FWJ Community Writing Project: The FWJ Comment Story
March 7, 2009 by Deborah Ng
Filed under Freelance Writing Tips
It was a dark and stormy night. She was home alone, but she liked it that way. She found the commotion outside rather comforting and snuggled up on the couch by the window to watch the thunder and lightning rage outside her window. The flashes of lighting always revealed something new: a passing car, a deer… and…why, that’s odd…is that a…
Your turn… I’d like to invite the members of the FWJ community to continue adding a paragraph in the comments until our story is done.
Tag…you’re it!
…hearse? It was. Melba shivered at the thought of the driver’s lonely errand and got up to get a cup of tea. The thunder settled down to the occasional thud outside as the kettle got up to a boil. As usual, taking the time to prepare tea helped calm her nerves almost as much as drinking it did. Melba rested her tea gently on the end table as settled herself back into the comforter. Much better, she thought, as she looked out the window to see, another hearse?…
That’s a good idea contributing paragraph writing until you guys finished a very long contributed story. Good Luck.
To see one hearse on this road would have been unusual, to see two was strange. And at this time of night? Melba knew she was probably being silly, but the unease settling in her stomach and the prickling of the goosebumps on her skin were real enough.
Melba tried to settle back down into her cosy evening, took up her mug of tea and wound back into her favorite armchair, the comforter worn fleecy with snuggling, when a knock at the door startled her from her reverie. Warily, and out of a habit of politeness she got up to see who, in the middle of a storm, would come calling…
Great idea Deb!
At about that moment she heard a knock. Rather, a light tapping on the front door. She didn’t think anything of it when she opened the door but she did notice a flash of silver on the left hand of the man who greeted her.
“Excuse me, miss. Me and my pal are stuck.”
It happened frequently. Everyone always underestimated a dirt road in the rain.
“I know it’s kinda weird, two hearses stuck in the same spot. Dark rainy night and all. Just wonderin’ if I could use your phone to call the boss.”
She nodded politely and the nicely dressed fellow came in.
pull into the driveway of her neighbor’s house. She watched as an ominous looking character exited the driver’s seat of the first hearse. After pulling his hat tight onto his head, the man proceeded to the back door of the hearse. Rain was dribbling down on all sides of his hat, and with the darkness surrounding him, Melba couldn’t make out the man’s face. She knew, however, it wasn’t her neighbor, so what was going on next door? Melba remained fixated on the scenario unfolding outside of her window. She gasped in shock as the man opened the back door of the hearse and…
a tiny dwarf, with an oversized bald head and a purplish-blue keloid scar traversing his empty left eye socket, hopped up on the edge of the open compartment. The storm’s light caught the water and the half-rusted machete flashed as the little troll raised it as high as his nubby arms would allow. Just as he began to hack at his new target…
“Wow”, thought Melba. She really had hoped this wouldn’t happen again. Ever since Melba was a little girl, she always had extremely vivid dreams. When they were most vivid, they often came true. Melba’s mother told her that she was “special” and should appreciate her gift. Melba remembered a few weeks ago, she had a nightmare with the exact same sequence of events and unlikely cast of characters. Well, the gift keeps on giving…
“Yes… yes… just a dream,” she thought as she stood shivering in the open doorway.
And sure enough, in the next flash of lightning, she could see that the tiny dwarf had disappeared. The hearses – no, they were just a pair of ordinary sedans, front wheel drive cars with their back, bald tires stuck in muddy ruts.
“So -” said the man at her door, now obviously an ordinary, anxious-looking little fellow in a dripping business suit and light, sopping coat – “can we come in?” He gestured behind him to the occupant of the second car, a worried-looking woman with a small boy bopping around the back seat.
“Uh… sure,” Melba responded, stepping back to allow the visitors in.
Again, the lightning cracked. Again the vision of hearses appeared. And again the image of the dwarf with his machete… She rubbed her eyes.
And as she did so, she felt the unmistakable sensation of losing one of her contact lenses. Due to her own vanity, something that she was gradually growing tired of in recent years, she’d almost never worn her actual eyeglasses since the first day they had been prescribed. Melba got down on one knee and with one eye open tried to find the missing lens.
Though she didn’t feel the needle pierce the skin on the back of her neck, she was fully aware of the warm comfort that slowly came over her. As she willingly embraced the unavoidable deep sleep that was in her immediate future, she also made a mental note of two voices arguing and a number of people stepping over her now motionless body and entering her home.
When she came to, the familiar dialogue of “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo” only confused her more.
The 21st century’s most lamentable fad, the flash mob, poured into her California bungalow in a warm, pulsing mucous flow. Bottles shattered in the background. Struggling gracelessly to her knees on the broken glass that had framed her favorite crosstich sampler, tiny shards slashed her vintage corduroy pants. The little abrasions were of less concern to her than where she was going to throw up. Here she was in her own house, and dwarves, naked and doubtless in the thrall of Exstasy, were doing belly flops off the rail of her back porch into the koi pond.
Why, against all her better instincts, had she done it? Why had she gone….
…and listed her home address on Facebook the night before? Was it a desperate attempt to fill her friendless world with anonymous acquaintances met over the computer, or was there more to it than that?
Melba wiped the vomit residue from her mouth and seeing as mouthwash was the one thing she’d forgotten to get off of last week’s shopping list, she decided to eat the better part of a box of Altoid’s. At that moment, the words “Curiously Strong” on the tin box of breath mints could’ve also referred to the repulsive scent emanating from her mouth. Depressed by the fact that she had no one in her personal life to offend with her poor oral hygiene, she suddenly became aware of the fact that all of the unwelcome guests from the night before had departed. All that they had left behind was a medium-sized brown-paper-wrapped package on top of her recently refinished apothecary table. A package with large black handwritten letters on it that spelled out…
“Halal”
Who’s Hal? Who’s Al? Could they have been responsible for the minute sneaker treadmarks on the ceiling of her bathroom? Were they the leather-clad little people with bandanas on their heads she remembered seeing groping one another in the porch hammock? Wasn’t her torts professor named Halal? The whiny creep with ear hair who was such a Red Sox fan?
She couldn’t place the name. The brown wrinkled paper crackled as she lifted the bag to look inside. As the last possible mouthful of bile reached her teeth she remembered where she’d seen the name “Halal.” It was what that crazy Arab girl had to have labeled on all her meat in elementary school. It was some kind of a religious thing. The smell reached her nostrils two seconds after she saw it: a warm, wet…
…mildewing, sea water soaked “Spring Break Cancun 1999″ t-shirt. Melba recognized it as the kind of shirt she saw lifted up around the necks of hundreds of co-eds a decade earlier. Her thoughts immediately raced back and forth between wondering who knew about that mind-altered, drug-induced trip south of the border she had taken following college graduation and regret that she instead hadn’t accepted her best friend Clementine’s invitation to celebrate the culmination of their higher education process with a tour of railroad museums in the Midwestern United States. Priorities sure do change she thought, when you’re young you think you know what you want in your heart but you have no idea the important role that the history of rail travel, and steam powered locomotives in particular, will play in your future. She wiped a tear from her eye and remembered a partial quote that her mother would often say involving something about youth and it being wasted on the young.
Melba lifted the t-shirt out of the package and holding it by the shoulders let it fall in front of her. Could it be? Was this the shirt she’d last seen worn by that young man Petros whom she’d met on the airplane traveling home ten years before? To this day she was one hundred percent sure she’d never met him before, but he had insisted he had known her since elementary school.
“Ahh, Petros” she said aloud as an ever so slight smile shown on her face. She tried to remember details of the conversations they had shared, but all she remembered were those deep brown eyes, that rich bronze skin, and that…
awful weeping “cold sore” on his lip.
She had so wanted to believe that he hadn’t contracted it from the skanky Moldovan she’d seen smoking at the bar, a sad, bruised captive trying to work her way out of the Russian mafia’s bondage.
When he passed the herpes on to her, though, the only thing she wanted more than a one-way ticket out was the ice-pick she jammed into Petros’s sun-kissed left ear. After that, she didn’t stick around long. She was too busy…
lining up venture capital financing for her family’s next business opportunity. Locals had always laughed at her father’s idea of capitalizing on two different national trends by developing a chain of country music themed coffee shops, but who was laughing now seeing as he was known around the world as the Juan Valdez of Nashville? Melba didn’t mind too much being the brains behind the business, it allowed her a certain amount of anonymity and at the same time provided the cash flow needed to fuel her desire to assemble the world’s foremost collection of historically significant ice picks.
Melba turned her attention back to the package that the t-shirt had come in and with one look at where the newspaper used to line the bottom of the box was from knew what her next step was. She immediately went online and booked a seat on the next plane to…
Mombasa.
She’d never been, but she knew there was coffee in Kenya. From the headline that of the soiled newspaper that came apart in her hands like a pre-schooler’s used Kleenex, she realized her father’s business was on the ropes. VALDEZ-TITTUTE the headline shrieked.
She knew the odds of finding a legitmate exporter in a sink of iniquity like Mombasa were few.
That was the way she wanted it. Legit was the last thing she needed.
In the false bottom of her footlocker she arranged her necessaries with the urgency of a senator hustling to a video camera. She threw in a Kabar and a pound of biltong. Before slamming the trunk closed,for good luck and good measure, she tossed in a…
whoopee cushion, a pack of spicy gum, and a plastic-snake-filled can of almonds. She knew Kenyans were notorious pranksters and she was well aware of the old saying, when in Mombasa, do as the Mombasians do.
The flight to Mombasa was agonizingly long, like watching a Kevin Costner marathon on a cable television station that should’ve lost its broadcast license. The flight would’ve been unbearable too if it were not for the flight attendant with the noticeable limp, the missing left ring finger, and the friendly face. Melba almost didn’t recognize her at first, but who else would wear dangling train engine earrings other than her old college friend Clementine?
They chatted for awhile about career choices, mutual acquaintances, and whether Kenya had an extradition treaty with the United States or not. The two long lost friends then hugged like two zoo chimpanzees being reunited after a long medical quarantine before parting when Clementine suddenly paused and said “Melba, you must join my husband Petros and I for drinks tonight”. Melba paused, stuttered, and replied…
“It’s ‘Petros and me, dear.’” Could it be the same Petros? It had to be. Maybe he had changed. Maybe his herpes was in remission.
Still, surely she could see through his by now fraying good looks, his unctuous charm, and of course, his left ear.
Given their history, drinks would be awkward. She had picked up a gross of imported mace sprayers in the souks of Mombasa.
“Of course, that would be lovely, Clemmie,” she said. “But first I should tell you…”
“…I’ve honestly murdered people in the past for correcting my grammar in a personal conversation, but since we’re old college chums I’ll have to let it pass this time.”
Melba turned and walked away in a huff. It wasn’t until she stopped in for some entertainment at the Thunder From Down Under All-Male Revue Traveling Road Show (Kenya Edition) that she realized she had agreed to meet Clemmie and Petros for drinks but had never discussed exactly where they would meet. “It makes no never mind to me” she thought to herself, “its not like I’ll ever see them again”.
The bartender asked her if she wanted anything to drink and she replied “Just bring me something you can serve flaming”. There were few things in the world that Melba actually cared about right now and her own liver wasn’t making the list either. She then downed the drink, took one more look at the eye candy on the stage and headed out the door in search of suitable overnight accommodations. Before she reached the end of the block she knew she’d found where she’d be staying, the flashing neon light said…
“Warren Zevon Slept Here.”