Post by Forestbreak on Feb 27, 2014 17:57:28 GMT -6
I'm going to be posting a few excerpts from something I'm working on right now. I'm not posting the whole thing, because it's around sixty thousand words long at the moment and there are a lot of curse words in it, but I'd really love some feedback and criticism on what I do put here. <3 Thanks. I'll probably add more later, but here are a couple.
1::
The world stops. You drop the phone, and it hits the cup holder with a dull thud. Tears shock your eyes, streaming down your cheeks, and the headache slits through your head in one swift swipe, and it screams primally, and a sharp whimper wrenches itself from your throat, and suddenly you can’t breathe.
“I’m sorry!” comes a faint yell from the dropped phone, and you slam your hand down it. It hangs up. Her voice is gone. Everything is gone. She’s gone. She’s gone. You’re crying so hard you can’t feel your face. The dread has unwound and left your body and grabbed your neck, and it’s shaking you and strangling you.
-- stuff here that I am omitting because lots of curses --
The world has recovered from its halt, and now it’s spinning, spinning too fast, and it’s hurting your head again, and you’re so hellishly dizzy, and you’re holding your head in your hands to stop the world from grabbing you by the wrist and swinging you around, around, too fast. Too fast. You’re alone. You’re alone. You slam your fist down on the dashboard. It hurts your palm, but you don’t care. You don’t care how badly you’ll bruise. You just know that it hurts, and you need the pain to forget the dizzying twists and whirls and sickening swoops the earth is making.
You suddenly feel the need to walk calmly over to Leo’s house in the rain, at a slow pace, so that the rain soaks through your shirt and your skin and deep into your bones, so that you become the rain, the ferocious, slamming, undoubtedly graceful storm, and to open his door and walk calmly over to him and to grab his throat and rip it open and scream into the crevice until every trace of Rose has been sucked out and into your scream. She’ll be back with you, enclosed softly into your voice, and she’ll never be able to get out again.
2::
She’s big on makeup, and she’s one of those girls whose eyebrows are always perfectly symmetrical. Her lips are large and full and daubed with a layer of some sort of strange, waxy lip gloss that shimmers like congealed fat in bad lighting, but the rest of her makeup isn’t overdone. Her hair is cut to just above where her breasts start, parted neatly in the middle, and it’s the sort of hair that looks heavy but featherlike at the same time, draping around her face like forced-apart curtains, and it’s got that chemical dullness to it that strips away any memory of shine and gives it a dingy, picked-apart appearance half the time. Still, it’s got a certain messy charm to it, and I like the way it falls over her shoulders in separate little snakelike tassels. She’s got eyes that don’t quite shock you, but rather, they dig into you over a long period of time: deep-set, not exactly large but not exactly small, and dark with thoughtfulness, and they’re a rich shade of mahogany-brown set by mascara-heavy lashes. Her nose is sharp, but not alarmingly so. Her cheeks are somewhat gaunt, but not disturbingly so. Her body is one that was defaulted with the winnings of the genetic lottery, but eventually sculpted with years of working too hard and drinking too much coffee. Her smile is usually strange and sarcastic and clamped-up like it’s being yanked into place by clothespins, but when it’s genuine, it relaxes into a blindingly whitened, eccentric grin that I’ve come to love. She dresses in a style that teeters on provocative, but she’s self-aware enough to not toe the line too much.
3::
“Good to hear,” you reply bitterly, seating yourself across from her. The chilly air is biting against your bare chest. “So you just waste my time and smoke my cigarettes instead.”
“Pretty much.” She leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. She’s in a tank top and shorts. She must be pretty cold herself. Her loss. You stare hard at her and try with every ounce of your being to hate her as much as was physically possible to hate Isabelle Avery, but you can’t find it in you, at least not right now, like this. Her head is tilted upward, curls spilling over her shoulders, and she’s facing the sun, eyes gently closed. You can’t hate her when she’s looking like that, as much as you want to, because if you’re hating her, you’re probably not wanting her. Probably. You’re not quite sure yet, because you’ve never hated her before.
4::
The first thing on your mind when you wake up on Monday: how badly you need a cigarette.
You don’t have any with you, since you quit last year, but if you did, you’re pretty sure you would have lit one up. To hell with your voice. It could get as rough as it X well wanted. And while you’re at it, to hell with your lungs, too. They could get clogged up with cancer till you burned in hell, for all you cared. And then your grandkids would probably stub out their smokes on your grave.
What today is: a studio day. The final odds and ends of the album need to be tightened up, the samples cleared, the instrumentals scoured for imperfections, the tracks tweaked and twirled around till they sound half-decent. You don’t mind these days, but they still drag on like any other day. They lose their luster after about ten minutes.
What you don’t want to do: get out of bed.
What you do anyway: get out of bed.
1::
The world stops. You drop the phone, and it hits the cup holder with a dull thud. Tears shock your eyes, streaming down your cheeks, and the headache slits through your head in one swift swipe, and it screams primally, and a sharp whimper wrenches itself from your throat, and suddenly you can’t breathe.
“I’m sorry!” comes a faint yell from the dropped phone, and you slam your hand down it. It hangs up. Her voice is gone. Everything is gone. She’s gone. She’s gone. You’re crying so hard you can’t feel your face. The dread has unwound and left your body and grabbed your neck, and it’s shaking you and strangling you.
-- stuff here that I am omitting because lots of curses --
The world has recovered from its halt, and now it’s spinning, spinning too fast, and it’s hurting your head again, and you’re so hellishly dizzy, and you’re holding your head in your hands to stop the world from grabbing you by the wrist and swinging you around, around, too fast. Too fast. You’re alone. You’re alone. You slam your fist down on the dashboard. It hurts your palm, but you don’t care. You don’t care how badly you’ll bruise. You just know that it hurts, and you need the pain to forget the dizzying twists and whirls and sickening swoops the earth is making.
You suddenly feel the need to walk calmly over to Leo’s house in the rain, at a slow pace, so that the rain soaks through your shirt and your skin and deep into your bones, so that you become the rain, the ferocious, slamming, undoubtedly graceful storm, and to open his door and walk calmly over to him and to grab his throat and rip it open and scream into the crevice until every trace of Rose has been sucked out and into your scream. She’ll be back with you, enclosed softly into your voice, and she’ll never be able to get out again.
2::
She’s big on makeup, and she’s one of those girls whose eyebrows are always perfectly symmetrical. Her lips are large and full and daubed with a layer of some sort of strange, waxy lip gloss that shimmers like congealed fat in bad lighting, but the rest of her makeup isn’t overdone. Her hair is cut to just above where her breasts start, parted neatly in the middle, and it’s the sort of hair that looks heavy but featherlike at the same time, draping around her face like forced-apart curtains, and it’s got that chemical dullness to it that strips away any memory of shine and gives it a dingy, picked-apart appearance half the time. Still, it’s got a certain messy charm to it, and I like the way it falls over her shoulders in separate little snakelike tassels. She’s got eyes that don’t quite shock you, but rather, they dig into you over a long period of time: deep-set, not exactly large but not exactly small, and dark with thoughtfulness, and they’re a rich shade of mahogany-brown set by mascara-heavy lashes. Her nose is sharp, but not alarmingly so. Her cheeks are somewhat gaunt, but not disturbingly so. Her body is one that was defaulted with the winnings of the genetic lottery, but eventually sculpted with years of working too hard and drinking too much coffee. Her smile is usually strange and sarcastic and clamped-up like it’s being yanked into place by clothespins, but when it’s genuine, it relaxes into a blindingly whitened, eccentric grin that I’ve come to love. She dresses in a style that teeters on provocative, but she’s self-aware enough to not toe the line too much.
3::
“Good to hear,” you reply bitterly, seating yourself across from her. The chilly air is biting against your bare chest. “So you just waste my time and smoke my cigarettes instead.”
“Pretty much.” She leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. She’s in a tank top and shorts. She must be pretty cold herself. Her loss. You stare hard at her and try with every ounce of your being to hate her as much as was physically possible to hate Isabelle Avery, but you can’t find it in you, at least not right now, like this. Her head is tilted upward, curls spilling over her shoulders, and she’s facing the sun, eyes gently closed. You can’t hate her when she’s looking like that, as much as you want to, because if you’re hating her, you’re probably not wanting her. Probably. You’re not quite sure yet, because you’ve never hated her before.
4::
The first thing on your mind when you wake up on Monday: how badly you need a cigarette.
You don’t have any with you, since you quit last year, but if you did, you’re pretty sure you would have lit one up. To hell with your voice. It could get as rough as it X well wanted. And while you’re at it, to hell with your lungs, too. They could get clogged up with cancer till you burned in hell, for all you cared. And then your grandkids would probably stub out their smokes on your grave.
What today is: a studio day. The final odds and ends of the album need to be tightened up, the samples cleared, the instrumentals scoured for imperfections, the tracks tweaked and twirled around till they sound half-decent. You don’t mind these days, but they still drag on like any other day. They lose their luster after about ten minutes.
What you don’t want to do: get out of bed.
What you do anyway: get out of bed.
