I went away for a very long time. This is for a variety of reasons. The last post I wrote had a grammatical error in it. This caused me to Hulk the fuck out and delete it. I was quite sure at that point blogs were super lame. I think I was having a bad day.
Anywho, I wrote a book in the mean time! Yay! It’s very strange and will likely never see the popular light of day. Normal people are boring. I shall now put the first few pages below so you can see what I mean. Also, if you’re an agent or a publisher, call me, maybe?
The Stone Wife
Cosmo waited three days before he finally climbed inside his stone wife. He noticed a crack earlier in the week while she showered, but he turned away, a little embarrassed and dizzy, maybe. He wasn’t sure. Anyhow, it hadn’t mattered until now. Not until she went to bed and turned hard, like a living statue, a ton of cold rock he couldn’t ignore anymore.
When Cosmo put his mind to it, he could see the all sorts of symptoms. She was speaking less and less, her skin was stretched taut, ashen and unattractive, and she was eyeing pigeons with an unduly amount of suspicion. There was a chance he imagined that last one, but the odd crevice was definitely real.
He had tried to block the yawning space from his mind but was unsuccessful. It would creep into his consciousness and his dreams, or more outright when her shirt would rise or she would bump into furniture with a hollow THWACK! Cosmo tried to make himself more useful: reaching for items on the high shelf to keep her clothes in place, padding corners and doorways, those sorts of things. He didn’t think it would be polite to bring up her changing state. Women could be so sensitive.
So Cosmo and his wife carried on as if nothing had happened. Cosmo liked that. It made sense to him. And because of that, he couldn’t understand why she now seemed to be breaking their unspoken agreement. Turning to stone hardly seemed like maintaining the status quo. He kept expecting her to snap out of it. Maybe she just needed a good night’s sleep or some time to herself or something, and soon, she’d come back to herself.
As the first day pressed on, Cosmo pretended all was well, going about his normal routine. That night, after he returned from work, he leaned around the corner and peered into the bedroom to see if she had moved, but she hadn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to sleep next to her, and besides, they had an exceedingly comfortable couch.
On the second day, he managed to walk into the room. He made loud noises. He slammed drawers and kicked around the hamper and coughed louder than usual, but nothing worked. He fell asleep between the vanity and the wall while he watched the hard curves of his wife’s face grow harder.
When morning came, Cosmo didn’t want to pretend anymore. He started to throw things at her. Small things like pen caps and shoelaces and crumpled bits of paper. The third night approached and the items grew. Shoes, empty glasses, full glasses, and a lampshade were all to no avail. This was ridiculous.
He stared at his wife, frozen in the fetal position, and he finally knew what he needed to do. Well, not specifically. But he knew something needed to happen. The gap in her side had grown these last few days. Where it used to stretch from hip to breast, it now travelled armpit to knee. This worried Cosmo. He wasn’t sure he could make her real again, let alone piece her back together if she split all the way through.
Cosmo took a deep breath and clenched his jaw to bolster his determination. This has gone on long enough, he thought heroically. If she can’t conquer her problem, he would. He would go in, once and for all. Yes, indeed. He would be the one to fix it. He was a man.
Even with all his bluster he couldn’t make himself sit down next to her. He tentatively reached his hand to her shoulder and squeezed. It was cold and didn’t give, not even a little. He wrenched his fingers away and suppressed the urge to vomit. What happened to his beautiful Grace?
“Grace,” he whispered to himself, holding her name on his tongue like glass. His beautiful Grace. He ran his hand along her ribs. It felt different. It wasn’t the same as her icy shoulder. Something was wrong, or something had gone wrong. He had to go inside. She needed him, he knew it. “Grace,” he whispered again as he settled himself next to her ruined side.
Cosmo pushed his fingers around the edges of her break trying to feel how fragile she was or how pliable she could be. This was a first for him and he was very unsure of how to proceed.
He was palm deep before he asked himself if maybe it would be better to go foot first, like maybe he’d need his legs out first to steady himself, but it was too late anyhow, he’d gone this far and besides, he thought, leaving a girl couldn’t be too dissimilar from crawling back in and once inside, up and down would be pretty relative. Or at least he thought. None of it made much sense, you can’t blame him for trying to find some reason in it.
So Cosmo pushed on and his wife didn’t feel so much like marble or maybe his bones didn’t feel much like bones anymore. More like clay. And the further he wriggled, the easier it was until he all but oozed over the last of the bed sheets and slid down the inside of his wife, sealing up the crack behind him.
Pulling himself back together was a peculiar feeling, and Cosmo was no artist but he managed ok. It could have been his own skewed perception of self, but he seemed more or less human again, more or less Cosmo again.
He looked up to see where he’d fallen from, or dripped from depending on how you look at it. He was concerned to see no clear way out and that the entrance was plugged. But maybe that was a good thing. It wasn’t much, he amended, as he looked around the dark, moist cavernous place he’d landed. There was still a great big room to fill. He didn’t think someone should be so hollow as Grace seemed to be and figured that was probably why she’d cracked open in the first place.
Cosmo hadn’t planned much further than this, which is perfectly natural since one doesn’t usually have a partner-turned-into-stone contingency. He wondered exactly where he was because it didn’t look how he thought it would. The ceilings were too high and too heavy; it was all so fragile looking. He didn’t know how it stayed up. Spindly rocks stretched down to join columns rising from the floor, like mating stalactites and stalagmites, but the rock was needle thin where they met. The whole scene was dark and alien, like the set from a cheap movie. Everything was almost real, but something made it fall short. It was too delicate, shimmering like spun sugar, carefully crafted for effect, reflecting an unnatural glow from some invisible source. The floors were seamless, smooth, rising and falling in gentle waves, and Cosmo would have thought they were sand dunes if he couldn’t feel them and know they were rock.
There was no clear path either, only hills and slopes and smaller alcoves and bigger tunnels stretching into more darkness. Cosmo started to panic a little, and his chest felt heavy. He couldn’t remember why he’d thought this was going to be a good idea, just that he’d been at a dead end and he so desperately wanted to be doing something. He needed action. He looked around once more and decided to follow the slope downward, partly because it was easier and partly because going up into the dark tunnels made his heart beat strangely. And this place was so big and Grace so small, surely there couldn’t be much more to it. Surely he would walk down this hill and around the wall and there he would find the source of all this strangeness. What, he wasn’t sure, but he’d recognize it when he saw it. Cosmo has been in love with Grace since he was seven years old. He’d know what didn’t belong. He’d fix what was broken.
Ta-dah! First three pages.
This blog was brought to you by an excessive amount of boredom and a momentary creative desires. Enjoy!
Also: All this shit is copyright, yo.
Sociable Ink 