To celebrate the publication of GHOST COUNTRY we're having a writing contest!
Contest starts NOW Tuesday 12/28 (12:01 am Eastern Shark Time-December 28 approx 24 hours from when this post goes up)
Post your entry in the comments column of THIS blog post.
The contest is: write a story using 100 words or fewer. Include the following words in your entry:
page
chase
bleak
entity
breach
One entry per person please. If you need a mulligan, a do-over, that's fine, but only ONE (the later entry) will be counted.
All decisions, awards, mistakes, errors, and boneheaded choices if any are mine. No grousing about who doesn't win or I'll gnaw you.
Prize: a copy of GHOST COUNTRY by Patrick Lee and some amazing swag that the sales and pr department at Harper cooked up (it's VERY cool!)
Get thinking!
77 comments:
The tales begin as always, with the old enemy giving chase over the bleak, wooded landscape of the old country, sacrificing our ancestors under the ghost moon.
It’s a breach of manners, and no small risk, to wonder aloud if these stories are true. But we can’t help it--an entity with small eyes, small ears, blunt teeth? Using only entrapment and axes? Hunting us?
And what of the hooded, blood-dyed cape? Was it a weapon? Was it magic? Was it real?
But Grandmother merely smiles, licks a razor-tipped claw with her curling tongue, and turns the yellowed page.
I sat at the computer, a glass of fortifying whisky to help me fabricate my holiday email. Unlike my sister, my stilettos weren’t up for the chase of the Canadian dream, much less a rich husband. And if lucky, I’d never fill page after page with glorious escapades of sparkling children. I’d skip it, but I needed to be summoned to Bleak House (i.e. childhood home) and railed against by Mummy for a breach of etiquette about as much as environmentalists need Stephen Harper. With Crown Royal clarity, I wrote, “I am an entity all my own!” and hit send.
"Coder"
"Damn," she hissed as she stared at the page, its bleak LED text blinking at her. Decode me, it sang. Join the chase, it cajoled.
She quickly memorized the message: 35DELTA89ENTITY42. She smirked. This one will be fun, she thought.
There had been an uncoded world where a privacy breach was inconceivable and people wrote their thoughts on postcards for anyone to see. She had watched stories about this world. Ate them up like candy until she couldn’t find them. Sure, "mole copies" exist, but they are -
"Got it!"
Her adrenaline monitor beeped. She paged back: ALPHA51ZED.
Her hair is wisps of pluming gray and white clouds, upward, a cumulus nimbus that dawns sunlight over the curvature of her egg scalp. She was beautiful once, but circumstance gnarled her and gravity pulled her and God demanded too much from her. And she, that bleak entity who even in chase could not be moved to breach the thinnest of barriers, a page from a holy book; she, that meek disaster who fought evil her entire life only to discover that wickedness was here long before her birth, dies. She dies as confounded as the day she first arrived.
I sit staring at the cursor blinking on a blank page, while in my mind I chase the words to fill my manuscript. The chances of success are bleak.
An entity, known as the internet, detours my every attempt to create a masterpiece by presenting enchanting blogs that entice me to sacrifice precious thoughts to clever contests.
Any and all efforts to breach the walls of writers block have been absorbed by the web of procrastination.
The library stood on a bleak promontory overlooking a half-frozen sea. It was protected by spells both arcane and obscure that in the end could not protect against treachery. The breach was opened when a page torn from a forbidden book was burned in a pure violet flame.
The entity lured the librarian into a chase past shelves holding grimoires and ancient crumbling texts. And while the librarian was diverted, the entity’s human accomplice stole a manual of alien necromancy the entity coveted.
The accomplice couldn’t read the text but the entity killed her anyway. It despised humans, especially traitors.
Mr. Copperfield had the peculiar occupation of giving chase to rabbits for a living. Every morning he would stare down at his vegetables from his farm house only to notice a severe breach in the wire fence around his garden.
It was a bleak situation.
Despite the turned pages of Rabbit Hunter Weekly, all of his cabbages were gnawed to the point of no return. Red-faced, Mr. Copperfield cursed the little bunny entity, marched outside, and poised his shovel to strike, only to find his dog, Pookie, slipping back through the fence with a cabbage head between his teeth.
By dawn, things were looking bleak for the Smiths.
They had led their pursuer on a wild chase across the city, but it was hopeless. Ever since the Breach, humans had been falling in massive numbers. The alien entity, whatever it was, was simply more intelligent, and humanity was on its way out.
Huddled together in an alley, Jack kissed his wife, hard.
“Don’t you dare give up,” snapped Maria, pulling a torn map page from her pocket. On it, the resistance headquarters seemed as distant to Jack as the diner they were sitting in when it all began.
Ten seconds to midnight. The Manual, on a page that no longer matters, gives that name to the time spent contemplating death, staring out the tiny window into the bleak void. No “chase” mission starts this way, it’s supposed to be simple: follow an entity, identify it, and kill it. But The Manual is (sometimes) ignored, and a breached fuel line- well, it leaves me at this horrible point on an unforgiving clock. Perhaps the entity has a similar clock- I'll never know. It’s still simple- I will forever chase the entity through space. Tick. tick. tick- into oblivion.
Chase watched the up and down of the book’s breathing. It was a living entity, but not because of him. A Lincoln son couldn’t breach the family magic until he was ten as Hunter always pointed out around a na-na-na-na-boo-boo. No, this book oozed darkness; a bleak reminder of the three others in the dorm the night Granddad won his magic.
Chase flipped to page thirty seven, his favorite number, and pressed his palm to the faded text. A zing of energy rushed through him. It was magic! And two years early!
Now to try it out on Hunter.
Leroy read the page three times before someone bothered to chase his fluffer down. He remembered a time when female headliners would have proved useful to his purpose, but they had long since abandoned the art. They were a separate entity now, and believed the act would surely be some form of breach of contract.
Leroy dropped his robe and gazed pitifully at his talent; its imminent future bleak. It seemed casting had begun recruiting eager, but unskilled labor, judging by his many calluses.
He heaved a sigh. Things could be worse, he thought. I could still be agenting.
She pauses over her journal, then reads, "Love is a bleak entity."
When did my tomboy become an emo-teen? Yesterday? The last time I blinked?
Saturday it was the Beatles and the arcade. She Loves You (yeah, yeah, yeah) and skee-ball. Now it's frickin' Bieber Fever and a page of fractured Goth poetry. How do The Biebs and Goth possibly go together?
I chase away a threatening giggle, not allowing it to breach my throat (and our relationship). I smile and nod. I try, hard-as-hell, to look understanding, while wondering how long this phase will last.
Maybe if I blink….
The time it took to smoke one cigarette. His rule, and as bleak as it sounded.
He made that clear to those going inside to do the job. Breach that rule and he was gone down the road and they were on their own.
He was a driver. Pure and simple. He’d tell anyone there was none better. Not more skillful, not cooler under pressure of the chase.
He had other rules, not on a page. He was strictly for hire, a nameless entity, and that’s the way he played it. The crew didn’t know him from shit or shinola.
Shaw sat in his car and snipped the dedication page from every copy of Ceaselessly and then returned them, the bookstore non-entities crediting his Discover with a sigh, a “Sorry” or “But it’s Henry Light.”
The pages applauded in Shaw’s hand as he chased Henry under the bleak dawn, across West Egg beach. Henry slipped on the rocky stubble, and Shaw fell on him. He rolled Henry over and kneed him.
“Into the breach. Into. Her. Dear. Friend.”
He filled Henry’s mouth until pages bloomed.
“Oops,” he said, standing, trembling, giggling.
“Oops. Oops. Oops.”
And dragged Henry into the sea.
The brochures paint a page's life as respectful and utilitarian: errand boy to a non-corporeal entity engaged in the real work of running the universe. And human options in the quantum era are bleak— Tritorn food, menial labor, or museum exhibit.
But my entity breached their rules of engagement by accessing my nervous system. Now she chases the body electric. Caviar, rare wines, daily massage are mine to savor for her pleasure. Would she be jealous of my enjoying another woman's flesh, or was that the very leverage needed to force her vote on 'the human dilemma' our way?
I never thought it would come to this. The entity I hunted was no more than a classification on a page, but still I gave chase. I caught up to it in a KFC restroom in Kansas City. Looking into dank room in which the thing hid, I froze. I didn’t wanted to go in. It was a place of filth. But I had no choice. I needed the money. Without it my future was a bleak wasteland. I pulled my gun and stepped through the breach and into the room. Mother told me there would be days like this.
Insufferable avian. Every year – every single bleak midwinter, without fail – it raps at my window, begging to be let in.
Let it freeze. It’ll never make it through the double-glazing. Besides, if I let it in, it’ll only chase me around my chambers, squawking its one-word vocabulary and pretending to be some dire entity of lore.
As if I didn’t have enough to do.
I ducked my head, turned the page and tried to concentrate on the report. Breach of contract, insurance number, ominous silhouette at the window –
No. Enough! I’d had enough!
Tomorrow, I was buying a .22.
Jeff sat at his computer. From the bleak night outside the study window, an enormous eye looked in. It had chased him window to window through the house until stopping here.
“It’s all in your head,” Jeff repeated, breaching the silence. He opened Word and stared at the blank page. The eye watched and waited. Jeff reached to close the blinds and the eye shifted, revealing a jagged-toothed mouth. He lowered his hand and the eye returned.
“Fine,” he told the entity and began typing, “I’m writing, okay?” It blinked, unconvinced. Jeff sighed. Some stories could be real monsters.
I found blank pages bleak, until the sickness.
It happens like this: you babble. You stop sleeping, then eating. You chase your shadow. You chew your fingers, tongue, cheeks, ‘til blood pours from your mouth.
Disease or entity, it lives on the page, hiding under words and between lines. Read it and you’re gone.
The infection –- some called it the possession -- leeches through the skin and into the mind, breaching the blood brain barrier like blotter acid, but this trip never ends.
I’m alone now, caring for the haunted ones. Every night, I promise myself: tomorrow, I will read.
I thought it was love when I asked why we couldn’t just go. He said they had a page at the registry and she’d already bought the dress. Then he kissed me. His expression looked bleak.
I found her in the library, not wearing his ring. Crying over a travelogue on Tibet. The honeymoon would be in Vegas. They’d signed a contract and anything else would be in breach. I comforted her, and thought about what one entity will do to another when both think they are right.
Then I left the chase. Maybe real love’s in Tibet.
(Not part of entry, but WHEE CONTEST! This was what I wanted for Christmas all along! Thanks, Janet!)
I chase the mage across the page
But bleak's the path I charge in:
The entity, my enemy,
Has almost breached the margin.
You have some freaking talented readers here. I'll have to mull this over and see what my bleak entity of a muse comes up with.
Maybe I'll chase her around the room with a pitchfork and torch and make her bend to my will. Nah, she'll probably consider that a breach of contract.
Anyway, I'm on the last page of "Day One," so I'm too distracted to bother with one of Janet's nonsensical writing contests.
“She wouldn’t let me page you,” Sam says, as I breach the double doors.
The bleak emptiness on his face confirms my worst fear.
“Why would she choose a human doctor?” I ask, as my eyes chase the arterial spray across a gleaming white wall, “I could have saved her. You knew that.”
My hands twitch with the need to touch my sister. Heal her.
“She didn’t trust magic,” Sam squeezes his wife’s limp hand, “believed it came from the Dark Entity.”
A sick feeling overtakes me.
“Sam,” My voice is low, but growing shrill, “where’s the baby?”
Her window was too high to hear the yardmen, their breath fogging as they worked. Winter was hard this far north, but for them, it was not without the comforts of friendship to help chase away the bleak chill.
A page knocked on her open door. "Your highness? His majesty awaits your convenience."
"By which you mean he wants me in his private bedchamber, and without delay?"
The boy stood still, sudden fear clamped down hard behind his fixed face.
"Be easy, child," she said, "I will not breach my contract with him. Come, lead me. I am ready."
Curling characters spluttered from Poe’s pen making milky vapors across the page.
“Feed us,” they whispered into the writer’s bleak mind. He espied them, idly intolerant. Idiots to the last.
“And breach my contract with The Man? Are you mad?”
Colors bloomed and stormed, the rebellion thwarted.
“Be gone!” came the order as the author gave chase to one sulking entity after another.
Poe sighed. They’d be back in a different guise tomorrow, maybe next year. He dismissed the fear that one day they would catch him out and returned to the vellum, scratching away the silence with his nib.
The ghost slipped sideways through time rip-running space. Page chased the bleak entity across the breach. Her ankle twisted on the tail end of a riven year. Momentum, freefall, arms splayed for purchase. Catch, jerk, rest. Gossamer threads of days hung about her head. Page, exhausted, used them, pulling herself back up to time’s unbroken skin.
Undaunted by the empty field, Page searched for his gnomonic projection. Finding the wave-ripple trail, she smiled, “Everything leaves a trace.”
Page pulled the spike-winch from her pack. Hunger opened its wide maw. “Soon.” She patted her belly, “We’re just a spooling away.”
“Mr. President, I suggest we thrust our men into the breaches of the cannons of history once again.”
Outside the Oval Office, a wintry wind drove a bleak snowstorm against the window panes.
“The entity known as the Red Faction has chased our allies into oblivion.”
A soft knock beckoned. The football has arrived.
The Chief of Staff opened the briefcase and placed a paper of codes on the President’s desk.
“Just read the directions, sir.”
“One question before I turn the final page on civilization.”
“Sure, shoot.”
“Can’t we just wear pants?”
He entered 911 and pushed the button.
The freezing rain came down in sheets, soaking into Page’s dark hair and sending wet strands swirling about her ashen face. The heels of the scientist’s boots click-clacked across the wet concrete, each sound sent tremors ricocheting across her heart as she raced across the courtyard.
The entity would give chase. Since the soul breached containment at the facility, the future of the program, and her life, looked bleak.
They had successfully separated a soul from its body, but had miscalculated how to contain it. They realized too late it the mistake of using a murderer as their test subject.
This was fun! Thanks for the opportunity! And I loved what I came up with so much that think I'm going to work my concept into a book. The plot is swirling around in my coffee-clouded head as I type this :)
I turned down another empty corridor. No! My fists slammed against the cement wall. Breach misery’s gate and chase the dawning star. The riddle made no sense, but it was all I had.
My feet blistered. My stomach churned. Every inch of my entity ached with bleakness. How much longer can I run? What happens if I can’t find her?
The page of a large gong blasted my ears. Enormous speakers that hung from the grotto ceiling magnified the ghastly noise. He was watching, sneering from the sidelines, at his twisted game.
Keep going. Time is running out.
This is my second try. I don't think the first attempt to comment worked, so I'm trying under another ID - not trying to game the system:
"Haunting Prose"
Until the sickness, blank pages seemed bleak. Now, only the unwritten is safe.
The infection -- some called it the possession -- leeches through the skin, breaches the blood-brain barrier like blotter acid. This trip never ends.
First you babble and speak in tongues. You hallucinate and chase shadows. You chew your lips and tongue, your cheeks, until blood spills over your lips.
Plague/demon, virus/entity -- All I know is it lives in writing, hiding under words, between lines. Read it and you're gone.
I am alone among the haunted. Every night I promise: tomorrow I'll read.
-
"She's gonna breach!" Terrence said and slumped onto the bottom of the boat, head between his legs.
Roderick gazed into the water at the large, rippling shadow almost directly below them. "Lord save us," he said to no entity in particular. He was too numb from cold to appreciate the irony of his success. Now that he was dying, who cared about the chase?
Terrence whimpered, and Roderick slid onto the floor beside him. At least I'm with my brother, he thought as he waited for the last, bleak page of his life to wash away.
The boat lurched.
For two years she was the rage;
Reading her was like a race.
As we turn another page,
Her absence now we must face.
A sad day we had to reach,
Indeed this day is bleak.
Hard to find a word for breach
(I know that rhyme is weak.)
Her authors may question her lenity
Before, during, and after Noel.
Today ends the mirth of the entity
of Dead Guy blogger Barbara Poelle.
And so we wonder and we fear
Will Tuesdays lose their awesome power?
Nay, we say. And Happy New Year!
Warm best wishes to Michelle Brower.
Paula Matter
"Page Bob! Leaks of his purchase have breached identity security."
“Lola breaches my soul. She’s different than any of my other characters.”
“She’s not real, Charlie. She’s words on a page.”
“But she’s different; she's here,” he says.
“You can’t love her, Char.” I emphasize, “Not an entity. Not human. Not real.”
“She haunts me.”
His papers fly from my hands. They swirl and float down like a busted feather pillow spills all over a room. Charlie panics. We chase them. Sunlight strikes the bleak pages, transforming them into glowing apparitions: untamed, and wild, and impossible to ever get back together.
“What’d I tell you?” he says.
“That was her?”
Librarian Vo's specialty was listed as character containment, which he felt was a great injustice. Not to himself - he wore his title with pride - but to every literary entity found on a page not within his collection.
The 'characters' he guarded were always trying to get out, and he couldn't blame them - put him in the fantasies they inhabited, and he'd be trying to breach the boundaries within 30 seconds. As shallow and ill-defined as they were, their worlds were worse. He pitied them - half a person, surrounded by beings even more shallow, trapped there forever.
Her static eyes couldn't even follow a firefly. For ten years, I chased drool streaming from her mouth.
I sealed her bleak future. My signature at the bottom of the page said so.
The new doctor said she needed medication, not an ice pick breaching the skull, twisted and turned until gray matter resembled scrambling eggs.
The entity chained to the porch post whimpered, begging for freedom.
"Shut up. Can't no one hear you out here." I slid the point across the sharpening stone. "Enjoy the fireflies while you still can."
My sister’s dying upstairs. Her baby is breach, and come too soon. Jonathan doesn’t think she’ll live. He hasn’t said so, but his eyes already reflect the bleak landscapes of his grief.
I sit and spin my knife while her screams grow fainter. Jonathan paces. I would touch him, but our sin is a chasm between us. I can read the shape of his shoulders like a page: he blames me, somehow. The chase corrupted us, I think. It’s not our fault.
I mumble a prayer to the Entity, but it’s not enough. Silence falls.
It’s almost a relief.
Night Shift
The room’s dark, though not enough to miss her lifeless eyes staring at me. I’m the last entity she saw before death— and that is what I live for.
Her husband had run when I pulled the trigger. He assumed I would chase him as he ran up the stairs. But where could he go? If this were a book of his life he was on the last page.
I have to kill like a whale has to breach.
For the husband the outlook is bleak. In my world he’s just another set of lifeless eyes.
Damn, another writing contest. What? One hundred words? That barely covers any of the page. Why do I chase after these? How desperate am I to get attention? Attention, hell, I want an agent to faint in rapture. Yeah, that’s likely. And some smartass MFA with no real world experience will win this. Here’s my chances - dreary, bleak, and hopeless.
C’mon, this crap is a breach of common sense. Short story, my patootie. That’s hardly enough room for a noun, a verb, and a sprinkling of adjectives. What screwy entity thought this up? Okay, here I go…
(not an entry - just wanted to clarify that there are two different Catherines posting at 1.44 and 1.50, sorry for the confusion! I'm the second one - Catherine Miller).
"Haunting Prose"
Until the sickness, blank pages seemed bleak. Now, only the unwritten is safe.
The infection -- some called it the possession -- leeches through the skin, breaches the blood-brain barrier like blotter acid. This trip never ends.
First you babble and speak in tongues. You hallucinate and chase shadows. You chew your lips and tongue, your cheeks, until blood spills from your mouth.
Plague/demon, virus/entity -- All I know is it lives in writing, hiding under words, between lines. Read it and you're gone.
I am alone among the haunted. Every night I promise: tomorrow I'll read.
The breach will occur in less than fifteen Earth seconds, and no one will see. Humanity's eyes are turned to the chase. The sacrificial entity skims along the ocean's surface in a speeder. Not fast by our standards, but fast enough to draw the human's attention while I tap a button. From the view-screen of my ship, I watch their mountains and missiles crumble to ash. I give the orders to break through the atmosphere and descend upon their helpless planet. And as this bleak page in the planet's history comes to an end, I smile.
He looked at his cell. It was her again. But the thrill of the chase was over. The challenge of tearing down a woman’s emotional walls was the best part. Knowing you had the power to breach security, no matter how tight. The challenge met, the possibilities seemed bleak, uninteresting. Each one was merely an entity to be used as intended, then discarded. Disposable. That’s what they were.
He glanced at the woman at the table next to him. She stopped turning the page of her book and smiled.
“I’ve read that,” he said. “You’ll love the ending.”
The horizon was bleak, empty of silhouettes that might hint of hope. He had been swimming for months, in the endless sea of unpublished authors. Often the predators of despair came to feed, and he saw those he knew dragged below by krakens of ignorance and octopi of laziness. Rarely the iron-sided publisher boats came, breaching the hordes to pluck some lucky entity away, often led by the sharkly agents who could smell new blood. He saw a fin. His query hung in its mouth. Was the chase at an end? It smiled at him.
“Sorry, not for …”
Can I enter the contest? Oh, wait... shoot...
Thank you for doing this contest, Janet, and thanks everyone for jumping in!!!
-Patrick
My Mulligan
Her dog was dead and would no longer chase cars or protect her. She couldn’t sleep and turned another page on a bleak story, wondering if the pictures on the stairs would again be rearranged by the entity that lived in the house. The first time it was her great-grandmother’s portrait moved from top to bottom. Each night a different portrait was moved.
The next morning when she walked down the hall, the breach was complete. She leaned over the banister. Her ancestors were all stacked against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
He watched her finish her beer and chase it with a whiskey. Maybe he'd try something a little classier than his usual.
"Excuse me," he began, slurring, "I don't know how to breach this subject exactly... ."
"Broach," she said, turning to him with bleak, weary eyes. "The word is broach." She turned away, her rejection a palpable entity.
In the parking lot he grabbed her shoulder from behind. She spun and punched him in the face.
He fell to the ground with a small plop.
"Finally," she said, "I think we're on the same page."
It was him. She knew it. Why did he stand there like that? Why didn’t he come forward? She looked down at the page, making sure she’d said the spell right. Suddenly he transformed from the shape of her dead husband to some unknown entity. Things were starting to look pretty bleak. She screamed and ran away. He didn’t give chase. Maybe he just wanted to be left alone. What had she done? She’d caused a breach, a break in the laws of nature. All she’d really wanted to do was feel her husband’s arms around her one last time.
Bruja, he says, as she digs in the dirt to chase away ghosts. She looks up, sees him standing in the doorway, watching. She could tell him he stands in another doorway, too, but which is the bleaker prospect? Right now she is “witch,” and filthy besides, but “crazy” has a full belly in a lonely building, twenty miles away.
She buries the page with his name on it, just as something taps the back of her neck. Which entity wishes her harm now? But it is only him. He breaches her protective shields with a word. Madre.
She cries.
“I am not giving chase to that boy. If he wants me, he knows where to find me,” Miranda muttered as she extracted herself out of the pneumatic entity tube. Tube riding wasn’t what it used to be. With so many crisscrossing the city it took forever nowadays. Breach Gaps were the new way to go, but a single ride cost a hefty page and a half of credits she didn’t currently own.
Shane came in after her, pulling himself out like an old pro. “Man, it’s bleak as hell out there. Remind me why we came here again?”
It was the breach of the marlin on the cover, the sharp, crisp slice of gray on blue revealing the adrenaline of the chase, the thrill of the hunt, the drama of that monstrous entity poised over the slight man in the boat that inspired her to pick up the book, no matter how bleak the end.
She opened it and inhaled the smell of old paper, running her eyes over the page.
The Old Man and the Sea.
She was filled with a sudden melancholy as she thought of her own grandfather.
The young Page burst through the heavy curtain of the Friar's bleak, shadowed room,..... the chubby priest giving chase, madly into the breach, briskly in search of his desired sexual entity.
Jack dropped the papers in the senator's inbox. Time to go home. The others had warned him about the senator, but track and field had been Jack's sport. No living entity could chase him down, least of all the doddering senator.
But before he reached the door the old man stepped in and turned the key. "Not so fast, son. I have a chore for you."
The page looked at the office door, his expression bleak. "I thought it was the custom to let us leave at five."
The senator leered. "Honored in the breach," was all he said.
I turn a rustling page of my newspaper. Perched on the arm of the couch beside me, the cat glares at me for this gross breach of etiquette.
"Oh, go chase a mouse or something," I mutter, disheartened. Her jade eyes narrow. She gives me a cool, considering look, as if wondering what sort of inferior entity I might be.
I sigh. I've been trying to befriend my mother-in-law's cat for a month now, in hope that a detente with the cat might soothe human relations as well.
The cat hisses. My prospects are bleak.
Alastair’s lips curled down as far as his decade of valet schooling would allow. He pressed the Mont Blanc’s nib onto the page, and scripted his signature sentence:
Murder is sometimes a necessary breach of etiquette.
Alastair placed the note and his folder of damning evidence atop the lifeless body, weighing them down with the garrote. He positioned the fountain pen amongst the other mementos in his valise, then strode into the corporeal mist of the bleak Sussex night, in search of a new immoral master to bring to justice.
Enforcement entities would soon conclude their chase for this one.
Thank you for your time, oh mighty and pointy-toothed Shark!
Happy holidays,
Jeff
"Turn the page! No. Let's burn the thing before my eyes fall out of my head!"
Chase leapt from the couch, a piece of the manuscript clutched in his hand. But Susie was quicker, the victor, as always. "Look!" She pointed to a passage. "Here it says you used to call a break in your mashed potatoes and gravy a 'breach.' That's freaking hysterical!"
"My mother was an alien. Just this side of Romulan." Dejected sigh.
"It's not that bleak. There's only what? Two hundred more pages to go?" Susie's eyes gleamed. "Consider it engaging bedside reading."
That cunning Adjective was on the chase again. Noun looked for a page to hide behind but the outlook was bleak. Verb had already unhappily fallen prey to Adverb. The battle for narrative clarity seemed impossible to win.
“Stop breaching protocol!” Noun shouted. “Publishing doesn’t like when we pair up.”
“I hate when you talk about Publishing as if it’s some Entity to fear,” Adjective said. “It’s those critique groups you should really worry about.”
“In order to make history, you must always chase your dreams,” my Mother always said. Her mantra echoed through my mind as I stared out at the bleak morning horizon, exhausted.
I’d decided to write my first novella but had been stuck on page thirty for days. Mercifully, there was a breach in my writer’s block and I cruised away on a writing swell, the prose becoming an entity in and of itself.
Temporarily bummed out by the tedious pathway to publication, I drafted my first query with my fingers crossed that Mom was right.
Bennett's chase theory proves true, every time. Any girl will diminish herself for his attention. But the problem is he's just chasing. He doesn't even want to score. She's just part of his entity. His game. He acts like he's really into her. Then, bam! The inevitable breach of trust transpires. He turns cold so fast--she hadn't realized how much she was yearning for him. Interestingly, she's chasing him now. And he's just turning to a new page in his book.
I think it's pretty bleak, to be honest. But he just can't get enough of the power trip.
There was this old poster in the dump we were calling a bar. A lot of papers were glued to the wall, pages from moist, yellowish books and what not. From time to time, as the alcohol was whispering dirty secrets in my ears, I was drawn to these colorful entities. I never really read the messages, but on this particular day a fly was driving me crazy. I finally squashed it on the wall after a quick chase. A breach in monotony occurred and the little French I knew helped me understand a bizarre text about a bleak brothel.
I resented the breach of ominous clouds that turned the night frigid and bleak. Wind pushed at the window behind me and I jumped. With a sigh, I forced my attention back to my book and turned the page. Suddenly letters jumped off the page to spell CHASE. I blinked. More letters -- RUN!
The window cracked and a ghost-like entity slid inside between shards, looking like a heinous cloud. The word BELLS drew my attention to the mantle. I reached for the jingle bells, managing to close my hands over them just as a chilly breath touched my neck.
Imprisoned blocks bound in by chase
did breach unsullied entity
of page and left imprinted wounds
too black to right with gentian tea.
Forty-two lashes first laid through duress
of Gutenberg’s new printing press
reach out beyond bleak history
in the form rejection just sent to me.
A spray of seawater erupts over the fin's breach, and Marcel kicks and coughs against the waves, knowing his chances are now bleak.
The still-floating briefcase bucks under his arms, both life preserver and anchor. As grey skin slides beneath him, Marcel's mind sings desperation. He cracks the case open. Water boils in, and a page floats off.
The entity heaves sideways to chase the ripple of white. Marcel seizes his drowning manuscript and flings it, then shakes empty and re-latches his briefcase.
As the shark lurches to gobble the pages, Marcel thrashes away.
~~~~~~~
Also, Ms. Reid, I made you this:
Happy Chew Year
I threw the page into the fire. Flames engulfed my handwritten words. Who the hell would want to read about a foreign entity anyway? Maybe if I threw in a chase scene or a mugging. I may as well breach my “no chocolate” commitment and live to write another day. When writing is bleak, chocolate brings light.
Her window was too high to hear the yardmen, their breath fogging as they worked. Winter was hard this far north, but for them, it was not without the comforts of friendship to help chase away the bleak chill.
A page knocked on her open door. "Your highness? His majesty awaits your convenience."
"By which you mean he wants me in his bedchamber, and without delay?"
The boy stood still, sudden fear clamped down hard behind his fixed face.
"Be easy, child," she said, "I will not breach my contract with the divine entity. Come, lead me. I am ready."
The calendar said December. She saw through her front window a sturdy oak, full-leafed and lit by the sun high overhead, the view more bleak than grey sky and barren branches.
She reached her right hand out to touch the chill of winter. The chase was for a connection to match up the inputs, to line up the chaotic breach across the hemispheres in her brain. Sinister against right, she wanted nothing more than to unify the factions into a single body she could control. She'd lost.
The five-fingered entity at her left moved toward the glass.
The blank page mocks me.
I gave it up, all of it! Walked right up and quit…a complete breach of contract. My license is gone, yanked. I’d enjoyed the chase for years, countless nights of harmless fantasies that always ended with the reassuring sound of the morning alarm. Then middle age hit, tormenting my hormones, turning my world into bleak and unsatisfying place to be.
Yep, gave it up, a total ADHD moment, inspiration and retirement both gone, and not a single entity to show for it on the empty page…the husband’s not going to take this well.
As a stowaway on Airship Assange, I wasn’t a legal entity. Survival odds? Bleak to nil. If the Swissians found me huddled over the Golden Rarebit, they would not chase, just behead me as they would anyone who dared breach their vessel.
The hatch swiveled and a Security Page entered to scan the dank hold with a gold-seeker. It sang. Alarms wailed. The Rarebit breathed and the page’s scimitar melted at my jugular.
“Rarebit awakes,” the page screamed, dying.
The ship vaporized, the Rarebit blew a mantle of belief over me and we launched for Antares.
Grace travels fast.
“There’s been a breach in the perimeter! Page the commander.”
I pick up the mezzophone and bark into the speaker, “Alien entity alert. Perimeter breach. Chase it down!”
Alarms sound overhead. The red light flashes, alternating with an amber blinker. This is the real deal.
I peer out of the viewport and across the bleak expanse of moonscape, seeking the telltale dust puffs that will give away the approach route. I see nothing.
The mezzophone chirps. “Yes?” I ask.
“Rizzo?”
“Yeah?”
“We found the entity.”
“And…?” I feel the sweat pool at the small of my back.
“It’s your mother.”
Beauty is for the eyes, not for the heart. Beauty can catch the heart, not because of the splendor or its lustrous look, why it's cause is it's perfection. Chase a sunset and page a friend to see it with you on mobile. Beauty is bitter and bleak, a galling thing almost a entity as shocking as sin in the sanctuary, when it shines like a mirage enticing ones heart to embrace all the emptiness of evil.This ugly companion inevitably destroys beauty; for beauty is no mate for the wickedness.
“How much longer?” Her breathing is shallow, and I think about the importance of silence, especially now.
“Two hours to hypothermia, eight to organ failure.” My voice detaches like an alien entity, distant as a page out of my old medical texts, and somehow I know it’s a breach of who we have come to be. I grip her hand as tightly as I dare.
She smiles, face glowing out of the bleak snow. “You always said you’d chase me to the ends of the earth.” And how, in the end, I would wish I’d had more modest dreams.
Janna paged through the Cessna owner’s manual. “Nothing about removing a stiletto from the throttle.” Grant tugged the shoe.
The heel clicked off and locked them at full power.
He considered throttling her. “Back to the airfield. We’ll run out of gas eventually.”
Dust tornados chased each other across the bleak desert. “Shit. Sandstorm.”
She gripped the seat. “This breaches our contract. The Entity won’t pay you.”
“Can’t use money if I’m dead.” He opened the door and dust filled the cockpit. “Jump!”
The chutes jerked open. Sand grated their skin. They hit solid ground.
“That job didn't last long.”
(Thanks for the contest! P. S. I used this entry as an example for my blog post on screenwriting and plot. It's hard, though, to hit all of the story arc points in 100 words, though! I'm sure I didn't succeed. Http://yaknow.livejournal.com)
Luther got down off the top step of the trailer and made his way over with a cane.
"Whatcha reading?"
The boy pushed his Coke bottle glasses up onto his sweaty nose. "The Wild Chase."
"What's it about?"
"I'm not sure yet, but it's got big words."
"Like what?"
The boy leaned two inches from the page. "Bleak, breach, and some word I can't say."
"Lemme see it."
The boy pointed.
"Entity," Luther said.
"What's that?" the boy asked.
"Beats me." Luther handed the boy the book and walked away.
There was no breach in the fence line—just neat little holes punched into the earth on the opposite side. My feet were already weighted down with pounds of clay. Giving chase was hopeless in this muck and the chance of a capture was bleak.
I headed back. At the door, I ran my finger down the well worn page of protocol dedicated to this particular clever entity. Rule 4: Don’t be worried if Stormy escapes, Stormy will break back in.
I sigh as I drop a page. I must stop fidgeting!
I stoop to pick up the trivial entity.
Embarrassment draws blood to my face like I stepped in a trap and got strung up by my toes. What are you staring at?!
Deep breath.
I peer at my competition. Are they aware of what is at stake?
I check the clock again.
Why do I chase these dreams of infamy? The outlook for me to win is bleak. I should go.
Was that my number?
I hop up. I breach the director’s office. Wish me luck.
Another page falls.
Mer-Bear knew she had to step into the breach. The Shark, moments before, had knifed out of the conference bar and plunged into the ocean, headed for Nassau. And now the writer-in-question staggered to their table, lipstick-stained wine glass in hand.
“Did you page me?” Mer-Bear heard despair amped into hope by Chardonnay. “Let’s cut to the chase. My manuscript. I know Janet loves it. It's “Bleak House meets Catching Fire.” I slipped it under the toilet stall…”
“Never a good idea.” Mer-Bear cut her off. “And you need to spell-check. It’s entity, not entitty.”
(Thanks for the contest. Now I do believe in Santa Claus.)
The attic is bleak and filled with shadows, and one, darker than the others, scuttles across the ceiling.
“Chase.”
She continues to tease the blood soaked sheet of newspaper from the man’s chest. “It’s the sports page: ‘Poms breach Aussie . . .’”
“Chase!” She looks at me, her mouth forms a perfect O, and her green eyes burst like trampled grapes. The entity, a torrent of ash, falls from the ceiling and engulfs her.
I draw my gun and pray, “Forgive me.” A thousand hot barbs pierce my flesh, and the cold barrel soothes my parched throat.
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