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Trifecta Writing Challenge: Week Sixty

This week, I decided to compete in a Trifecta writing challenge for the first time. As usual, it’s V’s fault. For the challenge this week, we were given three words. They could be used in any order, but we were only allowed to add 33 words for a total of 36. Our words were rain, rebellion, and remember. Here’s my entry.

 

*       *       *

It’s been thirty years this week. Thirty long years since the day that the blood fell like rain. The city in the clouds above us had erupted in war, a full fledged rebellion.

I still remember.

 

 

Shambhala

The following piece has been crafted for another one of Chuck Wendig’s writing challenges. We were given three lists of ten topics, for sub-genre, location, and included element. Thanks to the luck of random number generation, I ended up with erotic fairy tale, capital city of an ancient civilization, and a magical pocket watch. Here’s “Shambhala” for your reading pleasure. Or just pleasure. 😉


Shambhala

Tick…tick…tick…

Edmund heard the watch before he saw her, long before he knew what it would come to mean. Nitya was her name, and the watch was hers.

Tick…tick…tick…

His cell was cool, but comfortable, with a woven blanket to keep him warm at night. He didn’t know if the others in the expedition had been taken captive as he was or if they had been killed, but he could hear none of them if they were imprisoned. He could hear nothing but the watch.

Tick…tick…tick…

On his first night in his cell, angry, refusing to sleep, he had seen her. Nitya walked the passage, and the sound had been overwhelming, though her bare feet padded silently on the floor. She had been the first person Edmund had seen since he had woken behind the cold bars, the first he’d seen since he had encountered the girl on the outskirts of the city.

Tick…tick…tick…

The watch’s chain glistened in the moonlight, looping her neck once before vanishing from sight. Edmund knew that the watch itself hovered just below the curves of her breasts, though he found himself wondering how he knew. In that instant, she turned and smiled at him, dark eyes shining. “It had to be you,” a soft voice murmured inside his head as she turned to walk away.

Tick…tick…tick…

He had been offered whatever treasure he could find in exchange for leading the expedition, and so he chartered a plane to Delhi, rode for over three hundred kilometers into the Himalayas, and found a small group of men who would attempt to guide him to the ancient city. The map that his financier had provided was in an ancient form of Sanskrit that few recognized and even fewer could interpret, but soon he was deep in the mountains in search of the mythical Shambhala.

Tick…tick…tick…

On the second night, Nitya passed by his cell again, the sound of the watch the only noise. This time, he lay beneath his blanket and watched her until she passed from his sight, entranced by her beauty. She wore no jewelry, barring the watch looped about her neck, and was clothed in a simple sari. Again, she turned to face him, and once more he heard her words, though she never spoke aloud. “I knew from the moment that I first saw you.”

Tick…tick…tick…

“Ask her who she is,” Edmund had said. The expedition had reached the top of a plateau, where an unbelievable sight had greeted them. A lush, verdant landscape opened before them, trees and ferns and flowers the like of which had never been seen were flourishing here in the harshest mountain range on Earth. In their midst stood a small girl, black hair cascading over her shoulders. She said nothing, but simply stood watching the men. Finally one of Edmund’s interpreters spoke up, speaking first in Hindi, then Urdu, and finally (after a suggestion from Edmund) Sanskrit. At this third attempt, the girl had smiled and raised one hand, as if in greeting. Edmund felt himself growing tired. The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the flash of a golden chain about the little girl’s neck.

Tick…tick…tick…

Could she possibly be the same girl? Edmund’s mind raced. The chain was the same. It had to be. It was the only possible conclusion. That meant, however, that Nitya had been responsible for the fate of his companions, whatever that might have been. The day passed in a confused blur of sleep and hunger. When he awoke with the moon on the third night, he found a small cup of water on the floor beside him. He sipped slowly, knowing that the ache in his stomach would only be worse if he didn’t pace himself.

Tick…tick…tick…

She was coming. The moon was waxing, and Nitya was drawing near. The sound of the watch grew louder. Was it really the third night that he had been locked in this cell? Time seemed to lose its natural rhythm. Was the moon waning now? Edmund could no longer be certain of anything. She had passed into his field of vision, and once again she paused before him. “I have been waiting my entire life for your arrival,” she said without speaking. “My father, King Suchandra, told me that you would come, but he has been gone for over six hundred years, and the Kulika now rules here.” She smiled again. For the first time, she opened her mouth and Edmund heard her voice with his ears. “Hello, Edmund. I am Nitya. And it is time that you were freed.”

Tick…tick…tick…

Edmund stood outside of the bars of his cell for the first time. Nitya stood beside him, an ivory and gold sari wrapped around her. “Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to Kalapa.”

“W…where am I?”

“Kalapa,” the woman repeated. “Capital city of the great realm of Shambhala.”

Edmund stammered again, confusion and disbelief mingling on his face. “S…Shambhala?”

“Is this not what you have sought? Was it not your wish to find this place?” Nitya’s voice was soft and mysterious, unmistakably feminine but with deep, dulcet tones and an accent akin to that of Edmund’s Sanskrit interpreter. When he said nothing, Nitya continued. “I see. You searched for my home, but you did not believe. You did not know that such a place could possibly exist.”

Tick…tick…tick…

“What happened to the rest of my men?” Edmund demanded, finding his voice at last.

“They have been sent away, returned to their families with no memory of this place, or even of you, Edmund.”

“How?”

“The watch,” she replied, reaching beneath the sari to reveal a golden pocket watch attached to the chain. “It grants me some control, within the boundaries of Shambhala.”

Tick…tick…tick…

Edmund blinked and found that he was now standing in the middle of a sandalwood grove, an enormous mandala towering over him. Nitya was at his side.

“This was my father’s garden,” she said. “And now it is mine, to share with the one that I deemed to be worthy. So it is that I saved you from your companions and brought you here.”

“Were you the little girl that we met at the edge of the city?”

“I was,” Nitya nodded, “but when I saw you, saw that you were of your age, I knew that the form I had taken to greet you was too young to welcome you properly. The watch accounted for this as well. And now,” she continued, “I am ready.” Nitya crossed her arms, taking the edges of the sari and pulling them down, exposing the full, smooth curves of her breasts. “I have waited for centuries, Edmund. Waited for the one with whom I could share the fullness of maithuna.” The sari fell away from her body as she stepped toward him, placing a kiss on his lips. “Do you understand now?”

Tick…tick…tick…

Edmund’s heart was racing as he wrapped his arms around her. “I came here to find  you, didn’t I?”

“You came here because I desired it,” Nitya whispered, unbuckling Edmund’s belt. “You came here,” she kissed his neck, “because I desired you.”

“Why me?” Edmund was gasping as his arousal grew. Nitya’s hands reached into his pants, pulling them down.

“You have the kundalini,” she said. “The sleeping energy. It is only waiting for you to reach the proper understanding, to awaken, for release.”

Edmund lifted his shirt over his head and tossed it to the ground as Nitya’s hands came to rest on his back. “The energy is here,” her fingers traced lightly over the base of his spine, “but you are yet unprepared.”

Tick…tick…tick…

Edmund lay naked on a bed of sandalwood, the moon now full overhead. Nitya knelt behind him, slowly massaging a fragrant oil into his skin. She chanted quietly in a forgotten tongue, her hands helping him to relax.

“If you fight, Edmund, if you are unprepared, the awakening can be most unpleasant. Breathe deeply now.” For what seemed like hours or days or months, her hands caressed him, until finally Nitya ran her index finger up his spine, placing a kiss at the back of his neck. Edmund felt a tingling race along his back, following the path Nitya had drawn, and his eyes flashed open. “Now.”

Tick…tick…tick…

“Now,” Nitya whispered, “maithuna, the union.”

Edmund rolled onto his back as Nitya climbed onto him, slowing lowering herself and moaning with pleasure. The watch swung on its chain as Edmund kissed her breasts, as he tasted her, as he filled her. Time fell away as they came together, again and again, the moon waxing and waning above them as energy surged between their bodies.

Tick…tick…tick…

“Your life outside of Kapala is now over, Edmund. Your time in the world beyond Shambhala is at an end, but your time with me is only beginning.”

Edmund and Nitya kissed beneath the pale glow of the moon.

“Then I shall stay,” he said. “I shall stay.”

Before the Dawn

This is my entry for Chuck Wendig’s latest weekly flash fiction challenge, which asked us to write what we know, but with a fictional twist. Here’s “Before the Dawn” for your enjoyment.

My father wakens me before the dawn. I dress myself in the dark, preparing to go to work with skill born of endless days of practice. Within minutes I am ready, and I leave my bedroom to find my father seated at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee before him, a glass of orange juice at the seat next to his. I sit beside him, questioning him about the day ahead of us and what it might bring. He is tired, though he tries not to show it. Work has been hard on him for the past few weeks, more so than normal. It’s harvest season, and it’s nearly over.

I glance out the window and I can see the last traces of the second moon fading as the sun peers across the distant horizon. The red tinge of our world is barely noticeable in the larger cities like Valentine, but out here, Mars is still Mars,  and it still feels like home. My family and I have lived here my whole life, and soon I will come of age, but not yet. I find myself dreaming of Earth sometimes, but I am grateful for the opportunity to be where I am. My mind drifts to what a boy my age on Earth would be thinking as my father tells me that it’s time to go.

We climb into the truck and head north, toward the field that we finished cutting last night. Since the terraforming, wheat has grown better on Mars than it did in the last hundred years or so on Earth. We’ve got almost a thousand acres left to harvest, but our crew is great this year. Two of my uncles, my grandfather, and a small army of cousins will be reaching the field soon, but since it’s one that’s close to our house, Dad and I are the first ones there.

I stretch as I climb out of the truck. A cool breeze is blowing across the stubble, and I think about how wise it was to bring a thermal sweatshirt this morning. Dad is already starting his half of the pre-harvest tasks, preparing the combine for operation. The equipment that we use was manufactured here on Mars, assembled by my grandfather and his brother from pieces that were printed upon their arrival on the planet. It was the only practical way to get the necessary machinery to another world, and it was achieved using Martian minerals. The technique had proven itself on Luna, and had only seen improvement by the time the terraforming process was complete on Mars.

My side of things is relatively simple. As has been my job since I was thirteen, I prepare the grain cart and the tractor that pulls it. I pull our truck alongside the tractor, lining up the fuel tank in the truck’s bed with the  tank on the side of the tractor. Once the fueling is in progress, I grab a grease gun and a rag from one of the tool boxes and begin the hunt for the the various zerks that are found on bearings around the tractor and the auger on the grain cart. Dad likes to tell me that farming has changed very little since he was my age. The only real difference is in location. And a little bit of gravity.  Okay, quite a bit of gravity.

I jump up to the top of the auger, greasing the bearing there before dropping back to the ground. Greasing the grain cart takes about ten more minutes, and the fuel pump clicks off just as I’m finishing up. As I’m wrapping the fuel hose back around the pump, the rest of the harvest crew arrives to service their machines. A swarm of family members pours out of a handful of other pickups, quickly preparing the other four combines, the tractors and grain carts, and the semi trucks that will haul the wheat away.

As the sun rises higher, the crew piles back into their various vehicles to make the move to the next field. We’ve got a fifteen kilometer trip there, so we form up into a convoy with the combines at the front and the pickups at the rear. At the max speed for the combines, it takes us about forty-five minutes. Upon our arrival at the new field, my grandfather takes the lead with his combine, cutting a small swath in the corner of the field where the rest of the vehicles will initially park. Once he’s done, he begins to cut a path through the wheat at the field’s perimeter. My father and uncles and one of my cousins follow suit, taking the next header width in. As my grandfather finishes his first round, the hopper on top of his combine is nearly full. It’s a good sign of the quality of the wheat, a sign of a good yield on a field this size.

Seeing this, I slip my tractor into gear, driving across the stubble to line up with the now-extended auger on the combine, matching my speed to his as the auger begins to feed wheat from the combine into my grain cart. My cousins fall in alongside the other combines, and as each grain cart is slowly filled we peel away to transfer our loads to the semis.  When the semis are in turn filled, other members of the crew will drive them to a storage facility on the outskirts of Valentine, about twenty-five kilometers away. It’s a familiar operation, one we’ve carried out every summer for as long as any of us can remember. We stop in shifts to eat packed lunches in our tractors and combines, and the day goes smoothly. Soon we will have provided a good portion of the wheat necessary for the growing colonies.

Dad calls me over to his combine as the sun begins to set and Phobos and Deimos appear in the sky.

“Good work today, sonny boy,” he says.

Cooper

I’ll answer your questions, certainly. But I’m going to answer them in the manner that I see fit.

1.) Yes, I’m still alive. I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but would I be able to give this interview if things had ended differently?

2.) No, I’m not going to tell you who I really am. I used a pseudonym on the plane for that very reason.

3.) I love the internet. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean that I can’t use newer technology. The joys of anonymity are numerous. Besides, I responded to your message board post requesting an interview, didn’t I?

4.) Yes, the bills I was given were marked. You think I didn’t expect that? You’d be surprised at how easy it was to get overseas under yet another pseudonym, exchange the marked cash, and move on back in ’71. A few similar swaps with the right contacts, and I was a free (and very wealthy) man. Marked bills serve as one thing. A paper trail. If you know you’re leaving one, it’s easy enough to set a false path. Hell, I started one before I even left the states. $5,800 in marked bills served as a perfect distraction. Took their time finding those, though, didn’t they?

5.) The briefcase didn’t have a real bomb. Again, I’m not that stupid. Even with security standards as they were in the seventies, I wasn’t about to try to take a real bomb onto a plane. I wanted to get money, not hurt people. That stewardess actually gave a surprisingly accurate description, what with the “red cylinders” and whatnot. Good on her. She stayed pretty damn calm the whole time, too. I wonder what ever happened to her. Quite a gal. Shame I couldn’t have let her in on the whole thing, but too many loose ends get real damn complicated real quick. I’d have at least donated a few grand to get her out of the stewardess business, maybe help her get an education or something.

6.) I’m well aware that they’re still looking for me. It’s funny, honestly. Some people had been making me out to be some sort of Robin Hood. What bullshit that was. It was never for anyone’s benefit other than mine, though like I said, I wouldn’t have said no to tossing a stack of cash to that stewardess.

7.) If I’d known how things were going to go, I might have gone about it a bit differently. Picked a different night, tried to find a better route out. I did bang up my leg pretty badly when I landed, but it was nothing I wasn’t prepared for. I didn’t plan to get caught, though, and I didn’t, so that’s pretty good overall.

8.) I suppose that someday I might let a memoir get published, let the feds know how I managed to dodge them for decades, but it’ll be a posthumous thing.  Oh well. I’m not anywhere they’re going to be finding me any time soon. Hell, by the time they realize where I really am, I’ll be dead and the money will be so far beyond their reach that it isn’t even funny.

9.) It seemed like a good idea at the time. Certainly caught the nation’s interest, didn’t it? Big media frenzy over the crazy hijacker, “Oh, he stole so much, how will we ever catch him?” Hmph. I was tired of regular life, see? I thought, as you kids would put it, that I needed to go big or go home.

10.) No, we can’t meet in person. Quite frankly, I’m tired of answering your questions now, so I’m going to go.

Sincerely,

The Real Mr. Cooper

A Farewell

“I loved him, and I love him still. I can say those words without regret now. Losing Liam somehow gave me the confidence I needed to say what I should have said three years ago.

“I still remember the day we met. He was radiant, ostensibly searching for a text on medieval literature. I was living a terrible cliché, an aspiring writer working in a small, out-of-the-way bookstore. I knew the book he wanted immediately, and found it for him with minimal effort. He smiled and called me his hero (he told me that he’d checked two other stores first and, like most of our clientele, preferred to give his business to a local store rather than some website) and paid for his book.

“I felt a brief twinge of guilt as I asked him for his ID to run his credit card at checkout. It wasn’t our policy to do so at the time, but I wanted to learn as much about him as I could before he left, possibly never to be seen again. I told myself at that moment that I’d hit the jackpot. Liam Reynolds was six months older than me, and he lived close enough to my store that I could expect to see him come in again. Subtle stalking complete, I handed his license, credit card, and book to him, and wished him a great afternoon. In the wake of his ‘See you soon!’ I was struck giddy by the thought of how green his eyes had been.

“Fast forward a year and Liam and I had gone on three ‘official’ dates. He’d come back to the store once a week to talk with me, planning his visits around my lunch breaks so that we could have more time. He was going to grad school for a master’s degree in literature, something I’d never had the courage to consider since my BA had cost so much and done so little for me. I told him that I’d been interested in him since that first  meeting, and that his stopping by to share a cup of coffee helped me to get through each week. He told me that he’d heard about an unbelievable clerk at my store from a friend who was always looking out for him. He’d come in that first day just to see me…

“I’m sorry… I shouldn’t be crying right now. We were so happy back then. Liam was a hopeless romantic, having spent most of his life at that point looking for but never finding love. When I agreed to go out with him, I was showered with more attention than I knew how to handle. Love notes written in a messy scrawl inside the cover of books he bought for me, flowers, home cooked dinners (always a nice change from my ramen and sandwiches and frozen pizzas). Then we celebrated our first anniversary, and he said he wanted me to meet his parents.

“I panicked. I’d never met a boy willing to take me anywhere near his family, but Liam wrapped his arms around me, kissed me, told me how much he loved me, and made me feel like all was right with the world for the first time since middle school. I was scared because I knew that my parents would never accept Liam the way his welcomed me, and not just because he wasn’t Christian and he had tattoos and a lattice of pale pink scars on the inside of each thigh that no one else had ever seen.

“But I went with him. He gave me courage then, just as he does now. We spent a full week with his parents that summer. I met most of you that week, and I couldn’t believe how willing you were to welcome a complete stranger into your lives, and I can never thank you enough for being for me after…after… No, I’m fine. I’m almost done.

“Liam would have loved to see you all here, celebrating his life. He told me that he wanted this when he died, that he wanted a wake. He said that the idea of a funeral was too depressing, and that he wanted his family and friends to remember the good times. Now I think he’d hoped we’d have been a little older before that happened, but life is like that. You never know what you’ll find around the next corner.

“The last time I saw him, I told him I loved him, and he gave me that Han Solo half smile he would always do, and said ‘I know.’ I think he knew we all loved him, no matter what he’d been through, no matter what we’d managed to say to anyone else. He wasn’t always strong, but he was always strong for me, and now we have to do the same for him. That’s all I have to say, other than this. I loved him, and I love him still.”

Two Years of WordPress

The Swords of The Ancients is two years old today! Two years ago, I started this blog to help facilitate the crafting of my first novel. Since then, I’ve written upwards of 30,000 words toward that goal and developed my main characters considerably. I’m nowhere near where I would like to be in terms of progress on this particular project, but I’ve found that through various connections I’ve made since beginning this blog, I’ve found a great deal of inspiration. I thank you all, my wonderful readers. While I’d probably still continue this just for my own sake, it’s nice to know that you’re here.

It’s time for some intense reading. We started the Winter Reading Program at my library a few days ago, and so the challenge is to make it through eight books over the course of eight weeks. I’ve already knocked out a book on the making of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I’m reading a bunch of the collected editions of DC’s New 52, but I’m trying to avoid counting those toward my eight, just for the sake of getting caught up on my backlog of books. I am almost two hundred pages through The Casual Vacancy right now, and I’m really enjoying it. A full review will follow as soon as I finish. I’m going to try to get through some classic fantasy pieces now as well, such as The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Worm Ouroboros, both of which have been recommended by V. I’ve also added The Well at the World’s End to my to-read list, since it served as an inspiration to Tolkien. There’s a few books I’ve been suggesting to patrons at work at the library recently, and so I’m considering tossing some rereading in as well, with Dune at the top of that list. So many books… Goodreads has been very beneficial in keeping track of them. If you’re a reader and you don’t have a goodreads account, I would highly recommend setting one up. It’s free, and it’s a great way to track what you’re reading, what you have read, and what you want to read, plus being able to rate and review books you’ve read.

I’m going to let you go for now, dear readers. I owe you some new stories, after all. I’ve been issued a challenge by Chuck Wendig. 1000 word flash fiction based on photos of some absolutely incredible and surreal real world locations. Feel free to take part. Entries are due by the 25th.

Excelsior!
(Note to self: Create a catchphrase that’s better than Stan “The Man” Lee’s)

Hallowe’en

My entry for my Hallowe’en Writing Challenge is here. Thank you participants, and Happy Hallowe’en.

“The Last One”

The fire had died down too much during the night, but it couldn’t be helped. I’d been in desperate need to rest after three straight days of running from them, and Marcus had been caught by them partway through the second day, so there was no one to share the watch. His screams had followed me, even into sleep.

As soon as I woke, I scrambled for a handful of twigs, leaves, and sticks to rekindle the flames, knowing that they were the only thing that would really keep them away. Once the fire was beginning to burn in earnest, I checked the gun I’d managed to grab from the facility guard’s body, a Colt 1911. “Only four rounds left,” I sighed as I checked the magazine. The .45 had been effective against them so far, but there were so many of them. Only one of us, me, now that they’d gotten Marcus. I sighed again, managing once more to hold back the tears that had threatened for the last day and a half, and chambered a round.

“He’s gone. Get over it. Get up, and get moving.” I added a small branch to the fire, watching as the flames kissed and embraced it, growing larger and brighter. As I listened for footsteps in the distance, I reflected on the past few days and marveled at how quickly everything had fallen apart.

We’d joked  for years, about how we couldn’t wait for it, and how our lives as video game geeks had prepared us for this exact situation. Well, let me just tell you that nothing, and I mean nothing can prepare you for the sight of your best friend being swarmed and eaten by those…things. We said that we’d make it through together, and now…I put my first three bullets into their heads. The fourth went through Marcus’ eye when I realized he wasn’t going to get away, when he realized what would happen if I didn’t.

The fire had scared them away, we didn’t know why, and I still don’t. I had the Zippo Marcus had given me for my eighteenth birthday, even though I didn’t smoke. I told him his habit would kill him. He said my nagging would be the death of him. Well, we were both wrong, but he was closer.

A crack of a twig breaking snapped me back to the present. They were here. I’d not gotten the fire started in time, and now they were here. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, grabbing the burning branch in my left hand and the Colt in my right. They were getting closer, surrounding me, but there was no way in hell they could know what my plan was. I knew I wasn’t going to survive, but I was going to take as many of them with me as I could. I fired my first three shots as they came into view. I dropped my torch into the dry leaves and raised my gun to my head.

 

 

October Writing Challenge

Halloween is nearly upon us, with NaNoWriMo close on its heels, and that thought absolutely terrifies me. In the spirit of the season, I’m taking a page from Sonia M and asking my readers to take part in a writing challenge. This is the first challenge I’m hosting, and so it is going to focus on my favorite holiday. Craft a piece of horror-themed microfiction. Think Poe, Lovecraft, King, Machen, condensed into roughly 500 words.


The rules are simple.

1.) Theme: Write a horror-themed piece of microfiction.
2.) Genre: Other than the overall theme, there are no genre limitations. Write a steampunk/horror story, or a horror/romance, or science fiction/horror, just for some examples.
3.) Word limit: 500 words (approximate).
4.) Deadline: October 31st, 2012.
5.) How to submit: If you have a blog of your own, post your story on your blog and share a link in the comments on this post. If you don’t have a blog of your own, feel free to post the story in the comments here. If you do this, I will post the story in a separate post and re-link it here.
6.) Prizes: The reward of a job well-done and the knowledge that you managed to finish one more short piece before diving headfirst into NaNoWriMo.

The Door

The door was locked. It had been for as long as I could remember, and it would probably remain so until the day that I died. Maybe even longer than that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t unlock the door to find out what she had hidden away so carefully. It was that I made a promise.

The door stood at the far end of the hallway from the room where I slept. I didn’t sleep in my bedroom anymore at that point. It seemed futile to try to fall asleep in that bed after she was gone. No, the room where I now slept, where I had been sleeping for nearly ten years now, was my study. The overstuffed recliner next to the fireplace served as a better bed for me, and I had lost count of how many times I had nodded off while a fire roared to counter the howling wind and snow outside of my windows.

The door led to a room that had been intended as a nursery, but the children had never come. One day she had gone into the room, and stayed there for several hours. When she came out, her face was pale, but filled with grim accomplishment. She locked the door then, and made me swear to never open it again. She threw the key into the fire that night, and we sat together in the recliner and watched as it melted away.

For a time, we were happy again, and we ignored the door at the far end of the hallway next to the bedroom, when the bed was still shared and we didn’t need the fire to stay warm. The door stayed locked, and I never asked her the reason. We trusted each other with every secret but this one, and it eventually drove us apart.

I don’t remember exactly what happened on the day (or night, I can’t seem to recall the hour) when she left. I don’t know where she went, but I know why. The locked door seemed to torment her more than me, a reminder of the life that she couldn’t carry. I want to say that I plead with her that night, got down on my knees and begged her to tell me what was eating away at her, what this secret was, but I don’t know. I may have, instead, filled my heart with courage from an increasingly empty bottle and told her that if she couldn’t live with herself then she couldn’t live with me, and that she needed to get out.

I don’t remember when it was that I took every one of my books and my lamps and my blankets and my pillows from the room that had been ours and left every one of hers behind. I haven’t been back in that bedroom for years, but I’ve left it unlocked. I can’t risk doing what she did. I can’t leave the house, either. That’s not to say that I can’t go out my door to buy groceries or to find a new book, but I can’t move. I can’t pack up and find somewhere new to live. I’m held here by my promise to her. If someone else were to buy the house, they might open the locked door, and I cannot bear the thought of some stranger learning the secret that tore her away from me.

The door sits at the end of the hallway, on the second floor of my home. My kitchen is directly beneath the room, and some days I find myself staring at the ceiling in wonder. What-if’s fill my head, and I find that I lose my appetite until the next day, when another empty bottle of whiskey or rum or vodka has turned up next to my recliner and I have no memory of coming back upstairs. One morning, I woke up on the floor of the hallway next to the locked door, a screwdriver and a hammer beside me. I must have decided that I had to open the door, but I had passed out before I could put my plan into action.

It’s better that way, really. I don’t want to know what’s behind that door, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Instead I sit next to the fire, or at my desk, and I read, or I write, or I try to do one or the other and fail miserably at both because I remember how much she used to inspire me and remember that she’s gone and she’s not coming back. Occasionally a magazine calls and asks me if I can finish another story for them this month, and I tell them yes, because I still need to eat.

Once in a while, I thought about having a new key made, or having a locksmith come in and open the door, but I realized that would still be breaking my promise, and even now I am still a man of my word. I know what I’m going to do now, though. I’m not going to break my promise to her. I’m not going to unlock the door. I’m going to stoke the fire high tonight, and I’m going to leave my chair closer to it than usual. I’m going to have a drink, and I’m going to fall asleep, surrounded by my books and covered in an afghan that she made for me the winter after I proposed, one of the blankets that I took from our old bedroom after she left. I’m not going to leave a note. It wouldn’t survive anyway. I suppose that the fire will start slowly, kissing the pages of the books, blackening them and turning them to ash. It will start in the study, and make its way down the hall.

It will consume everything in its path. It’s fire, after all, and it will devour the house that was once ours and is now mine and mine alone. The hallway will offer little resistance. Likewise the bedroom we once shared and I now shun. It will burn, and the smoke alarms will attempt to wake me to save me from myself, but it will be in vain. The locked door will stand at the end of the hall, but it too will burn, and her secret will die with me.

An Update

I have at least four short stories that I’ve gotten good starts to. These stories are currently sitting in a Moleskine, eagerly awaiting digitization. Most of these will not be published on here, not yet, anyway. These are the big ones, the stories that I’m going to be submitting to various publications in the hopes of getting noticed. Don’t worry, dear readers. I’m still writing some stuff that will be just for you. “Gateway Shuffle” will be coming soon, continuing my Cowboy Bebop-inspired sci-fi series. Additionally, I’m working on an update on what’s going on with Arsus and Rime as their journey across the Sand Sea continues in “The Swords of the Ancients.”