Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Willis had entertained dreams of being signed to the majors like all kids who ever came back to a dugout with dirt on their knees. He got closer than most, and was in talks with State for a scholarship when a simple fall on a rough old sidewalk led to a devastating rotator cuff injury. He tried playing through the pain, but it was no good; he wound up at State anyway, but as a business/accounting major.

Still, that wasn’t enough to quash the hope–is it ever?–and once he started seeing Lily, Willis became convinced that the next generation was the ticket. He has all the right equipment to train his son to be a great ball player, to create someone with a sharp mind and unerring aim that would lead inexorably from high school to college to the minors to the majors. It was an ironclad plan, and it made the pain of tossing a ball to himself against the back fence almost bearable.

After the wedding came the baby shower, and after the baby shower came Carolyn. Willis held off buying her the baseball pajamas until Lily’s miscarriage made certain there’s be no second crib. Wasn’t this a brave new world, anyway, one with the WNBA and Title IX? Carolyn still had a shot. And she had talent: it was apparent early on that the girl was whip-smart with a dead eye for using a stick to put a ball just where she wanted it.

Softball came and went along with practice in the backyard, but Carolyn chafed under Willis’s regimen. She loved the sport but hated the teamwork, the sitting and waiting, the subterfuge and the dirt. When her father heard about the junior high tennis team, he was distraught at first before reassuring himself that those same skills–his genes–were still in evidence and would still make their mark. Intense practice and a backyard net followed, along with summer tennis programs at State.

But Carolyn  never really hit her growth spurt, and topped out at five foot two in heels in the seventh grade. Good enough for high school, maybe, but it was apparent that against the willowy blondes she met at State, Carolyn was at a terrible disadvantage. The day she left for State on a clarinet scholarship found Willis seated in his garage, disconsolate, spinning an old racket in his good hand and clutching a worn-out old softball in his bad.

With 115 seventh-grade kids split between the five class periods that made up an average day at Deerton Middle School, a project based on the 116 elements then known to exist (according to the out-of-date table that had come with the chemistry classroom). But there was reason to suspect that old Mr. Lancaster had influenced the element assignment process among wags.

Exhibit A was Boyd Carruthers, who had been assigned no. 82, lead. Anyone who had witnessed Boyd in class or in the cafeteria had no doubt that in all things he was heavy, malleable, and slow. And flighty little Tina Hedstrom in third period being slapped with no. 2, helium, seemed entirely too pat–to say nothing of bony Theresa DiSanto, on the wrong end of a growth spurt, earning no. 20, calcium.

But the plan (if there was a plan) had its more esoteric aspects as well. Caleb Schmidt was granted no. 43, technetium. There didn’t seem to be any connection b’tween that unstable and roguish element and the normally quiet and staid Caleb, until one took into account his recent behavior. Socializing, speaking up in class, trying out for the track team, even unsuccessfully courting Emily Dinklage for snowcoming…like Technetium he was arriving late to the game but making a splash. Quiet, meek, average students like Cara Joyce, who sat in the back and never spoke or made waves or did anything other than make steady unyielding eye contact, tended to get slapped with transuranic elements in Lancaster’s plan (if it was a plan). Cara got Unununium, an element no one without a degree in particle physics could say much about and one that nobody but perhaps the head of IUPAC could pronounce correctly.

Lancaster thus got Cara Joyce up for a brief presenation with a word that would take as long to spit out as anything she’d be saying afterwards.

Turning, Nick walked out the door he’d come in and down the hall toward the stairs. He wanted to see where the other voice had come from.

His room.

The stairs weren’t long, and their soft, blue carpeting cushioned Nick’s footsteps. Upstairs, the hall was L-shaped, turning left at the room that had once been the guest bedroom before it became his father’s study, continuing past his sister Jessica’s room and the master bedroom. At the end…

His room.

The door swung open, and there he was. Nick saw himself at seven, with that dopey little haircut and the shirt with a cartoon character on it. He was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by a pile of toys, playing.

Nick looked around the room. The walls were still covered with brightly colored balloon wallpaper, the stuff that hadn’t come down until eighth grade when Nick became painfully aware of how childish it looked. His little bed, not to be replaced for years, still rested in the center of the room, covered by young Nick’s favorite Star Wars bedsheets.

Little Nick looked up “Who’re you?”

Nick blinked. The room was empty; its white walls were decorated only by a pattern of sunlight filtering through the windows. Dazed, Nick stumbled down the rickety wooden stairs, through the other barren rooms, and into the sunshine of the yard.

Furniture burned surprisingly well; the dining room chairs were enough for Elliot to keep the feeling in his fingers, but the snap of the blaze and the stink of burning varnish wasn’t enough to keep gloomy thoughts at bay.

“Village’s 20 miles away,” Elliot said. “Never make it in the snow. Dammit, it’s their fault for pushing me out here. How’s anyone supposed to get anything written with committees and classes and all that college everywhere?”

The fire crackled in response; Elliot took this as agreement. “It’s bad enough that the place is full of professional vultures,” he said. “Grading papers five days a week and writing criticism the other two. If someone thinks they can tell Baudrillard he isn’t Marxist enough, they won’t show any mercy to me. No, it’s just more paper to shred, more writing to pick into its component pieces like a fetal pig on a dissection table.”

Ashes glowed and cinders churned; sparks worked their way up the chimney. “They’re afraid,” Elliot said. “they can’t produce anymore; they gave it up. Who wants to write when you can’t help but see all the petty biases and assumption that color it all? As if the endless stuffy papers they churn out are any better. They’ve forgotten how to produce, and they’re scared of anyone who still can.”

He pounded his fist on the cold wooden floor. “I’ll show them. They think they can doom me to obscurity, driving me out into the snow to die. I’ll show those dusty old fossils in the department what a real writer can do.”

More chairs went onto the fire in the following hours, and then the table, broken into pieces with a hammer. The bedframe was next, then the bookshelves and cupboard doors. All the while, Elliot scribbled furiously on his pad, stopping only to tear sheets out.

Finally, Dr. Harline’s books went into the blaze. “Screw the feminist reading of Crime and Punishment,” Elliot said, hefting the volume onto the ashes. “Let’s hear the arsonist reading. The Nazi reading. The this-is-why-they-don’t-allow-smoking-in-the-building reading.” The paper burned bright and fast, but before long, the embers were dying.

Things became fuzzy after that. Elliot had a vague recollection of more items offered up to Vulcan for heat, endless spirals of cursive writing snaking across notebook pages, and hoarse shouting and recriminations. The very existence of the Osborn University English department, the publishing industry, and readers at large were questioned in front of a rapt audience of dying coals. Everyone who had kept Elliot’s brilliant prose from attracting the praise it deserved was tried in the cinder court, convicted of obstructionism, and sentenced to hang in the air as frozen breaths.

After he’d worked at my company for about three months, I began to suspect James Müller of something. I didn’t even know what at first, but there was something suspicious about him.

The fileroom incident is probably what really aroused my suspicions. I’d walked out of my office, up on the fourth floor, during lunch and headed toward the fileroom to pick up some documents I had filed away.

I collided with Müller as I opened the door, scattering papers everywhere.

“Oh!” he gasped and put a hand to his chest, “Good Lord, Murphy, I’m terribly sorry! I didn’t see you coming!”

“No, no,” I replied, “My fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.” I knelt down and began gathering his papers up.

An unreadable look fluttered across Müller’s round features. “No.” Beneath his glasses, his brown eyes blinked nervously. “That’s okay. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“No trouble.” I scooped up the remainder of his papers, and noticed a black object under them. A camera. I placed it on top of his papers and handed the bundle to Müller. “Nikon. That’s a good quality camera. Have one myself.”

“This one’s always served me well. Sorry again about that.” With a flash of reflected light from his bald head, Müller was gone.

Shrugging, I continued into the fileroom as I looked the row of gray metal cabinets over, I noticed that the door of one was ajar. I noticed as I moved closer to it that the door wasn’t ajar; it had been forced open – the metal was bent and the paint chipped. I searched around and uncovered a hammer and chisel hidden behind the radiator.

But, it was when I pulled open the burglarized drawer that my suspicions truly crystallized. It was full of long-range financial plans, blueprints for products my company made and several industrial production schedules. The papers were wrinkled and out of order, almost as if they’d been hurriedly shoved back into the drawer.

What had Müller been doing in here? Suddenly, it all came together; the camera, the tools, the files and Müller’s nervousness.

He was a spy.

No one knew whose idea the bike trip had been. Killian Leary credited her youth pastor, and favored her with a friendly pat on the back. Brian Dahl blamed Jimmy Gough, his youth group’s treasurer and a star athlete. Nathan McGivers barely gave the issue a second thought.

Wherever the idea came from, it was soon a reality. Three of the area’s church youth groups united to provide a weekend of camping, hiking, and biking to help build ‘community ties’, and more importantly, to have a good time.

Thus, Brian along with Killy, and Nate–as Nathan and Killian preferred to be called–found themselves biking on the back roads of Jasper County in the summer of 1997. The initial pack of cyclers thinned out rapidly, leaving these three strangers in the rear.

Killy, attired in shorts and a t-shirt in her school colors, her long dark hair secured in a ponytail, took her time–biking was pleasant and relaxing compared to the volleyball camp she’d just come from. Gradually, Killy lost sight of the person in front of her, but was confident that she knew the way.

Brian, rather unwisely clothed in a heavy black t-shirt and cut off jean shorts, struggled on gamely behind her. He was completely unprepared for either the length or the strain of the ride, but was determined to impress certain members of his own group with his endurance.

Nate rode easily behind Brian, determined not to let him fall behind. He was more concerned with the scenery–great swaths of second-growth forests and wild, untended fields–than his performance.

Killy pressed on, and the others followed, barely noticing the bike tracks turning left, or the sudden change from pavement to earth. That is, until Killy rounded a blind curve and ran into a large mud hole in the middle of the road.

In the 15th year of King Andalus’ reign, the peace of the noble land of Aegard was shattered. The legions of the Dark King, which had long slumbered in the shadowy depths to which they had been banished in the Halcyon Age, burst forth with new strength, besieging Aegard and threatening to lay all they touched to base ash.

Ramoh nodded gravely. “Ttyl.”

Raymond looked up from his screen and rubbed his eyes. “That dick,” he muttered.

Jeremy knew that Aegard Keep was a dangerous place to pause. Even if he used the darkmeld ability on his Dragonforged Breastplate, chances were that if he moved away from the Raiders of Terra screen for just a second that he would return to his character’s cooling corpse.

His grandfather, as it happened, had been a minor military official in the court of the old king, and had retired to a small plot of land as reward for his service. This is how he came to be able to read and write, both rare in the days of ancient Ujram. But it came to pass that the old king’s son was succeeded–through the natural succession or usurpation–by a cruel tyrant who ravaged the land with high taxes and paid bands of marauders to steal the land of peasants and farmers.

One such band came to Iral’s village seeking the same, and he showed a natural aptitude for forming the local men into a militia and leading them in battle. When the marauders had been driven off, one of his companions asked “What will you do now?”

“I will continue to fight until I see justice restored to Ujram.”

In time, more villages and village militias flocked to Iral’s banner. The situation grew so alarming that the wicked king loosed his army upon them. Iral destroyed or recruited most of the formations sent against him, and soon his motley gang had become a full-scale rebellion. The wicked king sent an emissary to Iral, offering to make him a satrap in return for his alleigiance, or anything else he desired. Iral refused. One of his companions asked “What will you do now?”

“I will continue to fight until I see justice restored to Ujram.”

The trickle of people deserting the wicked king became a flood, and the great capital of Ujram fell without a battle. The old king hung from a gibbet, and Iral’s supporters crowned him in the square before the palace. One of his retainers asked “What will you do now?”

“I will continue to fight until I see justice restored to Ujram.”

At first, Iral ruled justly. He expanded the boundaries of Ujram through war or peace, and allowed the provinces to choose their own satraps. But when the first regional rebellion arose, he was forced to put it down though it meant the death of many who he had trusted. One of his prisoners from the campaign asked mockingly “What will you do now?”

“I will continue to fight until I see justice restored to Ujram.”

One of the other things Benny would do to impress us was give detailed plot summaries of R-rated movies that our parents wouldn’t let us watch. This was predicated on the solid supposition that a parent who put their kid through the rigmarole of Scouting was probably unlikely to be one that let their kids watch Skinemax as soon as they could hold the remote.

It didn’t matter that Benny’s own parents wouldn’t let him watch R-rated movies either. He just made it up as he went along.

Listening to him in the back of a minivan or on a fishing boat, we were enraptured by Benny’s highly intricate stories. Looking back, it’s actually kind of hilarious. He maintained that Total Recall was about a man who dreamed he killed his sister, only to wake up from the dream and have it really be true. Not sure where the gunfights and Mars fit into that, but I for one assumed that it was all stuff Arnold did to try and rescue his sister. Benny also claimed that It, that gold standard for horror for kids of the mid 80’s, was about a secret government program to produce homicidal monster clowns (which sounds about as reasonable as Stephen King’s tale of pandimensional spider shapeshifters, really).

This post is part of the June 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is a simple descriptive setting.

It was raining in Heden. This was evident in the way its citizens scuttled to and fro in the few open spaces, avoiding the heavy droplets as best they could.

It always rained in Heden. There was a faint shimmer to the bright, bizarre fabrics worn by the people that indicated waterproofing, and each person shed a wake of droplets that collected near thousands of drainage grates.

It would always rain in Heden. There was no way to be sure of this, but the water-worn and rusted surfaces of the Towers suggested it. Looming up into the ever-dark sky, they seemed resigned to an eternal pelting from the neverending storm.

The original design of Heden had called for six of the great Towers, forming the simple hexagon shape found on many of the great neon billboards and television screens that dotted each Tower much as lichens dotted the occasional real rock. The Towers had grown together, fused into one great shapeless mass by centuries of construction, destruction, rust, and rainwater. The simple glass walkways that had connected them had been long shorn of their panes, and hundreds of homegrown, rickety, winding paths of iron and steel had appeared to supplant them.

A monitor was suspended above one such improvised walkway, placed to ambush passersby with its message. Its bright, flashing image wasn’t an ad. Ad Boards were hard to afford, anymore; people who wanted to advertise just added more crumpled paper or laminate fliers to the mass that coated every surface reachable by human hands. This screen was an Info Board.

Info Boards were there to ‘illuminate possible interpretations of information for the purpose of educating the people’ according to the Boards themselves. This particular Board was playing the ‘History of Heden’, and everyone passing beneath had seen it before.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
juniper
LadyMage
dolores haze
jkellerford
Ralph Pines
TheMindKiller
AuburnAssassin
pezie
WildScribe
Inkstrokes
Irissel
Guardian
Lyra Jean
egoodlett
cwachob