Short Story Saturday

Part Two of the story started yesterday.

“I'm so tired of this, Rick. When are you going to get a job? All you do is sit around, watch tv, play games. Is this one of your new 'let's mess with Em' games? Because I'm sick of those too. You need to grow up.”

He stared down at the scuffed brown boots he wore. “I mowed the lawn yesterday.” 

“You have a degree. You have student loans to pay. You can't run from those forever.”

“I was thinking I should go apply for grad school.”

“I was thinking we still have a position open in marketing at Brown Webster,” she countered.

Brown Webster was the company she worked for. He imagined going to work with her everyday, and tried not to imagine choking her one day as they drove down the carpool lane.

“Em, I don't think--”

“Of course you don't think!” she pushed past him. “I have to go to work. I'm going to be late now because of you and your games.”

She covered her face with her hands and for a moment he panicked. She was going to cry and was going to be the bad guy after all. But when she lowered her hands her eyes were sad but dry.

“When I come home tonight, I don't want you to be here.”

Rick nodded slowly. “Yeah. I guess that would be best.” He shuffled his feet. Even though he wanted this it still felt awful. It would have been better if she had screamed and thrown something.

She grabbed an empty laundry basket. He watched her sadly and realized that maybe he didn't want to all of it to be over. He still loved her and knew that pretty much all the misery of the past 6 months had been his fault.

“You're in my way.” She was standing with the basket propped on her slim hip. He was blocking her way back to the stairs.

“Oh. Yeah.” He stepped aside. “Em.” She stopped. “I'll go. I won't be here when you get back. But do you think...?”

“Rick, I can't do this. It feels like I'm dealing with a twelve-year-old sometimes. I love you, I really do, but I can't carry you anymore.”

He nodded again. Looked down at the floor. She didn't move. Maybe she was waiting for his reply. He looked down at her small feet. She was still wearing her fuzzy green house slippers. Her shadow slanted away from her and he saw his own shadow pointing towards her. Only that wasn't right. The light was to their left. He glanced to his right and there was his shadow laying sadly on the concrete. He looked back at the shadow pointed at Em and realized it wasn't attached to anything, it was just a black smudge on the floor like a discarded rag. Then it wiggled.

“Em?'

“I have to go to work.”

“Em. Emily!”

“What!?” she snapped,whirling around--

--and the shadow leaped into the air, and as it flew it expanded and unfurled like two giants wings sweeping towards her.  She had no time to react. He tried to reach her-his arm went up, one foot lifted to take a step; and the shadow was on her, wrapping around her small body like a soft black robe. Without a sound she disappeared.

The shadow crumpled, empty, to the floor in a puddle that spread like an oil stain. It expanded in a perfect circle, thinning until a circle of gray concrete appeared and grew larger as the ring of shadow grew thinner and rushed to the edges of the room. Then it was gone.

Rick stood alone in the basement. The light bulb dangling from the ceiling pushed the shadows into the corners. He stared around him, at the laundry basket lying discarded on the floor; at the washer and dry and his bike. It was all still and silent as if the shadow had swallowed all the air in the room.

His vision blurred. “Em?” The word fell softly as a he watched a shadow slide across the floor towards him.

Rick

Another Flash Fiction Friday.  This is actually the beginning of a longer story I'm working on.  Enjoy.

They stood together in the basement. The light bulb dangling from the ceiling pushed the shadows to the corners, but Rick still felt uneasy.

“You are ridiculous,” Em said. “Seriously, how old are you? Monsters in the basement?”

“I never said monsters,” Rick replied. He glanced around the room again, at the washer and dryer and the plastic table they used to fold laundry on before dragging it back upstairs. His bike was in one corner, banished to the basement until spring. In another corner stood a stack of plastic totes filled with Christmas and Halloween decorations. “I just said I'm kind of weirded out.”

She waved her small hands around the room. “Nothing here. Maybe if you got a job and left the house once in a while you would have better things to do than make up stories about the Boogeyman Man in my basement.”

Her basement. She never let him forget that it was her basement, her house, her job that paid the bills. A year ago they had been soul mates, but that was before he was fired from his assistant manager position at Cheddars. Before she realized that he was a 17 year old in a 30 year old's body and there was nothing she could do to make him behave otherwise. Before he realized that if she couldn't change him with subtle hints she would belittle and insult him in every way possible. His friends went from “artsy” and “interesting” to “lazy” and “useless”. His tattoos were no longer “intriguing”, but “stupid”. His beard went from “sexy” to “Why don't you shave that thing off? No one wants to hire a guy who looks like he's homeless.” At this point he stayed because he never wanted to be the bad guy in a break up.  It was also easier than finding another place to live. He didn't know why she let him stay.

“Let's just go back upstairs,” he said.

“No,” she said, flipping her dark hair over her shoulder. He used to love that hair. It was black and shiny and smelled like lavender. “Where's the monster Rick?”

“I never said there was a monster,” he repeated.

He never did say there was a monster, but the basement had been really creeping him out the past few days. There were noises, like whispers from far away, and shadows in places where shadows shouldn't be. And just this morning he had seen one of those shadows move.

Of course he shouldn't have told Em about it. She had immediately rushed downstairs just to prove him wrong.

Questions

Hey! 


Now some random questions.


Q. Do you ever doubt the existence of people other than yourself?
A. Weird as that question may be, the answer is yes.  Yes I do.  How do I know that people exist when I'm not around, hmm?  Just because you say you do, I'm supposed to take your word for it?


Q.  If you try to fail, but succeed, what did you do?
A. Failceed.


Q. If a baby's leg pops out at 11:59PM but his head doesn't come out until 12:01, which day was he born on?
A.  Ummm... I think you have more important things to worry about if *a* leg comes out before the head.


Q. What's the difference between normal ketchup and fancy ketchup?
A. You squeeze fancy ketchup with your pinky sticking up.  Also it's fancy "catsup".


Q. Why do we sing "Rock a bye baby" to lull a baby to sleep when the song is about putting your baby in a tree and letting the wind crash the cradle on the ground?
A. Because they need to learn a lesson about what happens if they DON'T shut up and go to sleep.


Q. Does a 'Marks-A-Lot' marker, mark any more than a regular marker?
A. I don't know, but you can get a lot higher on the fumes from a Marks-A-Lot.

Pets

I have 3 cats. Tom and Jerry, who are brothers I have had since they were kittens, and Sunny, who showed up on my porch one day last August half starved but extremely friendly.

Jerry does what he's going to do and the others just go along for the ride. Jerry is the most stubborn of the three, but he's still my favorite. He's the type of cat who would be in the ruling class if only cats had thumbs. To keep him in his place, I like to rub his tummy and sing "I got that Jerry tummy" to the tune of "Moves Like Jagger." He doesn't get as much joy from that as I do.

Tom is the kind of cat who figures if he can't see you, you can't see him. If you pick him up he just goes limp, so you can flop him around, if you were so inclined.

Sunny is the kind of cat that people who are allergic to cats hate. If you walk into my house, he will be there to greet you like a good host, and the second you sit down he will be in your lap.

A few nights ago, I heard the cats ripping into something.  I was in bed and debated whether to check it out.  I thought they had gotten into the utility closet (where both the litter box and food are kept, which is why the door is always open) and were tearing into the bag of cat food.  Finally, to save myself the effort of cleaning up cat food the next morning, I dragged myself out of bed to slap some sense into them. (No animals were physically harmed during the writing of this post, though I probably hurt their feelings when I cussed them out.)
I get into the kitchen and what do I find?  Jerry had jumped onto THE TOP of the refrigerator and pulled down the bag of cat nip kept there.  He had chewed a good sized hole in the bag and scattered nip all over the floor as the other two cats rolled around in ecstacy, little green flakes coating their fur.
I took the cat nip and put it in the laundry closet and went back to bed.  Two minutes later I hear the sound of a small package hitting the floor and realized that there were still two bags of cat treats on top of the fridge.   I get back to the kitchen and Jerry is standing there with a bag of Whiskas Temptations in his mouth while Tom and Sunny loitered around waiting for him to give them their treats.

I blame my mother.  She had visited the week before and was always giving the cats treats.  I'm a mean cat mommy and only give them treats once a week.  I figure they got used to daily snacks and decided that if I wasn't going to give them anything, they would get it themselves.

Out of Context Science

Just wanted to point out one of my favorite non-Blogger sites, Out of Context Science.  This Tumblr site is devoted to excerpts from reputable journals of science taken completely out of context that leave you scratching your head.

I'm not a scientist-nor do I play one on tv-but I can generally get an idea of what the original article is about just by the excerpt, but some of them leave me doing that head tilt thing that dogs do when they hear a high pitched noise:

Here are a few examples:

"it is optimal that she be exposed to the number of planets between five and eight days later"

Algorithmic Education (including the Mathematics of Cramming) 

"to our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage"

Pork, the surprise remedy for a nosebleed "The wrinkly balls did not yield all of their mysteries." Scrunch time: The peculiar physics of crumpled paper      



So if you have an interest in science and ridiculous sounding excerpts, visit Out of Context Science.

*Image courtesy of Puppy Toob.