Scarlet Tropix
01-30-2010, 04:00 PM
This excerpt is a piece of something I hope to turn into a novel later. It's sort of a sci-fi/psionics thing. I've been planning it for about four years.
So, erm, fire away. I really appreciate criticism and feedback. You could say I convert it into fuel. Sorry if the formatting stinks, it didn't really convert well.
CHAPTER THREE
1
The sun hung overhead, a perpetually bleary blot hanging over San Francisco’s hideously orange skies. Zoe sat on the fire escape of her father’s ramshackle apartment, dangling her bare feet off of the side idly as she picked insistently at the flecks of rust that coated the railing. Occasionally, she would toss a handful of flaky paint chips over the side, seemingly unaware of the way it stained her hands and stuck under her nails as she bit her lip in thought.
Zoe had come out to the fire escape, as she often did, to get away from Phil—she couldn’t bring herself to call him dad, not anymore—until the booze knocked him out for the night. Her shoulder still ached sympathetically where he had struck her, and already she could tell that it would be swollen in the morning. There hadn’t been a reason for it. Not that a man like Phil ever needed one. No, she’d just been unfortunate enough to get home right as he ran out of beer, and audacious enough to enter without resupplies. She considered herself lucky to have come out of it without glass in her sides. Phil had a mean swing.
Rubbing her shoulder sullenly, she tossed another handful of rust over the balcony. It wasn’t that she couldn’t leave; The old drunk wasn’t nearly personally invested enough in her torment to try and follow her. There was just nowhere to go, a fact that was patently obvious just from a look around. From up here, everything was endless rows of squat brown bricks and the metallic tan of water tanks. The condominiums ran together in a horrible tangle of chain link alleyways and cast iron bridges out as far as the eye could see. She was caked in grime from sitting out here, and long past caring. There were no options. That was the crux of the matter. Not for anyone, and not under the dome.
It was a level of uniformity so low tuned as to have no words, but to her that was still frankly terrifying. The definitive example of it, in her mind, had come around her fourteenth birthday, a little more than a year ago. She had seen a man fall from an apartment two floors above her; a moment of falling past her with an expression of mild confusion on his face, as if he hadn’t yet realized what had happened to him. Then he was gone, the wet sound of the impact rising up—like a watermelon bursting, she had thought later with a shiver—for a split second. Then silence. Then, as she looked over the railing at the street below, the screaming, so shrill and loud that at first she hadn’t realized it had come from her own mouth.
She had bolted inside, tripping over the shag rug and causing Phil to spill his beer all over the two of them. He had gotten ready to slug her then, splayed out over the rug with booze dripping through her hair like matted blood, but something in her expression must have changed his mind; He stalled mid-swing and stared with that dopey, muddled expression unique to dogs and drunks, his breath a filthy stench of sausages and booze thick enough to choke on. They froze like that for a minute, her on the edge of tears, him breathing heavily, a vein in his forehead throbbing dangerously.
Stroke. Stroke out. The thought popped into her head with a sort of horrible clarity, and she leapt on it like a drowning man. If only he would just stroke out, right now, and leave her be. By all means, he could blow the fuse in what was left of his boozed out brain, or bust a tuning valve in the old sloppy heart, she’d get over it somehow. After a moment he lowered his fist, swallowing, smacking his lips, blinking repeatedly as though in a daze, before wandering out to the balcony where sirens had begun to sound, leaving her there in a sharp snarl of relief and, to her own shame, disappointment. Minutes later, after stripping naked and burying herself under a mountain of blankets, Zoe had curled into a ball on her futon and cried herself to sleep.
If that had been the end of it, Zoe thought, scraping the dust off of the bottoms of her feet, she might have forgotten it, eventually. But the real horror had come the next day.
The following afternoon she had gone out to the fire escape again, despite a very real dread that clung to her like a shawl. Walking almost on tiptoe, as if warding away an unseen spirit, she came to the edge of the railing and peered over. At the bottom, where the man had fallen—and died, she would always remind herself, hating the tone of finality that the word held inside her head—there was a dark stain of dried blood, running from the edge of road up the sidewalk to the wall of the apartment complex. It was no longer recognizable as blood; instead looking like the very material of the building itself had spread like a root.
She hadn’t slept well that night. The image of that man falling, that expression of surprise, constantly replayed through her mind over and over. The more she thought about it—not that she could have driven it out—the more she had become convinced that it hadn’t been surprise but some sort of malign awareness.
“Did you fall?” she had written later that week, “Or did you jump?”
After a moment of consideration, she continued.
“Will I jump?”
Beneath it, in orange crayon, she had drawn a roughly Zoe shaped blob. There had been somewhat of a limitation in that the color she wanted wasn’t actually available as a crayon; It looked more like the sky than anything else, but to Zoe, who perhaps had a better perspective on the whole thing, it looked like dried blood. A few months later, she had come across the paper again and thrown it away, but the mental image had remained burned into her head; A rusty smear across gray pavement. Would she jump? For now the answer was no, but sometimes, when she was at her lowest, that horrible belief would return—that feeling that everything was being consumed by a vicious mottled brown.
2
Phil Callahan was sinking quietly.
He laid motionless on the tatty sofa, the doors and windows closed, curtains drawn. The only light in the room was the faint glow of the television, the muted picture encased by a thin sheen of static. In the kitchen, he could hear the fridge ticking occasionally, accompanied by the minute sounds of shifting ice and the hum of the fan. His hand was still draped around a bottle on the floor, the condensation refreshingly cool against his skin in the warm, heavy air of the apartment. Occcasionally the fan whirred past, the breeze tousling his hair and caressing his exposed arm.
He was waiting for his daughter to come back. They had fought, he remembered, but not why or when. It could have been moments ago or days—for the clock, when he was strong enough to look at it, displayed murky gibberish. The only signs of the outside world were the bands of color around the doors and windows, and he could not say for sure whether they had always been there. It hurt too much to look.
So, erm, fire away. I really appreciate criticism and feedback. You could say I convert it into fuel. Sorry if the formatting stinks, it didn't really convert well.
CHAPTER THREE
1
The sun hung overhead, a perpetually bleary blot hanging over San Francisco’s hideously orange skies. Zoe sat on the fire escape of her father’s ramshackle apartment, dangling her bare feet off of the side idly as she picked insistently at the flecks of rust that coated the railing. Occasionally, she would toss a handful of flaky paint chips over the side, seemingly unaware of the way it stained her hands and stuck under her nails as she bit her lip in thought.
Zoe had come out to the fire escape, as she often did, to get away from Phil—she couldn’t bring herself to call him dad, not anymore—until the booze knocked him out for the night. Her shoulder still ached sympathetically where he had struck her, and already she could tell that it would be swollen in the morning. There hadn’t been a reason for it. Not that a man like Phil ever needed one. No, she’d just been unfortunate enough to get home right as he ran out of beer, and audacious enough to enter without resupplies. She considered herself lucky to have come out of it without glass in her sides. Phil had a mean swing.
Rubbing her shoulder sullenly, she tossed another handful of rust over the balcony. It wasn’t that she couldn’t leave; The old drunk wasn’t nearly personally invested enough in her torment to try and follow her. There was just nowhere to go, a fact that was patently obvious just from a look around. From up here, everything was endless rows of squat brown bricks and the metallic tan of water tanks. The condominiums ran together in a horrible tangle of chain link alleyways and cast iron bridges out as far as the eye could see. She was caked in grime from sitting out here, and long past caring. There were no options. That was the crux of the matter. Not for anyone, and not under the dome.
It was a level of uniformity so low tuned as to have no words, but to her that was still frankly terrifying. The definitive example of it, in her mind, had come around her fourteenth birthday, a little more than a year ago. She had seen a man fall from an apartment two floors above her; a moment of falling past her with an expression of mild confusion on his face, as if he hadn’t yet realized what had happened to him. Then he was gone, the wet sound of the impact rising up—like a watermelon bursting, she had thought later with a shiver—for a split second. Then silence. Then, as she looked over the railing at the street below, the screaming, so shrill and loud that at first she hadn’t realized it had come from her own mouth.
She had bolted inside, tripping over the shag rug and causing Phil to spill his beer all over the two of them. He had gotten ready to slug her then, splayed out over the rug with booze dripping through her hair like matted blood, but something in her expression must have changed his mind; He stalled mid-swing and stared with that dopey, muddled expression unique to dogs and drunks, his breath a filthy stench of sausages and booze thick enough to choke on. They froze like that for a minute, her on the edge of tears, him breathing heavily, a vein in his forehead throbbing dangerously.
Stroke. Stroke out. The thought popped into her head with a sort of horrible clarity, and she leapt on it like a drowning man. If only he would just stroke out, right now, and leave her be. By all means, he could blow the fuse in what was left of his boozed out brain, or bust a tuning valve in the old sloppy heart, she’d get over it somehow. After a moment he lowered his fist, swallowing, smacking his lips, blinking repeatedly as though in a daze, before wandering out to the balcony where sirens had begun to sound, leaving her there in a sharp snarl of relief and, to her own shame, disappointment. Minutes later, after stripping naked and burying herself under a mountain of blankets, Zoe had curled into a ball on her futon and cried herself to sleep.
If that had been the end of it, Zoe thought, scraping the dust off of the bottoms of her feet, she might have forgotten it, eventually. But the real horror had come the next day.
The following afternoon she had gone out to the fire escape again, despite a very real dread that clung to her like a shawl. Walking almost on tiptoe, as if warding away an unseen spirit, she came to the edge of the railing and peered over. At the bottom, where the man had fallen—and died, she would always remind herself, hating the tone of finality that the word held inside her head—there was a dark stain of dried blood, running from the edge of road up the sidewalk to the wall of the apartment complex. It was no longer recognizable as blood; instead looking like the very material of the building itself had spread like a root.
She hadn’t slept well that night. The image of that man falling, that expression of surprise, constantly replayed through her mind over and over. The more she thought about it—not that she could have driven it out—the more she had become convinced that it hadn’t been surprise but some sort of malign awareness.
“Did you fall?” she had written later that week, “Or did you jump?”
After a moment of consideration, she continued.
“Will I jump?”
Beneath it, in orange crayon, she had drawn a roughly Zoe shaped blob. There had been somewhat of a limitation in that the color she wanted wasn’t actually available as a crayon; It looked more like the sky than anything else, but to Zoe, who perhaps had a better perspective on the whole thing, it looked like dried blood. A few months later, she had come across the paper again and thrown it away, but the mental image had remained burned into her head; A rusty smear across gray pavement. Would she jump? For now the answer was no, but sometimes, when she was at her lowest, that horrible belief would return—that feeling that everything was being consumed by a vicious mottled brown.
2
Phil Callahan was sinking quietly.
He laid motionless on the tatty sofa, the doors and windows closed, curtains drawn. The only light in the room was the faint glow of the television, the muted picture encased by a thin sheen of static. In the kitchen, he could hear the fridge ticking occasionally, accompanied by the minute sounds of shifting ice and the hum of the fan. His hand was still draped around a bottle on the floor, the condensation refreshingly cool against his skin in the warm, heavy air of the apartment. Occcasionally the fan whirred past, the breeze tousling his hair and caressing his exposed arm.
He was waiting for his daughter to come back. They had fought, he remembered, but not why or when. It could have been moments ago or days—for the clock, when he was strong enough to look at it, displayed murky gibberish. The only signs of the outside world were the bands of color around the doors and windows, and he could not say for sure whether they had always been there. It hurt too much to look.