Post by Forestbreak on Mar 19, 2014 20:09:10 GMT -6
I recently began a story (tentatively titled Waste, but I'll probably change it later on), and I've got the first chapter written. I'd like to see what you all think. Critique would be much appreciated. c:
Chapter 1 --
The world is complete.
I can feel our small heartbeat working furiously in our chest, ribs pounding, blood rushing into tiny, stretching figures, and I can practically hear the mechanical scratch of a brain working. Smothered beneath the child, I am content and warm, blanketed in baby-soft skin, and I am happy to let the earth spin endlessly around us as we curl our body into scents of milk and polished crib-wood and down mattresses. Our hand gropes at nothing, small and gentle and innocent, reaching for a world that will not reach back. A fire crackles nearby, and we are only dimly aware of the heat it folds into us and the soft popping of embers. The blurred rush of voices above us is far more engaging.
We gurgle out a faint whimper. Acknowledge me, we think. Both arms weakly raise up, fingers working furiously at the air. Our blanket slips down our nearly-naked body, coming to rest in front of our abdomen. We whine again. Cold. Our cheeks flush with want. Warm me, we scream to ourself. The bigger people are not paying attention to us. They are looking hard at each other’s eyes and whispering. A fat man is holding a tube to his lips, and strangled notes are bleeding out from it. His eyes are yellow where they should be white, and he looks tired. We cannot understand what the big people are saying, and we do not want to. The things that matter to them do not matter to us. We twist our head to the side, and a few sparse locks of sandy-yellow hair fall in front of our eyes. We cry out softly.
Someone says, “Lille.” We know that word: it’s our name. It’s what Mama and the governess murmur to us when they pick us up and cradle us gently against their chests, and what our brother says in his funny boy-voice when he bends over our crib and sticks his impish face near ours. The person who said it doesn’t say it to us, though. It’s in the middle of a sentence, said to our daddy. He says something with “Lille” in it back. They both mumble in agreement.
We squint and stare up at the ceiling. Dust hovers in a winking beam of light above, radiating from the spindling cracks in the wooden walls and the dirtied windows. The hair is still in our face. We clumsily push it away with a chubby arm. We yawn. We try to rub our eyes, but we miss and hit our forehead instead. Our face contorts into a grimace.
“Shadow,” our daddy says (in the middle of a sentence again). I know that word, because they say it a lot, but we don’t know what it means. A strange man crouches down and looks at us. He has an oddly gaunt face and small, watery blue eyes that tremble and twitch slightly. His skin is bone-pale, and there is hair on his face that glints like metal in the light.
We feel balanced, but the strange man’s closeness to us somehow tilts the balance. We squirm on the mattress, uncomfortable, wanting the man to go away. He smells sharp and potent, nothing like the sweet, milky smell of Mama or the rich, dusty smell of Daddy. We whine and try to slap him away, but his head isn’t quite close enough. He laughs, but his laugh is harsh, and it grates in our ears. “Spirited child!” he caws. His words are meaningless to us. He pulls something from his belt and holds it up. It catches the late evening sunlight, scattering blood-orange rays through the room, and momentarily making our vision white with the flare. Something about it makes us nervous. Our heart pumps faster, working furiously, and we squirm with more purpose. As he brings it out of the light, it becomes apparent that the thing is a knife, the blade crystal-clear like a windowpane, with a large ruby embedded in the hilt. We know that knives are bad. Our brother got screamed at for playing with one. Mama will probably scream at this man, too. We look over at her. She doesn’t look back, but she’s staring at the man.
Then, the man sets the knife down beside him, sucks in a rattling breath, and reaches down. His hands close around us haphazardly. We let out a shrill scream. Down! Down! He laughs again. The bare air is cold, and all we have blocking us from it is a rough piece of fabric wrapped around our thighs. Because of the dim lamplight and our proximity from the floor, I am thrown down against the wall, stretching out, and I can only watch the child flail from above, my feet still connected to hers, my body matching her movements with swift precision. Balance.
He picks up the knife. Her uneasiness clouds into my being. We scream again, a tear slipping from the child’s eye. Down! Please! Mama watches us, her knuckles pressed to her mouth, and Daddy stares grimly from a corner. Our brother, Hamish, peers out from behind the door, but Mama somehow notices him and quickly ushers him back into the nursery. When she walks back in, she whispers, “Hush,” to the child. We do not hush. A strange man is holding us, and it is cold, and he smells bad, and he has a knife. There is no reason to hush. We yowl into the ceiling, trying to rattle the windows, face twisted and red and messy with tears and snot.
The fat musician blows more loudly into the tube, and louder notes squeak out. The strange man mumbles something under his breath, in a buzzing, humming tone, and he presses the cold blade of the glass knife to the child’s feet. Our panic intensifies. We cry until our throat feels raw, and then we keep crying. Down! Her arms flail. My arms flail. Our arms flail. Comfort. Balance.
The knife slits through the air, and in that moment, everything crumbles.
The air screams, flying around me and hitting me hard as I am launched into a corner of the room. Everything screams. The world turns dark and narrow. Balance- no; suddenly, the balance is gone, and a soul-sucking emptiness rushes into me, cold and unfamiliar. Darkness pounds into my being, howling like a stranded wolf, and there is no heart beating anymore, no skin, no bones, no perfectly complete connection. I can see, dimly, as if I have been thrown into another dimension entirely, the child above me, floating like an angel. She is not me anymore. I am not her. The realization rips into me with a cruelty unlike anything I have ever felt before.
Dumbly, I try to move. I can barely feel a thing. My limbs are not supple and sure, now that the guidance of hers is gone. I try to scream, but it is to no avail. And then the pain hits me, starting at my feet and searing up into my body (what is left of it), fire-like and unmerciful. I had not known pain before, but somehow, I identify the feeling readily. Everything is wrenched away except for the pain and the image of the child swimming in my vision.
She is still yelling, I realize. Her yell is like music.
“You got her foot!” cries a woman. It is her mother. “Her foot is bleeding! Albin, look! It’s dripping blood!”
“My sincerest apologies, your majesty, but please do not fret,” the man murmurs, producing a handkerchief and wiping the blade clean. “Just a shallow cut. She’ll be all right. The knife is sterile.” He turns to me, hawk-eyes piercing through me. “Would you like me to dispose of the shadow, my queen, or shall we leave that task to the priest?”
“The priest is late. He will not mind if you take it upon yourself,” her mother says softly, voice trembling, gaze still locked on the child’s foot.
“Very well, your majesty.” He straightens up to his full height and strides over to me, then pulls a pair of gloves from the same belt he took the knife from and slides them on. They are dark and translucent, shimmering like liquid as they cling onto his hands. Then, the man reaches down and encloses me in a firm grip, folding me like a scrap of fabric. I try to resist, but my body only twitches.
His arm extends out, and suddenly, pain explodes through me again as I am drawn closer to the fire burning in the hearth. It intensifies with every passing moment, throbbing through my body, until it become almost unbearable, and then his grip is gone, and I slip down onto the stone floor, the fire still flickering uncomfortably close, and the pain still ripping inside of me.
“Priest Elis!” he coos, his voice growing fainter as he crosses to the other side of the room. “Wonderful timing!”
Aching all over, I attempt movement again, focusing first on my arm. I set my mind on it, shutting out everything else, trying desperately to signal it with whatever of a brain I had. It twitches once, then falls still, then twitches again, but more intensely this time. Progress, I suppose. A few seconds pass, and finally, it slides a few inches across the floor. I turn my attention to the other arm, and am able to move it a few inches, as well. With a burst of mental energy, I thrust my lower body from side to side a few times, and slowly but surely, my entire body creeps across the stone ground, away from the fire and toward a dark corner. I continue moving, picking up speed gradually, and I glance back to see them setting the child back down in her crib. Something about her is different. Her skin is white- not healthy peach, but white, like moonlight. Her hair is lighter. She seems to glimmer softly as she moves, rolling over on her mattress.
The balance has been upset, I realize, and my stomach churns as it dawns upon me with sickening suddenness. We are not one. I am filled with an indescribable emotion, perhaps some kind of mix of anger and desperate sadness and an incredible, ever-reaching emptiness and loss.
I reach the corner, and I slide safely in, blending in with the darkness like a cat. The blur of voices comes closer, and I curl in more tightly, panic and the empty ache pulsing in me.
“Where did it go?” he calls, tone shrill. “Your majesty?”
“I was looking the other way, Kier. Marta? Did you see where it slunk off to?”
“No, Albin.” Her mother glances around, alarmed. “Is it dangerous, Kier?” she asks the gaunt man with the knife.
“Heavens, no. Shadows are barely sentient, your majesty.” He clasps his hands together and bends down, looking around. “Elis? Is there any cause for alarm?”
“No. Kier speaks the truth, your majesty,” says a man dressed in white. “God does not intend for such creatures to sustain themselves with no human to guide them. It will pass away on its own. But I’m afraid it will be difficult to find, if you do wish to find it. They hide impeccably in the dark.” I flinch.
“No need,” the child’s mother says after a few moments. “If it will die on its own, we need not waste our time hunting down such a thing.”
“As you wish, your majesty,” says the man in white. Kier slips the knife back into his belt and removes his gloves. I would feel relief if not for the incredible emptiness I feel, and the aching want jittering across the unfeeling surface of my shadowy figure as I watch Lille gurgle happily in her crib, palms glowing as they stretch toward the sky.
I slide out from the corner and slink under the door of the room. I want to stay with the child, but I know that such a notion is foolish, and I will be carving my own headstone if I stay here much longer.
Chapter 1 --
The world is complete.
I can feel our small heartbeat working furiously in our chest, ribs pounding, blood rushing into tiny, stretching figures, and I can practically hear the mechanical scratch of a brain working. Smothered beneath the child, I am content and warm, blanketed in baby-soft skin, and I am happy to let the earth spin endlessly around us as we curl our body into scents of milk and polished crib-wood and down mattresses. Our hand gropes at nothing, small and gentle and innocent, reaching for a world that will not reach back. A fire crackles nearby, and we are only dimly aware of the heat it folds into us and the soft popping of embers. The blurred rush of voices above us is far more engaging.
We gurgle out a faint whimper. Acknowledge me, we think. Both arms weakly raise up, fingers working furiously at the air. Our blanket slips down our nearly-naked body, coming to rest in front of our abdomen. We whine again. Cold. Our cheeks flush with want. Warm me, we scream to ourself. The bigger people are not paying attention to us. They are looking hard at each other’s eyes and whispering. A fat man is holding a tube to his lips, and strangled notes are bleeding out from it. His eyes are yellow where they should be white, and he looks tired. We cannot understand what the big people are saying, and we do not want to. The things that matter to them do not matter to us. We twist our head to the side, and a few sparse locks of sandy-yellow hair fall in front of our eyes. We cry out softly.
Someone says, “Lille.” We know that word: it’s our name. It’s what Mama and the governess murmur to us when they pick us up and cradle us gently against their chests, and what our brother says in his funny boy-voice when he bends over our crib and sticks his impish face near ours. The person who said it doesn’t say it to us, though. It’s in the middle of a sentence, said to our daddy. He says something with “Lille” in it back. They both mumble in agreement.
We squint and stare up at the ceiling. Dust hovers in a winking beam of light above, radiating from the spindling cracks in the wooden walls and the dirtied windows. The hair is still in our face. We clumsily push it away with a chubby arm. We yawn. We try to rub our eyes, but we miss and hit our forehead instead. Our face contorts into a grimace.
“Shadow,” our daddy says (in the middle of a sentence again). I know that word, because they say it a lot, but we don’t know what it means. A strange man crouches down and looks at us. He has an oddly gaunt face and small, watery blue eyes that tremble and twitch slightly. His skin is bone-pale, and there is hair on his face that glints like metal in the light.
We feel balanced, but the strange man’s closeness to us somehow tilts the balance. We squirm on the mattress, uncomfortable, wanting the man to go away. He smells sharp and potent, nothing like the sweet, milky smell of Mama or the rich, dusty smell of Daddy. We whine and try to slap him away, but his head isn’t quite close enough. He laughs, but his laugh is harsh, and it grates in our ears. “Spirited child!” he caws. His words are meaningless to us. He pulls something from his belt and holds it up. It catches the late evening sunlight, scattering blood-orange rays through the room, and momentarily making our vision white with the flare. Something about it makes us nervous. Our heart pumps faster, working furiously, and we squirm with more purpose. As he brings it out of the light, it becomes apparent that the thing is a knife, the blade crystal-clear like a windowpane, with a large ruby embedded in the hilt. We know that knives are bad. Our brother got screamed at for playing with one. Mama will probably scream at this man, too. We look over at her. She doesn’t look back, but she’s staring at the man.
Then, the man sets the knife down beside him, sucks in a rattling breath, and reaches down. His hands close around us haphazardly. We let out a shrill scream. Down! Down! He laughs again. The bare air is cold, and all we have blocking us from it is a rough piece of fabric wrapped around our thighs. Because of the dim lamplight and our proximity from the floor, I am thrown down against the wall, stretching out, and I can only watch the child flail from above, my feet still connected to hers, my body matching her movements with swift precision. Balance.
He picks up the knife. Her uneasiness clouds into my being. We scream again, a tear slipping from the child’s eye. Down! Please! Mama watches us, her knuckles pressed to her mouth, and Daddy stares grimly from a corner. Our brother, Hamish, peers out from behind the door, but Mama somehow notices him and quickly ushers him back into the nursery. When she walks back in, she whispers, “Hush,” to the child. We do not hush. A strange man is holding us, and it is cold, and he smells bad, and he has a knife. There is no reason to hush. We yowl into the ceiling, trying to rattle the windows, face twisted and red and messy with tears and snot.
The fat musician blows more loudly into the tube, and louder notes squeak out. The strange man mumbles something under his breath, in a buzzing, humming tone, and he presses the cold blade of the glass knife to the child’s feet. Our panic intensifies. We cry until our throat feels raw, and then we keep crying. Down! Her arms flail. My arms flail. Our arms flail. Comfort. Balance.
The knife slits through the air, and in that moment, everything crumbles.
The air screams, flying around me and hitting me hard as I am launched into a corner of the room. Everything screams. The world turns dark and narrow. Balance- no; suddenly, the balance is gone, and a soul-sucking emptiness rushes into me, cold and unfamiliar. Darkness pounds into my being, howling like a stranded wolf, and there is no heart beating anymore, no skin, no bones, no perfectly complete connection. I can see, dimly, as if I have been thrown into another dimension entirely, the child above me, floating like an angel. She is not me anymore. I am not her. The realization rips into me with a cruelty unlike anything I have ever felt before.
Dumbly, I try to move. I can barely feel a thing. My limbs are not supple and sure, now that the guidance of hers is gone. I try to scream, but it is to no avail. And then the pain hits me, starting at my feet and searing up into my body (what is left of it), fire-like and unmerciful. I had not known pain before, but somehow, I identify the feeling readily. Everything is wrenched away except for the pain and the image of the child swimming in my vision.
She is still yelling, I realize. Her yell is like music.
“You got her foot!” cries a woman. It is her mother. “Her foot is bleeding! Albin, look! It’s dripping blood!”
“My sincerest apologies, your majesty, but please do not fret,” the man murmurs, producing a handkerchief and wiping the blade clean. “Just a shallow cut. She’ll be all right. The knife is sterile.” He turns to me, hawk-eyes piercing through me. “Would you like me to dispose of the shadow, my queen, or shall we leave that task to the priest?”
“The priest is late. He will not mind if you take it upon yourself,” her mother says softly, voice trembling, gaze still locked on the child’s foot.
“Very well, your majesty.” He straightens up to his full height and strides over to me, then pulls a pair of gloves from the same belt he took the knife from and slides them on. They are dark and translucent, shimmering like liquid as they cling onto his hands. Then, the man reaches down and encloses me in a firm grip, folding me like a scrap of fabric. I try to resist, but my body only twitches.
His arm extends out, and suddenly, pain explodes through me again as I am drawn closer to the fire burning in the hearth. It intensifies with every passing moment, throbbing through my body, until it become almost unbearable, and then his grip is gone, and I slip down onto the stone floor, the fire still flickering uncomfortably close, and the pain still ripping inside of me.
“Priest Elis!” he coos, his voice growing fainter as he crosses to the other side of the room. “Wonderful timing!”
Aching all over, I attempt movement again, focusing first on my arm. I set my mind on it, shutting out everything else, trying desperately to signal it with whatever of a brain I had. It twitches once, then falls still, then twitches again, but more intensely this time. Progress, I suppose. A few seconds pass, and finally, it slides a few inches across the floor. I turn my attention to the other arm, and am able to move it a few inches, as well. With a burst of mental energy, I thrust my lower body from side to side a few times, and slowly but surely, my entire body creeps across the stone ground, away from the fire and toward a dark corner. I continue moving, picking up speed gradually, and I glance back to see them setting the child back down in her crib. Something about her is different. Her skin is white- not healthy peach, but white, like moonlight. Her hair is lighter. She seems to glimmer softly as she moves, rolling over on her mattress.
The balance has been upset, I realize, and my stomach churns as it dawns upon me with sickening suddenness. We are not one. I am filled with an indescribable emotion, perhaps some kind of mix of anger and desperate sadness and an incredible, ever-reaching emptiness and loss.
I reach the corner, and I slide safely in, blending in with the darkness like a cat. The blur of voices comes closer, and I curl in more tightly, panic and the empty ache pulsing in me.
“Where did it go?” he calls, tone shrill. “Your majesty?”
“I was looking the other way, Kier. Marta? Did you see where it slunk off to?”
“No, Albin.” Her mother glances around, alarmed. “Is it dangerous, Kier?” she asks the gaunt man with the knife.
“Heavens, no. Shadows are barely sentient, your majesty.” He clasps his hands together and bends down, looking around. “Elis? Is there any cause for alarm?”
“No. Kier speaks the truth, your majesty,” says a man dressed in white. “God does not intend for such creatures to sustain themselves with no human to guide them. It will pass away on its own. But I’m afraid it will be difficult to find, if you do wish to find it. They hide impeccably in the dark.” I flinch.
“No need,” the child’s mother says after a few moments. “If it will die on its own, we need not waste our time hunting down such a thing.”
“As you wish, your majesty,” says the man in white. Kier slips the knife back into his belt and removes his gloves. I would feel relief if not for the incredible emptiness I feel, and the aching want jittering across the unfeeling surface of my shadowy figure as I watch Lille gurgle happily in her crib, palms glowing as they stretch toward the sky.
I slide out from the corner and slink under the door of the room. I want to stay with the child, but I know that such a notion is foolish, and I will be carving my own headstone if I stay here much longer.
