Etchings and Scribbles

It was lonely down here. My mind kept returning to that fact, despite the cacophony of other things my body was trying to tell me. Somewhere amidst my plummeting blood pressure and the pool of blood amassing beneath me were the remnants of my leg. I vaguely remember feeling the bones crunch and snap on the way down, bashing into a cliff face repeatedly will do that, I suppose. I’m fairly certain more than a few of my ribs were fractured as well, there might even be a gash on my head, I know I bounced a few times, and granite is anything but soft. In essence, my entire body was screaming at me while simultaneously dumping adrenaline into my bloodstream to try and keep me aware enough to do something about my situation. Laying prone, staring up at a speckled white slab of nature and a gentle pink sky, I wondered if there really was anything I could do about this. The reptilian part of my brain was screaming for me to do something, anything, to go hide in a corner and lick my wounds a...

Felston had always been a tinkerer. From his birth his parents had left him toys, and they were promptly torn apart, dissected, their inner workings (be they fluff or cogs) pulled out, set down, and cataloged. Indeed, he had always held a curiosity for how things functioned, and this curiosity developed into a passionate hobby. There were very few limits on what he would pull apart, especially if was something he'd never encountered. He learned his lesson though, that not all things should be torn apart immediately after he found a certain ticking box in his mother's closet. Traumatic memories aside, he knew from that day onward that he would be a doctor. Not the boring kind that doles out medicines and allays concerns over bumps and strange rashes, no no, a doctor of the sciences! Anatomies, chemistry, alchemy, machinery, histories, yes yes, all these things were mere systems that begged to be torn apart, cataloged, and then put back together (this was something he is stil...

It was a murky evening. Late summer crisped it's way into autumn, and the dying trees were beginning to match the parched brown grass. Not that there was overmuch landscaping left to be seen around the city anymore; the 4 month drought made certain that frivolities like house plants and manicured lawns were put to the wayside. It made the dripping that much more maddening, a fluid lost to some unappreciative ground, whisked away before it could be detained. It made my daily stroll to the docks that much more unbearable. All day I sat and descaled fish, cut heads off fish, watched fish be brought into port in giant nets, dumped unceremoniously onto scales, into shipping containers; water everywhere and not a drop of it potable. I daydreamed sometimes of drinking it anyway, chugging until my stomach was full to burst and then bathing in the stuff, and letting the dehydration consume me, wither me externally as it swelled me internally. 'twas a pipe dream to be sure, but a consi...

Griff was early in life seduced by the life of crime via regular visits to the seedy underbelly of the city. His father was a cleric of the God of Justice and his mother died in childbirth. His father took regular steps to remind Griff of this, clearly upset that it wasn’t the other way around. Griff did not start out as a bad apple, but his father’s poor treatment of him (emotionally) certainly did not help when Griff was offered the chance to steal the things he wanted: money, baubles, the occasional kiss. During his father’s missionary trips into the rough parts of town, Griff made certain to sneak off and find or start his own trouble. When one day Griff returned to find his father dead in a puddle of his own blood, Griff’s first thought was not remorse, it was of freedom. At the ripe age of 12, Griff joined the local organized crime ring and began to learn from the best the city had to offer. How to pick locks, how to steal from a person’s pockets without them noticing, how to ble...

An attempt at writing third person -------------------------------------------------------- It was a serene day in the village. At last, the long winter had finally broken, sunlight streamed through the freshly budding leaves in the orchard, and children ran amuck in the streets. Well-worn dirt paths held deep grooves on their sides from merchant wagons that passed through. The village itself had grown since the previous year. It seemed every so often a passer-by would decide to stay and a family would sprout up around them. The robed man walked into this saccharine scene full of relief. It had been a long journey, and his feet were killing him. A gentle breeze picked up and carried the smell of wildflower blossoms to him, his grayed beard trailing along outside his hood. “Yes, yes…” he muttered to himself, lifting one foot in front of the other in an almost zombified state of mind, he made his way to the largest building in town, the inn. The inn itself was perhaps the finest building...

Our first visit was a short one. Not that we realized or knew what was going on, but we knew without a doubt that the safest place any of us could be was in that broom closet. “More like a boom closet,” one of us had tried to joke. No one laughed. Humor had died with everything else. “We need to find food and water. I think for now we have a workable shelter.” “How are we gonna sleep in there? It’s packed full of shit.” “We’ll pull the racks out and recycle them into something else.” “Oh yeah, you’re just Robinson fuckin’ Crusoe, aren’t ya?” “Chill the fuck out man, I know we’re in a bad spot. But if we don’t want to die, then we need to work together, OK?” That was the extent of our conversation that day. No names asked, no life stories shared. I think we were all in denial. It’s difficult to ask those hard questions when you’re surrounded by destruction, and deep down we all knew the answer. Deep down we wanted it all to go back the way it was. None of us were happy, but one of us c...

Melissa and I had been officially seeing each other for a few weeks. To whom it was made official I’m not sure, but she had been staying at my place, and I had allowed Her toothbrush to grace my bathroom counter for more than a night. To me, that said “Official Couple”, to  Her  it probably said “Official Dumbass Has Allowed You In”. That was a term I began hearing a lot more, “dumbass”. She only called me that every now and then, but that was  Her  official description of everything, ESPECIALLY things she didn’t care to understand. “Look at that dumbass”, “What kind of dumbass”, “What the dumbass”, “Who in their dumbass mind”, trust me, it got old. But I was blinded by attraction, and, arguably, a dumbass about the ways of love or even a healthy relationship. It seemed the only healthy relationship was  Her  status with cigarettes and getting  Her  nails done. I never asked how or where she got those nails fixed up every few days. Once, I was be...