This is the most recent story I have written, which is sad considering it's from July of 2009. It was written for the semi-annual URPG Summer Writing Competition on PokemonElite2000, and, surprisingly, it won first place.
I just thought I would post it here, both to see what you guys think of it and to give you a sort of 'preview' of the style of a URPG story, I suppose, though this takes a more abstract approach than what will be introduced to you guys in May.
This story was inspired by Neal Shusterman's novel 'Everlost'.
And I Could Smell the Wildflowers
“When you go home, the very weight of your own absence is so unbearably heavy that you start to sink like a stone in water.” – Everlost, Neal Shusterman
I can still remember the smell of the wildflowers. Funny, isn’t it?
The sickly-sweet fragrance that would knot my insides and bring nausea to my lips was now the single lasting memory that I could cling to. No recognizable persona, place, or moment remained - Just the perfume that had now become a stench, a disease, a plague, a clawing entity that swarmed around my understanding. Taunting. Always taunting.
It isn’t with a heavy heart that I recite this tale of hillsides overgrown with the nameless flora, the hosts of the scourge. When no feeling remains, how can one remember in a way that would be deemed sorrowful? Emotion left with flesh, and flesh left with bone that withered and died beneath the earth. But an aura can never be removed, the aura of a once-living being that clings to a particular spot in fear of being whisked away by the winds of their demise.
The aura knows not sympathy, empathy… feeling. The aura just knows. It remembers. I remember.
The railroad was deplorable. A rickety compilation of dew-eaten timber and rusted steel tossed together in no particular design. It sprawled across the foothills that ran the perimeter of Littleroot Town, the only break in an otherwise gorgeous landscape of purple and white and yellow. The wildflowers ran rampant now, as winter’s fatal breath retreated across the mountains, pursued by the warm curtain of spring.
The choking scent of the flowers had long-seized the air, so thick I could taste the petals on my tongue, know the thousands of pollen-toting insects that had come to rest upon the buds. It was quite a feat in itself, for my countless fits of sneezing had blocked any sort of smell from my nostrils. The flowers were valiant, though, and they succeeded in piercing the shroud. That, I remember.
I’d left my schoolyard companions, as always, to venture across this field. It seemed oh-so-silly to trek along the path they took, which would undoubtedly add an hour to my homeward voyage. Despite the regular protests of “Lila, you’re going to dirty your dress!” – I’d like to imagine that they’d called me Lila, it was such a pretty name, though it wasn’t mine. My name. That, I do not remember – I’d waved them off and tumbled headlong into the blossoms.
My springtime garb wasn’t befitting of my adolescent frame, – an old, lacy dress of my mother’s, hemmed in faded lilac and stitched with satin – and thus billowed around my thighs, hindering my sprint. My hands were a permanent fixture at my waist, tugging futilely at the gown, as if such efforts would be fruitful in freeing my strides.
The weeds, hidden like a predator beneath a lush canopy of bloom in wait of its prey, reached up to snatch at my feet. I would flounder, yes, but I would never fall. In reminiscence of the day, I now have come to realize that their intentions were in no way tainted with wickedness. The weeds and my oversized dress and everything else I had, at the time, viewed as a hindrance, hadn’t meant harm, but had instead been a warning. A warning of what was to come. They’d tried to stop it. Mother Earth, in all her appalling malice, had tried to battle fate itself. She wouldn’t win.
I came upon the railroad with no idea that I would die here. The abandoned boxcar that had plagued the hillside with its presence for a decade or so did not whisper words of my doom. The towering oaks that shed an uncomfortable shade over the neglected track hadn’t urged me in their ancient voices to flee. And so I hurried forward, footsteps hushed against a carpet of pine needles.
The school day hadn’t bestowed upon me the ordinary exhaustion it would, and thus, like any twelve-year-old ¬– Twelve, wasn’t it? Maybe ten or eleven? – I felt adventure tug my body toward the boxcar. What was the harm in climbing through it instead of walking around? The railroad had been abandoned, after all.
It was of the old sort, born of the 1940s era, and it hadn’t lived an elegant life. The boxcar’s deep russet metal was hidden beneath thick jackets of white-orange rust, and the spaces that were visible donned the curly letters and offensive sketches of the latest generation’s graffiti. Vines snaked down from the treetops overhead and looped through holes in the top, while beneath, roots of the nearby trees took the wheels hostage in their strangling clutches.
It took little effort to hoist my body into the compartment. I cringed at the castles of dust that had constructed themselves sporadically over the floor. The boxcar had been gutted long ago of whatever cargo it had been hauling at the time of its desertion by the head engine. Several boxes stood against the wall in a dilapidated tower, their edges prominent with frayed jags of splinter. Their mouths were gaping, empty.
The dying sun’s rays touched hesitantly upon the walls, revealing in its orange swathe an ocean of scrawlings that matched the outside. The spray paint was faded to such an extent where the bulbous letters and ‘gang names’ were illegible. It was chipped as well; dwarf mountains of orange and purple collected beneath.
I suppose that if I had lingered for even a moment longer, my life would have been spared. If my human body had spent only a second more examining the ‘artwork’ of miscreants, I would have heard the train whistle, the roar of wheels tearing across the track that ran alongside the one the boxcar rested upon. I would have tasted the heavy savor of coal smoke in the air, would have had enough sense not to step foot into the path of the oncoming train.
But I didn’t linger, and fate won.
Even as I leapt down upon it from the innards of the boxcar, I didn’t realize that there was a second track. My feeble adolescent mind had adhered to the theory that it was part of that single track, the safe track, where the boxcar was. Where I wasn’t.
A train hadn’t run these tracks in over a decade. Why now? I wasn’t familiar with the smog that streamed ahead of it, born of the coal furnaces and busy shovels. The whistle wasn’t of the charming variety, but instead a rough, phlegm-throated shriek. It screamed profanities at me, bombarded me with a punch to the gut, a slap to the face.
The thunder of the rushing, spinning wheels, driven at top speed, was laughter. “Stupid girl,” the wheels laughed. An offensive guffaw, hurtful chortle.
The train hit me, and I slept for nine months.
- - - - -
He walks the stairs to her room without using the handrail. Should he fall, would there really be any repercussion? Death, maybe? Might death reunite the two - the discarded soul and the other left to wander among the living? Would death really be so bad?
Mr. Stone ignores the light switch, stumbles into the chamber that has been darkened not by night, but by absence. Moonlight that should have been soft and inviting comes hard and jagged through the window. It dances a dance of mockery upon her bed, falls upon the dresser and her countless framed pictures – distorts her face, sketches a mustache, a pair of fangs.
Enraged, the man flounders to the bed, shreds the pillows and the comforter in his steely grip, but the moonlight remains. The dastardly fiend that dares ridicule his daughter continues to seep in through the windows, to play across his rotund form.
“Give her back!” he screams in a bellow that shakes the foundation, head tossed to the heavens as if such a position might better his chances of the message reaching God’s ears. Visions play across his eyes – her corpse twisted and gnarled, torn by metal and crusted in soil. The dress, his beloved wife’s dress, ripped into a million little pieces, scattered on the wind. Himself, kneeling before the railroad, pounding the ground until his fists are dirtied in blood and imbedded with pebbles.
Tears streak his face now, hunt desperately for the edge of his chin. They drop into the darkness below – it matches his heart, doesn’t it? He wonders about things that he’s never given mind to before, and the tears come faster. The sadness spreads; an ache that seems so very unfathomable presses at his chest. He sputters twice, then regains himself.
She’s gone.
- - - - - - - - - -
But I’m not.
I tumble along in a darkness that isn’t quite uncomfortable, but unfamiliar in itself. I can’t think; my thoughts swirl and swirl, prance around my understanding. I can see them: the old boxcar, Mrs. Huckabee pointing eagerly at the blackboard, the dirt, blood. But I can’t seem to collect them; they swirl into my view, then leave, and I don’t remember them ever having been there, so when they come back around a second time, a third, fourth, they seem so new, so clear.
I relax into the blackness; it’s all I can do, really. I feel light, like a gas in the atmosphere, so light, in fact, that I can’t control my movement. I drift along on whatever path I’ve been thrown onto, watching my memories over and over as if they are a film playing before my eyes.
It isn’t within my understanding to guess how long I drift. Every moment seems like the first, over and over, again and again, and I enjoy them all the same. I know only the moment I exist in. Nothing else.
It all stops after what seems like only a moment in this comfortable, twisting vortex. And every second leading up to this pours over me, pounds my consciousness like a busy hammer. I struggle to arrange my thoughts, my memories, but they keep coming, harder and faster than ever.
Jason passing me a note in Chemistry. Abigail Jaworsky stealing my lunch. Walking through the wildflowers. Climbing into the boxcar. The train. Run! Don’t just stand there. Run! Move, you have to move!
And the vortex ends in a drain. It sucks my gas form down, down, and I can see a hospital room. I’m spinning, spinning faster and faster. My head slams into the walls of black. I can see a calendar on the wall, but can’t make enough sense of my situation to realize that it is marked ‘December’. I don’t realize that I’ve been drifting for nine months.
I’m losing control. I can see a lady, hunched in a bed, legs spread wide, enormous lump on her stomach. A man squats before her, hands pressed into the space between her legs. He’s muttering words of encouragement, but the drain is too loud to hear him – so very loud.
There’s a certain aura surrounding her, emanating from where the man’s hands are. It’s incredibly bright, blinding even, and I can’t help but look away. I’m sure the others don’t see it. They don’t seem bothered in the least.
The drain changes direction now, slurps me closer and closer to the blinding light. I begin to struggle. There’s something that tells me to stop. An instinctual sensation urges me to accept the light, to allow it to engulf me, and I know deep, deep down that it is right. It is wrong to fight; my soul chips away with every kick. I can feel it fracturing.
But I don’t stop. It feels like I am defying the gods, but I follow my own advice, comply with the words of my memories Move, you have to move! I move this time. I refuse to make the same mistake as before; I thrash, kick harder than I ever have before. It’s like I’m swimming in the thickest pudding in the densest ocean.
I’m moving away from the light, away from the hospital bed, and every kick becomes easier. The darkness is drawing upon me, and it begins to slowly inhale me once more. It is freezing, but I push myself into it, and I feel like I’m shedding all of my nerves, every feeling I’ve ever felt.
I turn one more time to gaze upon the hospital bed. The pregnant woman is sobbing uncontrollably. The light from between her legs has been extinguished, and the doctors and nurses rush about the room with a small, limp object. They thrust metal tools upon it, but its arms do not move, nor do its legs. The brilliant yellow aura is dwindling around it. It is barely a glow now.
I try to gasp; I feel responsible, and I want to reverse my direction. I swim frantically for the dying infant, but the darkness has taken a hold of me. I cry out a silent sob, and the aura around the stillborn goes out. And I fall into the darkness.
I just thought I would post it here, both to see what you guys think of it and to give you a sort of 'preview' of the style of a URPG story, I suppose, though this takes a more abstract approach than what will be introduced to you guys in May.
This story was inspired by Neal Shusterman's novel 'Everlost'.
And I Could Smell the Wildflowers
“When you go home, the very weight of your own absence is so unbearably heavy that you start to sink like a stone in water.” – Everlost, Neal Shusterman
I can still remember the smell of the wildflowers. Funny, isn’t it?
The sickly-sweet fragrance that would knot my insides and bring nausea to my lips was now the single lasting memory that I could cling to. No recognizable persona, place, or moment remained - Just the perfume that had now become a stench, a disease, a plague, a clawing entity that swarmed around my understanding. Taunting. Always taunting.
It isn’t with a heavy heart that I recite this tale of hillsides overgrown with the nameless flora, the hosts of the scourge. When no feeling remains, how can one remember in a way that would be deemed sorrowful? Emotion left with flesh, and flesh left with bone that withered and died beneath the earth. But an aura can never be removed, the aura of a once-living being that clings to a particular spot in fear of being whisked away by the winds of their demise.
The aura knows not sympathy, empathy… feeling. The aura just knows. It remembers. I remember.
The railroad was deplorable. A rickety compilation of dew-eaten timber and rusted steel tossed together in no particular design. It sprawled across the foothills that ran the perimeter of Littleroot Town, the only break in an otherwise gorgeous landscape of purple and white and yellow. The wildflowers ran rampant now, as winter’s fatal breath retreated across the mountains, pursued by the warm curtain of spring.
The choking scent of the flowers had long-seized the air, so thick I could taste the petals on my tongue, know the thousands of pollen-toting insects that had come to rest upon the buds. It was quite a feat in itself, for my countless fits of sneezing had blocked any sort of smell from my nostrils. The flowers were valiant, though, and they succeeded in piercing the shroud. That, I remember.
I’d left my schoolyard companions, as always, to venture across this field. It seemed oh-so-silly to trek along the path they took, which would undoubtedly add an hour to my homeward voyage. Despite the regular protests of “Lila, you’re going to dirty your dress!” – I’d like to imagine that they’d called me Lila, it was such a pretty name, though it wasn’t mine. My name. That, I do not remember – I’d waved them off and tumbled headlong into the blossoms.
My springtime garb wasn’t befitting of my adolescent frame, – an old, lacy dress of my mother’s, hemmed in faded lilac and stitched with satin – and thus billowed around my thighs, hindering my sprint. My hands were a permanent fixture at my waist, tugging futilely at the gown, as if such efforts would be fruitful in freeing my strides.
The weeds, hidden like a predator beneath a lush canopy of bloom in wait of its prey, reached up to snatch at my feet. I would flounder, yes, but I would never fall. In reminiscence of the day, I now have come to realize that their intentions were in no way tainted with wickedness. The weeds and my oversized dress and everything else I had, at the time, viewed as a hindrance, hadn’t meant harm, but had instead been a warning. A warning of what was to come. They’d tried to stop it. Mother Earth, in all her appalling malice, had tried to battle fate itself. She wouldn’t win.
I came upon the railroad with no idea that I would die here. The abandoned boxcar that had plagued the hillside with its presence for a decade or so did not whisper words of my doom. The towering oaks that shed an uncomfortable shade over the neglected track hadn’t urged me in their ancient voices to flee. And so I hurried forward, footsteps hushed against a carpet of pine needles.
The school day hadn’t bestowed upon me the ordinary exhaustion it would, and thus, like any twelve-year-old ¬– Twelve, wasn’t it? Maybe ten or eleven? – I felt adventure tug my body toward the boxcar. What was the harm in climbing through it instead of walking around? The railroad had been abandoned, after all.
It was of the old sort, born of the 1940s era, and it hadn’t lived an elegant life. The boxcar’s deep russet metal was hidden beneath thick jackets of white-orange rust, and the spaces that were visible donned the curly letters and offensive sketches of the latest generation’s graffiti. Vines snaked down from the treetops overhead and looped through holes in the top, while beneath, roots of the nearby trees took the wheels hostage in their strangling clutches.
It took little effort to hoist my body into the compartment. I cringed at the castles of dust that had constructed themselves sporadically over the floor. The boxcar had been gutted long ago of whatever cargo it had been hauling at the time of its desertion by the head engine. Several boxes stood against the wall in a dilapidated tower, their edges prominent with frayed jags of splinter. Their mouths were gaping, empty.
The dying sun’s rays touched hesitantly upon the walls, revealing in its orange swathe an ocean of scrawlings that matched the outside. The spray paint was faded to such an extent where the bulbous letters and ‘gang names’ were illegible. It was chipped as well; dwarf mountains of orange and purple collected beneath.
I suppose that if I had lingered for even a moment longer, my life would have been spared. If my human body had spent only a second more examining the ‘artwork’ of miscreants, I would have heard the train whistle, the roar of wheels tearing across the track that ran alongside the one the boxcar rested upon. I would have tasted the heavy savor of coal smoke in the air, would have had enough sense not to step foot into the path of the oncoming train.
But I didn’t linger, and fate won.
Even as I leapt down upon it from the innards of the boxcar, I didn’t realize that there was a second track. My feeble adolescent mind had adhered to the theory that it was part of that single track, the safe track, where the boxcar was. Where I wasn’t.
A train hadn’t run these tracks in over a decade. Why now? I wasn’t familiar with the smog that streamed ahead of it, born of the coal furnaces and busy shovels. The whistle wasn’t of the charming variety, but instead a rough, phlegm-throated shriek. It screamed profanities at me, bombarded me with a punch to the gut, a slap to the face.
The thunder of the rushing, spinning wheels, driven at top speed, was laughter. “Stupid girl,” the wheels laughed. An offensive guffaw, hurtful chortle.
The train hit me, and I slept for nine months.
- - - - -
He walks the stairs to her room without using the handrail. Should he fall, would there really be any repercussion? Death, maybe? Might death reunite the two - the discarded soul and the other left to wander among the living? Would death really be so bad?
Mr. Stone ignores the light switch, stumbles into the chamber that has been darkened not by night, but by absence. Moonlight that should have been soft and inviting comes hard and jagged through the window. It dances a dance of mockery upon her bed, falls upon the dresser and her countless framed pictures – distorts her face, sketches a mustache, a pair of fangs.
Enraged, the man flounders to the bed, shreds the pillows and the comforter in his steely grip, but the moonlight remains. The dastardly fiend that dares ridicule his daughter continues to seep in through the windows, to play across his rotund form.
“Give her back!” he screams in a bellow that shakes the foundation, head tossed to the heavens as if such a position might better his chances of the message reaching God’s ears. Visions play across his eyes – her corpse twisted and gnarled, torn by metal and crusted in soil. The dress, his beloved wife’s dress, ripped into a million little pieces, scattered on the wind. Himself, kneeling before the railroad, pounding the ground until his fists are dirtied in blood and imbedded with pebbles.
Tears streak his face now, hunt desperately for the edge of his chin. They drop into the darkness below – it matches his heart, doesn’t it? He wonders about things that he’s never given mind to before, and the tears come faster. The sadness spreads; an ache that seems so very unfathomable presses at his chest. He sputters twice, then regains himself.
She’s gone.
- - - - - - - - - -
But I’m not.
I tumble along in a darkness that isn’t quite uncomfortable, but unfamiliar in itself. I can’t think; my thoughts swirl and swirl, prance around my understanding. I can see them: the old boxcar, Mrs. Huckabee pointing eagerly at the blackboard, the dirt, blood. But I can’t seem to collect them; they swirl into my view, then leave, and I don’t remember them ever having been there, so when they come back around a second time, a third, fourth, they seem so new, so clear.
I relax into the blackness; it’s all I can do, really. I feel light, like a gas in the atmosphere, so light, in fact, that I can’t control my movement. I drift along on whatever path I’ve been thrown onto, watching my memories over and over as if they are a film playing before my eyes.
It isn’t within my understanding to guess how long I drift. Every moment seems like the first, over and over, again and again, and I enjoy them all the same. I know only the moment I exist in. Nothing else.
It all stops after what seems like only a moment in this comfortable, twisting vortex. And every second leading up to this pours over me, pounds my consciousness like a busy hammer. I struggle to arrange my thoughts, my memories, but they keep coming, harder and faster than ever.
Jason passing me a note in Chemistry. Abigail Jaworsky stealing my lunch. Walking through the wildflowers. Climbing into the boxcar. The train. Run! Don’t just stand there. Run! Move, you have to move!
And the vortex ends in a drain. It sucks my gas form down, down, and I can see a hospital room. I’m spinning, spinning faster and faster. My head slams into the walls of black. I can see a calendar on the wall, but can’t make enough sense of my situation to realize that it is marked ‘December’. I don’t realize that I’ve been drifting for nine months.
I’m losing control. I can see a lady, hunched in a bed, legs spread wide, enormous lump on her stomach. A man squats before her, hands pressed into the space between her legs. He’s muttering words of encouragement, but the drain is too loud to hear him – so very loud.
There’s a certain aura surrounding her, emanating from where the man’s hands are. It’s incredibly bright, blinding even, and I can’t help but look away. I’m sure the others don’t see it. They don’t seem bothered in the least.
The drain changes direction now, slurps me closer and closer to the blinding light. I begin to struggle. There’s something that tells me to stop. An instinctual sensation urges me to accept the light, to allow it to engulf me, and I know deep, deep down that it is right. It is wrong to fight; my soul chips away with every kick. I can feel it fracturing.
But I don’t stop. It feels like I am defying the gods, but I follow my own advice, comply with the words of my memories Move, you have to move! I move this time. I refuse to make the same mistake as before; I thrash, kick harder than I ever have before. It’s like I’m swimming in the thickest pudding in the densest ocean.
I’m moving away from the light, away from the hospital bed, and every kick becomes easier. The darkness is drawing upon me, and it begins to slowly inhale me once more. It is freezing, but I push myself into it, and I feel like I’m shedding all of my nerves, every feeling I’ve ever felt.
I turn one more time to gaze upon the hospital bed. The pregnant woman is sobbing uncontrollably. The light from between her legs has been extinguished, and the doctors and nurses rush about the room with a small, limp object. They thrust metal tools upon it, but its arms do not move, nor do its legs. The brilliant yellow aura is dwindling around it. It is barely a glow now.
I try to gasp; I feel responsible, and I want to reverse my direction. I swim frantically for the dying infant, but the darkness has taken a hold of me. I cry out a silent sob, and the aura around the stillborn goes out. And I fall into the darkness.
