LOOK AT THIS THING I'M WRITING

Metzger Meister · July 2009

I submit to you a story I'm writin'. It's the first thing I've tried to write that is meant to be of any substantial length, so I'm expecting it to be eviscerated.

June 12, 2011
1:16 AM… can’t sleep. Nightmares… bad enough to have them when you sleep, but waking up in one every day gets really fucking old. Flipped through some earlier journals. Hard to believe I was ever that optimistic… but then, it’s difficult to imagine any other life than the one I got right now. The old world seems so far away… it’s like looking at something through a thick fog. You can see it, make out what it’s shaped like, but when you try to see detail or minutia everything is just gray and fuzzy.
The dream’s the same every night. I’m in my old house, back in Iron Mountain, looking out the window. All I see is this flat plane, going on right to the edge of my vision, scorched and black, barren of life. The clouds that blanket the sky are a filthy brown, like water in a pothole, with that sickly chemical rainbow of scum floating on top of it. Everything about what I see feels… wrong, somehow. Like the façade of a haunted house; just past the cotton-wool cobwebs and plaster poltergeists, there’s nothing but bored employees and aging clockwork.
A crack, like dry wood splintering, rips through the sepulchral silence, and halfway between me and the horizon the earth splits open, a yawning mouth full of broken teeth and diseased, brown gums. A wall slowly rises from the gash, an open infected wound spilling pus. I look close and see, finally, that the wall is a huge slab of rotting, grotesque flesh, bones and teeth and clumps of hair a patchwork of horror covering the tumoral barrier. And I know that it can feel me looking at it, and I also know that it doesn’t like it, and I know that if it decides that I’m a nuisance, and takes action to remove the nuisance, that it’s over for me.

Colby jolted awake, a silent gasp filling his lungs. His eyes shot open, swiveling around his darkened bedroom blindly, primal panic filling him completely for a moment as his hand groped manically for the drawstring of his lamp. Clammy fingers found the thin metal chain and yanked on it, bathing the room in the neutral yellow glow of a forty-watt bulb. He lay back on his bed, stomach heaving with each gasping breath, eyes closed. The adrenaline coursing through his body causing him to shake uncontrollably until he finally sat up and put his feet on the floor, toes flexing in the carpet.
“God…” Exasperated with himself and his subconscious, Colby checked the clock. 4:15… might as well not bother going back to bed. Only 45 minutes until his alarm would have woken him up anyway. He shambled sleepily to the bathroom, his old black lab Remmy lifting her head from her paws, the old white-muzzled dog woken from restful sleep by her noisy owner.
He looked himself over in the mirror, as he did every day, brushing auburn hair from his forehead, fingers moving over a beard he’d let grow too thick before his eyes met their own reflection. He noted their color, an gray-green, like the ocean on a stormy day, that he had been told was unusual, as they flickered up and down a face that he’d been told was handsome. He didn’t see it; his head was too square, his nose too crooked from multiple breaks, his jaw too strong, turning his face into a dour grimace when he was upset. Not like the men preferred these days, the kind who got manicures and had never worked a job that didn’t require a tie as part of the dress code.
Colby had never had what most people would call a “respectable” job… he’d bounced around a lot since he left high school at the age of sixteen. Chump jobs like flipping burgers at McDonalds, bagging groceries, washing cars or painting houses in the summer. Then he’d gotten a call from his uncle two years ago, on his 18th birthday. Uncle Bill had said to him, “Come work for me, kid. I need another driver, and I’m the only family you got left.” So Colby had packed his bags and left sunny California for Iron Mountain, Wyoming.
He walked to the kitchen barefoot, hitching up his flannel pajama pants as Remmy pushed herself to her feet, trotting up beside him. Colby’s hand dropped down automatically to rub behind the old lab’s ears as his bare feet slapped the linoleum tile in his kitchen, groggy steps carrying him towards the coffee machine. A few minutes later, he was sitting at the kitchen table, the overhead light on until the sun came up, the local paper unfolded in front of him.
More unexplained and unusually violent attacks on the homeless in Denver, and just the same as the previous cases, the victims appeared to have been partially cannibalized. The police were baffled by the attacks. One of the homeless victims had been carrying a rather large sum of money, presumably from a day of successful panhandling, when he was attacked, but the small satchel containing the cash (nearly five hundred dollars in small bills and change) had been left untouched. No leads.
Big-city problems seemed so far away to him now… Iron Mountain was a town of less than 20,000 people, tiny by most people’s standards. Violence seemed almost a part of every-day life in California. Every week or so you’d hear about gang shootings over turf disputes, or drugs, or a robbery gone wrong that ended in some poor cashier taking a hot lead slug to the lung. In the two years he’d lived in Iron Mountain, there had been one murder, some woman walking in on her husband with her best friend. So he’d heard anyway.
The attacks in Denver felt different than the typical big-city lunacy, at least to Colby. Vagrants and bums ended up murdered a lot, but he wasn’t sure if cannibalism was a common factor in any murder, especially considering the extent to which the victims had been mutilated, as if a wild animal or a pack of dogs had been at them. Chunks of flesh ripped right from the body by fingers and teeth, rather than cut off.
Colby pushed any thought of the attacks from his mind, as he got ready for work. Thick, sturdy Dickie’s work pants, a plain white work shirt with his name embroidered onto the pocket, which also sported a small iron-on patch with the tow-yard’s logo on it, a yellow diamond with big red S in the center. “Super Tows; saving the day for over thirty years!”
He locked up behind him, his aging pooch asleep on the floor in the sun that streamed in through the big windows that faced his back yard, as he walked out to his tow-truck. One of the smaller in the “fleet”, as they called it, much less impressive than the 20-foot flatbed dubbed “Big Daddy.” Colby settled into the driver’s seat, sunglasses slipped on to guard against the glare of the morning sun, and started the white wrecker up, feeling the satisfying rumble of a powerful diesel engine shake the cab like some ancient beast waking from a centuries-long slumber.
The local country station was playing some disgusting new song by one of the countless, completely identical teenage female singers that had recently invaded the genre, and Colby’s hand struck out at the radio with a smiting vengeance, poking the second pre-set button with a righteously extended index finger. The wailing guitars and high vocals of Led Zeppelin greeted him with the switch, and was immediately relieved at the sudden switch. The Zep always reminded him of his father. They’d been his favorite band when he was still alive, and Colby couldn’t count the times they’d sat in some hidden cove in a nearby lake, or a sunny clearing in the woods, listening to an old cassette in an even older boom-box as they waited to begin a day of fishing or hunting.
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Also this thread can be about writing in general.