Tag: unfinished

  • Dead Letter Office [fragment]

    I started this a while back for Jolene Rice’s story prompts and never got around to finishing it. This particular list included: a key that nobody else has, a bumper sticker offers excellent advice, a slow poke, and an oddities collector.

    This time, I was going to eschew my normal fantasy/noir/horror inclinations and lean fairly straight, non-genre storytelling. I do that on occasion. When I do, chances are there are still hints of some kinds of odd in the tale, but the world’s chocked full of odd kinds of tales.

    Anyway, it seemed a shame to let a not-terrible beginning to a story molder in a draft folder, so I decided to share it in the story’s unfinished state.

    All apologies offered in advance.

    Bonus points if you can figure out the inspiration which informs the tone of the planned story.

      There was a traffic jam on the kudzu-lined gravel road leading into Gideon. There were already at least three cars lined up behind whatever was obstructing the road around the canopy of vines hanging down from telephone wires and what-all the greenery could find for support to cling to.

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    1. Strife | a fragment

      Photo by Marjoline Delahaye on Unsplash

      The following is a lightly-edited fragment of a what was intended to be a longer bit of fiction I wrote in January 2015. I found it while looking for old files on a portable HDD to see how hard it would be to recreate “Rust” from my post yesterday. No dice… yet, anyway. I may be looking for the wrong filename and it could be under another name entirely. The song I referred to as “Myrrh” (which is only one of many “Myrrh”-titled songs I’ve worked on) is actually fully intact and on my modern DAW, so I might have to share that (with vocals!) once I decide what those lyrics should be. But, on with the story… I’ll say a bit more about this piece after the fragment.

      Strife

      The smell of excrement, rot and chemicals rose from the waters as the barge Vivienne and Llewellyn were riding floated across the River Strife to the slaughter yards south of the river. The copper smell of fresh blood drifted over the other smells and Llewellyn had to choke back a the bile that threatened to add to the miasma of roiling in the dark twilight waters below.

      “Good gods, how does anyone deal with this stench on a daily basis?” he asked no one in particular, and didn’t expect to get a response. He covered his face with a handkerchief.

      (more…)