Lamia

Ahh! I was just going through my monster project from comp lit and couldn't find this story on here! Did I forget it?
This is the Lamia story from my comp lit class...

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For three weeks Adam had seen the ghost lingering in the back corner of his closet. She wasn’t a particularly threatening ghost, but still Adam would call his parents every night to come upstairs and tuck him in and turn on the nightlight.

“Adam, you’re a big boy now, aren’t you? Does my big first grader really need me doing this every night?” his mother would coo before kissing him goodnight. Adam would shrug and try not to look at the closet door.

Around midnight the door would slowly creak open, sometimes waking Adam up. On the nights it did, he would glance over at the source of the noise to see a woman hunched in the closet. She was fairly young, with long, tangled hair. Adam couldn’t tell much else about her, because she was always balled up into a fetal position and rocking back and forth. Adam was torn between being afraid and pitying her. She was obviously distressed, but he was too scared of the ghost and he didn’t dare approach or try talking to her.

After almost a month of this, Adam awoke to a new sight. The ghost was no longer in his closet. Instead, she was sitting in the shadow between the closet and the dresser, much closer to his bed, still rocking back and forth rhythmically. Adam barely managed to keep from crying out. He shut his eyes as tightly as possible, willing himself to sleep.

Adam hadn’t been able to sleep, and while his mother was pouring the orange juice he nodded off at the breakfast table. Annoyed, his father looked up the newspaper—he’d been reading an article about the bloody murder of a local high school girl driving home from a concert—and raised an eyebrow. His mother was furious. She knew “the ghost lady” keeping him awake all night was just another way of saying “playing videogames.” Adam was sent to bed early that night to prove a point, and locked in his room to prevent him from sneaking back downstairs to his Playstation.

Adam was petrified. He mimed sleep for a couple hours, and when the soft creak of the closet door pierced the silence, he opened his eyes. Adam didn’t even have time to scream before a soft, cold something covered his mouth. The woman was kneeling beside his bed, hand over his mouth, other hand brought in a hush motion to her lips. She was very beautiful. Her tangled hair fell in mossy curtains around his face and he saw that she was crying.

“Why are you crying?” he whispered when she lifted her hand. “Are you sad?”

She said nothing; she opened her mouth, moving her lips in what appeared to be the motions of speech, though she made no sounds. She closed her mouth, shaking her head. She continued to cry, dripping fat clammy tears onto Adam’s cheeks. She bent forward, kissing his forehead.

“You don’t have to be sad,” he whispered, “I’ll be your friend. You seem like a nice ghost. Let’s be friends.”

She only cried harder, bending down to kiss his cheek and then his neck. Adam turned slightly to look at her. She raised her head from his neck and he saw his own blood spilling from her mouth, running down her face. Adam screamed once and then the house was silent.

poetry shit

breathe in and out: inhale, exhale,
burt stones, dirt, metal, fiber glass;
dry, hot, dry, hot, swollen.
counting steps; dry, hot, swollen;
dark beasts prowling behind the door.
little wooden puppet feet,
scratching, clawing, breaking.
ballerina with skinny wrists licking her fingers, a look is exchanged;
wet hair, cold puppet feet, thick wooden legs, leaning sideways, dripping, watching.
bones wrapped in wire, string attached to the head;
a little wooden puppet
breaking glass, swallowing, turning red;
thick dark curtains, almonds, mirror eyes, peeling paint, creaking;
jostling, shifting, slipping;
a scarecrow, a rag doll, a wooden puppet.
floating head held aloft by a wire, rotating slightly;
falling suddenly: a crashing sound as the wooden limbs crumple in a heap;
smiling: wide, bright, sharp predatory teeth, shadow throat, laughter.
breathe in and out: inhale, exhale: everything is fine,
this is how the world works,
this is how it's supposed to be;
breathe in and out: inhale, exhale: calm down, everything is fine.
little wooden puppet, lacking lungs, barely breathing, exhale, empty.
falling suddenly: a crashing sound as the wooden limbs splinter slightly;
digging debris out of the gaps between the floor boards,
tiny pieces of wood, bits of wire.
shadow throat, laughing, ghostly shadow eyes:
buttons, strings, mirror eyes, pealing paint, grease;
the striking feeling of being lowered into warm water,
or onto a knife blade;
the subtle vibration within the wood.
standing, supported by a wire, watching;
suddenly: a crashing sound as the puppet falls to the floor.

Bloody Bones, part II

I've become very fond of the vitalic CD that I got from matson. it's pretty classy. I recommend it. (the CD is called Flashmob.)

So I feel pretty confident about my comp lit final now, because most everyone else's were standard short stories with romantic comedy elements. hopefully Nadia will like my project. I don't really know if she'll be offended. I have a feeling she won't be. we'll see.






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Bloody Bones:
Part II


Excited that she was allowed to stay up late for once, she took some cereal from the cabinet closest to the floor and began eating straight from the box. Boy, this was wonderful: staying up late and as much sugar cereal as a little girl could want! Suddenly she heard a baby’s watery hiccup. Annoyed, she ran back to her parents’ bedroom, but no, the baby lay still in his crib. She shuffled back to the kitchen, stuffing her face with Lucky Charms. There was the hiccup again, and this time Alicia was able to hear it coming from the sink. She pulled her little yellow plastic stool up, putting the cereal down on the floor, and peered into the drain.
“Hello?” she called, “Is there a baby down there?”
Silence.
She got down off the stool and continued to eat her cereal sitting down at the kitchen table. There was another sound from the sink, more of a moan this time. Alicia was a little scared now, and tip toed over more carefully before getting back on the stool.
“Hello?” she called again, “Who’s down there?”
A quiet whisper answered back, “You’ve been a naughty girl, Alicia.”
She jumped, dropping her cereal box onto the linoleum floor, “Who are you?” she whispered back to the drain.
“My name is Bloody Bones and you’ve been a very naughty girl, Alicia, killing your brother like that,” came the voice, gurgling from the pipes.
“I just made him go to sleep! He was being annoying,” Alicia whispered.
“You’ve been a naughty girl, Alicia. I’m going to have to punish you.”
Alicia stepped back off of the stool. Without turning away from the drain, she picked up her cereal box, sucking the thumb of her other hand. She ran to the living room, burying herself under the cushions on the couch, eating cereal and watching the kitchen sink. After a few minutes of silence, Alicia decided it was worth a look. She crawled out from under her pillow cocoon, shuffling her little feet into the kitchen. She climbed onto the plastic stool, looking down into the drain.
“Naughty girls must be punished,” the sink gurgled at her. She screamed as a long, thin arm shot from the drain, wrapping itself around her throat, dragging her down into the dark.
When Alicia’s parents got home, they found only a box of cereal spilled in the kitchen, a small plastic stool and an empty crib.

Bloody Bones, part I

Sitting in herter, waiting for my class to start[9:30].
it seems strange that
only a few weeks ago
there were leaves on the trees outside the window here;
there were squirrels too.

winter is like refreshing death.
cold is very refreshing[in moderation].
when it gets to be too much I feel a bit like I'm about to die,
but at this level
it's alright.



Bloody Bones:
Part I

[I don't think it's as good as the werewolf or the wendigo]


Ever since the baby came, everyone was too busy tending to Alicia’s new little brother to pay her any attention. She would paint pictures of mermaids for her mother, who would barely look before saying, “that’s nice, Alicia,” putting them down to feed the baby or cuddle the baby or play with the baby. Alicia’s sadness and resentment grew and grew, until she outright hated her new little brother. No one cared if she cleaned up her toys like a good girl, and no one cared if she was given time outs at preschool for unruly behavior. She was no longer the only child, glittering with importance, and, being only three, she didn’t like it one bit.
One night, Alicia’s parents were invited out to dinner with some old friends. Both were a little nervous at the idea of leaving their baby for the night; there had been a string of unexplained, extremely violent murders recently and one, a midnight break in, had even involved a child—a little boy not much older than Alicia. The police weren’t saying it, but the locals assumed a serial killer, and if a serial killer who was not above breaking into houses and slashing little boys’ throats at night, Alicia’s parents feared the worst for their children. Despite their fears, Alicia’s parents couldn’t refuse the invitation. They keyed in the four-digit code to activate their home security system and entrusted their daughter with the task of babysitting.
Upon the closing of the car doors and the roaring of the engine fading into the distance, the baby began to cry. He wailed and wailed, and Alicia had no idea what to do. She pulled a chair to the crib, standing on it to reach in and lift her brother out. He continued to cry, spitting and snotting all over her pajamas. Alicia wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Quiet down,” she said, “Mommy and Daddy will be back soon. Just shut up, ok?”
The baby did not shut up. Instead, he grew louder still. Alicia began screaming and crying for him to be quiet but being a baby, he didn’t listen. He simply hiccupped and cried and continued to soak her clothes. Alicia slapped him across the face, to no avail. She shook him up and down a little but he only cried harder. She then took her thumb and forefingers and pinched his lips shut as hard as she could, but he simply screamed in an eerie high-pitched hum. She placed him back in his crib, using her other hand to hold his nostrils shut. Finally, silence. The baby flailed around for a minute or two before he was still. Alicia sighed, removing her hands from the baby’s face. Proud of herself for making her little brother fall asleep, she got down off the chair and made her way to the kitchen.

Wendigo

here is the wendigo story:



It’s been weeks. Weeks. It is all I can do to stare up into the canopy of the tent. I cannot even begin to try and move from the sleeping bag. I turn my head to the left to assess her condition. She is far worse off than I. Her hips have become bone, hard, thick cat ears jutting from her waist. Her sweater and blankets cover most of her body, though I know that underneath the layers her torso has become a xylophone of ribs. She breathes heavily, gasping. I am not much better; I lift my arm slightly and both the ulna and radius are clearly defined. The pain in my muscles is almost constant now; my body is eating itself.
We have been trapped on this mountain, buried in snow for I know not how long. We have no measure with which to keep track of time; we cannot see the sun. I fear myself, fear my mind; I am no longer safe inside my own head. I have horrible thoughts. I have dreams of wrapping my thinning fingers around her throat and watching her struggle, this girl that I love. I watch her pale hair as she breathes in and out, fighting for every gasp. Her soft white skin has become transparent and dead from hunger and thirst. I reach over to her with my boney arm, letting my hand settle in her angel hair.
I stroke her forehead lovingly and close my eyes, willing myself to die in my sleep for fear of the madness within me.
“At least we’ll die together,” she breathes softly.


I sigh, coughing violently with the change in breathing pattern, as I feel his fingers against my brow. His hand is cold. I dare not open my eyes to see what we have become. I feel enough from that touch alone to know that he, like me, has become something no longer human. We are wire frames now, skeletons. Our organs barely function; our muscles dissolve into our bloodstreams. The quiet of the snow and the pain in my body are harmonious.
“At least we’ll die together,” I say, though it comes as a whisper past my peeling lips.
I feel him relax slightly and assume he must be asleep now. I lie still, praying for death to take me. If there is a god, let Him kill me now.


In the night a monster awakens who is not I. I watch with mute horror as the monster turns to my beloved, reaching for her with my body’s hands (they are no longer mine). She doesn’t open her eyes, doesn’t struggle. I watch the monster press down harder on her delicate sparrow neck; her eyes flutter softly.
“Thank you,” she gasps.
The monster wastes no time, immediately cutting into her gut with the hunting knife I had brought along for rabbits. I am no longer present; she is alone with the monster as it eats her steaming, withered organs straight from her corpse. Never has the monster tasted anything so wonderful, so nourishing. This monster would, were it capable of emotion, feel such overwhelming happiness and triumph. It becomes too intense for my once-human body to withstand.
The monster is alarmed, furious, as my body rejects this terrible act by vomiting onto the tent floor. The monster uses what used to be my hands to scoop the expelled pieces, forcing them back into my mouth. By this point I am only a soulless observer somewhere far away. The monster continues its feast.
Hours later, or maybe days, the monster is finished with her. She is only hair and scattered bits of bone; the monster ate even her marrow. The monster forces my once-human body to crawl from the tent into the snow. This new body is indifferent to the cold, always in pain. The monster uses its new eyes to survey the mountain, finding nothing. It hungers still.
The monster walks, dragging its new feet, sometimes using its new hands to craw through the snow. A mangled corpse, tall and cracked, it makes its way down the mountain, deeper into the forest. The monster’s skin is pale, bloody, rotten. Its teeth and nails chipped and ground to a repulsive state from breaking bones. The monster will wait in the woods, always walking, always searching. I am nowhere to be found.
The monster will forever starve. The monster will forever hunger. At least we died together.

Werewolf

I've written three of the four vignettes I need to write for comp lit on tuesday.
I have the wendigo still to go.

I've done the lamia, the werewolf and bloody bones. my favorite is the werewolf, of course. werewolves are the easiest to write about, as I have experience. it doesn't take a lot of thinking to write about werewolves.
rip, tear, guilt.
basic formula.



Here's the werewolf one.

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She is so unsuspecting, as they always are. I stand by the road and wait in the shadows. It has been night for a long, long time and so I am not afraid of who will be awake to hear. The girl driving is blasting loud music and obviously under the influence of something toxic, and I’m not sure whether or not she’ll stop for me as I timidly step into the road. I do not fear her speed and size; a car could never hurt me. I am so blindly hungry that I would fight a highway. I move to the side, letting her bumper come to a halt a couple inches from my haunches. I turn my muzzle towards her as she drunkenly urges me onwards with her hand. Before she can react, I am on top of her hood and through her windshield. She screams once before I cut her short with my mouth around her neck. I drag her out of the car and into the road by the throat.
Blood bursts forth, a fountain of dark wine, as I tear her throat with my teeth. Gnashing my canines together against the sweet softness of the muscle beneath. My throat is so dry, it is on fire; I feel as if I am going to die if I do not drink. Her life is running down my esophagus into my gut. Her eyes are still open; she is dead, watching me. I slide my claws deep into the hole I have created in her neck, scoring a path of fresh rivers downwards across her sternum while the music from her radio continues to play. I tear her chest open, drinking from the pool that has formed there. I lift my head for a moment; the necklace she was wearing is broken in two, tangled in her hair. She was a very beautiful girl, very young. I spread my lips open, sliding them past my enormous teeth, and break my way through her ribs and eat her heart in large, messy bites. I am so hungry. My throat is so dry. I eat and eat until there is nothing, her chest is empty; her ribs strain to touch the sky. I make fast, sloppy work of her arms, her legs, her gut; nothing is untouched in my feast. Her soft, smooth intestines are hot and steaming in the night air as I pull them from her soft, smooth body. She no longer has a face and I have eaten her eyes. I leave her there with broken pieces of her body strewn across the road.
In the morning I will feel the pain of what I have done, but for now I am not human and I feel no remorse. Her life has no value; she is my food. In the morning I will remember. In the morning I will feel the meat in my stomach and expel it neatly into the toilet. I will retch and retch until I bleed. In the morning I will sob in the downstairs bathroom, taking care to not wake my sleeping wife. In the morning I will drive my children to the high school that is now one student smaller.




for some reason I can't think of a story involving a wendigo. this is odd, because usually wendigos are easy to write about (not as easy as werewolves, but almost).
hopefully before tuesday I'll have thought of something.

fish bowl effect

unicorns are violent, beautiful creatures.
I'd like to do some sort of art with unicorns (how female of me).
unicorns slaughtering people and eating them, perhaps.
I need to get better at drawing animals[horses, creatures].





















oranges, peeling back
their fleshy, swollen faces,
grinning in the moonlight.

palestinian weather forcast:
sand and sea and broken bones,
bloodied knuckles;
smiling children, broken fingers.

oranges, peeling back
their slimy, filthy skins, rubber eyes,
baring their teeth, gnawing at the glass.

nails in the walls, grinding into the muscle.
my bones are hidden, tucked away beneath a soft coating of grime.

falling apart in little pieces of egg shell;
fingers, toes, frothy eyes, little pieces of egg shell.


This doll creeps me the fuck out what the fuck

breaking egg shells

Edith laughed, almost dropping the Mason jar she was carrying under her arm, as the cat tumbled off the high, wooden beam chasing his moth. She bit her tongue, cutting the laugh short, and gasped at the sudden taste of blood in her mouth.
Summer was peeking its round, sweaty face through the thin windows of the Blue House in the Gully and yearly cleaning was in full swing. The cat provided company while Edith searched the Blue House for bits of trash and scrap to make ornaments. She stood at the top of a skinny ladder, her stick figure legs wobbling as she reached towards the swollen rafters. Edith grimaced. She swallowed the blood, feeling the cut pucker its lips, and braced herself for the sound that came like a small gunshot as she smashed the mason jar against the wall. The large fragments made beautiful additions, she thought as she super glued them to the panes of the high windows; the light filtered into broken, poetic pieces.
The cat meowed loudly, tip-tapping up the rungs of the ladder to wind himself around her thin shoulders, purring and meowing in odd, disjointed hiccups.
“Yes,” Edith said, “Yes, yes, and yes.”
She stepped cautiously down, the cat still clutching at her neck, and headed to the kitchen. Delicately, she pulled the three-legged stool from under the counter and perched herself atop its flat, wooden face. Careful not to look down, she reached her thin, white arm deep into the cabinet’s bloated bowels, extracting an unopened can of cat food. The cat cried and screamed, spinning in circles on the countertop. Edith placed the can next to the sink, climbing down with slow, practiced motions. She pulled the can opener from the drawer, nervously assessing its tiny teeth.
Once the cat was fed, she thought it would be best to take out the trash bags that had accumulated from her cleaning. Edith, unable to carry all three of them by herself, struggled to lift the bags one by one into the wheelbarrow on the porch. She brought them to the end of the winding driveway, discarding them behind the dumpster which she assumed must be for her own personal use; the trash she left disappeared on a rather predictable schedule.
A terrible cramping pain erupted suddenly from her gut. Edith gasped, waiting for it to subside. A monster sunk his teeth into her organs, gnawing and biting and refusing to let go until she sat down in the wheelbarrow. She stood, panting to catch her breath, watching the dark cloud in front of her vision suspiciously, making sure it faded completely before she moved again. Edith grasped both handles of the wheelbarrow and walked it carefully down the hill.






There is no meaning behind this; it's really just a life.

darkened soot and the bones of fish

I post way too often for a blog that [maybe] one or two people read.
but that's not the point of this, I guess. the point is just to be writing
(not that I write anything of value here, this isn't poetry or prose).


I decided on a name for the girl in the story I've been writing on and off for several months: Edith.



(don't let my time frame fool you; this story is only one and a half pages, single space.)





this is how I feel a lot of the time.
this is how I feel a lot of the time.
this is how I feel a lot of the time.
this is how I feel a lot of the time.
this is how I feel a lot of the time.
this is how I feel a lot of the time.
this is how I feel a lot of the time.






here is a piece of the beginning of my [very]short story:

The wind ate up the Blue House in the Gully as Edith rocked herself slow and steady, her knees pulled up to her chest. Hair ribbon askew, thin fingers shaking, she watched the glass tighten in the window frame.
Several miles north from the center of town the road forked, rolled to the right, and flopped uselessly into the woods. The ugly trees, their nervous fingers parting, twisted into anxious positions along side the dirt road as it fell down, down, down, into a pebbled driveway. The Blue House in the Gully lay at the bottom of this swirling mess, rotten as ever.
The wind ached and writhed, Edith’s voice rose and broke in little whispery screams each time a rock hit the window. Edith hated storms, hated storms, hated storms. Eventually, unable to remain inside any longer, Edith pulled a sheer white gown over her nightdress, taking stumbling, drunken steps through the door and over the stones in the grass to her car outside. She moaned and shrieked as the wind tore at her eyes, gasping when she finally fell into the driver’s seat. The key grumbled unhappily in the ignition.
After twenty minutes of driving, holding the steering wheel at her nose, Edith approached civilization. The wind picked up, screaming and yelling its guttural demon noises on the other side of the car windows. Edith screamed along with it. She pulled into the parking lot of Way’s, wrenching the key out, gasping, moaning, shaking in her seat.
She purchased several packets of gum in her bedclothes and drove back, trying not to die.

monsters

In 1979, author Ian Woodward published claims suggesting rabies as a possible origin of the werewolf, stating the remarkable similarities between the symptoms of rabies as with traits of werewolves in legends. Woodward focused on the idea that being bitten by a werewolf could result in the victim turning into one himself, which pointed to a transmittable disease like rabies.



All cultures in which the Wendigo myth appeared shared the belief that human beings could turn into Wendigos if they ever resorted to cannibalism or, alternately, become possessed by the demonic spirit of a Wendigo, often in a dream. Once transformed, a person would become violent and obsessed with eating human flesh. The most frequent cause of transformation into a Wendigo was if a person had resorted to cannibalism, consuming the body of another human in order to keep from starving to death during a time of extreme hardship or famine.


In Greek mythology, Lamia was a beautiful queen of Libya. According to the legend, Zeus engaged in an affair with Lamia. Hera, furious that her husband had cheated on her yet again, killed Lamia’s children in a rage. Driven insane with grief, Lamia began devouring other children, sneaking to their beds at night to suck their blood.

And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
-John Keats, Lamia


Bloody-Bones is said to live near water (in older tellings) and under sink pipes (in newer tellings). Rawhead/Bloodybones rewards very good children, but will punish naughty children by dragging them down the drainpipes or into the water and drowning them.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.

-Yorkshire children’s rhyme