Saturday, February 12, 2011

Exercise #4: The Unstable Self

Write a story that alternates between the I and the he or she(or the name of the narrator), making sure you don't confuse the reader with the switches. This story was inspired by the Supernatural episode The Monster at the End of This Book and Richard J. Evans The Third Reich Trilogy. 500 words.

The blank page curled inside my typewriter mocks and frightens me with words I have not yet written. I am troubled, not by writer's block, but by the story I have become entangled. I pray for God to deliver me from this burden, and if He can not, for Him to give me the courage and wisdom to continue my work.

Esther's fingers throbbed from arthritis and her head hurt from a revelation induced migraine worsened by the "clickety-clack" of her Underwood. Three visions in one night. It was a record she knew she would not repeat. All three visions needed to be recorded before dawn. The clock in her study chimed midnight.

These three revelations have been delivered unto me:

Lost in a vast desert wilderness, dieing of thirst and hunger, I come upon a soldier guarding two fruit trees. The first, a plum tree, twisted and decayed, its fruit lying in a rotting heap on the sand. The second, an apricot tree, striving and lush, its ripe yellow fruit weigh its branches down. The plums smell sweet in spite of their rot. I ask the soldier for water and he offers me a sip from his canteen. Full after only one sip, the smell of the plums still entices me. I ask for a plum, but the soldier warns that the fruit of that tree is poisonous. Unable to resist, I take one of the plums and bite into it. I clutch my stomach in pain. A beast hidden in the branches falls upon me.

The plum had tasted sweet when she bit into it, but the juice burned her stomach and made her head hurt. Her mind had been bombarded with esoteric knowledge and images that lost their meaning upon waking. The knowledge the fruit gave her didn't kill her, but lying in the sand, clutching her stomach, she wished it had. The clock struck one.

Running down a forest path, chased by a beast I can't see. The path leads to a clearing with a solitary tree. A girl sitting at the base of the tree holds her arms above her head palms open. I warn her of the best on my trail. The girl can not leave. "I'm waiting for the stars to fall," she says as thousands fall from the sky in burning arcs. She reaches out to save as many as she can. The rest burn to ash as they fall to the ground.

Her eyes welled with tears at the memory of so many dead stars shaped like the yellow badges the Nazi's had forced her people to wear during the war. The clock struck two.

I wake to find the beast standing over me in my study. Its purple bloated face is as rotten as the plums from the desert and its lips are stained with juice. I tell it I know why it has come, that I can not give it what it wants. "We will see," it says. My mind and body are twisted by his magic, but he doesn't find what he is looking for. My body dies. The beast removes the page from my typewriter, reads my final message, and falls into a rage when he reads these words: The knowledge has been taken from me, given to someone for safe keeping. You should have eaten the apricots first. You will lose.

Esther nodded off at her desk.

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