aunt’s house was starting to fade a bit in the bright afternoon sun and could probably use some scraping, priming, and painting.  He recalled looking at the flowers growing around the trees and noticing that they were still glowing with the moisture from the sprinklers (Dick never could get Aunt Trace to put her sprinklers on in the early morning or evening, and her somewhat green yard had quickly turned motley as it suffered from the quick evaporation during the summer).  He brought forward the recollection of the small yellow-jacket wasp as it crossed Dick’s path, and he grinned at the memory of the short burst of involuntary panic that always seems to accompany such encounters.  All of this came back easily to Dick.

So he pressed further on.  When did his brain start to short circuit?  He remembered politely refusing Aunt Trace’s invitation to stay for dinner, and he remembered her less-than-polite insistence that he get his ass in the bathroom and wash up before dinner.  Dick remembered saying “yes ma’am” and doing what Aunt Trace said.  Dick recalled the steam rising from the warm rolls that Aunt Trace called her specialty.  He thought of how Grace actually looked happy for a while as she ate the meatballs that Aunt Trace also called her specialty.  He played with his napkin for a bit at her table while Aunt Trace and Grace cleaned up (Aunt Trace insisted that her nephew not move a finger – he was still recovering from all the shock after all – and Grace always loved to help Aunt Trace with anything)…

And there it was.  The moment where panic set in.  Aunt Trace and Grace were in the kitchen.  Dick had heard the plates clinking and the water running and the giggling starting and the Dawn liquid soap getting squeezed and the sink stopper getting put in place and the wash rag squeaking against the plates and the fork falling to the ground and the gentleness in Aunt Trace’s voice as she asked Grace to get that for her.  And then it all became red, stark, stiff, bite-your-fingernails panic and terror.  Nothing else registered after that but motion and nausea.  He couldn’t pick out when he had said his goodbyes.  Dick didn’t remember taking Grace’s things to the car, or putting Grace in her booster seat, or putting the keys in the ignition, or driving home, or stopping at a single stop sign or traffic light, or turning the wheel to go around the curve on his street, or hearing the brakes squeal (he had needed to change the pads for about a month), or putting the car in park ,or… anything.  It was all sort of a smudged and streaked remembrance, dangling dangerously close to being nothing at all.  Nothing but the fright and the sick feeling in his gut.  The revelation that he had made it home without remembering the trip scared him as well, but here he was.  Thank the good Lord his house was only a few miles from Aunt Trace.

He knew that he had started to come back to some sort of reality when he got out of the car.  He had a clear picture of unbuckling Grace’s seatbelt and gently picking up his sleeping little girl and taking her upstairs and putting her to bed.  So what was the difference between the situations?  Why did he wake up now?

Nothing else would come.  He smashed the heel of his hand into his forehead in a desperate attempt to shake something loose, but all he managed was a blinding flash of pain and a short-lasting headache.  He knew he was thinking as clearly now as he possibly could.  There was no discernible impediment, no garbled edges to his thoughts.  He just could not find the memories.  The reason behind the blackout simply was not there in his mind.  He knew at that point that he would have better luck getting answers out of the moth he had seen fluttering against the light bulb outside the front porch…

Wait, where was the moth?  More importantly, what had happened to the light on the front porch?  Dick knew he had not turned it off, and he didn’t notice when it turned off.  Or did it just turn off when he was looking up?  And just like that, the curdling fear was back.  No notice.  No “by your leave”.  Not a single shred of warning or foreshadowing.  It just came.  And just as quick Dick found himself on the floor gagging and spewing chunks in artistic fashion across the rug and under the coffee table.  He knew that his perception of himself on the floor was actually a sort of clear-headedness, so he grasped once again for pure thoughts, for unadulterated cranial activity.  And as he reached, he was stomped on like an earwig walking across the dining room floor.  He sank and sank and sank.  But right before he completely blacked out, he caught a faint whiff of an odor so long forgotten, so pleasing to him when he first snatched a hint of it so many years ago, and so completely sickening to him soon after when the doctor told him he was allergic to the perfume.  The picture came back to him clearly, Jane’s face so sad and mournful when she realized that she would have to change her signature scent because it made the love of her life puke up his Cheerios every morning.  Jane was here.  Inside the house.