SHUT UP AND SAY SOMETHING

these are just here in case I need them for Sharafy's class, today

D Stephen Alberts (or "Another Story I've Started but will Never Ever Finish")

"We all die," Cara said, stroking D's cheek, and he had to suppress the rush of hot anger that threatened to flood him. He had to stop himself knocking her hand away. Her dress, a slinky, black number with a lot of something that might have been silk, slipped from one shoulder, and she made no move to replace it. He wondered if it was deliberate. She dropped her hand from his face, and he realized that he missed her, already. "I'm not dead, yet," she told him, as if reading his mind. She pushed the silk from her other shoulder, and the dress fell to the floor with a whisper. With great effort, he tore his eyes from hers and looked her up and down. She was as thin as ever she'd been, but paler than he'd ever seen her. His hands found her shoulders, and before he knew what had happened, he was embracing her. She made a sound against his chest that could have been a sigh or a sob, and he held her tighter. Gently, she pushed away from him, and he loosed his hold on her. She took his hand and led him to the bedroom, where they made love for what was to be the last time. When he woke, the sun shone on his face, and he knew without looking that she had gone. He couldn't blame her, really. It was probably his fault she had gone. Who would want to spend their last days with someone who had already begun to mourn them? He stood and walked, still naked, to the kitchen. He found it on the refrigerator, the note. The note he had expected for a week. The yellow post-it read:

Gone back to NY to [there was something scribbled out that he thought was "die] be with my family. Please don't follow me. Come to the fune see [and continued on a second post-it] me off, you know, after it's done. I Love You.

He took the yellow papers and crumpled them into a ball; he threw them away, and then he grabbed them out of the trash. He would shower. He would go to the park or the Sound, try to clear his head, try to be strong, and try to do as Cara had asked. ................................................................................ The collar of D's winter jacket was turned up so that nothing below his nose showed from the side. From the front, the lower half of his face belonged to a centurion, as nothing wider than his mouth was uncovered. From the back he was Dracula, leaning on a rail, throwing chicken to the crabs. If a piece didn't immediately break the tension of the frigid, salty water, a dozen seagulls would dive for it in an instant. Twice, an eagle had snatched the chicken from the air. Next to D in the early-spring cold was a five-feet and two-inches-tall Mediterrainian-looking man. His brown-black hair was pulled back in a coarse tail and held in place by a strip of leather tied into a hasty bow. A golden ring glinted from his left ear, and its partner sparkled weakly on his right hand in the subdued light. D was convinced that Salvador was a pirate, no matter how many laughing denials the latter had professed. D had tried a dozen times in the past six months to get a good picture of Salvador, half of which were surreptitious attempts. Each had yielded the same result as the first: a picture of a small man from Spain, sometimes with a grin which made him look toothless, and always with his eyes firmly closed. D threw a sidelong glance at Salvador and found the man's green eyes staring directly into his own. "Where is your," a pause, "novia?" Salvador's eyes seemed to grow both larger and greener, and his low, heavy brows arched themselves high onto his forehead. "She's," D leaned back as Salvador moved an inch forward, "in New York with her family." "Why have you," another pause, "e-stayed behind?" "She-- She asked me to," D admitted without meaning to. "Why?" "She makes you e-smile, even in this," he gestured to the low ceiling of clouds, "exceptional weather." He looked pointedly at D. "Every one needs a reason to e-smile." "And what's yours?" D asked before he could stop himself. A flicker of something, maybe pain, maybe sorrow, flashed across the small man's face. "I have had," he said, turning back to the ocean, "many, in my time. Some were older, but most were younger." Salvador looked out at the Sound, but D thought he was seeing something else. "I miss my children," he said to the cold air. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, smelling the salt. "I-- didn't know you had children, Sal," D said, unsure how to cheer him up. "I do not," Salvador said. Then, as an answer to D's confused look, "They have all passed," he wiped at one eye, "and some time ago." "I'm sorry, Sal," D said as he fought the urge to produce a camera from within his coat. At times like this, D hated himself. "No, no," Salvador told him, waving a hand. "No hay problema. Not your fault." It began to rain soon after that, and the pair headed for the small coffee shop Salvador had procured a decade earlier. And uncle or grandfather-- D could never really remember which-- had left him a small fortune and Sal had fulfilled a lifelong dream in buying the place. He liked coffee, and he loved the rain, so Seattle had almost been a given. They talked for a while over coffee, but really said nothing at all. Finally, D said goodbye and went to his apartment. He rifled through portfolios and stacks of reference photos. He painted a little, and he slept a lot. He kept the same routine-- eat, go to the Sound, have coffee with Salvador, paint, and eat before sleeping-- for another six days, until he got the message. He had come back from Sal's to see his answering machine blinking at him. Hope and fear waged decades of war in an instant as he dashed to the machine but couldn't, for a moment, hit the button labeled "Play." "Stephen," the voice was scratchy on the old and overused tape, but he could recognize the voice of Alice, Cara's mother. She and Salvador were the only ones who called him by his middle name, claiming that "D" was no kind of first name at all. "Stephen," Alice's voice said, again, and she choked back a sob. "It's-- She's gone, Stephen. I-- Th-the funeral is Sunday at n-noon, the wake is Saturday at seven." She set the phone down and blew her nose. "I hope you can come to both," she said, and that was it. D listened to the message twice more, then deleted it, then regretted deleting it. He didn't cry. H couldn't cry. He booked a flight the next day with Salvador, and they went to the wake and the funeral together. D did not sit with Cara's family, as he didn't feel it was his right.

El Sol Del Verano

I feel the heat of
the Summer Sun
and lament that the
rain has not returned.
Harsh light and
hot breezes sting
my eyes and burn
my skin.
The sweat rolls down
my spine;
the humid air stops
its leaving
and performing its
function.
Cement and
Asphalt
sear my bare feet.
Only the grass knows.
Only the trees understand.
They provide the cool,
the shade,
the gentle whispers
of comfort,
shielding me from
the Summer Sun.

Lantern

this is the lantern I hope to make in ceramics, if the assignments allow for it...

More of Wren

Wren had laughed at Castonnei, she had laughed at Julia and Quincy. She had laughed when they mentioned training sessions, simulations, practice. She had laughed, but it had all been for show, a completely false bravado. Wren had been nervous at the idea of having to prove herself. She shuddered, internally, at the prospect of humiliation.

But when she had fallen, when she had stumbled or walked into traps -- many of which had covered her in purplish slime -- the others had not laughed. They had not jeered. This was a place of teamwork, Castonnei had told her, not a place of stinging jokes and biting comebacks. This, he had said, was a place of trust, and Wren was no longer worried about embarrassing herself. She was, however, worried that this little band of thieves might be the beginnings of a cult.

Wren thought about these things as she pushed herself up, a hand sliding in the cold, clear gel on the floor. She opened a communications line, and she knew a tiny light would be blinking somewhere in her head, signifying a successful link had been established.

"Fabian?" she asked aloud. Fabian Connected, read a translucent-blue overlay, blinking in her field of vision. It scrolled out of the way and left a small, slowly turning icon of a rotary dial of the same color, just at the edge of her sight.

"Wren," said Fabian. The robot's voice echoed slightly inside Wren's head, an effect she had designed herself. The transmission connected directly to her auditory nerve, another part of which acted as her microphone, so no one else would be able to hear her correspondent.

"What's this goo?" she asked him, squinting at her hand and switching on her visual link. "It was on the floor of the session room. Any ideas?"

"Quincy," he said, "has been working on a new defensive system." His voice gave away both pride and annoyance, for his creator's ingenuity and Wren's apparent ignorance, respectively.

"What's it do?"

"What it's just done," he said with the same mix of annoyed pride. "You slipped through the laser and onto pressure-sensitive areas of the floor. Even assuming you had escaped successfully, the gel is laden with nano-robots meant to track you and provide assistance in your arrest or capture." He sounded smug, in her head.

"Thank you, Fabian," she said and cut the connection. She would have given Fabian a friendlier personality, she thought.

"Take Cicero, for example," she said to the empty room as Cicero flew through the window to her in his many small, ornate, bug-like pieces.

"An example of what?" Cicero asked. He landed and appeared almost to shatter or melt as his pieces became yet more pieces. The reassembled themselves into an eight-inch approximation of a human. Like a fluorescent light, skin, hair, and a toga blinked into life, hiding Cicero's inner workings, Even Fabian didn't have holo-emitters!

"A good robot," Wren told him, and she patted his tiny head. He glared at her, feigned indignance playing on his face. Without warning, Cicero jumped and curled into a ball. When he landed, it was on the four paws of a sleek, grey cat with ice-blue eyes. He purred at her and said:

"Now you may pet me." Wren grabbed him and crooked him into one arm. She could not help but appreciate her own craftsmanship: he was indiscernible from a real cat, if one ignored the talking.

"You," she said, poking his pink nose, "sent me excellent telemetry." Cicero closed his eyes as she scratched behind his ears. It was true. Without Cicero constantly scanning the environment, her new program -- and several others -- wouldn't work at all. Wren depended on Cicero, her closest friend, as much as he depended on her for maintenance and power. Even his memory was linked to hers.

...more to come (?)

(p.s... this was really more... trying to introduce ideas... sorry if it's slow)

elves cry, too

Tears,

hot as

molten iron,

rolled

down his face.

One

by one

by one.

He pushed

a shaking hand

through his

long hair,

dark and brown

as stained oak.

A ring on

his hand

and a ring in

his pointed ear

clinked together,

and he thought

of ripping out

the latter.

Eyes the shade

of unripened

grapes

streamed more iron

down the cheeks,

spoiling the

handsome features.

The man,

the Fae,

glared at the

world

through his tears.

He smelled their

salt

and tasted blood

as his teeth,

sharper than yours and

sharper than mine,

sank into his

livid tongue.

Grief and

Rage and

Hurt

took their turns

overpowering him,

and they fought

for dominance.

He cried,

and he bled,

and he

poured out his

loss

'til the

world was gone

and he was

hollow

and dust.

Wren (yet another work in progress...)

Broken glass tinkled gently, quietly, for a split second before the shards were torn from this existence, this dimension. Wren was good. Wren was very good. She was handling her newest upgrades with professional ease, almost grace. With a twitch of her concentration, Wren's world flared brighter. She recognized the infrared and ultraviolet colors, even though they were new to her.

Gazing at the lasers which now rather overtly crisscrossed the room, Wren accessed one of the formerly empty portions of her brain. This section was suited for software, and she had written some impressive lines of code, herself. This was a new program, but in time she would access it instinctively.

Wren watched a yellow-white overlay of the room's contours settle in her field of vision, cross-hatched with the UV strands of the laser grid. Her goal, a door outlined in bright red, lay across the room. With a thought, various paths, indicated in green, simulated themselves across the space. They bore labels such as Easiest, Fastest, Acrobatic, and Footpath. With another thought, pressure-sensitive areas of not only the floor, but also the walls, were revealed to her. The program compensated, re-plotting courses. Easiest and Footpath disappeared.

Wren selected Fastest with an imaginary cursor and the information sat in a buffer section of her brain, near her spinal cord. She imagined she could feel it there, waiting, anticipation building. After another moment's suspense, she thought, very clearly, very deliberately, Execute Program.

Wren watched in a slightly detached way as the program told her legs how to run, how to jump. It told her arms how to counter-weigh and push off the safe portions of the walls and floor. The program told Wren's eyes where to look and her lungs when to breathe. It was working very well; Wren was pleased.

Halfway across the room, Wren's foot hit something wet, and it slipped. The program compensated, but the damage had been done. Cancel Program, she thought. Wren sighed, then groaned. Her head had hit the floor, and hard, just after it had passed through an ultraviolet beam.

Lights flashed between yellow and blue, and an alarm buzzed and whooped, alternating. End training session, she thought, enunciating each word in her head. Overhead lights kicked on, and the alarms ceased. They left a hollow ringing in Wren's ears.

A woman was just here. I could smell her through the glass. She smelled like the old library. It's a smell like dying books...

Kiss my ass, romantic comedy. The guy doesnt always get the girl. (That's the "hopeless" part of "hopeless romantic")

I want a credit card that reads "GOD" or "JESUS CHRIST" on the section for the name. That would NEVER be declined...

desolation

JUMP!

yup. grashopper. adorable.

:)

He's a toad.

He's cute.

Accept his cuteness.

(Or else!)

Hunter.

And that's when I knew...

Weeping, cradling the blackened, cauterized stump of my left forearm, I knew.

You were gone...

I cried in silence; my haggard breathing was the only sound.

I could still feel the sharp, hot metal in my right leg, though it had been removed hours before.

How I longed to hold you in my arms -- my arm -- just one more time. I wished I could tell you I loved you. Your face swam in my tears, and through their salt I could taste your kiss. Remnants of you burned me deeper than the explosions, the ensuing fires, had.

I wept and I bled and I wished for death. God, why couldn't I have just died!

But I didn't die. Not on the outside, anyway.

There was work yet to be done.

I had to find you...

I had to kill you all over, again...

My love. My tragic love. Not alive.

You're not alive.

Why can't you see that you're not alive?

I have to kill you, because you're not alive...

You have to die...

Because you're not alive...

Baby bunnies!!

My brother found baby bunnies while mowing!

Photos

Here's the sunset from the parking lot at Chipotle.

And this douchebag is riding a motorcycle without a helmet, though he HAS one next to his ass. When he's in the back of an ambulance, he'll regret that... I have no doubt (as long as his brains aren't all over the pavement...).

This is the Davis Memorial in Hiawatha, Kansas. It's "famous" I guess... o.O

You're on my mind way more than I thought you would be... It's confusing, and I'm not sure how to feel, what to do. Wing it, I guess...

On an unrelated note, Seven-Foot Black Guy, a customer of mine, has joined to ranks of Dillons Security, alongside Very Pregnant Woman and Kindly Middle-Aged Man.

Drawings!

This is a tree from Tecumseh Park and my parents' work picnic.

I made a memorial for all the baby mice that have died at work... poor guys...

Were...something...

I drew a werewolf at work today. Or... probably a werefox? I don't imagine werewolves having such large hands (but bigger feet). Or tails, either. That's just me, though.

It's on the back of (half of) a sheet from the memo pad at work.

A (hopefully) short story...

Rain fell on the cement-and-brick stairs at the front door of the dark house. It's whispered song echoed across the street for the man in the midnight traveling cloak. He stood out in the small hamlet, an anachronism in a velvet top hat -- or he would have, were it daytime. He stood next to a street light made to look like a gas lamp as out-of-time as he was. Its electric bulb flickered as he touched the lamppost absently. It was as fake, as fraudulent, as everything else in the village.

The man's face was hidden in the heavy shadows of his hat. Maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe something about the face itself made it hard to make out. Maybe the face was hideous, grotesque to a point that the eyes overlooked it, that the mind denied its existence. Maybe there was something even more strange about the man himself; maybe there was no face at all.

The man's dark silhouette changed shape as he lifted a cane as midnight as his cloak and as glistening as the wet street. A swift motion and a tinkling of broken glass later, the light was out, and the man was gone to all perception.

Ariana shivered. Had the man seen her? She had been staring from one of the dark house's third-storey windows, trying her damnedest not to breathe. Now she found she couldn't move at all. She stared wide-eyed into the darkness the man had once -- maybe still -- occupied. She strained for any hint of the tap of a cane or a footstep, but all she could hear was the rain.

Whatever idiot had designed these street lights had also placed them too far apart for even one to burn out (or to be shattered, for that matter). If only there had been lightning, then maybe Ariana would be able to see through the inky blackness. As if to prove her point, a single, solitary flash of static electricity jumped from one cloud to another. She leaned forward, pressing her hand against the glass, and saw the space next to the lamppost completely unoccupied, but perhaps that was a dark shape moving away, a block down the empty, one-a.m. street. Perhaps...

"Look who's finally up," Emily said, smiling from behind a bowl of cereal as large as Ariana's head. Ariana smiled a weak smile and glanced at a clock. Eleven thirty.

"At least I'm up before noon," she said, shoving an unruly bunch of brunette hair behind her ear. "Trouble getting to sleep last night," she explained. "There was a..." She stopped.

"A what, now?" Emily asked.

"I... Don't remember. Must've been a dream. I thought-- I thought there was someone, something, watching the house, last night."

"Sounds like a dream," Emily said, but her voice held a note of concern, a note of sympathy. She looked worried. "Come here, hon," she said, pulling a chair away from the small table and removing a stack of magazines from it. Ariana sat down, rested her elbow on the cluttered table, and propped her cheek on her hand. The lock of hair had escaped her ear, again, and Emily pushed it back for her. She brushed Ariana's cheek softly, perhaps more slowly than was necessary, before she pulled her hand back.

"You used to have dreams, didn't you, Ari?" Emily asked her. "When you first moved here, I mean." Her concern was plain on her face, and Ariana, named for some great-grandmother, somewhere, felt a little guilty for bringing it up. Emily had feelings for Ariana, and it would be so easy a thing to reciprocate them. Ariana missed closeness. She missed relationship. She ached to be held.

"Yeah," she said, sitting up and looking at her hands, trying to clear her head. "Those were just dreams, though. Normal nightmares." She looked into Emily's eyes and tried not to blink. "This was almost real." A small part of Ariana wondered how much longer she could continue denying the way she felt about Em, but the rest of her buried that part. "The man..." she thought aloud. "The man had a hat... and a cloak... He had a cane!" she said, her eyes wide, excited with memory. "He--" she broke off. "The street light!"

Ariana jumped and bolted for the door, hurtling Henri, the thin, grey cat which seemed to belong to the entire household, on the way. Emily followed her out, apologizing to Henri on the way. He looked at her unblinking, disinterested, as she went.

Ariana was already headed back to the house when Emily reached the open front door. She held her hands tightly together before her, as if she had caught a firefly and wanted to show it to whoever would look.

"See?" she said, excitement and fear jockying for control within her. "He broke the lamp," she told Em. Ariana opened her hands, and Emily saw a small, yellow-white shard of glass resting there. "It was real," Ariana whispered, and something deep inside Emily worried for her friend's sanity.

[Looks like it'll be longer than I'd hoped for...]

So hell. I have no idea what to write. It sucks. A lot. I feel useless, impotent, even. What the hell...