Day Three Teaser

Safely settled at just over 10k words, I would say that this has been a very successful three days.  I completely a few word wars tonight with some good friends on G+.  I must say that G+ has probably changed the face of writing for me forever.  It is still a solitary act that happens entirely within me, but I can challenge myself and boost my creativity by enjoying the conversations with others that are like-minded and competing toward a similar goal.  Not to mention getting and giving advice has never felt so nice.  It's a great community, and I'm very happy to consider myself not only a writer, but a NaNo participant.

With that being said, here's the teaser from earlier today.  It's a dream sequence:

His mouth morphed, skin flicking off of it. His tongue rolled out from inside, and his jaw snapped as it dislocated. Teeth stretched out of his bloodied gums, growing into sharp knives and his eyes turned to blood lust. He growled at Jess and took a step forward, claws growing out of his shoes, his clothes disintegrated as he grew fur and grew twice the size. He took another step and reared back on his legs. Kroags launched himself at Jess, and she could almost hear the tearing of her own flesh over her high pitched scream.

To sleep, perchance to dream

If you have a queasy stomach, you probably should not read this...

Perchance to mess with reality.  But what if reality starts messing with you?

After coming home from a late day at work, I started to notice something wrong about our kitchen.  Ants, again, had crawled into our pretzels, over our crackers, found the little, tiny hole in the saltines container.  They were small, a light tan brown, that almost look like little moving crumbs.  If they weren't so easily multiplied, and if they didn't desire the same things I like (salty, savory food) maybe, just maybe, I'd be more entitled to let them live.  But when all is said and done, you have to bust out the can of ant killer, forget your morals, and protect your property from this seemingly small infestation.

What I found last night baffled me - it wasn't a seemingly small infestation anymore.  They had made homes in between the boards of our cupboards, nested on the roofs of our cabinets, and made little happy and trails all along each seam in our kitchen.  One area looked like a New York subway system.  I couldn't help but be fascinated by them for just one moment - how did they move around each other with such fluidity?  They look like such awkward creatures, but they never hit each other, even if there's 10 of them in a square centimeter.  They pass each other by with different lanes of traffic, and they know, without anyone painting down lines, how to keep their distance from each other.  So, I blasted them with ant killer and called it a day.

My dreams that night almost seemed so real, and I swear they were.  I woke up at one point wearing my necklace, and another having it off.  I take off my necklace every night, so I realized that I had awoken into a dream, but much too late.  My reality came bearing down on me - ants poured out of our cupboards, eating our food like a flock of locusts before moving onto me.  They crawled on my toes, around my ankles, and I felt itchy as they pierced and pinched my body.  The dream shifted into an even worse nightmare and I woke up again, without my necklace, and realized that I wasn't dead.  My husband was still asleep next to me, I hadn't just gotten eaten by ants and thrown off a cliff (how the cliff came into play, I could never tell you).

I walked into the bathroom, tired, sleepy, feeling a little off.  There was something pinching my eye.  It felt like I had been wearing contacts that got a little sliver of dirt pressed underneath them.  I looked into the mirror, staring into my red, puffy right eye.  A few veins were prominently heading towards my cornea, the red part of my eye was huge, inflamed.  And at the center of it all, on the farthest possible right hand side, was a little crumb.  No, not a crumb.  An ant, coiled around itself, dead.  I flushed my eye with water, doused it with saline solution, I put re-wetting drops in it, and not a thing dislodged this crumb.  I have to be dreaming, I told myself, this has to be a dream.  I used a cotton swab and swiped at it, my eye stung more and the coiled little sugar ant didn't move.  Finally, I washed my fingertips in saline solution and used my fingernails on my eye.  I scratched lightly at the surface.  The ant, in his last effort to stay alive, had attached himself to my eyeball in a little, piercing bite.  Was this my punishment for killing their colony?  For massive ant genocide?  Was there really even karma for that?  Did ants have karma?  Hot, frustrated tears rolled down my face - I pleaded with the ant inside my head, please, please just come out...

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Yes, this actually happened to me last night - yes, it was horrible.  I went into a hysterical panic, started crying, woke up my poor, sleep-deprived husband, and it finally came out on its own - mostly because of all the frustrated tears.  It was the smallest, little thing I've seen before - but anyone that wears contacts knows what it feels like to have something underneath them - and yes, it hurts.

Drawn into the World

Reflections of the world

Through dreamy, starry eyes

You’d have it all

The brilliancy of naivety

The things that stand unknown

The beauty of anew

Reflected in those blues

Dreams may never be seen

Nights to sleep in peace

Catchers drift and sway

Watching over you

Chase the pointing away

Replace fingers with words

Describe the world as is

Categorize, learn, assume

Draw the wrong conclusions,

Your eyes have changed

The color no long reflects

But holds emotions, unseen.

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I'm really hoping that you got this without me explaining it - because the way I see it, words should speak to you with your own assumptions of the world.  No professor can teach what an author writes, because so many things can become changed - askew to what the reader's view of the world is.  I'm always open to discussing my work - but unless someone asks, I'll let this piece stand as is.

Eric

I jumped off stage and scooped her into my arms.  Amanda was so light, I could pretty much throw her across the room, though I have no strength to speak off.  I was just lanky, really tall, and she was just really petite.

I was talking a mile a minute.  “You thought it was good right, I mean, I didn’t mess anything up, and it sounded okay?”  She laughed and nodded, I stared at her teeth – perfect, straight, glowing white.  That smile was kind of what I lived for, though, I could never tell her that.

She swilled whatever drink she had convinced some 21-year-old to buy her as she listened to me go on until I couldn’t even speak anymore.  I realized that I had some serious cotton mouth going on and watched the world swill inside her cup.

“You can have some if you want,” she pushed it towards me.  I met her eyes with mine and smiled.

“Who’d you swipe it from?”  She shrugged and laughed.  “Fair enough,” and I took a huge gasping gulp.  It was just your traditional rum and coke – with entirely too much rum.  I almost coughed, which just made her laugh harder.

“So, hey, I was wondering,” she placed her fingers in mine, “if you wanted to do something this weekend?”  The warmth of her fingers pushed against my hands, I could almost feel my blood cells stealing whatever kind of heat they could from her.

“Yeah, sure like what?”

“I don’t know, I was thinking you could come up with something.”

I shook my head, “You know what happens when I do that.”  Countless times I’ve been with this girl entirely too stoned, usually because of my poor planning.  And I mean, it wasn’t like now, where my head was gently rolling and I could still focus on her, her perfect lips, the way her hair framed her face… no , it was usually the high where I start pouring confessions, crying about nothing.  I remember the look in her eyes when I knocked on her door – my hair was slick with sleet, my fingers were freezing, and my eyes bleary from the walk.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, glancing between both my eyes, completely focused on me.  I struggled to find the words, but ended up just mouthing, “I don’t know.”  She took me by the hand and guided me inside her apartment.  She took off my coat and I felt absolutely helpless, hopeless, futureless.  She brought me into bed with her and I lied on her chest while she stroked my hair for hours, until we fell asleep.  I think I fell in love with the way that she smelled that night, if you can fall in love with a person’s smell.  But it was that strange, musty lavender and it was intoxicating.

But right now, her lips were sour, so I shook the memory away and said, “Sure, I’ll try something, but I can’t promise it’ll be legal.”

“You know I’m always game.”  She pinched my cheek.  “I’m going to go drag Kelli, we have to get to this other party tonight.”  She looked around, “Shit, you think she dragged Derrick off again?”

“Probably.”

“Figures.  I don’t know why she can’t get over that boy, I mean, he doesn’t even act into her – is he?”

I shrugged, “Hell if I know.”

“Well, who does he talk to?”  She stood up, hands on her hips, lips pursed, but her eyes were still filled with laughter.

“You always try to act so serious,” I smirked and reached my hand up, gently taking her face in my hands and I kissed her.  “I’ll see you Saturday, 2pm, it’s a date.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Anthony.”  

Amanda made a face.  We both knew exactly how Anthony felt about Kelli.