Week 13 Storytelling: Is this Hell?

Image Information: Beginning of losing your soul to hell. Source: SodaHead.com

The girl was dirty. Her hair was matted down and had visible knots; the blonde color almost completely obscured by who knows how many months of dirt. She had blue eyes. They sparkled when she looked at me, glowing with a sort of happiness that only comes when finally things are beginning to work out for the better.

            She was eating so fast. Scarfing down the food that I had put onto her plate almost as soon as I gave it to her. Reveling in it. It hurt looking at her knowing that it must have been a while since she had eaten so well.

            She grabbed for her water and grinned at me right before she took huge gulps from the glass. She had just set the glass back down on the table when her eyes snapped back to mine, suddenly startled and alarmed. My chest ached a little when I saw the betrayal in her eyes. But it didn’t last long. Her eyes started to glaze over and her hands twitched, knocking over the glass, the water dribbling onto the floor.

            After she had passed out, I stood up and began clearing the table. After taking the dishes to the sink, I dug my phone out of my pocket and tried to open the messenger app. My fingers were cold and I struggled to get complete control of them as I tried to type. Eventually though, I managed to type the necessary message out: Deed done. Pick up in 15.

            It was colder in the apartment than I remembered it being. My fingers kind of felt numb. Maybe I needed to put a sweater on or something.

            I looked at the girl again. She looked actually kind of peaceful laying there on the table. Even though she was dirty, I knew that she had to have been one of those perky, perpetually happy girls from high school. I wonder what had happened to her that she ended up here, is some stranger’s apartment trusting them with her safety, with her life. How far had she fallen? How far had I fallen? Taking advantage of her like this. My chest ached again, and I felt a shiver find its way down my spine. My blood kind of felt sluggish. Slow. Cold. I don’t think it was this cold in here earlier.

            There was a knock on the door and I answered it immediately. There was a large man at the door, and he looked me up in down before pushing the door open and stepping inside. I shut the door behind him and he glanced at the girl at my table. Without even glancing back at me, he reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope. He threw it back at me and stepped towards the girl, pulled her from the chair, threw her over his shoulder, and walked out of my apartment without even giving me another glance.

            I clutched the envelope to my chest and felt that ache again. I shivered.

            Later that night laying in bed under a mound of blankets, I still couldn’t get warm. I felt emptier than I had before and I was so cold. Nothing I did helped. I choked down a sob, and felt a couple of tears slip from my eyes and roll down my cheeks. But something weird was happening. They didn’t fall. They froze on my face, and the tear tracks stung every time I moved. More tears fell from my eyes, but they froze to my eyelashes and I couldn’t do even open my eyes anymore. My lip trembled. Everything was so cold.

Author’s Note:

I read Dante’s inferno this week and I was really inspired by the imagery of the third zone of the ninth circle of hell, Ptolomea. It was striking how betraying a guest was such a horrible sin that your soul immediately goes to hell. You don’t even have to die first. You just become soulless. Frozen in hell and half-alive on Earth.

Bibliography:

Ugolino. Story source: Dante's Divine Comedy, translated by Tony Kline (2002).

Week 12 Storytelling: Lost

Image Information: Alice through the looking glass, desperate to go home. Source: Tumblr

Her tears puddled together on the hard ground. Balancing on the tip of her nose, the edge of her lips, her chin, as if clinging to her in sympathy before fate forced them from her. They fell, far far down, making a small noise as they joined the others, contributing themselves to the growing puddle.

She dragged her fingers through the salt water, getting her fingertips wet, and drew them along the concrete. She sketched little lines alongside the puddle with the moisture that beaded on her fingertips, each one fading further with every second that passed.

            She couldn’t remember how long she had been here, kneeling on the ground, watching her tears fall and become one with the Earth. She remembered running, and lots of blurred greenery, warped by her movement. And noises. So many noises. Yells and thuds. Screeches. It was dark and getting darker every second, and lying on the ground wasn’t changing that. But she was just so confused. How long had she been here even? Was she ever going to find a way out of these woods?

            “Alice.” She shivered, and whipped her head around, staring into the darkness of the woods behind her. “Oh, little Alice. Where did you go?” She looked down and saw her face in her tears—an eerie mirror image to the beginning of her trip into this opposite world. Her fingers were in the tears again, but this time there was no other world on the other side. The Alice looking back at her was the same one that was looking in. There was no world on the other side. No portal back to her real home in her real world.

            But what was real? Was she even real? Nothing about her felt real anymore. Her tears felt real though. And real tears must have been created by a real person. So she was real, wasn’t she? Nothing about this place felt real and the longer she spent here, the less connected to herself she felt. It was like she was fading away.

            She heard a crunch behind her, but resigned to her fate in this weird, dark land, she didn’t move from her crumpled position on the ground.

            Two hands landed on her shoulders—one on either side, “Oh dear Alice, don’t be sad. We’re in Wonderland. There is no sadness here.” She looked up on either side of her, the faces of the two twins staring at her, huge, ignorant smiles on their faces.

            “A poem will help, Alice. Let us tell you another poem.” The one on the right said.

            “Make it the longest one you know, brother.” The other said.

            Alice closed her eyes, and continued to cry. The sound of the brothers squabbling harsh in the background. The tears mixed with the pool already gathered on the ground. She saw her reflection in the ripples. She hung her head and continued to weep, sure that she would never see her home again.

Author’s Note:

I was really struck by the singular part of the Tweedledee and Tweedledum story where Alice starts to cry because the brothers tell her she isn’t real. It was crazy that this little part is actually just a deeper philosophical question that basically everyone has struggled with. Alice is in this crazy different world and the stress is beginning to get to her. I wanted to write about how this struggle can affect you in a deeper way. She’s hopeless and has given up. It’s illogical to think that most stories can end positively when in reality nothing works that way.

Biography:

Tweedledee and Tweedledum (continued). Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871).

Week 11 Storytelling: Time for Change

Image Information: A more dramatic exchange of child for changeling. Source: Todd and Erin Favorite Five

            There was something about this town that made it different. Things happened and there was no explanation and people just accepted it. Just saw it happen and pretended it didn’t in hopes that it wouldn’t happen to them. But they whispered. Whispers that followed all of the unexplainable things, stuck to them like shadows, twisted behind them on the threads of the wind, carried from ear to ear, from person to person, as unexplainable as the things it followed.

            And there were rules. Rules you followed even if you didn’t fully understand them—sometimes purely because you didn’t understand them. But like the oddities in town, these rules were never talked about either. Instead they were implicitly implied and everyone expected them to be followed.

            But on the surface, this town was just like any other. And it was for this reason that Rayna and her husband chose this town to relocate to. It had looked beautiful and free and so different from the dark, damp city that she had lived in for years before this. But she had a family now to think of, and that meant moving to a better place with a better sense of community, and so she had done that. Which was how she found herself lugging box after box into their new mid-size house in the Irish countryside, green lawns for miles in each direction and beyond that more trees than she could even begin to count.

            “Hey babe?!” She called as she forced the front door open while juggling the box in her arms, “How are the girls doing? Are they asking for lunch yet?”

            She walked up the stairs and came to the nursery on her left. Putting the box down inside the door, she looked in on her husband and her twin daughters, all laying together on a light pink blanket laid out on the floor. Her husband was on his back on the floor, their two girls rolling around on their stomachs, gurgling at each other and playing as one year olds tend to do.

            She kneeled down on the ground next to them and greeted her husband with a kiss to his cheek. “I really feel like we’re going to do well here, you know.” She breathed out and settled down against his side. “I can just feel it.”

            The next day, her husband left for his job in the city in the early morning, leaving her alone with the twins to finish the unpacking job. The whole day was spent in this task. She carried the twins from room to room with her, placing them on their blanket and working on box after box.

            Everything was going perfectly well until after lunch when she got a phonecall from the neighbors, whom after having met yesterday had given them her information in case of emergencies.

            “Hi Rayna, I am so sorry to call you like this so soon, but I didn’t know what else to do. Is there any way you would be able to come over?” Rayna looked over to her twins, sleeping soundly on the floor of the living room.

            “Hey I’m really sorry, but the twins are sleeping. I probably won’t be able to come for a while. She hesitantly told her neighbor.

            “No Rayna. You have to come now. It’s important.” Her neighbors voice was frayed, threaded through with distinct distraught and pulled tightly at Rayna’s heart strings.

            “Okay, okay. I’ll come but I can’t stay long. I have to leave the twins on their own.” She hung up, checked on the girls one more time, and grabbed her keys. Locking the door behind her, she hurried down the road to her neighbors.

            Every step down the road made her feel a sharp sense of discomfort in her chest, but she hurried along, eager to get this trip out of the way and get back home. The trip was quick, inconsequential really, her neighbor imploring her to believe her and her feelings of foreboding that centered around her family. Rayna distanced herself and make to leave, angry that this was what she had come here for, but was stopped by her neighbor’s hand grabbing her arm sharply, “The whispers say their eyes are wrong, Rayna. The whispers say there is something wrong.”

            She ripped her arm out of the hold and left, disoriented and unnerved. She began to run back down the same path she had taken. In the distance she saw two figures walking into the woods. It looked darker outside than it did before, the trees more sinister, the grass less green, and taking it all in she grew more and more uncomfortable. Scrambling with her keys, she managed to unlock the front door. Finally getting the door open and her body inside, snapping the door closed tightly behind her. She caught her breath with her back against the door, eyes closed, breath sharp. Only to freeze. She heard a whisper on the wind, coming from the living room, “Oh look, mommy has returned.”

            Her hand shook as she dug her phone out of her pocket, the sense of dread that had been steadily growing since her earlier phone call finally solidifying deep in her abdomen.

            “There’s something wrong with the twins, John.” She clutched her eyes tighter together and heard a weird chuckle from the other room. “John, you have to get home as soon as possible. Something is very wrong.”

            She felt two small hands clutch her pant legs and tug. A little voice asked, “Mommy? What’s wrong?” She choked down a scream.

            “Please John. Hurry.”

Author’s Note:

            This week I chose to model my story off of the Celtic Fairy Tale, The Brewery of Eggshells. In this story, the twins are stolen away by goblin/fairy creatures and replaced with changelings. The mother thinks that something is wrong with her children and has her suspicions confirmed when they twins speak beyond their years and never grow up. I wanted to have the same creepy sense of change and exchange to be felt in my story. I wanted this magical world to coincide with the “real” world in a small town where secrets are kept.

Bibliography:

Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1892).