The Humming

Chris couldn’t sleep. He lay for hours next to Rachel, listening to her breathe and snort and snore while he just lay there staring at the ceiling praying that sleep would come, but it didn’t. He listened to rain pound on the roof and windows, listened to the ticking of the clock and wondered how much longer he would have to suffer through the night, but he just couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t wait any longer.

Chris peeled off the sheet and slipped out of the bed so he wouldn’t wake his girlfriend and then he crept into the living room, shutting the door behind him. He stood there for a moment in the dark, waiting, listening for Rachel stirring in the bed, but everything was silent so Chris moved across the room and into the kitchen where he turned on a light and then went straight for his backpack.

He grabbed the pack, it was still soaked from when he was out in the rain earlier, and lifted it from the kitchen chair. Immediately Chris felt something strange in his hand, a feeling, more like a sensation of a low vibration. It was what was in his pack that was doing it, Chris knew. He had to open the bag anyway.

His kitchen table was a mess, not to mention a window into the life of a man who was himself a thorough mess.  He brushed away cigarettes that had fallen out of the ashtray and relocated a stack of CDs and his collection of pills to the counter behind him before placing the backpack on the table. He sat in front of it, watching it, readying himself to open it. There was a bottle of bourbon on the table and Chris took a long gulp and then slammed the bottle down. He ripped open the zipper like it was tape over his mouth, quick and violent and with courage.

The tesseract bounced out of the bag, and Chris’s hand shot out and grabbed it from the air. He balked at himself. His hand felt like it had moved on its own accord. Certainly he didn’t want to be touching this thing, Chris thought to himself, yet he clutched it in his bare hands and stared into its depths, the brilliant cube that expanded infinitely inward inside itself, glowing. 

Now that he was home, now that he wasn’t running for his life, Chris could get a good look - and feel - of the thing. Its size was deceptive: it fit into Chris’s palm, it was maybe three inches square on each side, but he guessed that the thing weighed almost two pounds. 

The tesseract thrummed in his hand. Again, he was hesitant to think of it as a vibration. He remembered last week, having sex with Rachel while they were hiding in someone’s bedroom at a party they went to. He had put his hand over Rachel’s mouth to dampen her groans, and that’s what the tesseract’s vibration reminded him of - a humming. But it wasn’t just that either, was it? Because it felt warm, too, and alive. It felt very nearly like it was breathing.

Chris held it up and squinted at the cube. It was dirty, the revolving colored glow was muted and not nearly as brilliant. He grabbed a box of tissues that was buried on the table and gently wiped the cube, turning it in his hand and noticing for the first time that the tesseract wasn’t completely clear. Where the vertices of the cubes met, there were what looked like minuscule, practically microscopic blue stones. 

Sapphire? he thought. What the hell is this thing?

Chris didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know whether he should tell anyone about this or just keep it to himself. But how could he keep it to himself? Of course no one believed him when he told people that he’d seen lights in the sky the other day. They all thought he was drunk, which he was, of course, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t drunk when he had seen them again tonight, and he thought he had seen what was making them, too. 

He had run so fast into the woods when he first saw the flashing in the sky. He wanted to prove it to himself that he wasn’t crazy, that something was really going on out there. The rain had been pouring, there were flashes of lightening and claps of thunder, and then he had seen it, this tiny glowing thing dropping out of thin air - the tesseract.

He had run to it, and when he reached the spot where it had landed he could have sworn that when he looked up through the tree canopy he wasn’t seeing a clouded sky, he was seeing something big and metal, and blocking out the clouds and stars and whole wide rest of the world. 

So he had run back the way he’d come, cutting a serpentine path through the woods, dodging rocks and branches and the deadfalls, he’d run home with the thing strapped to his back, and now, what?

What was he going to do with it?

The tesseract hummed and glowed, and Chris was so very afraid. 

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For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Anna N. Mouse gave me this prompt: Use these words in your story: A box of tissues, cigarettes, bourbon, a stack of CDs, serpentine, sapphire, pills..  (You can find the words bolded in my response.)

I gave Barb Black this prompt: Start your piece with this line: 'It was bad enough just being in the basement, but then of course there were rats."

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I want to thank Anna for the most challenging and one of the most fun writing challenges I've ever done. Her prompt, to add a bunch of random words, was HARD. Good thing I find the hard challenges to be the most rewarding in the end. This was really fun to write.

This piece is also an immediate follow up to a scene I wrote for Write on Edge last week. If you are interested in reading more about Chris you can read The Tesseract, short and sweet at around 500 words.

Suzy's Big Mistake

Suzy Brown was only five years old, she shouldn’t have been wandering off so far from the house and into the woods on her own at such a young age. It wasn’t that there were bad people around town or hobos in the woods that would prey on a young girl, and there hadn’t been sightings of any wild animals that could pose a danger this close to town and populated areas, but… 

Little children get lost in the woods. They wander off and get themselves all turned around and then they can’t figure out which path through the trees will bring them back home. Most of the time, if a kid gets lost in the woods, you send out a search party and you find them crying on a rock, hungry and scared. But sometimes you don’t. 

Suzy Brown wasn’t lost in the woods that day though, she knew exactly where she was going, to her special place in the woods where she stored all of her treasures. 

Little Suzy loved collecting rocks. She had done it for as long as anyone could remember in her short years, and as she got older her parents were delighted to find that her interest was genuine. Suzy asked for geology books for her fifth birthday, and her parents had surprised her with a trip to National History Museum, where she got to see all sorts of rocks. Rubies and diamonds and moonstone and even rocks from the moon. 

Her treasures were stored under a flat rock that sat between the base of two small trees. Suzy crouched down on the ground and looked over her shoulder in both directions, already at five years old she was sneaky and smart. Satisfied that no one was spying on her, she lifted the rock to reveal the hole she dug out between the trees that was filling up with all of the rocks she’d collected. Most of them were filled with shiny, but brittle pieces of mica, and some of them were dark red garnets she’d found near the stream. 

Suzy ran her hands over the rocks, picking some of them up for a moment to examine and then put them back down before covering up her secret treasure trove again. 

This was her habit, her ritual. First, Suzy would check to make sure that her hiding place had not been disturbed and that her rocks were all there, and then she would go out hunting for more. 

It was a nice warm day in spring, and Suzy headed farther away from her house and towards the stream where she found all the best of her treasures. The walk was much farther than Suzy’s parent’s liked, a good five minutes into the woods at a child’s brisk pace. It doesn’t sound far, and it never feels far to Suzy, but to a parent, a five minute jog is an uncomfortable distance away from your child.

This is why Suzy lied to her parents and always swore to them she never went anywhere near the stream. 

The only person who Suzy ever told the truth to about her adventures was her Papa. He had been delighted when Suzy told him that she’d found rubies in the stream, and Papa had thrown back his head and laughed and told her that they were really garnets, a common stone. 

“But they are beautiful, Papa,” she’d whined, and he laughed at her again. 

“Yes they are, precious.”

Suzy’s Papa died last month of the cancer. She missed him terribly, missed being able to tell him about her adventures, but for some reason losing her Papa had only made Suzy feel even more adventurous.

Suzy skipped through the woods, brushing her hands over the tops of the tallest ferns that she passed on the path that she had made through the woods to the stream all on her own. Another thing her parents would be horrified to find out, that their daughter had defied them so often, she’d beaten a well worn path of lies.

The sound of water babbling over rocks came to Suzy before she saw the stream through the trees. She sped up, but then came to a stumbling halt about twenty feet from the stream when the ground in her path seemed to rise up in front of her and block her way, a wall of dirt about a foot and a half high and just as wide.

Suzy skirted the edge of this wall, slowly, but with more fascination and wonder than confusion. She faced the other side of the wall and saw that a bowl shaped impression had been ground into the earth, the displaced dirt curving up from the ground to form the little wall of dirt that had startled her. Turning her head, Suzy saw that a ragged path in the dirt was cut over her own, with little waves of dirt marking its straight edges as it went directly into the stream and stopped. 

She walked the length of the path, noticing how hard the earth was packed down by whatever it was that had made these marks. She thought it looked like someone had dropped a bowling ball from an airplane and it had rolled down her path and into her stream.

Suzy peered into the water, watching a leaf ride the current toward her and then into the mouth of carved path that had cut into the side of the stream bed and let the water rise past its banks. 

Suzy searched the water and the stream banks, not knowing what she was looking for at all, but she knew something had made that cut in the earth and that something ended up in the water, because that is where the path had come to its end.

Suzy walked along downstream, following the current. She didn’t want to cross to the other side and risk getting wet, but this side of the bank was covered in thickets of ferns and low bushes that tangled her ankles, and then she had beat her way through a forsythia bush and came out the other side covered in little yellow petals. She smiled looking down at herself, and didn’t bother trying to shake the petals away.

It was after this emergence that she saw something glinting in the stream. The sun was coming in a beam through the green canopy and reflecting off something black and shiny that was spinning in the water.

Suzy ran to the edge of the water and plopped down on her knees, leaning over to get a closer look. It was about the size of a bowling ball, just as she had thought (Suzy was such a smart girl), but it wasn’t smooth at all. It was rough and jagged, not completely round because there were jagged little knobs sticking out in places. It looked to Suzy like a volcanic rock, except it was not as porous, and it was jet black and gleaming, the water giving it a brilliant dark shine, but Suzy could still tell that the surface was rough and would probably feel like sandpaper to touch. 

The rock was spinning in the stream, caught between the edge of the bank and a tangle of branches that had fallen into the water, making a dam and keep it from floating any farther downstream. 

It never occurred to Suzy that rocks don’t float in streams, and this is why children should never wander off into the woods by themselves. 

It is clear what had happened. Something fell from the sky, the force of its impact sent it careening into a neighboring stream where it traveled down a few dozen yards and was caught for an unsuspecting five year old to find. 

It would have been clear to Suzy’s parents that the best case scenario would be that what Suzy was pulling out of the stream had been dumped from the toilet of a passing airplane. If adults had come upon this sham of a rock, floating and spinning in a stream, they may have been smart enough to call in some authorities to deal with whatever it was.  But of course there was no way for little Suzy to realize the enormity of what she had done when she carried that black rock back to her treasure trove, and upon reaching her stash, decided that this rock seemed to special to leave outside. 

So she took it with her into her house and into her bedroom, where only a few hours later when Suzy was back outside playing with her dog, the rock began to hum. 

And then it cracked open. 

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This piece was written using the Studio 30+ Writing Community's weekly writing prompt, which was to use the word 'Papa' and/or 'enormity.' I used both.

I think at this point I should admit to myself that the three pieces I wrote for prompt challenges this week are shaping up to be something a little more than just three characters dealing with creepy things out in the woods.

I mentioned the other day that I have been feeling strangely quiet, and yet I've also been having really good writing days. I am finding that when I sit down and put my fingers on the keyboard, they just start to GO. What a wonderful, refreshing change that is.

The Tesseract

Chris sprinted through the woods, dodging trees and rocks and the deadfalls of old leaves he knew must be hiding out there. The rain stung his face. It was a hard, cold rain for so late in the spring, and he wiped his eyes again with the back of his hand, not as if it would do anything, but because it was habit. When you couldn't see, you tried as hard as you could to see.

In his left hand, Chris clutched his backpack by one shoulder strap. He had been too panicked to strap it to his back before he began running, and too panicked to stop. Occasionally as he ran, the backpack would jostle and slam against something, and Chris was caught between terror that what was in the bag would break, and equal terror that it wouldn't.

Finally he saw his garage through the trees. He had left a light on in one of the rooms above the garage where he lived, and it was a beacon guiding him home.

Chris sprang from the woods and beat feet to his door. He fumbled in his pocket for his keys, tried putting the key into the lock, and failed. He dropped them in a puddle of water at his doorstep.

"Oh, shit," he squealed. Frantic now, Chris dropped to his knees and plunged his shaking hands into the puddle to search for his keys and found them finally.

Standing to try again, Chris froze when he heard something behind him. The crack of a tree branch, perhaps? Something falling from a great height onto a rock, it could be...

But this time his key slid in and he turned the door handle and dashed inside.

Image courtesy of liam_101 via Flickr Creative Commons

He ran up the steep stairs to his filthy apartment, flipping on light switches as he went. In his kitchen, he slammed his bag down on the table that was covered with weeks worth of litter - old coffee cups, cigarette packs, the detritus of a lonely life, and he swept it all to the floor.

He opened the bag and dumped it out onto the table. The cause of all his miseries, the source of the lights.

It was a tesseract. Chris remembered what these were from high school physics class. A cube within a cube within a cube. It was built of what looked like glass, though it was lighter than glass and shimmered like a diamond as he watched with revulsion as the thing lit up his apartment with its sickening glow.

"Baby?"

Chris's heart slammed in his chest. It was Rachel, in the bedroom. He had completely forgotten she was there.

"Baby what is that, what are you doing out there?"

For a moment he considered telling her everything. About the lights in the woods, about the dreams. But then the light changed again, from that vile green to the calm white, and he was filled with quietude.

Gently, he put the tesseract back into his bag and zipped it up.

"It's nothing, Rach. I'll be back to bed soon."

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This was written for Write at the Merge Week 24 over at Write on Edge, which is becoming my favorite place to link up because it's not (yet?) a huge community. I don't feel lost there, is what I am saying.

The prompt this week was hard but it has inspired me big time. We were to use the image above, and the word "tesseract." Yes, I had to look that up on Google, and you should too.