Bayou Sauvage – Chapter 4

She smelled overused oil, fish, and something that might have been pine trees, but she wasn’t sure as she fought her way to consciousness.  Muted light seeped through her closed eyelids and with a herculean effort she lifted them, and cried out as the bright light stabbed her retinas.

‘Here..’

She pushed against the hands holding a glass of water and two white pills and, silently promising revenge, sat up and dropped her legs off the side of the table. Her head throbbed, that was no lie, but her jaw.  Her hand cradled the left side of her face, ‘ow, ow, ow!’.

Again the white pills were thrust under her nose, ‘take them.’

One eye closed, she peered through the lashes of the remaining one at the man before her, ‘feeling guilty?’

Dak growled.

Katriana groaned and slid off the table her hands resting upon the top until the world stopped spinning and she could focus.  She took in the shabby but clean kitchen of Ms. Prissy’s.  She was home.

She moved slowly toward the sink area and a small cabinet labeled, First Aid. Flipping the door open she reached in and pulled out headache powders and quickly upended two of them into her mouth.  Hand bracing on the side of the sink she turned the water to full blast and cupped her hand beneath the flow drinking of the palm filled coolness.

She turned resting back to the sink and took in the angry man standing in her kitchen, ‘what do you want?’

Dak dropped the pills in the trash, ‘he wants you in Biloxi next Saturday night.’

‘No.’

‘Kit, you don’t have a choice.’

Katriana, moved away from the sink and to the wall, sinking slowly to rest her aching jaw against the cool floor tiles, ‘No.’

Frustrated Dak grabbed a towel and filled it with ice from the ice machine, ‘don’t be stupid, Kit.  You know what he is.’  Dak squatted and handed the ice filled towel to her.

‘A murdering , lying, heartless S.O.B’ she murmured.

‘A vampire,’ Dak hissed trying to make her see reason, ‘a freaking vampire.’

Kit sat up grabbing the cold towel and placed it against her jaw, ‘and’ she snarled then winced ‘he was a soulless, murdering piece of crap when his heart was beating what has changed? The fact that he’s no longer vegan?’

Dak’s head dropped slowly shaking at her foolishness, ‘what’s changed’ he rumbled, his eyes rising to meet hers ‘is that he wants you, like him.’

Dak dodged as Kit threw the sodden towel at him then winced as pain flooded her face,  ‘Tell him I’ll do Biloxi,’ a relieved breath he didn’t know he was holding escaped, ‘then tell the freaking vampire, Kitty says it’ll be the last one.’

Dak’s heart tumbled into his stomach, ‘Kit…’

‘Go away Dak,’ she sighed wearily sliding back to the tile floor, ‘I’m not into minions right now,’ she moaned as her eyelashes fluttered to the throb of pain.

Drabble Word Count: 499

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Bayou Sauvage – Chapter 3

The bus pulled into the depot, and sluggishly deposited it’s content of travelers into the humid, mosquito clouded night of another Louisiana dirt water town. Katriana shifted the baseball cap on her head pulling it lower against the brassy lights of the terminal’s street lamps as she pulled her overnight case behind her away from the crowd and into the shadows.

With the exception of her overnight case dragging along concrete she moved quietly until the warmth of human conversation faded and only the intermittent sounds of a town asleep touched her ears.  Abruptly she lifted the overnight case and moved through the shadows till she found what she had been looking for, the stench of mud as the tide receded, and the disheveled shadows of a dock long abandoned.

Tossing the bag over the side her whispered snarl interrupted the quiet lapping of water, ‘it’s the last time.’  Her hands jammed into her jeans pockets, ‘I’ve repaid my father’s debt!’  Her eyes attempted to peel back the shadows to reveal the man.  She needed to know he understood, no more.

‘No.’

The simple word, spoken without anger, without acknowledgement hit her with the force of a middleweight fighter in the stomach.  She gasped bent slightly as footsteps drew near, and the tall silhouette of a male closed the distance, slender fingers tugging the ball cap from her head.

Midnight curls sprung – released from their confinement – to bounce in a madcap dance about her head as a slender finger lifted her chin to meet the steely gaze of it’s owner.  ‘Not until, I say it’s done is it done.’

She pushed his hand away, and stepped back her eyes filled with hatred, ‘you can’t make me do these runs.’

He smiled, his hands slipping along suit material to find his pockets, ‘Kitty,’ she grimaced at the nickname he gave her, ‘Kitty’ his smile turned lethal as she felt her arms grabbed and her body lifted on level with his eyes, ‘you really should learn not to scratch the hand that pets you..’

Hard knuckles tore through the corner of her mouth as her head jerked back with the blow, ‘Asshole’ she muttered forcing herself to look back at him as she licked the blood from the corner of her lip.

‘You have no idea,’ he grinned before turning to leave, ‘but you will,’ she shuddered in the hands that held her as back to her he lifted his hand and waggled his index finger at her, ‘you will.’

The next blow took her unaware, sinking her into oblivion.

Drabble Word Count: 428

Blogadoh..

You know, I really was struck by the quote I shared in my post ‘This Life’, but I gotta admit to realizing two things after re-reading my additional little blogadoh;

1 – I was stuck in cliche hell that particular moment – no as I think about it, the whole dog-gone day!   And ..

2 – My fingers are driven by what ever is going on around me at the time, and at the moment I wrote the last post I was starved!!  Ice cream? Beer? Chocolate eclairs? … or maybe it was one of ‘those’ moments, you know … those moments?

Oh what’s ‘blogadoh‘?  It’s Inky speak for meandering words that try to sound erudite, and worldly – the emphasis being on ‘try’- with a final resolution of a, Fail.

Gotta laugh at yourself…

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This Life..

“This life is what you make it. No matter what, you’re going to mess up sometimes, it’s a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you’re going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends – they’ll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything – they’re your true best friends. Don’t let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they’ll come and go too. And baby, I hate to say it, most of them – actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can’t give up because if you give up, you’ll never find your soul mate. You’ll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don’t, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.”  Marilyn Monroe

I found this today while doing research for a project at work and instantly fell in love with it and had to share.   There is no denying, Marilyn Monroe went through a lot of pain and hardship yet it seems she knew what it meant, Life.  To use the cliche ‘been there, done that, burned the t-shirt’ would be frivolous, but true.

But then so have you, and you with the beer, and you over there eating ice cream and reading this post.  Yeah my mistakes, joys and heartaches are all my own, but then so are yours, and while it may not matter what measures of each your life consistently deals with, what does matter is that I can say, ‘I know. I really know..’ and mean it.  You’re not alone…

Life is one of the most dizzying roller coaster rides out there, but if you’re anything like me, you’d grab another ticket and stand in line to do it over, and over, and over again as many times as they’d let you, or until they shut down the circus.

I know I’m that way – a creamy chocolate eclair wrapped by a glutton for punishment, so sweet and yummy on the inside but pure hell getting there!

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Bayou Sauvage – Chapter 2

Condensation beaded on the glass, as an ice cube chinked and dropped lower in the amber fluid.  Rady Joe, Club Voletta’s handyman, rubbed the chest of his sweat stained t-shirt, and swallowed, his eyes glued to the glass and it’s contents.  He had come to the big man’s office to report when he noticed the abandoned glass.  Giving in to his tired leg’s urging he sat on the long couch in front of the observation glass looking out over the club floor and studied the amber fluid.

‘It taken care of?’

Rady Joe nodded his tongue brushing against his suddenly parched bottom lip.

‘I said,’ Rady Joe froze at the soft spoken growl, and turned toward the tall slender man watching the club floor ‘is it taken care of?’

‘Yeah,’ the handyman assured him, as from behind a hand swept around his throat and slowly began to squeeze.  Rady Joe felt his throat closing and fought with the loss of air to get his words out, ‘yessir, jez like you said, two miles in the swamp, weighed down.’  The last was whispered past fingers meeting around his windpipe.

Suddenly free, his own hands reached to brush his bruised skin as he gulped life giving air, his eyes darting with fright to the broad shoulder bodyguard he had not heard enter the room. The whiskey glass appeared before his lips as Club Voletta’s owner smirked at his man.  ‘He was just leaving, weren’t you Rady Joe?’

Glass empty, hands trembling, the handyman pressed against the edges of the room, away from the intimidating guard and headed for the door, ‘yes sir’ was the only thing left in the room as the door creaked shut.

The club owner brushed down his Armani suit and turned back to watching the club floor, ‘have them replace the couch’ he ordered.  Nodding, the bodyguard headed for the door only to be stopped, ‘..and Dak?’

Dak turned and for the first time looked into the eyes of the man who signed his paychecks. He could see nothing not even his reflection.  Caught he continued to stare into the twin black holes.  A vision of being snared in their gravity, and pulled screaming, deep within their darkness flooded his mind before he blinked.  A frission of fear slipped down his spine as twin pinpoints of red glowed in the centers.

‘Take care of that for me,’ Club Voletta’s owner flicked his finger at the door through which Rady Joe had disappeared, his smile filled with awareness of the bodyguard’s fear.

Dak turned and headed out of the club office, his hands clenched in fists to keep them from trembling.  His eyes moving over the concealed staging of bodyguards throughout the club. He wondered whether they had seen as well. He shook his head, and hunched his shoulders against another ripple of fear.   They couldn’t have or they all would have come to the same conclusion he just had; they were damned.   They were all, irrevocably damned.

Drabble – Word Count 499

Of Turtles and Tardiness

So I was smack dab in the middle of my commute this morning and I noticed a little commotion in the lanes across the way; so being the type of person I am – *cough* nosy *cough* – I pulled off the road to see what was going on.

Apparently a turtle was trying to cross a four lane highway, and had stopped right on the middle white line.   Of course, three or four motorist of good moral fiber had stopped to ‘help’ the turtle.  Trouble was, they couldn’t agree on which way the turtle had been traveling in order to put him on the side of the road he was heading toward.

Discussion was heated, meanwhile the four lane suddenly found itself a two lane because cars were beginning to pile up in the ‘fast’ lane holding the good samaritan’s cars.  It has a truck horn that finally got the good samaritan’s attention, and finally one of them suggested my side of the road or at least I think he did because he was pointing my way.

Traffic was halted while one of the samaritans picked up the turtle by the shell and carried it across to a farm field planted in tobacco to the right of me and released the creature.

Two things occurred to me as I watched the turtle while traffic cleared to it’s normal flow.

1 – I wonder what the samaritans used as an excuse for being late when they got to work?  ‘Sorry Boss, I had to help a turtle cross the road..’  Naww, they wouldn’t would they?  and..

2 – Do turtles eat tobacco leaves?   Evidently not, not long after the commotion died down the turtle’s head cleared its shell bobbing slightly, before legs popped out and lifted the shell turning it in the opposite direction right back toward the highway.

Interested in the outcome, I picked up the turtle and put it on the passenger seat of my car and drove it across the road, and set it under a shady tree.   Within moments the head emerged again along with the legs, and headed off into the underbrush.

I sat for another ten minutes sipping my morning coffee, and wondered what excuse I would use for being late to work, then I remembered a quote I once read; ‘Two wrongs dont make a right, but they make a good excuse!’

I started the car and headed on in to work.

The quote by the way, is attributed I think to Tom Szasz.  If not please correct me.

Oh, my excuse? ‘I got caught up in research’, I told my boss with absolutely sincerity, ‘on the human response to stress induced safety problems, and how they are resolved’

Maybe its the type of work we do, or my sincerity, who knows but he bought it. Lateness for helping a turtle cross the road, excused.

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Inky & writing..

Mr Grossman of Time best defined it back in 2011: “Fan-fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couch bound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”

I really liked the ‘brilliant pop-culture junkies’ reference but suffered some qualms about the sealed in a bunker scenario somehow that just sounded, uhm.. sweaty.

I write fan fiction. I do it to exercise my writing muscle. I tried taking the well known course of keeping a daily journal but found within two months, I simply did not have anything of interest to say to myself, about myself. Sobering, huh? Then I discovered fan-fiction. For a long time I simply read, and kept my journal. Researched, and ignored my journal. Read some more and used my journal for kindling in the fireplace.

Then I opened my laptop, and began to write.  It was like balloons, and hot dogs at the county fair, jet skis, and freshwater tubing, sneaking out for a date, getting your first kiss and not getting caught. In other words, F.U.N! Before long I was letting my imagination have free rein and I discovered it was larger, a tad bit more naughtier than I knew, and always, always up for the adventure.

With each story, my writing muscle grew leaner, meaner, and before long frankly I fell in love.  Which shouldn’t have been surprising since I always went for the lean, tough guys.

What was I going on about? Just this, write what excites you, what lets you sit in front of the laptop typing frantically as tears waterfall down your cheeks, or you burst out laughing fingers clacking away. Because writing is a conversation between you and your imagination.  Your fingers acting as the dutiful secretary  recording for prosperity your soul smeared on paper for everyone to examine.  With that kind of price tag if it’s not at least half way fun, what’s the purpose?  Why do it?

By the way, the laughing out loud, and the waterfall of tears part while typing? Yea, same night in the span of an hour during which my family threatened to call Fire and Rescue what a hullabaloo!

In the end, the story got rave reviews and my imagination and I, were healthier, happier, ready to conquer another plot line, and miscreant characters.  This time, though, they were my own.

Bayou Sauvage Chapter 1

The drone of bullfrogs, and crickets stilled as a heavy darkness spilled across the green mire of swamp water, and slithered across the boat’s hull like cold oil.  A fission of awareness erupted into tiny bumps across his skin.  Heart thudding, he shivered against the momentary unseasonable cold whisperings and peered into the night.   He waited, but no lights flared, there was no sound of water being disturbed by an oar, or the thud of feet upon the bank, still he remained uneasy . Focusing on the task at hand he quickly tighten the rope and secured it in an old sailor’s knot.

‘That should do it,’ he rasped before reaching between his legs, and lifting the well secured cargo by one end.  Struggling with the heavy load, his muscle’s screamed as the boat rocked slightly with the harsh movement.  He froze, muscles tense, and let the boat’s rocking ease before expelling a breath he didn’t know he was holding.  Grunting, his stance steady, he tightened his hold and lifted the object to the boat’s lip.

Sweat glistened then fell from beneath the hair at his temples,  He swiped at it with the hem of his shirt and studied the rope crowned tarp. He was getting to old for this kind of work, he grumbled as he bent and pushed slightly at the load resting on the boat edge before moving down its side to the head.  Cold hunger filled eyes surrounded him as he studied the tarp’s outline long enough to catch his breath.

It really was too bad, he lifted the head and maneuvered it to the side of the boat and let it rest for moment. She had been such a bright girl, a pretty face, with a sweet disposition.  He shook his head against the flash of regret then pushed the human filled tarp into the murky depths with a dull splash.   He watched the tarp sink as the added weight of the cinder blocks did their work.

A knowing silence filled the swamp as the gurgling of the sinking tarp slowly ended with it’s disappearance below the murky surface. The latest in a long line of secrets he figured as he raised a well used whiskey bottle and took a deep drink.  Running his arm across his mouth he sat and followed the slow burn through his chest as the swamp recovered.  It was eerily quiet with only the whine of a mosquito swarm, before the gentle splash of a fish, then cricket song, followed quickly with a big cat’s anger filled howl in the far distance as reflective eyes peered intently at him from the water’s edge.

Lifting the whiskey bottle again he drew deeply only to choke, then erupt into ragged coughs, spewing flecks of blood into his fist, his chest on fire.  His breath labored he wiped his lips, and moved to the oars. The Boss – he shivered hands tightening on the oars – would be waiting.

Drabble – 493 words.

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Drabble

Drabble (Noun) – an extremely short work of fiction of exactly one hundred words in length, not necessarily including the title.  It’s purpose is brevity, and the expression of ideas in a confined space. 

That’s the common definition, I use the term rather loosely not confining myself to the 100 word limit.  I have decided to write a Drabble Story starting this week, fiction of course.

The story will have short chapters of no more than 500 words, until its ending.  How many chapters will be involved I cannot say since the characters have always determined the pace, motives, and length.

It’s name is Bayou Sauvage.  It’s reason; fifteen years ago I created a game for an online social network.  I wrote the premise, the background story, the characterizations, the rules, and was the writer of many of the storylines until I walked away from it ten years ago.  I spent a lot of time researching, building the characters and storylines and I grew to love the story itself.  So I decided to bring it back to life because I can.  I hold the copyright…..

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Saturdays with spirit

Saturday mornings are my paranormal days.  No work, no need to be anywhere, a large mug of Blue Mountain coffee, a quiet house and me – remote in hand giving free rein to my paranormal addiction.

Do I believe?  Yes.

Anyone who has been touched by the hand of death so many times in a single lifetime would have trouble denying anything beyond this existence.  These two wise eyes have witnessed too much, these ears have heard too much.  It simply is not a question for me, but a fact.   That however is beside the point and not the subject of this rapidly written discourse.

Set aside for a moment whether you are or are not a member of the group of believers that surround the globe, and ask yourself;  Is it so important to gather evidence that you are comfortable with being an absolute jerk?

Forgotten is the simple fact that these were once people who someone loved, cared for, and mourned.   Common decency and tenants of humanity would suggest that you would treat the spirit of the individual with the same respect and consideration you would if they still breathed.

So what is with the provoking?

Abusive language, barked commands, demands for performance, do that to me while I breathe and I’d tell you succinctly what you anatomically could do before I slapped you, and walked away.   Do you think the response to such situations would change simply because I stopped breathing?

Let me give you a clue.  That would be a, No!

I get it, entertainment is for entertainment.  But there ought to be some moral clause somewhere that states that simply because you do not breathe isn’t a license for outright inhumanity and abuse.

I sat for the very last time, this morning, and watched a paranormal investigator – a woman mind you – be as cruel as any one person can be to a spirit in attempt to elicit a response. She got one, tears and a rejoinder of her taunts.  She has the tape, her fifteen minutes of fame, that’s entertainment.  That’s evidence.

That’s sickening.