Cracks

The second entry today is a story I wrote as an assignment. The assignment was a two page story that uses dialogue, has two characters and one location. The location has to be symbolic of their situation, one character has to want something from the other, and it has to be in third-person objective. That means no thoughts or feelings, just what an observer could see. I wrote it in past tense at first, thinking that it'd be more traditional, but I changed it back to present tense because it felt more urgent that way. It's called Cracks:

“It's getting worse out there.”

“What?”

The boy looks at her then back at the horizon, a liquid sun in peril of drowning beneath a sea of jagged black. “I said it's getting worse out there,” she says after following his gaze. She shrugs. “That's what my mom says.”

She watches the way he chews his lip, the way the embers in his eyes die all at once. He watches the mountains turn from silhouette to coarse purple waves, like the uneven vertebrae of some great distempered beast.

“My mom says we'll be fine in the suburbs,” he says at last. “My dad's gonna move out there.” He looks at her on the wall beside him, at her little hands fiercely gripping bony knees. She looks down at the mortar between the gray cement bricks of the wall.

“I thought they didn't love each other any more.”

He shrugs. “You should tell your dad to move out there,” he says fingering a crack in the cement. “It's safer. Maybe you could live next door again. The school is really nice. You'd-”

“Do you think they'll have school next year?”

The boy looks back to find her looking down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap. He clears his throat and looks at the mountains again, pulling his knees up under his chin, wrapping his arms around his shins, and rocking gently on his perch. “I hope so,” he says. “I'd hate to think of not seeing Kim anymore.”

A light in the house behind them winks out, and the girl droops her head slightly. The boy stops rocking and rests his chin neatly between his knees. A cat in a nearby yard runs up a fence to call to the night.

The girl lifts her head. “I should go and help him with the sheets,” she says. She looks behind them at the house and thrusts her small chin out.

“Yeah.”

She looks at the older boy beside her and blinks once, twice. “Promise me something?”

“Hmm?”

“If it gets real bad, don't come back here.”

The boy bites his lip and focuses intently on the mountains, his eyes rapidly scanning the horizon. “I'm sure you'll be fine. You're not far from-”

“Promise,” she pleads, watching his face.

He looks at the house before them, turning away slightly to do so. “I promise.”

She wraps her arms as best she can about his chest and knees, then she presses warm lips to his quivering cheek. “Good night,” she whispers and climbs deftly from the wall into the yard behind them. He croaks something that sounds like a farewell and turns to watch her walk into the house, tears overflowing onto his cheeks and dripping onto his neck and shirt below.

After a few moments the shaking subsides and he drops silently from the wall and into the opposite yard. Just outside the back door he turns back to the line of cement blocks stacked high against the night and wipes his sleeve across his nose, cheeks, and eyes.

The Little Master (Part 1)

The little master awoke and put an unsteady finger to his lips, then his cheek, then his hair. He tenuously rubbed the corners of his eyes, digging recklessly until the last of the sharp irritants were purged. The ceiling above him was gray in the dark, and the water stains cycled swiftly through their reticent routine of shapes at once familiar and abstract.

He raised his head in silence and looked down at his feet, mysteriously uncovered by the night, his tiny toes wiggling at him. He wrinkled his nose at them and let his head ease back onto the pillow. He shut his eyes and forced his head further down into the fluff, until the edges of the depression closed about his ears. The sounds of the room became quiet and oppressive, and his breathing became obscene and enveloped his thoughts like a furnace, burning away the last impurities of dream. After a few revelatory moments the maintaining of this posture became difficult and uncomfortable. He relaxed his neck muscles and the room awakened once more.

The big clock on the wall, ticking steadily, confused him, and while he knew with enough time he could understand its meaning, the hands by then would have surely moved and he would have to start over. The digital clock on his bed stand was much faster, especially in the dark. 2:08am. After some very basic arithmetic he decided that school was a long time off, even though six hours was still a mostly abstract concept to him.

The door was closed, and no light seeped in beneath it, but soft blue-gray moonlight from the large and shadeless window on the opposite wall cast a large cross-shaped shadow on the green bathrobe hanging upon it. A blue shirt with green stripes and a pair of black pants sat upon a wooden chair in front of the closet. He remembered the day before, his mother asking for his approval before removing the shirt from a plastic hanger, him nodding his head absently.

He no longer needed to check under the bed before setting his small feet upon the ground; he was much too grown up for that. He padded softly on the warm wooden planks, heated from below by the furnace pipes. A yawn yanked at the corners of his mouth and set his thin tongue in retreat and his small, sharp teeth to glinting wetly in the moonlight, as he rounded the corner of the bed.

One small finger stretched the elastic of his underwear and let it snap back audibly against his skin. He repeated this passively until reaching the door and placing one hand on the brass-colored handle and turned it. The hallway was darker, but when he reached the stairs, the light coming from the windows in the living room made traversing the wooden steps easier.