Cyan said:

Challenge #129 - "Breakdown"
Gattsu25 - untitled

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Gattsu25 said:

This one did have a title, actually (in the spoiler of the post). It was titled "Ignorance".

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ZeroRay said:

*looks at list*

Man, I need to come up with better titles.

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Mike M said:

I'm nearly 500 words over the limit.

Secondary objective just got interesting...

EDIT: Down to 2240, but all the low hanging fruit is gone. Fuuuuuuuuuu...

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Charade said:

Titles can be tough. I always seem to come up with a couple each time, but end up choosing the simple/safe ones.

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Man, the most I've ever had to cut down so far was ~250 and I thought that was a pain. Good luck

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Mike M said:

Pht. I can count the number of times I've had problems with titles on one hand and have fingers left over.

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I've cut it to the marrow and gotten it down to 2,075.

Squeezing blood from a stone at this point...

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I see my shadow flicker under the streetlight, vibrating with a harsh intensity against the soft glow of the jaundiced hue. What the fuck is going on? Old Charlie behind the newsstand doesn't seem to notice anything. His thick glasses always look like they're smeared with vaseline, making his eyes look huge and distorted. Even so, no amount of prescribed magnification seems to help his sight. I always have to clear my throat to let him know I'm ready to buy something, even after standing in front of him for twenty awkward seconds.

Ahem. “A pack of Marlboro Reds, please.”

“Six fifty, champ,” a voice booms behind a toothless grin.

Our conversations always last exactly four seconds. There are no wasted words in our exchange. I pay Old Charlie for my pack of cigarettes with change I saved up by skipping lunch. It's amazing how much you can save up if you stop eating. Not that I have much of an appetite these days. Being a college student is the ultimate appetite suppressant, and the only job I can find is testing new drugs for all types of shit––anxiety, depression, addiction, male dysfunction––the list goes on. Big Pharma, man, they make a killing off people's misery, and they pay me scraps to do it.

The street's always empty at this time of day, and the newsstand looks like a lonely haven against the backdrop of ever-encroaching night. Only the half-shy moon peeking behind darkened clouds offer us company. I never ask Old Charlie this, but Why's he always open this late when there're no customers except for stragglers like me? The advancing autumn cold makes the night air sting and your breath comes out in spurts of fog, yet he's always there behind the counter smiling his toothless smile under the ineffectual warmth of the streetlight. I take a sidelong glance at the floor, casually trying to see if my shadow is still assailing the concrete with its schizophrenic tick. Nothing out of the ordinary there, just my elongated shadow satirizing my every move like it normally does. I need to get some sleep tonight.

I strike the match and the smell of sulfur dioxide penetrates deep into my nostrils. It's the same compound found in rotten eggs, but I don't mind the smell of the lit matches much. It reminds me of dusty bars and arcades with sticky floors. I take a drag of my cigarette and inhale the toxic cocktail of nicotine, arsenic, and tar, and my body immediately releases dopamine and endorphins into my bloodstream. Fuck yeah, instant gratification. I needed that. It's amazing how the human body responds to threat and external stimuli––overload it with enough poison and it forces itself to release its own pleasure mechanisms to compensate. The eternal cosmic struggle of Yin and Yang playing out in human chemistry and viscera.

I look over the magazine rack, searching for something interesting to read on my subway ride home. Nothing but gossip magazines and Playboys stare back at me. Lindsey Lohan may have overdosed on cocaine again and it looks like Michael Jackson was spotted in the Canary Islands. Literature these days. I grab a copy of the Times and drop fifty cents on the counter.

“Thanks much, Bastion,” gums Old Charlie with a knowing grin.

What the fuck? How does he know my name?

Our conversations always last exactly four seconds––not a second more, not a second less, and they never include personal information. I only call Old Charlie by that name because “Old Charlie” is stitched onto his work shirt. I don't say a word, slowly walking away from the counter unable to look away from those huge, framed eyes that see nothing.


.


Sebastian. What a fucked up name. My parents must've really been hung up on Disney cartoons to name me after a crab. Truth is, I never knew my parents. I grew up in foster care, before running away at the age of thirteen. I started calling myself Bastion, you know, like a fortress, so the other kids would stop teasing me. That wasn't much of a defense though. No matter what name I came up with, I was still me––skinny, awkward, socially inept, and infinitely teased.

“Spare some change, mista,” pleads Hungry Will, jangling the styrofoam cup in my face.

I reach into my pockets and fish out the last of my lunch money and drop the offering into his cup, adding to the mountain of silver and copper coins. Iscariot betrayed Christ for less. I throw in a couple of my Marlboros, too.

“Thank you, mista.”

Here was Hungry Will, a mockery of a hunger artist, an unintentional ascetic gymnast training for spiritual fulfillment asking for change so he could eat. Life's failures take on many forms. Like Kafka's hero, Hungry Will largely gets ignored by the world around him, but he and I are kindred spirits so I try to help him out whenever I can.

We share a light conversation when the trains run late.

“It's starting to get cold.”

“That's what autumn's for, mista. Things begin ta die. The sun comes out less and less, and the shadows take over. We are wedded ta the darkness in autumn time.”

Why's he talking about shadows and darkness and death?

“So, uh, how're the wife and kids,” I ask a homeless man without thinking, trying to shift the conversation.

“They still dead.”

I say I'm sorry to hear that and quickly approach the train that just pulled up, passing the walls scrawled with graffiti. “Lasciate ogne speranze, voi ch'entrate,” reads a banner written in bright red letters. Italian, maybe? The foot traffic in the subway station is pretty light at this time of night. Only Hungry Will and the harmonica player, Windpipe, are regular fixtures in this place. Windpipe is always wearing sunglasses, his eyes forever encased in darkness. He stops breathing life into his Hohner Chromonica blues harp and smiles in my direction. The air around me immediately falls flat and I hear the da-dum da-dum intensity of my heart beat. Windpipe's dark sunglasses and walking cane suggest he's blind, but the way he's smiling at me makes me think he can see me. Only the blind can truly see in the dark. Or sense me at least. Maybe the tap tap tap of my footsteps alert him of my presence. I dash past him and step on to the waiting train, ready to get my bizarre evening over with.

I flash my monthly subway pass to the driver who looks at it from the corner of his eyes. He turns his head to look me up and down and grunts something nondescript. The train's mostly empty, save for the scattered homeless who take the trains from one end of the line to the other to pass the time. They're always passing time, when time eventually passes you by anyway. I make my way to the back of the train where an old lady is sitting alone with the newspaper folded on her lap. I usually take the subway home on Wednesdays from my night classes, so I'm familiar with the faces in the seats, but I've never seen this old lady before. She looks harmless enough so I sit across from her and open the Times, and right on cue elevator music starts trickling from the train's speakers.

That's fucking odd. The train never played music before.

A soft jazz number starts drifting down, life confetti flung from the rooftops of the U.S. Bank Tower on a windy night.

Bzzzt Bzzzt BzzzzzzT. Static interrupts the tune and I feel a voice transmitting inside my head.

Maybe God's trying to speak to me through the speakers on the AM wavelength––550 kilohertz of burning bush. He works in mysterious ways after all.

Not many Angelinos know about the history of L.A.'s subway system. They think it's a relatively new phenomenon, built to help battle L.A.'s chronic traffic problem. Fact is, the Pacific Electric Subway system opened in 1925, running from Fourth and Hill Street to a portal near Beverly and Glendale Boulevards. The irony is that by 1933 the subway system was crippled by the advent of automobiles. Everybody wanted to drive in their fancy new cars and left the subway system to rot. The subterranean catacombs lay dormant for a few decades before being revitalized to combat the traffic that first put it to rest. Now, it's a waypoint for subterrestrial navigation and home to the homeless, blind musicians, junkies, and old ladies. What is it about the underground that attracts the damned?

I can feel the old lady's eyes boring into my forehead. The intensity of her gaze is trepanning into my frontal cortex, the area in the human brain that contains the most dopamine-sensitive neurons. Practitioners of trepanation believe that the level of a person's consciousness is directly related to the amount of blood in a person's brain. To elevate the brain's blood volume, practitioners will drill a hole into the skull. It's the oldest surgical procedure practiced by humans, dating back to the Neolithic era. Prehistoric cavemen would use a crude hunk of sharpened flint as their tool of choice. Savages. People today use electric drills instead. Progress.

“I know your secret, little boy” the old lady's eyes say directly to my brain.

Huh? I'm losing it. There's no way her piercing stare raised my level of consciousness to the point where telepathic communication is possible. That's crazy.

I slowly lower my newspaper and take a peek from behind the Sports section. The old lady is smiling at me from ear to ear with her eyes shut tight. What a creepy fucking smile. Beads of sweat start forming in the hollow of my chest, and trickles down to my navel. She looks like she just stepped out of the '60s, dressed like Jackie O with her pink round hat and white gloves stretched to her elbows. One of her stockings is rolled down to her ankles. The other one looks like it lost a fight with a cat, frayed to oblivion. Her arthritic body makes her posture statuesque. Maybe rigor mortis happens before death if you're that old? I see the creases in her face under the diffused glare of the train's fluorescent light, ancient reservoirs now deprived of moisture. Her lipstick looks smeared by a Parkinson's hand, like a child's sad attempt to color within the lines.

I quickly look away from the strange old lady and catch a glimpse of my shadow sitting on the floor with a nickel-sized hole in the center of its head. My hand involuntarily reaches for my temple, searching for a bloody opening. Whew. I'm still in one piece. I think. I get up and walk towards the front of the train to get away from the old lady, dragging my reluctant shadow along. I take my new seat and turn to look towards her in the back of the train. Her body is still rigid and erect, 90 degrees of geometric perfection. Her neck slowly starts twisting towards me, with her face still locked in that forced smile. Suddenly, her eyelids flap open and wisps of smoke rise from her eye sockets. I'm losing my fucking mind. I jump to my feet and rush to the exit, ready to get the off this fucking train.

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Cyan said:

Setting up another Writing Hangout for this weekend. Sunday only, apologies to those who can't make it. I'm flying home from a wedding Saturday afternoon.

Quote for link:

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FlowersisBritish said:

Slightly off topic(and not to bring in a topic from another thread) but has anyone else been feeling too bothered by recent state of affairs of the US to write? I feel like whatever I type is just so insignificant right now. :/

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FlowersisBritish said:

Slightly off topic(and not to bring in a topic from another thread) but has anyone else been feeling too bothered by recent state of affairs of the US to write? I feel like whatever I type is just so insignificant right now. :/

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Mike M said:

Probably going to be late, took the family out to brunch at a ridiculously busy restaurant that's a considerable distance from the house

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Tangent said:

I'm just catching up with threads. Was it Portage Bay Cafe? YUM.

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QuantumBro said:

There's no deadline on the secondary objective, right?

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Spoiler

Man, I have never written in this style before, or about this content. It might have been the most uncomfortable thing I've ever done. It made me want to vomit.

Mike M said:

LOL, no. I'm "Seattle area," not Seattle. Went out to Maltby Cafe.

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Sober said:

I hate scanners.

...

It took me longer to get a proper scan than probably anything else. Scanners and scanner software suites are are truly the greatest technological evil we face today.

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