I don't normally post first drafts of personal writing, but I submitted an in-progress short story for last week's Operation Garbage Fountain, and, as per my agreement with fellow garbage-fountainier Lars Doucet, I am contractually obliged to write about it online.
The theme of the week was "Rust."
Lars wrote a highly amusing story about a narcoleptic Dream Agent named Rusty (which I'm hoping he will post soon). I decided to dust off an older story and start expanding it. After last week's 1930s Explorer-inspired pulp adventure shenanigans, I wanted to do something in a decidedly different genre. (Although it remains, as always, AS WEIRD AS I CAN MAKE IT.) The other thing that I really wanted to do was write in the first person again. Some of my favorite novels are first-person accounts, and I actually did a lot of very well received first-person writing for Defender's Quest (critics regularly called the journals the best writing in the game), but somewhere along the line I got it fixed in my head that first-person writing put me in the danger of becoming too "self-indulgent." I think that I read one too many snippets of terrible young-adult-wish-fulfillment fiction and decided that first-person writing was playing with fire. (...Or perhaps it was hearing Gilbert Gottfried read excerpts from 50 Shades of Gray.) Either way, I avoided it for a long time, even though I enjoy it and am sometimes even good at it.
So, I decided to break personal taboos and engage in some self-indulgent writing! (...And then share it without 500 rounds of revision! MADNESS!)
Anyways, here is Vim, up to the point that I shared it with the rest of the Operation Garbage Fountain folks! (For maximum effect, turn out the lights and read it to yourself out loud...)
Vim is the color of rust and sun.
It is, I suppose, an act of great hubris on my part to think (hope?) that this account shall live into a time or place where such an introduction is necessary. The rag picker who shall in all likelihood come to possess this bundle of sheets after my demise shall need no description of the dust-caked streets and rusting, weeping walls whereon that trade is plied. (Hello, friend. I hope your fortune is greater than my own.)
Still, there is the dream (and nightmare) in my mind of an age when the Vim that will be has no likeness to my own, or, perhaps, when the great machines stop, and Vim itself is forgotten by the world.
To these futures, I say, in my hubris:
Vim is the color of rust and sun, and it sits in the shadow of the Prince's Mountain.
We five are fools, and surely soon to be dead.
In the event that such things become required, I record here our full and true names (though this is, perhaps, another act of hubris on my part. Still, I would not leave the future unprepared.):
–Slightly of the Cart
–Honest Landsman (being neither)
–Gill Below, who is called Stave Hands when passing on the streets of Vim, and would surely kill me for knowing and making record of the truth.
–Paradise Wild (to whom I am forever bound in all futures and all deaths.)
–Grit the Quill, myself, and author of this account.
The Prince's Mountain stands to the perfect West of Vim, though those who have seen many winters in our rust and sun report that it has stood in other places around our walls, pacing over the course of decades, like a rancher circling his herd. Or, perhaps, it is Vim itself that rotates, like a scintillating platter before its feasting Lord. None of we five have lived long enough to say ourselves.
Of the Prince, there has been no sighting since we were but children. A toll greater than his tithe is now exacted by the beasts and brigands outside the wall, whose incursions grow more brazen with the waning of the year, and the storms and winters which grow beyond bearable ferocity. In short, it seems the Prince is dead or gone away with no regard for the forces he once checked, and his tithe is taken up tenfold by all the things which now run wild and free across the night. In light of this, we have made a decision:
Whereas, Vim has paid for its protection many times over,
And, such protection has failed to be provided,
And, winter approaches with great rapidity and strength,
And, no one in the five aforementioned wish to expire in the frost-rimed rusted streets come first snow,
We five (aforementioned) have covenanted thusly:
To (each at personal expense and risk) journey in concert together to the place known as the Prince's Mountain (being located perfect West no more than a watch's ride from the walls of Vim) and there make ingress by whatever means there may be to do so, in order to (once said ingress has been made) carry off whatever goods and assets we may find as the rightful reparations and remunerations due us as wronged citizens of Vim (Gill Below/Stave Hands and Paradise Wild being considered full and honored citizens by dint of shared suffering and shared risk in this coming enterprise.)
In the execution of this undertaking, each member, exposing themselves to equal hazard, shall receive equal share (that is, one fifth) of whatever recompense shall be successfully collected. In the event that a member abandons the enterprise through fear, treachery, or other impulse while still able-bodied and capable, the portion due that member shall be revoked and divided equally amongst all remaining members of good standing. Those rendered physically incapable of pursuing the enterprise due to injury or illness sustained in the commission of their duties shall receive a share proportionate to their contributions prior to the injurious event, counted in time spent on site.
In the event that a member perishes in the pursuit of this endeavor, all recompense accrued to them shall pass to their named successor, which I herein denote:
Honest Landsman leaves all to the ladies of the Early Risen, outside the Southern Gate.
Stave Hands (Gill Below) leaves all to the Widow Hands, his mother, living in the Common House beside the Eastern storm drain.
I myself, Grit the Quill, leave all things to Paradise Wild, also called Neorxenawanga in her own language, for I can do nothing else.
Paradise shall never die while I am still alive, so no preparations need be recorded.
As the only person of letters amongst our company, I have attempted to lay out our agreement as it was said, though the others are content with spitting and pricking their thumbs with the sun as witness. Perhaps, you who read this (or merely scrape it clean to be written anew) will find some level of understanding in these words, should our actions carry any impact into your own time and place.
It is the height of hubris, surely, to record ourselves as if we were Princes of the Earth, but hubris has brought us this far.
We shall see how far it carries us into tomorrow.
___
The plan is this: Honest shall precede the rest of our company at dawn, posing as a country tinker heading to his rounds, and taking with him the provisions and tools we have collected (stolen, I think, though I do not ask). The more forbidden of these shall be concealed below the rest and certain monetary inducements made to ensure a lackadaisical eye from the tariffers (whose primary concern, we tell ourselves again, is the entering rather than the exiting of the city). Having made good his departure, Honest shall take himself to the abandoned coaler's hut at the frog stream and there await the rest of our company.
We remaining four shall leave the city in the pleasance of midmorning, bringing only a little food and wine and such supplies as could be taken for a country picnic, we presenting ourselves as two sets of lovers, gone to make banquet on the banks of the Fell in the last ashes of summer. They will almost assuredly take us for students sporting with hired company (or perhaps think Gill cavorting with us all, given my lithe and beardless countenance), but I will not say such to Slightly and dear Paradise. Though she remove her bangles and cover-up her scars, her gait will always betray her foreignness. It is a roving, eager thing, molded to the hill and forest rather than our rust and stone, or the coppiced groves of the tame country. It was that, perhaps, which caused me first to give my soul to her: I had never before seen a free creature. I do not think that I have ever truly seen another.
Well, whatever the tariffers think us, they will let us pass: four youths making simple banquet in the tame country is hardly cause for alarm.
Having made good our exit, we shall proceed to rendezvous unobserved with patient Honest, and from thence begin the journey in earnest.
If these precautions seem to you strange and needlessly complex, then the Vim in which you live (or the world) is very changed from what makes up our own. How I wish that I could question you about this place, this future, the steps to get there! Alas, this gate of minds that stands between us opens in but one direction. No road of ink will ever march your answers to my eyes. The great tragedy of all men is that we can only be when we are.
I am now.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I will not.
___
Stave is dead, I think.
No, I see the arrow in his body rise and fall. He breathes yet, and his heart beats enough to stain the rags fresh-pressed around his wound. I must tell the others.
There is some discussion as to whether we should turn back to seek him aid, though I think none of us are so foolish as to believe that he would last the journey through.
Paradise has put our attackers' axes at his feet, alongside one of her bangles and the letter that I wrote (though I am loath to part with parchment, I cannot bring myself to write him off with paper.) I do not doubt he would have killed me had he learned I knew his secret, but I also know he split the wretch's skull who would have split mine, and took that arrow standing before Slightly and my Paradise.
I had always feared him, I suppose, even before I knew him. A loud and rough man, who I never learned to trust as friend. For all his freakish blood, he was a companion to the end.
The others are growing heated in their talk, though it is clear that Stave will die before any course of action can be taken.
I spilled no blood myself, other than my own, and even I am taut in every nerve and element. Paradise put her handaxe into the back of the last man as he fled, and Honest carved the belly of another. They argue loudly now, not even hearing their own words. Slightly cracked sling stones into three, and now sits staring into the unlit fire.
Stave's breath is whistling in his wound.
There are not many hours of daylight left, and night will bring worse than feral foresters.
I must speak to the others, though I can pretend to no great wisdom in these matters.
Any action will be better than waiting idly for the next evil.
___
I fear this cave is too convenient to be unknown, though we killed a water beast to claim it.
Outside, we hear the whistles of the forest men, searching for their own. They cannot keep their hunt past the dark, not if they still be men. In the rusty streets of Vim, people talk of foolish things, and say the colliers and wolf-catchers converse with beasts and even take them to wife, and so are born the true masters of the night.
The sun shall wane soon, and we shall find out, I suppose, though I think the night has only one true master, and he is long departed. If we fear not the Prince's Mountain, what terror could there be in all the creatures of the forest, man or beast or mutant devil? We set out to despoil the father of monsters. His bastards are beneath us.
Yet, a simple robber's shaft spilled Stave's lifeblood.
Stave still gasps his last hours with us, bundled in the pelts we took from our attackers. We could not bury him alive, and the girls would not let Honest cut his throat, though it surely would have been a mercy. He moaned and gasped with every step on our stretcher made of saplings. It is no way for a strong and earnest man to die.
We dare not even light a fire to keep him warm.
I cannot write in this growing dark.
___
Snakes slither up from the bank of the Fell. I have woken Paradise, whose night eyes are far better than my own. Still, we have had to chance a candle. The moon alone can pick them out atop the surface of the water, but once they land upon our shadowed cave mouth's shore, they melt into the darkness. The cavern echoes with their creeping. 13 we have killed so far, pinning their necks with a forked stick and quietly crushing their heads with Stave's iron-tipped staff.
14. I dare not write anymore. We must rouse Slightly and Honest.
16.
21.
___
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