Monday, October 15, 2012

The enemy within

So.... I want to write. I think about it a lot: the lines I'm going to type, the new story I'm going to outline, the play I'm going to work on. Then I don't. Lately it's not been the usual, "oh, I'll do the dishes and then write." No, it's been more of a sitting down at the computer, writing a couple lines and then, "ugh, I can't," and walking away. Or just sitting and reading news and following my nose through links, anywhere, as long as I don't have to write. It's not writer's block. It's something insidious. It's me. And I fight it day after day and this is the worst it's been. Maybe writing this will help. I know I've been slowly, slowly, editing a short story.
Is it fear? Fear of what? Succeeding? Failing? I know that I have good ideas, they just need to get out of my brain and onto paper. Maybe I need a change of scenery.
Whatever it is, it's happening and I'll need to find a way to work past it.
In the mean time, here's a couple pages of a short story, sort of a sci-fi dystopian future with a dash of Cthulhu mythos added in - though that last part might not be apparent in the first few pages. Enjoy. Comment. (Though, I am here alone. Here the echo? I do.)


The Thing In The Net
by
Earl T. Roske

     Casey and I had been best friends as long as we could remember. I became a reporter. Casey became an electrician. Not because he dreamed to be one as young boy but because early mandatory career path evaluation by the state determined that this was the job where he could best serve the homeland. Perhaps if Casey’d been allowed to choose his own career path the horror he accidently unleashed in his lab would never have happened. Perhaps he’d still be alive today. And perhaps our world would not be in the path of the danger looming invisibly ahead.
     Not everyone was misplaced by the mandated career path evaluation. Since I’d begun to write as a child I’d fallen in love with it. So when the state determined I could best be of service as a reporter I hadn’t felt any sense of loss. I’d get to write for a living.
     Others, those who felt they’d been improperly categorized like Casey trudged along in jobs that gave them no sense of purpose or direction. This was the will of the homeland, however, and it was not to be question.
     People like Casey had to find other ways to fill the void in their lives that comes from having the wrong job. The state wasn’t about to let anyone change careers. The state, with all of its psychological science, doesn’t make mistakes. All of us knew better than to question that fact. But the state did encourage creativity. Poetry, theatre, art films, painting, sculpture, even macramé, just so long as the art didn’t question the methods or intentions of the homeland.
     I knew that Casey had creative talent beyond solving complex physics equations he found in the physics journals and writing elaborate computer programs. However, I’d never have guessed him for a sculptor. But as I stood in the gallery, not just looking at the weird forms he’d molded with his own hands, but listening to the people talking about his work in words I’d only seen in the art columns of the paper…. I was impressed, hough I’d never admit that to him.
     “Chunky!” I heard the nickname I’d earned in middle school. High school swim team and track team had removed the source of the nickname, but the name never left.
     “Everyone here for the free snacks?” I asked Casey as he excused himself from some adoring fans and weaved his way through the crowd to me.
     “Could be,” he said.
     Casey looked nervous as well as pleased with the attendance and attention. And there was something else.
     “What’s going on?”
     “Art exhibit,” he said.
     “I can see that. But you’re holding something back.”
     “I’ll tell you later. Come look.”
     And Casey, the suddenly popular sculptor, took me on a quick tour of his art.
     The sculptures were not your traditional torsos or heads of beautiful or famous people. They weren’t detailed depictions of animals or trees. They didn’t – and this seemed a bit crazy at the time – they didn’t even seem to be of this world. They looked like someone had taken several earthly species and put them in a bag and then shook them together, pouring the new and the strange out onto the table.
     “I know limited recreational use is legal, Casey, but have you exceeded the max on your ration card?”
     Casey laughed. It was the kind of laugh when someone realizes you don’t get the joke. “No drugs. None. Messes with my math.”
     “This isn’t math,” I said. I pointed at the sculpture that looked like a bumble bee with a scorpion’s tail and bat wings done in leopard print. “This is ….”
     “It’s crazy.”
     “It’s not even remotely anti-system. Which is a good thing. If the censor-committees even thought for a moment… that’d be bad.”
     “You couldn’t find any thing here that speaks against the state.” His words were said with confidence.
     We’d moved on to a sculpture that might have been a spider. If a spider mated with a caterpillar that’d previously been crossed with a beetle.
     “This isn’t an interpretation of the state’s fear of movement towards change?” I’d meant it in good humor jest, temporarily forgetting that there is no humor when it comes to the state’s opinion of itself.
     There was a immediate bubble of silence in the vicinity of my gaff. Everyone looked at everyone and only when it was clear that no one was a state agent and the exhibit wasn’t going to be crashed did the conversations slowly ramp up.
     “Sorry,” I said.
     Casey moved closer and I expected a rabid earful for my foolishly flippant comment. Something I would have deserved. Instead, he wanted to know one thing. “Do you really think my work could be considered a threat to the state?”
     “No,” I said. “I just had a stupid attack.”
     “You’re sure?”
     “About the stupid attack?”
     “We both agree on that,” he said and stepped back, smiling. “The other.”
     “I don’t think you have anything to fear. I’m not even sure how to interpret them,” I said as I watched many people stop and stare at Casey’s work before moving on with many backward glances. Some laughed and made jokes, many looked uncomfortable, and a few were intrigued enough to buy one of his misshapen sculptures.
     “Maybe they aren’t supposed to be anything but what they are?”
     “What? Like alien bugs?”
     “Do you think you can keep a secret?”
     What was that about? We’d been keeping secrets for each other since elementary school. I know I’d tripped up with my crack about the state. I’ve seen editors make the same mistake in meetings. Of course, they’ve disappeared as well.
     “Despite my stupid attack just now, you know I can keep a secret.”
     “Show’s over at midnight. Come back then. I’ve got something you need to see.”

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