Month: December 2014

Friday Freewrite

By / December 9, 2016 / Creativity, Fiction, Writing
2 Comments
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What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

I have the most curious desire1 to forsake everything I know, a job, a house, nice things, to travel the world, to write, to see things most people only dream of seeing.

I want to be free, free to write, to see things, to be what I was made to be. I hate being stuck in a 9-6 job, sitting by the window, watching the ocean from the 11th floor, people scurrying about like ants, boats coasting along the water like children’s toys in a bath tub2.

I hate not being a part of it. Life is so much more. There’s a whole world out there, and every day, from 9 to 6, I’m missing it.

I want to sail to Africa, backpack through the middle east. I want to get on a rocket that won’t ever stop until it’s touched the furthest star.

Freewriting. Loosening the pen and the mind, when I get stuck and don’t know—3

Blue, rough fibers4, streaked in blue and green, a foreign pattern. The woman flopped it about her, swatting away at flies by a dusty old well that hadn’t provided for decades. Ancient symbols festooned the marble band that wound around the rim, their meaning lost along with the water.

The woman looked up at the sky, shielding her eyes from their oldest nemesis, that big flaming ball of fire in the sky that roasted and scorched and killed with indifference.

Footnotes

1. I’ve had this desire for a long time. Maybe someday it will come true…

2. Should be bathtub.

3. If I’m freewriting and I have no idea what to write about, I sometimes write that. You’d be surprised how often I stumble onto a new topic simply by keeping the pen moving, even if the pen doesn’t produce anything interesting for a while.

4. After freewriting on one topic, I abruptly switched to another, this time a random visual that popped into my head while I was complaining that I didn’t know what to write about. I remember where I was when I wrote this. I was sitting down at the Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble in Long Beach. I was hosting a meetup group, and was waiting for the one person who had RSVPed to arrive. It’s amazing how much you can recall when a specific memory is attached to a strong sensory perception, even if it’s one that’s imagined.

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.

A Case of Mistaken Identity, Part 10

By / December 9, 2016 / Fantasy, Fiction, Magic, Short Stories, Writing
6 Comments
Image licensed by Shutterstock.

You can read part 9 here. Reading for the first time? You can find part 1 here.

I rushed headfirst into the closet. It wasn’t until I brushed past hanging coats and pants and nearly bumped my head against the wall that I realized the doorway to the other world had already closed.

I felt as if all the wind had been knocked out of me. I slumped against the wall, closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands.

I’d been so close.

Tears squeezed out of my eyes unbidden, and I was overcome with despair. I would never get home now, I thought. I was stuck in a hateful world with a hateful mom and a hateful brother. I would never see my real mom again, and my double would continue to enjoy the life he’d stolen from me justice-free.

“Mom.”

I stopped crying. I looked up and cocked my head so I could hear better.

“Mom.”

I heard it again. I knew that voice. It was quiet and filled with pain. Tom.

Despair vanished, replaced with the raw instinct to survive. I scrambled off the floor and ran from the closet. I paused in the doorway, looked for signs that Tom had seen me, then jogged silently toward the stairs.

I heard him call again for his mom. Each time his voice grew softer, farther. I moved down the steps as fast as I could manage without making sound.

I halted when I reached the bottom. Once again, like the first day I’d come to this place, vertigo and a sense of otherworldliness swept over me as I took in the living room before me, all at once familiar and strange.

Then Tom called again from upstairs, and the spell was broken. I dashed for the front door. I panicked when at first it didn’t open, and it took me a moment before I realized I had to undo the lock. I ran outside, sailed across the concrete path and darted off along the sidewalk, into the moonlit night.

I ran. I ran some more. I didn’t stop. I looked around at the houses in my neighborhood. Mirror-Eugene’s neighborhood. The houses were similar but different. The street was more rundown than my own, as if it had suffered years of neglect. It reminded me of some of the more destitute communities in my own world, which I sometimes saw pictures of on TV.

I ran until brief pinpricks in my right side blossomed into sharp stabbing pains. I slowed, and only when I stopped did I realize my breathing had grown ragged and that I could barely stand. Adrenaline had abandoned me, leaving me weak and disoriented.

I gazed about, lost. At some point I’d wandered away from the area I recognized, even more dilapidated than where I’d started. Large concrete structures loomed overhead, stained and chipped with age. Many were surrounded by chain link fences, some of which were topped with barbed wire. Plumes of smoke rose into the air, illuminated by the moon and artificial lighting so that they seemed like spirits rising into heaven.

I would have been scared had I not been so exhausted. I leaned against a decrepit wall and closed my eyes.

I thought I’d only take a minute to rest and catch my breath.  But when I opened my eyes again, the sun was up, I was on the ground and I wasn’t alone.

Continued next week…

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.