The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
My Check
11-29-03

A piece of paper flies through city, the wind whisking it forever higher through the streets and between the buildings until it goes through a window and lands on a desk. A pretty woman stands in the window.

My vision moves through a maze of windows and fire escapes before centering in on me at the golf course with a mob boss. He kills me, then pulls a gun out and kills me again. The black and white flashback of my life is less glamorous than imagined, highlighting all the mundane and boring parts of my life.

I'm alive in the hospital. Someone tries to kill me again. I literally scream "bloody murder!", after which my attacker dies. He was being possessed. Someone comes in and certifies that I'm insane.

I get released from the hospital and walk around town, wishing I had sunglasses so that the mob guy wouldn't recognize me if he saw me. I go to the bank to get a check when some guy walks in and blows the place up.

A piece of paper--my check--flies through the city.

posted by Phlegm at 3/16/2004  (0) comments

 
Remember No More
11-28-03

I'm being chased by the cops, and I'm driving so fast my stomach feels like it's on a rollercoaster. Bullets fly around me everywhere, and eventually I crash into a building. I manage to escape into a nearby church. I wonder why I'm there, but I enjoy the sanctuary and the silence. People start making noise, however, so I leave. It's a shame, because the techno remix church music was actually pretty good.

Just as I'm leaving, though, I see it again. The thing with the honey silk voice. Terror rips through me as I realize I never did destroy it. Human legs dressed in jeans. A barren spine leading up to an empty void of a head. Bony arms that can peel the skin from your bones with no effort at all. Mercifully I black out and remember no more.

posted by Phlegm at 3/16/2004  (0) comments

 
Good Day for a Walk
11-27-03

I'm in what's supposed to be downtown SB, but the streets are so dark, I can't tell for sure, and I get lost trying to get back to De La Guerra. My euclidean sense of geometry fails me when I try to navigate in circles.

By morning I make it to a construction site north of town. It's a hilly region, mostly hard dirt with large patches of grass. Only the building's frame is up, but people are working on it. The path I'm following goes straight through the structure, so I follow it. Noone seems to notice.

My backpack starts to weigh me down, and I wonder how much further I need to go, when I see some tourists up ahead. Civilization can't be far. They're gathering at the top of the next hill. I make it over there and see a hotel in the next valley.

I make it down there and head into the hotel. I need a shower, and there is a public shower area, like in a gym. It's huge. Most of the showers are on, though noone is there. Even the benches and lockers are being sprayed by water. As I'm showering, Ted Turner shows up and tells a story about drinking and gives me instructions on how to shave my balls.

Outside in the lobby, I run into Shanner and MV. I can't believe it, and I exclaim to them how strange it is that I always run into the most unlikely people in the most unlikely of places. I feel refreshed. It's a good day for a walk.

posted by Phlegm at 3/16/2004  (0) comments

 
Xian
11-08-03

I've just finished reading a book about the bear people, who have a twisted view of the world that makes them see everything as good. I'm also some sort of supernatural creature, and since it's night out, I'm outside with another of my kind. We're up on a mountain, and vampires are fleeing toward us. We bound down with our swords and slaughter them. We see they were running from werewolves. We're about to go kill the werewolves, too, when more vampires come out and catch them, including the master vampire. They start to feed. I don't want to stick around. I see a little girl who was running, the original bait. I take her back to the mansion.

Back at the mansion is a locked courtyard with monsters inside. I fumble for the key to unlock the door to get in. Monsters surround me. Someone locks me in. Weaponless, I go for a file cabinet to grab my weapon. I kill everything and unlock the door again.

Afterwards I'm sitting inside, holding the little girl. Another guy comes up and slaps her, says she can't be one of us cuz she's a "Xian" (pronounced "shan"), not European. I yell that that's fine, call him inbred, that I'm the genetics guy around here. Then I yell at him some more. Monsters fill up the courtyard again. Someone's in there with a machinegun, holding them off. The guy next to me goes to help. I know I won't see him again for a while, and I'm relieved. I notice everyone has caught some disease. Some sort of slime is melting off them. It gets everywhere. I decide to leave.

Daytime. I'm driving a big blue truck through the middle of the desert. I find a country town and park in barn designated for parking. It's spacious like a parking structure, but only has a ground floor. I see some guy getting beat up badly. I know he's like me, but much weaker. I beat up his attackers. He's in bad shape and runs off to hide.

I stay in town and go to the pub that night. A woman joins me to play cards, but then tells me to hide the deck. I hide it under the table. Someone says we've already started our hourly card-playing rate. She calls out women's names, and they come forth (if there are a certain percentage of women there, it's a discounted rate). She also convinces the bartender that he needs to be more responsible serving people liquor, so we must say complicated sentences to get additional drinks.

I spend four days in town, drunk as I can be the entire time, which isn't very. I exhaust all the cash I have with me.

Daytime again. Some other supernatural guy finds me and decides he doesn't like me. He tries to torch my vehicle, but he gets the wrong one. I find him in the parking barn and beat him up, kick him in the back of the head. The guy I saved earlier comes out of a closet he'd been hiding in and helps me. The bad guy turns into a tin dusting pan, and I bust it apart with a pole.

Two normal people are there watching, and old man and wife. They helped me earlier, but now they're frightened of me. I give them each a hug, the man having stepped into a big cobweb.

posted by Phlegm at 3/16/2004  (0) comments