DavidO
01-22-2012, 04:35 AM
Hello, I was working on a "writing exercise" to improve my skills and I tried to expand it into a fuller short story. I consider myself to be a novice writer and I would greatly appreciate any type of feedback, even if you don't manage to get through it all, or don't like it. I experimented with a bunch of stuff including style for the first time and and I'm curious to find out how much of it works or doesn't work for an outside reader. Thanks!
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MOUSETRAP
There on my bed I lay chained, drenched in a puddle of sweat, drowning in a sea of horror. Scattered about my apartment were demons tiny and numerous, fuzzy and ashen grey, darting out of my sight and squeezing into crevices from which they could still watch me tremble. And tremble I did, incontinent in their fiendish presence. Hours or possibly days full of time had slipped my mind before I could grab hold, vanished before I could unravel the moments and place them in a chronological order. Mist slithered serenely there like a floating web of snakes, and in the darkening haze I took stock of my shackles. A few yanks confirmed that they were holding as steadfast as when they were first applied. My handcuffs, smelted of the purest trepidation, burning white-hot against my skin while my ankle-weights, forged of the murkiest fatigue, exuded the hypnotic swirls that rose and hissed and sunk me deeper into my mattress. You see, I was immobile in that hellscape. Lying on my back with my eyes stained red and my arms stretched wide, I was incapacitated. By my own will? Technically, yes. But it was a will so weak, so overcome with fear and weariness that I had to externalize the devices keeping me trapped. It did not seem possible for my imprisonment to be of my volition, so I would not accept an explanation as simple as “cowardice.”
No. I was forcibly clamped down—broken, beaten and bound. My apartment, my dungeon, a den submerged almost entirely underground; through a strip of window trickled one naked morsel of sunlight yet ripe enough to soften the darkness. And possibly as a consequence of its sinister glow, or from the taint of the curling fog, or through some sort of epiphany, I realized that my walls which had once gleamed white were now streaked in sickly yellow, the sour color of nectar which might ooze from an insidious hive. Brown was the air that sagged below the mists, rank with odors from the heap of garbage atop my canister, with the stench of muck from a sink jammed full of crusty dishes, fungus blotches crawling up over the pot rims and breathing onto the counter surface. On the carpet amid the grime and beneath the sorrow dwelled the shriveled corpses of Febreeze, of Downy, of Airwick, faithful comrades whose powers had withered and died leaving no valedictory scent in my plea. And there, like an altar in the middle of a swamp, the bed upon which I lay chained was most putrid, the puss-filled palm of the devil’s embrace. On it I’d shed my soul and my excess countless times. Wet stains over dry stains over sludge had seeped through my bed sheets, and my bed covers had long since been strewn to the carpet below. But that dismal carpet was demon territory, where the demons itched to scurry and swarm and devour my flesh, eager to purge my essence from the mire. As such, my bed remained an island of refuge, so I dared not roll off its edge. Or rather, I was helpless to roll off its edge. Understand, the pressure of my shackles granted me no room to budge.
And then it returned, that demon chant which pierced the bitter stillness. Ticking noises, sharp, high-pitched, and quick, like the chirps of nail clippers clipping nail tips. It felt inappropriate because within these sounds was no emotion and I found it strange that such feral beasts of blood and fur and hate could sound so metallic, so callous; but propriety seemed the last thing on their minds, agony seemed the first. They called for me. Their ticking sounds lifted in a chorus of echoes from every corner, not in a swell but in splashes, and between each splash of ticks were pauses, inexplicable gaps of quiet. Here I must confess: I do not know what I found to be more terrifying, the actual sounds, or the soundless moments between the sounds. Yes, the ticking noises reinforced the presence of the demons as they sat crouched under my piles of laundry, behind my dusty stacks of books, beneath my wobbling bed. But the pauses, the silences connecting the ticks were unsynchronized; they clashed with the eighth-note rests of my heartbeat and they abandoned any idea of rhythm. So very unsettling were these silences, so ungodly, unbearable! It seemed as though the demons had infiltrated my thoughts and planted their sounds into my lapses. Chirping only when I least expected and succeeding to drive me mad. Sometimes I would hum in the still moments and create my own noise to block my ears from the eeriness of anticipation, but this often proved futile.
I was, of course, alone. My roommate had been gone for days to the west side of campus, sleeping, eating, and lounging in his lover’s quarters—a three-bedroom suite with plate glass windows facing the clouds. Soon after I’d made my fateful discovery I’d called him by phone. At that point things were not so dire, not even a shadow of the grimness that followed. At that point I could still move.
He’d answered his phone on the third ring. I remember hearing the ruckus of music and the shrieks of laughter through the earpiece, spilling from his background into the quiet of my own.
“Yo,” I said to him. “I just found a mouse in the cupboard under the sink.”
He’d responded with suitable worry, suitable guilt, and he’d volunteered his assistance in resolving the mater. But I declined his offer.
“It’s no big deal,” I told him. “I got this.”
I often said stupid things when I was anxious or nervous. I often said stupid things when I was tired or cheerful, or even calm. I often said stupid things, and I often retrospectively lamented the stupid things I said. That time was no different. Later, as I lay there in chains, I rebuked myself for allowing yet another collection of stupid words to escape my tongue. For my predicament had quickly multiplied beyond the numbers of any horror I imagined back when I first made the assertion. “I got this.” A pitiful fool I was. I’d gotten nothing. How could I? I stood no chance. But “this,” on the other hand, this dark, this madness, this misery had indisputably gotten me.
Now, you are likely wondering if sleep would have provided me asylum given that mobility had fled my bones and weariness engulfed me. Perhaps sleep would have at least alleviated the drag of fatigue? Such a query is a logical but exceedingly ignorant one and it merely refreshes my hell. Let me assure you, there was no solace in sleep then, none whatsoever. For nightmares sprang thick in sleep, nightmares sprang thick in dreams. Dreaming served only to augment my fear and I would ask that you place yourself in my position to behold the vision that occurred once I fell victim to these dreams: Myself alone under a black sky dripping with tar, barefoot upon an expanse of simmering mud, cowering before a rodent god whose name I now know but vow to never utter. Skin like an oily rug, eyes like black marble pellets of an endless gloom; simply recalling those wicked splays of whiskers plunges me into a whirl of nausea. I cannot give a precise report on stature, but taller than my standing height seems a reasonable approximation. The trouble was that my knees had buckled under the repugnance seeping into my pores so I could not make an accurate measurement. However, I remember that shapeless bulk of mass with all four paws suspended above ground, paws that squirmed in the air, independent of one another as though blindly groping for my throat. I wouldn’t have known which set were feet and which were fingers had those eyes and that snout not oriented me. Wriggling was my prediction for method of locomotion, wriggling like a giant grub through the sludge, but there was rarely any movement. What loomed over me was only a stationary blob, swaying on occasion after making a dreadful squawking noise.
I wondered if such a creature could be responsible for the abundance of mice that dwelled in my apartment. Perhaps spawnlings of some kind? Tearing out of that bloated belly? I could not know, but I felt the relationship between phenomena. Additionally I sensed that these dreams were meant to be moments of reckoning, as if I had been dropped upon this ground at the whim of a depraved puppeteer and was given a chance in the realm of the abstract to rectify my real misfortunes. But even amid the surreal I did nothing but quiver and quake. Please, do not scoff, remember yourself in my position. Imagine my helplessness at the mercy of a rodent god who oppressed my lungs with the stench of its acrid drool and cackled with a frightful menace. Worse yet, imagine kneeling upon a land of no horizon, of no dawn, of no heaven and no hell, no twilight, no guide, only shadow. It was more than I could stand to see, more than I could bear, and from those haunted dreams I was almost grateful to be jerked awake by the recurrence of the ticking noises. For when I flickered my eyelids open and felt my rapid breath, that cackling ball of mirth faded into the recesses of my subconscious. However I must divulge that upon waking, my lips would make a brief sputtering sound, much different than any sound I’d ever known. I felt for a moment that my body had become a shell for a ghost; one that would enter when I slept, flee when I woke, and leave a parting curse as we brushed minds. Nevertheless, each time I escaped sleep my eyes were spared the nightmare, though in wakefulness, my ears became the pathway of terror. Tick…tick…..tick tick.
Now again I must reveal another dilemma: I cannot gauge whether my dreams were truly worse than my reality. At first I believed so. This is because a most chilling aspect of dreaming is the void, the corridors of nothingness that envelope yourself and the target of your interactions. Dreams are fragments, their infrastructures, elusive. In dreams there is little to anchor the mind and so reality stands more stable, more concrete, with an entire world to latch onto. This is what gave me comfort as I lay there chained, steadying my gasps, tasting my sweat, content with my choice to face my waking demons. But as more time slipped away I felt my hollow soul begin to rustle with despair, because I came to understand that even in waking I remained in a void. Even in waking I was losing my grasp of the concrete infrastructure that connected the world around me. Yes, I knew that on the other side of my walls beamed the fullness of the sun enchanting the city with the kiss of its rays. I was aware that open-hearted souls drifted blissfully under the blue skies and I knew of the green places where life danced into bloom. But within my enclosure I was there lost in the aura of my demons, and so that world, those distant images, those vague horizons began to fade, and they each took with them their reassurance. After all, they were only memories to me. Of what use were memories when life is what I sought? Of what use were memories when I was trapped? Without the ability to go forth and soak in that sky or blend with those souls, trembling in my pit I felt as if I was on an elusive singular plane of my own. Only my demons were real, and there was no salvation in memory. No dawn.
In gutters unnoticed by humanity above a deadly war rages between mouse and man and somehow I’d become ensnared by it. The world had been spinning as it has always been known to do but I had lost my footing and tumbled off into a fringe. I’d fallen and I’d found myself isolated by those hungry demons, so I might as well have been living in a nightmare. Tick..tick-tick……tick….tick........TICK! Time was running out, the mice were clamoring about. My war was coming to a close, whether withdrawn or withheld I was neutralized in final acknowledgment of my doom and I prepared myself to surrender. After sampling both dream and reality for a time, I made my ultimate decision. I opted to be consumed by the dream. I melted away into a heavy slumber, and when the dream came, I mustered the strength to make my move without hesitation. Using my fingers I gouged my eyes so that the hideous visions would become nothing more than another eternal memory in my album of mush. I stepped forward in the dreamscape and felt the mud swallow up near my ankles. The wind caressed my outstretched arms and I absorbed the calm and chaos of this new world which I have dared to call home.
So now here I stand, unbound, unbroken, and unchained, free and full in this unfathomable domain. I stand blind before you and together we bask in the goo of this simpler void while I breathe easy, firm in the knowledge that turning back may be impossible. Here we wait. You’ve spoken your name to me, I’ve spoken mine, and it is clear we are both quite lost. So now here I humbly ask, you wretched rodent god, can we drift together? Can we share a dream? Will you love me if I fade with you into this sky of blackest tar?
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MOUSETRAP
There on my bed I lay chained, drenched in a puddle of sweat, drowning in a sea of horror. Scattered about my apartment were demons tiny and numerous, fuzzy and ashen grey, darting out of my sight and squeezing into crevices from which they could still watch me tremble. And tremble I did, incontinent in their fiendish presence. Hours or possibly days full of time had slipped my mind before I could grab hold, vanished before I could unravel the moments and place them in a chronological order. Mist slithered serenely there like a floating web of snakes, and in the darkening haze I took stock of my shackles. A few yanks confirmed that they were holding as steadfast as when they were first applied. My handcuffs, smelted of the purest trepidation, burning white-hot against my skin while my ankle-weights, forged of the murkiest fatigue, exuded the hypnotic swirls that rose and hissed and sunk me deeper into my mattress. You see, I was immobile in that hellscape. Lying on my back with my eyes stained red and my arms stretched wide, I was incapacitated. By my own will? Technically, yes. But it was a will so weak, so overcome with fear and weariness that I had to externalize the devices keeping me trapped. It did not seem possible for my imprisonment to be of my volition, so I would not accept an explanation as simple as “cowardice.”
No. I was forcibly clamped down—broken, beaten and bound. My apartment, my dungeon, a den submerged almost entirely underground; through a strip of window trickled one naked morsel of sunlight yet ripe enough to soften the darkness. And possibly as a consequence of its sinister glow, or from the taint of the curling fog, or through some sort of epiphany, I realized that my walls which had once gleamed white were now streaked in sickly yellow, the sour color of nectar which might ooze from an insidious hive. Brown was the air that sagged below the mists, rank with odors from the heap of garbage atop my canister, with the stench of muck from a sink jammed full of crusty dishes, fungus blotches crawling up over the pot rims and breathing onto the counter surface. On the carpet amid the grime and beneath the sorrow dwelled the shriveled corpses of Febreeze, of Downy, of Airwick, faithful comrades whose powers had withered and died leaving no valedictory scent in my plea. And there, like an altar in the middle of a swamp, the bed upon which I lay chained was most putrid, the puss-filled palm of the devil’s embrace. On it I’d shed my soul and my excess countless times. Wet stains over dry stains over sludge had seeped through my bed sheets, and my bed covers had long since been strewn to the carpet below. But that dismal carpet was demon territory, where the demons itched to scurry and swarm and devour my flesh, eager to purge my essence from the mire. As such, my bed remained an island of refuge, so I dared not roll off its edge. Or rather, I was helpless to roll off its edge. Understand, the pressure of my shackles granted me no room to budge.
And then it returned, that demon chant which pierced the bitter stillness. Ticking noises, sharp, high-pitched, and quick, like the chirps of nail clippers clipping nail tips. It felt inappropriate because within these sounds was no emotion and I found it strange that such feral beasts of blood and fur and hate could sound so metallic, so callous; but propriety seemed the last thing on their minds, agony seemed the first. They called for me. Their ticking sounds lifted in a chorus of echoes from every corner, not in a swell but in splashes, and between each splash of ticks were pauses, inexplicable gaps of quiet. Here I must confess: I do not know what I found to be more terrifying, the actual sounds, or the soundless moments between the sounds. Yes, the ticking noises reinforced the presence of the demons as they sat crouched under my piles of laundry, behind my dusty stacks of books, beneath my wobbling bed. But the pauses, the silences connecting the ticks were unsynchronized; they clashed with the eighth-note rests of my heartbeat and they abandoned any idea of rhythm. So very unsettling were these silences, so ungodly, unbearable! It seemed as though the demons had infiltrated my thoughts and planted their sounds into my lapses. Chirping only when I least expected and succeeding to drive me mad. Sometimes I would hum in the still moments and create my own noise to block my ears from the eeriness of anticipation, but this often proved futile.
I was, of course, alone. My roommate had been gone for days to the west side of campus, sleeping, eating, and lounging in his lover’s quarters—a three-bedroom suite with plate glass windows facing the clouds. Soon after I’d made my fateful discovery I’d called him by phone. At that point things were not so dire, not even a shadow of the grimness that followed. At that point I could still move.
He’d answered his phone on the third ring. I remember hearing the ruckus of music and the shrieks of laughter through the earpiece, spilling from his background into the quiet of my own.
“Yo,” I said to him. “I just found a mouse in the cupboard under the sink.”
He’d responded with suitable worry, suitable guilt, and he’d volunteered his assistance in resolving the mater. But I declined his offer.
“It’s no big deal,” I told him. “I got this.”
I often said stupid things when I was anxious or nervous. I often said stupid things when I was tired or cheerful, or even calm. I often said stupid things, and I often retrospectively lamented the stupid things I said. That time was no different. Later, as I lay there in chains, I rebuked myself for allowing yet another collection of stupid words to escape my tongue. For my predicament had quickly multiplied beyond the numbers of any horror I imagined back when I first made the assertion. “I got this.” A pitiful fool I was. I’d gotten nothing. How could I? I stood no chance. But “this,” on the other hand, this dark, this madness, this misery had indisputably gotten me.
Now, you are likely wondering if sleep would have provided me asylum given that mobility had fled my bones and weariness engulfed me. Perhaps sleep would have at least alleviated the drag of fatigue? Such a query is a logical but exceedingly ignorant one and it merely refreshes my hell. Let me assure you, there was no solace in sleep then, none whatsoever. For nightmares sprang thick in sleep, nightmares sprang thick in dreams. Dreaming served only to augment my fear and I would ask that you place yourself in my position to behold the vision that occurred once I fell victim to these dreams: Myself alone under a black sky dripping with tar, barefoot upon an expanse of simmering mud, cowering before a rodent god whose name I now know but vow to never utter. Skin like an oily rug, eyes like black marble pellets of an endless gloom; simply recalling those wicked splays of whiskers plunges me into a whirl of nausea. I cannot give a precise report on stature, but taller than my standing height seems a reasonable approximation. The trouble was that my knees had buckled under the repugnance seeping into my pores so I could not make an accurate measurement. However, I remember that shapeless bulk of mass with all four paws suspended above ground, paws that squirmed in the air, independent of one another as though blindly groping for my throat. I wouldn’t have known which set were feet and which were fingers had those eyes and that snout not oriented me. Wriggling was my prediction for method of locomotion, wriggling like a giant grub through the sludge, but there was rarely any movement. What loomed over me was only a stationary blob, swaying on occasion after making a dreadful squawking noise.
I wondered if such a creature could be responsible for the abundance of mice that dwelled in my apartment. Perhaps spawnlings of some kind? Tearing out of that bloated belly? I could not know, but I felt the relationship between phenomena. Additionally I sensed that these dreams were meant to be moments of reckoning, as if I had been dropped upon this ground at the whim of a depraved puppeteer and was given a chance in the realm of the abstract to rectify my real misfortunes. But even amid the surreal I did nothing but quiver and quake. Please, do not scoff, remember yourself in my position. Imagine my helplessness at the mercy of a rodent god who oppressed my lungs with the stench of its acrid drool and cackled with a frightful menace. Worse yet, imagine kneeling upon a land of no horizon, of no dawn, of no heaven and no hell, no twilight, no guide, only shadow. It was more than I could stand to see, more than I could bear, and from those haunted dreams I was almost grateful to be jerked awake by the recurrence of the ticking noises. For when I flickered my eyelids open and felt my rapid breath, that cackling ball of mirth faded into the recesses of my subconscious. However I must divulge that upon waking, my lips would make a brief sputtering sound, much different than any sound I’d ever known. I felt for a moment that my body had become a shell for a ghost; one that would enter when I slept, flee when I woke, and leave a parting curse as we brushed minds. Nevertheless, each time I escaped sleep my eyes were spared the nightmare, though in wakefulness, my ears became the pathway of terror. Tick…tick…..tick tick.
Now again I must reveal another dilemma: I cannot gauge whether my dreams were truly worse than my reality. At first I believed so. This is because a most chilling aspect of dreaming is the void, the corridors of nothingness that envelope yourself and the target of your interactions. Dreams are fragments, their infrastructures, elusive. In dreams there is little to anchor the mind and so reality stands more stable, more concrete, with an entire world to latch onto. This is what gave me comfort as I lay there chained, steadying my gasps, tasting my sweat, content with my choice to face my waking demons. But as more time slipped away I felt my hollow soul begin to rustle with despair, because I came to understand that even in waking I remained in a void. Even in waking I was losing my grasp of the concrete infrastructure that connected the world around me. Yes, I knew that on the other side of my walls beamed the fullness of the sun enchanting the city with the kiss of its rays. I was aware that open-hearted souls drifted blissfully under the blue skies and I knew of the green places where life danced into bloom. But within my enclosure I was there lost in the aura of my demons, and so that world, those distant images, those vague horizons began to fade, and they each took with them their reassurance. After all, they were only memories to me. Of what use were memories when life is what I sought? Of what use were memories when I was trapped? Without the ability to go forth and soak in that sky or blend with those souls, trembling in my pit I felt as if I was on an elusive singular plane of my own. Only my demons were real, and there was no salvation in memory. No dawn.
In gutters unnoticed by humanity above a deadly war rages between mouse and man and somehow I’d become ensnared by it. The world had been spinning as it has always been known to do but I had lost my footing and tumbled off into a fringe. I’d fallen and I’d found myself isolated by those hungry demons, so I might as well have been living in a nightmare. Tick..tick-tick……tick….tick........TICK! Time was running out, the mice were clamoring about. My war was coming to a close, whether withdrawn or withheld I was neutralized in final acknowledgment of my doom and I prepared myself to surrender. After sampling both dream and reality for a time, I made my ultimate decision. I opted to be consumed by the dream. I melted away into a heavy slumber, and when the dream came, I mustered the strength to make my move without hesitation. Using my fingers I gouged my eyes so that the hideous visions would become nothing more than another eternal memory in my album of mush. I stepped forward in the dreamscape and felt the mud swallow up near my ankles. The wind caressed my outstretched arms and I absorbed the calm and chaos of this new world which I have dared to call home.
So now here I stand, unbound, unbroken, and unchained, free and full in this unfathomable domain. I stand blind before you and together we bask in the goo of this simpler void while I breathe easy, firm in the knowledge that turning back may be impossible. Here we wait. You’ve spoken your name to me, I’ve spoken mine, and it is clear we are both quite lost. So now here I humbly ask, you wretched rodent god, can we drift together? Can we share a dream? Will you love me if I fade with you into this sky of blackest tar?