dead girl writing

N A N O W R I M O 2019 - CLEAVECROSS

GENRE: dark fantasy WORD COUNT GOAL: 80k click here to read more in the tag. 

this is a story about a city. this is a revenge story. this is a horror story. this is a love story, post-mortem.  none of these qualities make it marsden’s story, however. he is just an endparlor owner (inherited, of course - he would never buy property here willingly) trying to get by with a little bit of fraud. he doesn’t even want to be back home in faldira, where the city is rotting on top of its own previous corpse.

this is not home. and if it is his home, just because he grew up here, then that doesn’t mean it’s safe. very soon, however, nowhere will be safe. a sundering does not discriminate between those who call faldira home and those who merely live there.

the faldiran saying goes that, in the end, you are bound to die alone, and only the reaper who comes to collect knows whether you were worth anything to anyone. with how things are going, he can’t help but think that collection is coming sooner than he might think.

     But so too do many stories start when filled with wayward teenagers and boring little towns surrounded by nothing, stuck dead center in the middle of nowhere.  Young things struck with boredom feel dangerously susceptible to darker events.  Adrenaline comes and goes.  Goes, mostly.  Leaving just about any teenager hungry to chase that rush over and over again.  But what makes this a distinction from other tales you may have read, other stories with feral children and the emptiness within with they live, is a single word.

     Accidental.  

     For when two children climbed into a rusted out, smoke spewing car within their home so fondly nicknamed Nowheretown, Arizona, they did not intend to end a life.  There was a hunger for excitement, but not brutality in their hearts at the creeping hour of midnight.  Or was it one am?  Or earlier even than that, simply somewhere within the twilight hours?

     Ah, well.  It doesn’t matter, does it?

I N T R O D U C I N G: THE HOUSE THAT HOLDS. after this point lies a ever-shifting curation. when something grows comfortable, it becomes honest. this is the law. ( psd by @inspurations )

GENRE: postmodern cosmic horror POV: first person THEMES: love. want. possession. taking. holding. the single law. CONTENT WARNING: body horror, death, one massive liminal space and all that entails.

Before me sits the House, that impossible mass of grey and black, its many windows peering back. Each one is the color of pitch, some black gem that absorbs all and reveals nothing. I have been waiting here for two days on this place I can only describe as a kind of macabre porch, a slab of desolate white rock that stretches out from the door. That door, too — that wretched thing, taunting me with its lack of locks, with the light that creeps underneath it, promising whatever lies on the other side is bright. Light itself bends around it. It is a half-foot taller than me. Sometimes it looks solid. Sometimes it looks like liquid. I have stood in front of it several times during my lonely vigil here, and each time a quality shifts.

The legends say that the House changes on its whims. They say that it is alive, that it feels and thinks but not as we do. In the same way its physical landscape is unknowable to us, so too is its mind. Warroes wrote of it first in his seminal Treatise On Outer Spaces, which I have read many times in preparation for this very expedition. He never ventured into the House, of course. He was, however, lucky enough to be a mere thirty-five years old when the House opened during his lifetime, and so he was there on this same doorstep that I sit when it opened.

“You may expect that it would be a great pit,” he wrote, “fitting of a devourer of things. You may expect the reek of acid rising in its guts, its front hall an esophagus and its doorway a mouth. Yet what I saw was nothing so traditionally grotesque. Indeed, this construction, which I have called the House that Holds, so named because it neither chews nor digests but seems to merely possess, is resplendent with light. The glimpse I saw of its interior reflected the infernal angles of the exterior. It is said that the House once stole a sun for itself. I thought that it might keep the sun in its heart or its stomach, in the same way we keep boilers and steam huffing away in our ships to battle the cold. But perhaps it keeps that captive star there in its front hall like a burning trophy. What further testament to the power of its captivity does it need than to tame the wildest beacon we know, mere steps from its threshold?”

Perhaps he was right. I have long been skeptical of Warroes, as some of his later expeditions were proven to be false. All of those, however, are after the House. I wonder if what he saw here changed him somehow - that it made everything else less of an aspiration, or the wondrous terror he felt settled so deep in his bones that he could no longer allow himself to leave the lights of home.

I know I have felt afraid here, in a way that is new even to me.

LAMBSTOWN CHARACTERS, zion aldridge.

it’s an every-meal sort of thing.  that is to say, there’s only two and a half restaurants in town; two that are always accessible to underage and one that turns adults only when the sun goes down.  thus, two and a half.  a diner joint, a half fancy place that uses low lighting and the smell of spicy candles to make everything just a shade more fitting, and the bar-not-bar.  sliding in and out of each of them is easy as pie for billie, but the diner gets her attention more than anyone else.  not a matter of price.  it’s a matter of waitstaff.  

where else can she find someone like zion on such raw display?  the mask that he wears is profound beyond anything, simplistically shaped to entertain the masses of their nowhere and nothing town who in return, barely tolerate the kid.  watching the evolution – what zion can’t hide with a fake bubbly personality and bright smile – with wide and wary eyes.  it’s chaos to them.  but it’s art to billie.  

when zion still went to school, alone for so long in every classroom, there was an aura of falsehood in the kid’s existence.  well cultured but grating beneath any attention, every passing day.  back then, zion still had hair.  loose and brittle from a lack of care falling down past shoulders and the swell underneath the front of loose shirts.  

back then, zion was a she with no question or hesitation in anyone’s minds.  there she goes wearing a name that doesn’t suit her, there she is staring at nothing again.  look at her, picking up garter snakes from the desert ground and carrying them as living knots around her fingers until the teachers make her release them into the sand again.  

now a lot of them aren’t sure.  things changed quickly for zion after graduation, as dismissive and dismal of a thing as it was.  first a head was stripped of hair and kept that way, bare, reflecting the sunlight.  then the ink appeared.  not cheap and poorly done; instead an elegant brutalist sort of pattern that made no sense to anyone.  poor taste, they called it.  that’s the thing killing zion’s poor mother, frail thing that she is.  

every job offer came out of pity.  almost every person clucked in distaste as zion lashed down her, their, his chest until every shirt hung even looser on that body.  what would happen, billie wondered, when sickness finally took zion’s mother away?  would all those jobs be suddenly filled?  the barely there kindness, would that dry up too?  towns like these weren’t made for odd silhouettes wearing snakes like bracelets and haunted, gaunt expressions when no one is supposed to be looking.

she knows it’s not a question of anything but how long.  and just who zion will be when the world collapses around him.  

               **𝕙𝕚𝕪𝕒   ,,   𝕚 𝕙𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕥 𝕨𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕟 𝕚𝕟 𝕞𝕠𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕤

if we interacted when i was active on here, please like/reblog this post so i can follow u    ( i went thru a stage & unfollowed all of u & i’m sorry but f me w a chainsaw ) 

if u dont know me and u find this all u need to know is im back in this community to look at all ur wips :o  the general me info is still in my bio and my about 

CLEAVECROSS SUPPORTING CAST ( 1 / ??? ) 

an endparlor owner from another land. 

someone trying to keep dogside in their grip until it kills them. 

a pickpocket who sometimes steals from the easiest prey there is.

the silent version of a wicked night | the introduction.

— T H E  B E G I N N I N G .

LIVING IN A SMALL TOWN in the middle of nowhere had never been synonymous to the word ‘exciting’.

in warlington, a place where 2,901 people lived, there was a school, a grocery store, a church, a park, and a movie theatre that released films three months after their world premieres. truths got twisted, news traveled fast, and half the population knew exactly what someone had done during a night out way before the person could make it to their home and explain themselves to their parents. there wasn’t anything interesting to do in the afternoon and, without a doubt, that didn’t change at night.

to the residents, life went by in the way they wanted, but to foreign people, however, life seemed to have stopped a long time ago.

when alexis and oliver campbell arrived in town with their parents, they were eighteen and their life was just getting started, but warlington wanted to be the end of it.

— T H E  D E T A I L S .

genre(s): mystery, crime.

point of view: third person, past tense.

status: in progress.

main themes: unsolved crimes, secrets, lies, friendship, family.

— T H E  C H A R A C T E R S .

alexis campbell.

oliver campbell.

noelle sawyer.

adrian barnsley.

lucas “luke” hartley.

SLOOM, 25k celebration excerpt.

     From the depths she pulls one test tube, one envelope.  Cradling them in the heat of her palm as she closes the freezer lid and, with rapid steps, heads back to the house away from the great cool emptiness of the seed vault’s guts.     Outside Oliver waits for her in the entrance, right beneath the house’s doorway.  She bites back the urge to hesitate — the great instinct that he wouldn’t have waited for her when freedom without communication awaited him only some yards away.     They’ve done well so far, not discussing it.  Ramona can imagine that he wouldn’t want to see her inevitably break that peace with the anxious ricochet in her mind.     “Here.”  Their boots nearly scrape together.  Her hand barely extended out, the final containers offered to him open palmed and barely trembling.     Oliver’s shoulders fall.  A softness there, in the looseness of his jaw as his callused fingers take both vessels from her.  A residue of contact lingers on her palm when he pulls away.  With slowness he overturns them both in his hands, from the writing on each label to the non existent weight they bear.     “Is this Hebrew?”  He asks her, holding the envelope up.     “Yeah.  Beautiful, but it took awhile for me to translate it.”     “You didn’t write it down.”     “I…”  Couldn’t, when opening the containers was already a profound sin.  To damage their skins, disgrace them with her own graffiti — “just sort of remembered it.  Those should be snap peas if I did it right.  Some sort of pea, at least.  The test tube has honeydew seeds.”     Oliver nods.  They both vanish into the front pocket of his flannel, vanishing behind thick red fabric that hangs ever so slightly lower.       Against the heart.  Figures.  He seems to be one for profound symbolism.  Doesn’t matter how small.     “Walk down carefully.”  Ramona says after a moment passes, walking forward to take his place in the doorway as he steps down into the dirt.     “I will.”     “My radio— it’ll be on.”     Oliver chuckles.  Shifts the weight on his back, where she can hear mason jars clanking between fabric and canvas.  “I’ll give you a call, but it might take a few days.  Keep an ear open for it.”     “Will do.”     “And hey,” over his shoulder, into the slow Spring breeze as he heads for cracked open gates so far away from the house, “thank you for humoring my stay.”     Ramona’s throat aches; with apologies and assurances and all the witty things she thinks of far too late for him to catch them before wind and weariness swallows them away.  It leaves her silent.  Only watching as he disappears through the crack between open gate doors, and into the forest beyond.     All at once the garden feels far too large, and perfectly like home.

i don’t know how to make this not sound boring: the wip.