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Eggs and Pancakes V1.1 [Swoll to 1872 Words]
MarkGoodhart
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Shiny New Hotness
Original...
The things I saw, I could not explain them. The lights, the sounds, the angles, none of them were computing in my memory. I saw one man torn apart by smells. I saw another man force reality back into its neat little binder where it belonged. A few gestures and words seemingly caused the air itself to alight in a blaze of, implausible as it sounds, plaid fire. The fire then, despite the laws that governed such things, formed a hand that shoved the thing of smells and lights back through a tear in the world. The man, if he could be called that, looked more like a primordial beast at the time, his very body enshrouded in tickling flames.
I sat with that man now. And to say that he no longer seemed quite so larger than life was a bit of an understatement. He looked like he could use a shower and a shave as sweat and grease hugged him close. I knew without him telling me that he was homeless but had an expansive education. He last ate more than 24 hours ago and hadn’t slept in 48. How I knew all that I couldn’t really express to you.
After the confrontation with the creature, I sort of had a fit. Not so much a seizure as much as a bunch of screaming and yelling. I demanded that the man explain what exactly had just happened and what that thing was and a series of other reasonable questions asked in an unreasonable manner. He had a pretty infuriating blasé response which said my answers were contingent on a hot meal. We hopped in my car and went a nearby dive with free refills and no kids. He said he wanted to go somewhere he would not stand out with his current state of disrepair. We slid into a booth and waited for Hazel to take our orders. Hazel was recently divorced and had two Labrador retrievers at home. Again, I don’t know exactly how I knew this. He ordered two plates of breakfast and a “honking big” glass of orange juice. He sort of chuckled when I just got a coffee.
“Don’t know about you man,” he smiled through yellowing teeth, “but I do not need woken up after that. Woof.”
“Yeah,” I replied, brushing aside his witty repartee, “Speaking of ‘that’…” I trailed off expecting him to take control of the parlay. I really didn’t have enough information to direct the conversation.
His expression changed to something a bit more what I would describe as professorial. He looked like he was about to give a dissertation on renaissance paintings or the proper way to bake a soufflé. “Well, ‘that’ was a manifestation of a lower god who was trying to gain entry into our reality through an open window. I slammed it shut on his fingers.”
He looked around the diner for a moment, seemingly more focused on how his eggs and pancakes were. To say the least, I was nonplussed.
“I assume that’s the short version of the story?”
He shrugged and smiled again, “About what happened today? Not really. There are things not of this world that try to get into it. These things don’t follow silly rules like gravity or time or physics. They come in and start wrecking stuff for whatever reason. People like me reinforce reality and send them back where they came from.”
“Wait,” I sputtered. “So these abominations…”
He interrupted, “We call them lower gods.”
I felt I needed clarification on any one single part of this morass of tomfoolery. If I could just simply wrap my head around something, anything then I could start to unravel this mystery. “Okay, wait… why lower gods?”
“They can do god-like stuff,” he looked almost wistful, “and they never seem too bright.”
I continued with this line of questioning, “So what do these things want?”
“Don’t know. No one really does.” He started looking away from me again and back to searching for the eventual arrival of Hazel and his meals. “Lord I am hungry.”
I was getting frustrated. I wanted answers but this guy just seemed to be holding me hostage for a Grand Slam. “How can you not know? You sure seemed pretty intimately knowledgeable while you administered a flambé to it.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, “Did you notice a bunch of jawing back and forth an hour ago? They don’t always have mouths and none of them seem like they want to talk. They want to roar and tear and maybe spit on the laws of nature.”
He sighed at me, “This isn’t what you really want to know by the way.”
“It’s not? It seems pretty relevant to me to discern the nature of beings that I didn’t know existed yesterday.”
He chuckled, “Not really. It’s not like there is a manual on them or anything. We have never seen the same one twice. They are all so different that you can’t plan for them. So what if the next one assaults you with a claw that rips apart your past? You just deal with them and move on to the next one.”
He continued, “The important thing is how you deal with you.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.” I was alarmed. Could this vagrant mean me some sort of harm? I was reasonably sure I could handle him in a physical sense but his supernatural powers were another matter. I stopped a moment to consider if I had seen too much in my companion’s estimation to be allowed my freedom from the encounter.
He put on a faux-British accent, “You’re a wizard Harry.”
“My name is Howard,” I returned, which in retrospect is an odd thing to be concerned with at the moment. But the words tumbled from my lips unbidden as my mind raced to properly categorize the new information it had been gifted.
“It’s a joke Howard. Not the ‘you-being-a-wizard’ part but the movie reference. You are a wizard. It sucks by the way.”
“What?” I felt overwhelmed by the way my companion seemed to be hitting me with the verbal simile of buckshot. The way he continued to give me new data over and over again. Just as I got my head wrapped around monsters, I was a wizard. Just as I was told I was a magus, I was told it was horrible. It was a rubber band ball of awful.
“It sucks. Trust me.”
“No go back,” I kept feeling like I was missing something constantly. I decided to take these things in the order that they were introduced. No reason to put the spell book before the wand, I thought to myself. Why I found this mixing of my situational images and an old saying amusing I could not tell you.
My fellow clarified, “You are a wizard. You can readjust the nobs of reality and do stuff no one would believe. You can see shit like we saw today. Most people can’t do that. They don’t even register that they saw anything. When it gets bad and lower gods go unchecked, normal people blame earthquakes and hurricanes. But you saw the absolute truth. You saw that thing. You saw what it did to Omar. You saw me deal with it.”
“I saw flames.”
“You did. And you might be able to make some yourself,” his eyes flashed red at the suggestion. “Or you might be able to do ice. Or maybe you will be able to sniff the things before they can even enter this world. The power living inside you has probably already changed you in ways you haven’t even noticed yet.”
The food came just then which put a screeching halt to our conversation. He tucked into his food with gusto while I pondered the implications of what he just said. Had I been modified or altered in some way? I pondered my inductions about my dining partner and our waitress. I then pondered that I was using words like pondered now. I replayed the conversation we had been having and my vocabulary choices. I then realized I could replay the conversation from beginning to end!
I was at a deficit.
He continued somehow breathing through his partially masticated scrambled eggs (made by a lefty, interestingly enough), “Now you have to figure out what to do. Because your life, as you know it is fucked. Once you see this stuff once, you start to see it all the time. And once you see it, you can’t ignore it. And once you can’t ignore it, your life is a mess.”
He pontificated, “Don’t let David Blaine fool you. Wizards don’t make any money. Lower gods don’t come with a debit card. We still need to eat though. We still need shelter.”
“I have a means of employment,” I felt like I needed to interject. It wasn’t a great form of occupation and I was currently a bit affronted I was the mere assistant manager when I could easily enumerate several ways to increase productivity without reducing quality.
“You will lose it. This stuff takes over your life. You disappear for days. Days if you are lucky. I mean it Howard. I lost the better part of 2011. You can’t keep dates or appointments. You will lose your family to this and you get nothing back. No one thanks you. No one puts you on a statue. If you are lucky, they might throw you a buck on the side of the highway. The good news is you will die young.”
“That’s not reassuring”, the man was starting to tremble slightly as his voice raised an octave and a quarter. I surmised that his respiration was getting shallow and his adrenaline was starting to surge.
“It becomes that way. I was a lawyer once, had a kid with my girlfriend. I haven’t seen them in ages. But the fact is you will throw all that other stuff away. You will throw your job, your family, everything away. It gets to point where you either get snorted by a monster or you just off yourself to make the noises stop.”
He swallowed, “Or the world might end. That is the situation Howard. People think they can turn away and let someone else do it. But they can’t. They cannot separate from the horrors they see happening to the world from what they know. You start looking at everything differently,” the eating had stopped for now, “every weather report makes you sweat. Every news report makes you want to throw up. The question keeps going through your mind, was that one of those things that did it? Could I have stopped it?”
He started eating again, this time starting on the pancakes. I took him all in. Wrapped in degenerating rags and worse flesh, I saw this man face down a thing that shouldn’t exist. I saw someone who had sacrificed everything personally to think globally.
Hazel interrupted with a cough, “You folks all right? Can I get you anything else?”
I looked at my cup as my partner shook his head and speared a sausage link. I readdressed my choice of beverage, “Decaf.”
I sat with that man now. And to say that he no longer seemed quite so larger than life was a bit of an understatement. He looked like he could use a shower and a shave as sweat and grease hugged him close. I knew without him telling me that he was homeless but had an expansive education. He last ate more than 24 hours ago and hadn’t slept in 48. How I knew all that I couldn’t really express to you.
After the confrontation with the creature, I sort of had a fit. Not so much a seizure as much as a bunch of screaming and yelling. I demanded that the man explain what exactly had just happened and what that thing was and a series of other reasonable questions asked in an unreasonable manner. He had a pretty infuriating blasé response which said my answers were contingent on a hot meal. We hopped in my car and went a nearby dive with free refills and no kids. He said he wanted to go somewhere he would not stand out with his current state of disrepair. We slid into a booth and waited for Hazel to take our orders. Hazel was recently divorced and had two Labrador retrievers at home. Again, I don’t know exactly how I knew this. He ordered two plates of breakfast and a “honking big” glass of orange juice. He sort of chuckled when I just got a coffee.
“Don’t know about you man,” he smiled through yellowing teeth, “but I do not need woken up after that. Woof.”
“Yeah,” I replied, brushing aside his witty repartee, “Speaking of ‘that’…” I trailed off expecting him to take control of the parlay. I really didn’t have enough information to direct the conversation.
His expression changed to something a bit more what I would describe as professorial. He looked like he was about to give a dissertation on renaissance paintings or the proper way to bake a soufflé. “Well, ‘that’ was a manifestation of a lower god who was trying to gain entry into our reality through an open window. I slammed it shut on his fingers.”
He looked around the diner for a moment, seemingly more focused on how his eggs and pancakes were. To say the least, I was nonplussed.
“I assume that’s the short version of the story?”
He shrugged and smiled again, “About what happened today? Not really. There are things not of this world that try to get into it. These things don’t follow silly rules like gravity or time or physics. They come in and start wrecking stuff for whatever reason. People like me reinforce reality and send them back where they came from.”
“Wait,” I sputtered. “So these abominations…”
He interrupted, “We call them lower gods.”
I felt I needed clarification on any one single part of this morass of tomfoolery. If I could just simply wrap my head around something, anything then I could start to unravel this mystery. “Okay, wait… why lower gods?”
“They can do god-like stuff,” he looked almost wistful, “and they never seem too bright.”
I continued with this line of questioning, “So what do these things want?”
“Don’t know. No one really does.” He started looking away from me again and back to searching for the eventual arrival of Hazel and his meals. “Lord I am hungry.”
I was getting frustrated. I wanted answers but this guy just seemed to be holding me hostage for a Grand Slam. “How can you not know? You sure seemed pretty intimately knowledgeable while you administered a flambé to it.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, “Did you notice a bunch of jawing back and forth an hour ago? They don’t always have mouths and none of them seem like they want to talk. They want to roar and tear and maybe spit on the laws of nature.”
He sighed at me, “This isn’t what you really want to know by the way.”
“It’s not? It seems pretty relevant to me to discern the nature of beings that I didn’t know existed yesterday.”
He chuckled, “Not really. It’s not like there is a manual on them or anything. We have never seen the same one twice. They are all so different that you can’t plan for them. So what if the next one assaults you with a claw that rips apart your past? You just deal with them and move on to the next one.”
He continued, “The important thing is how you deal with you.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.” I was alarmed. Could this vagrant mean me some sort of harm? I was reasonably sure I could handle him in a physical sense but his supernatural powers were another matter. I stopped a moment to consider if I had seen too much in my companion’s estimation to be allowed my freedom from the encounter.
He put on a faux-British accent, “You’re a wizard Harry.”
“My name is Howard,” I returned, which in retrospect is an odd thing to be concerned with at the moment. But the words tumbled from my lips unbidden as my mind raced to properly categorize the new information it had been gifted.
“It’s a joke Howard. Not the ‘you-being-a-wizard’ part but the movie reference. You are a wizard. It sucks by the way.”
“What?” I felt overwhelmed by the way my companion seemed to be hitting me with the verbal simile of buckshot. The way he continued to give me new data over and over again. Just as I got my head wrapped around monsters, I was a wizard. Just as I was told I was a magus, I was told it was horrible. It was a rubber band ball of awful.
“It sucks. Trust me.”
“No go back,” I kept feeling like I was missing something constantly. I decided to take these things in the order that they were introduced. No reason to put the spell book before the wand, I thought to myself. Why I found this mixing of my situational images and an old saying amusing I could not tell you.
My fellow clarified, “You are a wizard. You can readjust the nobs of reality and do stuff no one would believe. You can see shit like we saw today. Most people can’t do that. They don’t even register that they saw anything. When it gets bad and lower gods go unchecked, normal people blame earthquakes and hurricanes. But you saw the absolute truth. You saw that thing. You saw what it did to Omar. You saw me deal with it.”
“I saw flames.”
“You did. And you might be able to make some yourself,” his eyes flashed red at the suggestion. “Or you might be able to do ice. Or maybe you will be able to sniff the things before they can even enter this world. The power living inside you has probably already changed you in ways you haven’t even noticed yet.”
The food came just then which put a screeching halt to our conversation. He tucked into his food with gusto while I pondered the implications of what he just said. Had I been modified or altered in some way? I pondered my inductions about my dining partner and our waitress. I then pondered that I was using words like pondered now. I replayed the conversation we had been having and my vocabulary choices. I then realized I could replay the conversation from beginning to end!
I was at a deficit.
He continued somehow breathing through his partially masticated scrambled eggs (made by a lefty, interestingly enough), “Now you have to figure out what to do. Because your life, as you know it is fucked. Once you see this stuff once, you start to see it all the time. And once you see it, you can’t ignore it. And once you can’t ignore it, your life is a mess.”
He pontificated, “Don’t let David Blaine fool you. Wizards don’t make any money. Lower gods don’t come with a debit card. We still need to eat though. We still need shelter.”
“I have a means of employment,” I felt like I needed to interject. It wasn’t a great form of occupation and I was currently a bit affronted I was the mere assistant manager when I could easily enumerate several ways to increase productivity without reducing quality.
“You will lose it. This stuff takes over your life. You disappear for days. Days if you are lucky. I mean it Howard. I lost the better part of 2011. You can’t keep dates or appointments. You will lose your family to this and you get nothing back. No one thanks you. No one puts you on a statue. If you are lucky, they might throw you a buck on the side of the highway. The good news is you will die young.”
“That’s not reassuring”, the man was starting to tremble slightly as his voice raised an octave and a quarter. I surmised that his respiration was getting shallow and his adrenaline was starting to surge.
“It becomes that way. I was a lawyer once, had a kid with my girlfriend. I haven’t seen them in ages. But the fact is you will throw all that other stuff away. You will throw your job, your family, everything away. It gets to point where you either get snorted by a monster or you just off yourself to make the noises stop.”
He swallowed, “Or the world might end. That is the situation Howard. People think they can turn away and let someone else do it. But they can’t. They cannot separate from the horrors they see happening to the world from what they know. You start looking at everything differently,” the eating had stopped for now, “every weather report makes you sweat. Every news report makes you want to throw up. The question keeps going through your mind, was that one of those things that did it? Could I have stopped it?”
He started eating again, this time starting on the pancakes. I took him all in. Wrapped in degenerating rags and worse flesh, I saw this man face down a thing that shouldn’t exist. I saw someone who had sacrificed everything personally to think globally.
Hazel interrupted with a cough, “You folks all right? Can I get you anything else?”
I looked at my cup as my partner shook his head and speared a sausage link. I readdressed my choice of beverage, “Decaf.”
Original...
The things I saw. I could not explain them. The lights, the sounds, the angles, none of them were computing in my memory. I saw one man torn apart by smells. I saw another man force reality back into its neat little binder where it belonged. I sat with that man now. He told me he would explain everything for a meal. He looked like he could use a shower and a shave too as sweat and grease hugged him close. We went a nearby dive with free refills and no kids. He said he wanted to go somewhere he would not stand out. We slid into a booth and waited for ‘Hazel’ to take our orders. He ordered two plates of breakfast and a big glass of orange juice. He sort of chuckled when I just got a coffee.
“Don’t know about you man,” he smiled through yellow teeth, “but I do not need woken up after that. Woof.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Speaking of ‘that’…” I trailed off expecting him to give me some sense of understanding to all this shit.
His expression changed to something a bit more, I don’t know, professorial. He looked like he was about to give a dissertation on renaissance paintings or something. “Well, ‘that’ was a manifestation of a lower god who was trying to gain entry into our reality through an open window. I slammed it shut on his fingers.” He looked around the diner for a moment, seemingly more focused on how his eggs and pancakes were.
“I assume that’s the short version?”
“About what happened today? Not really. There are things not of this world that try to get into it. These things don’t follow silly rules like gravity or time or physics. They come in and start wrecking stuff for whatever reason. People like me can reinforce reality and send them back where they came from.”
“Wait,” I sputtered. “So these things…”
“We call them lower gods.”
“Okay, wait… why lower gods?”
“They can do god-like stuff. And they never seem too bright.”
“So what do these things want?”
“Don’t know. Lord I am hungry.” He started looking away from me again and back to searching for the eventual arrival of ‘Hazel’ and his meal.
I was getting frustrated. I wanted answers but this guy just seemed to be jerking me around for a Grand Slam. “How can you not know?”
He raised an eyebrow at me, “Did you notice a bunch of witty repartee an hour ago? They don’t always have mouths and none of them seem like they want to talk. They want to roar and tear and maybe spit on the laws of nature. This isn’t what you really want to know.”
“It’s not? It seems pretty important.”
He chuckled, “Not really. It’s not like there is a catalog of them or anything. They are all different so you can’t plan for them. You just deal with them.”
I didn’t like the “you” part of that sentence. He continued, “The important thing is how you deal with you.”
“Huh?”
He put on a faux-British accent, “You’re a wizard Harry.”
I muttered, “My name is Howard.”
“It’s a joke Howard. Not the ‘you-being-a-wizard’ part but the movie reference. You are a wizard. It sucks by the way.”
“What?”
“It sucks. Trust me.”
“No go back,” I kept feeling like I was missing something constantly. Like there was a camera around the corner ready to pounce and post this on the internet.
“You are a wizard. You can readjust the nobs of reality and do stuff no one would believe. You can see shit like we saw today. Most people can’t do that. They don’t even register that they saw anything. When it gets bad, they blame earthquakes and hurricanes. But you saw the truth. You saw that thing. You saw what it did to Omar. You saw me deal with it. ”
The food came just then which put a screeching halt to our conversation. He tucked into his food with gusto. You would think he hadn’t had a meal in days and that might have been the truth of the matter.
He continued somehow breathing scrambled eggs, “Now you have to figure out what to do. Because your life, as you know it is fucked. Once you see this stuff once, you start to see it all the time. And once you see it, you can’t ignore it. And once you can’t ignore it, your life is a mess.”
He continued, “Don’t let David Blaine fool you. Wizards don’t make any money. Lower gods don’t come with a debit card. We still need to eat though. We still need shelter.”
“I have a job,” I felt like I needed to interject. It wasn’t a great job but I wasn’t going to quit and become a magic hobo.
“You will lose it. This stuff takes over your life. You disappear for days. Days if you are lucky. I mean it Howard. I lost the better part of 2011 to this life. You can’t keep dates or appointments. You will lose your family to this and you get nothing back. No one thanks you. No one puts you on a statue. If you are lucky, they might throw you a buck on the side of the highway. The good news is you will die young.”
“Are you joking?”
“I was a lawyer once, had a kid with my girlfriend. I haven’t seen them in ages. But the fact is you will throw all that other stuff away. You will throw your job, your family, everything away.”
“I won’t…”
“Or the world might end. That is the situation Howard. People think they can turn away. But they can’t. They cannot separate from the horrors they see happening to the world from what they know.”
“Earthquakes?”
“You start looking at everything differently,” the eating had stopped for now, “every weather report makes you sweat. Every news report makes you want to throw up. The question keeps going through your mind, was that one of those things that did it? Could I have stopped it?”
“So what do I do?”
“You want my advice?”
“Why the fuck would I ask?”
“Hold on as long as you can. Fuck that clean break shit. I say struggle against it as long as you can. Squeeze every bit of happiness out of life like there won’t be a tomorrow. So when you are at your lowest, you have something to remember. Have something to hold onto when the laws of reality are doing the tango. I look back on my kid’s birth at my worst.”
He started eating again, this time starting on the pancakes. I took him all in. Wrapped in dirty clothes and dirty flesh, I saw this man face down a thing that shouldn’t exist. I saw someone who had sacrificed everything personally to think globally.
‘Hazel’ interrupted with a cough, “You folks all right? Can I get you anything else?”
“You know, I think I would like some eggs.”
“Don’t know about you man,” he smiled through yellow teeth, “but I do not need woken up after that. Woof.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Speaking of ‘that’…” I trailed off expecting him to give me some sense of understanding to all this shit.
His expression changed to something a bit more, I don’t know, professorial. He looked like he was about to give a dissertation on renaissance paintings or something. “Well, ‘that’ was a manifestation of a lower god who was trying to gain entry into our reality through an open window. I slammed it shut on his fingers.” He looked around the diner for a moment, seemingly more focused on how his eggs and pancakes were.
“I assume that’s the short version?”
“About what happened today? Not really. There are things not of this world that try to get into it. These things don’t follow silly rules like gravity or time or physics. They come in and start wrecking stuff for whatever reason. People like me can reinforce reality and send them back where they came from.”
“Wait,” I sputtered. “So these things…”
“We call them lower gods.”
“Okay, wait… why lower gods?”
“They can do god-like stuff. And they never seem too bright.”
“So what do these things want?”
“Don’t know. Lord I am hungry.” He started looking away from me again and back to searching for the eventual arrival of ‘Hazel’ and his meal.
I was getting frustrated. I wanted answers but this guy just seemed to be jerking me around for a Grand Slam. “How can you not know?”
He raised an eyebrow at me, “Did you notice a bunch of witty repartee an hour ago? They don’t always have mouths and none of them seem like they want to talk. They want to roar and tear and maybe spit on the laws of nature. This isn’t what you really want to know.”
“It’s not? It seems pretty important.”
He chuckled, “Not really. It’s not like there is a catalog of them or anything. They are all different so you can’t plan for them. You just deal with them.”
I didn’t like the “you” part of that sentence. He continued, “The important thing is how you deal with you.”
“Huh?”
He put on a faux-British accent, “You’re a wizard Harry.”
I muttered, “My name is Howard.”
“It’s a joke Howard. Not the ‘you-being-a-wizard’ part but the movie reference. You are a wizard. It sucks by the way.”
“What?”
“It sucks. Trust me.”
“No go back,” I kept feeling like I was missing something constantly. Like there was a camera around the corner ready to pounce and post this on the internet.
“You are a wizard. You can readjust the nobs of reality and do stuff no one would believe. You can see shit like we saw today. Most people can’t do that. They don’t even register that they saw anything. When it gets bad, they blame earthquakes and hurricanes. But you saw the truth. You saw that thing. You saw what it did to Omar. You saw me deal with it. ”
The food came just then which put a screeching halt to our conversation. He tucked into his food with gusto. You would think he hadn’t had a meal in days and that might have been the truth of the matter.
He continued somehow breathing scrambled eggs, “Now you have to figure out what to do. Because your life, as you know it is fucked. Once you see this stuff once, you start to see it all the time. And once you see it, you can’t ignore it. And once you can’t ignore it, your life is a mess.”
He continued, “Don’t let David Blaine fool you. Wizards don’t make any money. Lower gods don’t come with a debit card. We still need to eat though. We still need shelter.”
“I have a job,” I felt like I needed to interject. It wasn’t a great job but I wasn’t going to quit and become a magic hobo.
“You will lose it. This stuff takes over your life. You disappear for days. Days if you are lucky. I mean it Howard. I lost the better part of 2011 to this life. You can’t keep dates or appointments. You will lose your family to this and you get nothing back. No one thanks you. No one puts you on a statue. If you are lucky, they might throw you a buck on the side of the highway. The good news is you will die young.”
“Are you joking?”
“I was a lawyer once, had a kid with my girlfriend. I haven’t seen them in ages. But the fact is you will throw all that other stuff away. You will throw your job, your family, everything away.”
“I won’t…”
“Or the world might end. That is the situation Howard. People think they can turn away. But they can’t. They cannot separate from the horrors they see happening to the world from what they know.”
“Earthquakes?”
“You start looking at everything differently,” the eating had stopped for now, “every weather report makes you sweat. Every news report makes you want to throw up. The question keeps going through your mind, was that one of those things that did it? Could I have stopped it?”
“So what do I do?”
“You want my advice?”
“Why the fuck would I ask?”
“Hold on as long as you can. Fuck that clean break shit. I say struggle against it as long as you can. Squeeze every bit of happiness out of life like there won’t be a tomorrow. So when you are at your lowest, you have something to remember. Have something to hold onto when the laws of reality are doing the tango. I look back on my kid’s birth at my worst.”
He started eating again, this time starting on the pancakes. I took him all in. Wrapped in dirty clothes and dirty flesh, I saw this man face down a thing that shouldn’t exist. I saw someone who had sacrificed everything personally to think globally.
‘Hazel’ interrupted with a cough, “You folks all right? Can I get you anything else?”
“You know, I think I would like some eggs.”
MarkGoodhart on
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It doesn't really drag me in, I'm afraid. Some of the supernatural elements seem a bit... thrown-in? The main character being a wizard kind of comes out of nowhere.
Something else, also. Punctuation dictates the rhythm of the writing, kind of, the way the reader hears it in their head. The way you're using sometimes seems to skip a beat, and sometimes it's like it stops too often.
I went with this section of the story for the simple reason that it is hard to really write the unknowable monster from Dimension X without actually explaining it. By letting Howard try to describe it and failing, I was hoping to side-step the issue. I appreciate your honesty though. I think it gives me a lot to work with.
"Wrapped in dirty clothes and dirty flesh..." It has the right idea, but it reads really awkward. You're making a connection between his haggard state and the sacrifice, but you probably don't need to come right out and blatantly say that it's what you're doing. Instead of spelling it out for the reader you could lead them in the right direction without explicitly saying it. I think the context is there throughout the excerpt that this man is either completely insane and the narrative character doesn't know what to think, or the man is a testament to what he's been saying the last few bits of dialogue. He did an impossible thing because- because why? Because no one else could.
You might try to spice up the adjectives instead of using "dirty" twice in a row. "dirty clothing and soiled flesh..." or "This worn and ratty man..."
Part of the problem with this excerpt is that the reader is being dropped unceremoniously into the middle of a bizarre and confusing situation. I'm all for cutting the cloth low, but sometimes a little more context in the form of narrative and action will let you do away with the cumbersome exposition of "this is what I did, this is what I am, this is who you are, and it isn't a good thing" down to "you saw it, which makes you like me, and for that i'm sorry". The worldbuilding elements, especially the expository stuff where a character is spoon-feeding explanation, grinds any good narrative to a halt, and minimizing it wherever possible is usually best. You can't get around it, especially in stories with fantastic and supernatural elements of magic, dimensional travel, etc. But you can make that exposition as short as possible and as interesting as possible.
What I liked most about this is the opening, where a man is torn apart by smells. A bit more description of the crazy stuff happening, even from the narrator's confused perspective, I think would go a long way to making this a very good scene in what I assume is a much longer work?
Keep it up, and let us see how it develops.
Language is like a martial art; if you have a strong foundation, feel free to improvise.
This exemplifies I think a lot of what still doesn't work, and some of what does work. I'll break it down as best I can.
After the confrontation with the creature, I sort of had a fit. Nothing in particular wrong with this line. It actually quite succinctly and mildly amusingly gives the reader a sense of the narrator's mental state. He is blase about it, which is in confrontation with how he's acting.
Not so much a seizure as much as a bunch of screaming and yelling. This one doesn't really work for me, and I think it's because it feels unnecessary. Instead of describing the "fit" maybe a simile would get across the idea. After the confrontation with the creature, I sort of had a fit. Like a verbal seizure. The fact that it isn't a proper sentence is okay in context with the narrative since it's a first-person narrative, and you can get away with a few stream-of-consciousness fragments in first-person narratives.
I demanded that the man explain what exactly had just happened and what that thing was and a series of other reasonable questions asked in an unreasonable manner. He had a pretty infuriating blasé response which said my answers were contingent on a hot meal. You could probably cut down these two sentences into a really concise, powerful statement while making it less past perfect and more past tense. Get rid of the "had" in the second sentence. Through a series of reasonable questions asked in an unreasonable manner, I demanded to know what had just happened; he responded with some half-promise contingent on the suggestion of a hot meal.
We hopped in my car and went a nearby dive with free refills and no kids. He said he wanted to go somewhere he would not stand out with his current state of disrepair. First there's a missing word here: went toa nearby dive I also believe you could switch the sentences and pawn off some of the responsibility of where they go on the smell coming off the hobo. He asked to go somewhere he'd fit in. With the lingering stench coming off him I couldn't get him out of my car fast enough, so we stopped at a nearby dive where parents knew better than to bring their kids and the refills were free.
We slid into a booth and waited for Hazel to take our orders. Hazel was recently divorced and had two Labrador retrievers at home. Again, I don’t know exactly how I knew this. He ordered two plates of breakfast and a “honking big” glass of orange juice. It's obvious from context that the narrator has some kind of telepathic power, but I don't think it has be that obvious. We found a booth away from other people and sat in silence, awaiting the waitress. As she took the homeless man's order, "The bacon and egg platter, the pancake special with blueberry syrup if you've got it, and a big honkin' glass of OJ," it occurred to me that I knew this woman's name, and that Hazel had two Labrador retrievers in an otherwise-empty home. Changing up the order of things a bit gets rid of some pronoun confusion in he ordered two plates... Having it the way it was before, the context of "he" is lost some sentences prior, and isn't regained until the narrator asserts himself again. Even the fact that it's first-person narrative doesn't help in this kind of pronoun confusion.
He sort of chuckled when I just got a coffee. You can cut down this kind of sentence, freeing it up for different kinds of information, and lose nothing but gain something. "Just coffee," I said to Hazel, who smiled in a kind of long-suffering good cheer as she swept away from the table, and I instantly knew she associated the exchange with the expectation of a bad tip. The homeless man just chuckled. Even though Hazel might be just window-dressing (I'm not entirely convinced she is), creating something meaningful out of their interactions gives the entire scene something extra. If, for instance, the narrator leaves a sizeable tip, more than 50%, we'll say, he gets to be privy to her shocked but pleased surprise as they're leaving.
Language is like a martial art; if you have a strong foundation, feel free to improvise.