Response Times and Professional Magazines

Here’s a bit from the story I’m trying to finish up today, a young adult piece tentatively entitled “The Ghost Installers.” It actually came out of a dream that I had – a good reason to be keeping a dream journal.

We talked about that recently in a class – the need to listen to your unconscious mind, to pay attention to dreams and serendipitous slips of the tongue. To nourish it with a variety of arts and make sure its senses are satisfied. To give it space in which to express itself. Sometimes when I’m drawing, that’s when a story that’s mentally knotted begins to untwist itself and show me what my mind is trying to do with it.

The dream was just a moment, an image/situation that I won’t describe for fear of spoilers. Talking to Wayne about it the next morning, I found a story idea emerging, which we batted back and forth, applying the classic try/fail, try/fail, try/succeed algorithm, until it was fleshed out to the point that I jotted down a 250 word outline. Now I’m working through that from scene one till the end, but I think if I get stuck along the way, I might try moving to the ending and writing it, advice from this excellent post about writing process by Kameron Hurley that I wanted to point to.

Here’s a bit from the beginning. Penny and her dad have just moved into their new house, so new that pieces of it are still being worked on. It’s two in the morning, and she’s just snuck in after hanging out with her friends in a nearby park.

She had a penlight in her pocket, although the battery was almost out from using it in the park. She crept towards the attic stairs. The solidity of the little light wrapped in her fingers reassured her, although it could hardly be used as a weapon.

Maybe some animal that wandered in? A raccoon or something. Maybe a cat?

She held her breath, as she crept up the stairs. Was that”¦voices?

“Goddammit, Mysa, hand me the calipers, this one’s a bitch,” someone said.

“Keep your voice down, Brian! There’s a family sleeping downstairs.”

“Who futzed up the schedule? These are supposed to go in before anyone arrives.”

“That’s why this one’s high-priority. They moved in three days ago.”

A mutter of Irritation. “Everything’s high priority.”

Penny swallowed down the lump of fear in her throat. Who are these people and what are they doing here? They sounded like the sort of people who’d been working on the house all along, but why were they installing something at two in the morning? She hesitated, then progressed upward a few more steps. A few more and she’d be able to see what they were doing. Speculations raced through her head, but she couldn’t figure out anything that would fit. This was all too weird.

But the pair, once she could glimpse them, seemed ordinary enough. They wore black coveralls and matching black stocking caps. The taller one was fiddling with something attached to the highest point of the roof. And then she noticed what wasn’t ordinary at all. His feet hung in the air. Unsupported, dangling just enough to show that he wasn’t standing on something that she couldn’t see.

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More free fiction, this time a piece that originally appeared in Cream City Review, in an issue guest-edited by Frances Sherwood.

When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.

My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.

I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.

My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.

“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.

My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.

My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.

“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”

Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.

I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.

I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.

I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.

I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.

A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.

Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.

In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.

We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.

I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.

My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.