Sunday, February 13, 2011

It was a dark and stormy night

This has nothing to do with my art but I thought it would be fun to share.

A few years ago I had to write a story for a Science Fiction class, and this is it.

I totally forgot about it and read it a few minutes ago. I actually like it a lot.


It was a dark and stormy night….actually it wasn’t. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. That is a lie too. If you want to know the setting of this story just reach back into the depths of your mind and create one. There! That is what the day was like when it first began. But you are asking yourself, “When what began? What is he talking about?” Well, I will tell you soon enough. Like now.

The yellow school bus dropped off Josh after school on Booth Road. He began his walk up the gravel driveway when he first realized something big has happened. I bet you are asking yourself, “What happened? Tell me!” I will tell you, but not right now. As I said, Josh was walking up his driveway when he first got an inkling that something happened. He knew this because at the end of the driveway he saw a UPS truck sitting there, not with a care in the world. Frightened, he stopped in his tracks for a moment and began to think, “Uh oh…the truck is here and it’s not even Wednesday. Why would the UPS truck come on a Tuesday afternoon? I did not order anything.” He would soon find out. Josh continued up the driveway, shortening the distance between himself and the big brown truck with every step he took. As he was walking he noticed how pretty the flowers and trees looked that were growing on his property. He began to wonder why they were put there. As Josh lurked closer and closer to the truck, he began to remember the time when a family of snowmen got brutally murdered in his front yard,

It was a snowy afternoon on Booth Road when Kyle and Josh witnessed an event so macabre that it was later told around a campfire. Kyle was behind the wheel of a Subaru station wagon while Josh was holding a video camera in the passenger seat. Kyle was driving eighty miles an hour up Josh’s driveway, the minimum speed limit, when he plowed through a gathering of snowmen. This turned into a huge mess. There were snow arms, snow legs, and snow heads scattered everywhere in the yard and on top of the station wagon. Josh quickly got out of the vehicle to videotape the scene. What he saw made his stomach churn. The same kind of churning that occurs when you smell road kill on a hot summer day. He immediately began interviewing eyewitnesses what had just occurred. “Oh man! My poor mother just got run over by a drunk driver! This is awful, I can’t believe this happened,” cried a little girl. A much older man told Josh that everything happens for a reason. And that if this had not occurred he would not be on camera right now or this story would not be told. Among the witnesses a particularly peculiar pretty snow-women was circling around with small gestures. Only when looking at her, one got the feeling of being in love. So Josh turned away immediately and saw that Kyle had a baseball bat in his possession and was hitting every snowman he saw in the face. Their cold faces came crashing to the ground after being hit with an aluminum rod.

Josh then came to his senses when his dog, Max Station, came running into the front yard with IT in his mouth. “What is he doing with IT?” thought Josh. Max continued running down the grass hill until he jumped up over a stump and began to fly away. After a few seconds Max was almost a kilometer away, slowly disappearing into the distance. One can only wonder where Max was going. It is possible that he may be going to bark at a few airplanes hovering above the earth. Who knows?

What Josh did know was that this brown truck was still sitting in his driveway. After knowing that it would not bite him, Josh walked right up to the back of the truck. He kneeled down behind the back tires and noticed that it still felt warm and smelled of burning rubber. He knew it had not been here for long. But exactly how long had it been parked above the gravel lying underneath it? Josh did not know. He slowly stood up, not wanting to get lightheaded and dizzy, risking himself to the possibility of passing out. And the last thing Josh wanted was to be unconscious next to a UPS truck in his driveway. As he stood up he noticed some smudges in the dust on the back of the truck.

W.A.S.T.E.

“Four legs good, two legs bad!”

After noticing what had been written in the dust Josh heard something behind him. He turned to look over his left shoulder but nothing was behind him. “Great…now I’m hearing things,” Josh said to himself. He began to wonder what the sound was. If you want to know what the sound was, I will tell you. It was an invisible eight-inch creature that I created to be added into this scene. It dug itself up from ground and broke a twig as its head hit the oxygen that we breathe in. After this happened the invisible creature got so afraid that he ran away as fast as I made his legs move, which was pretty fast. This species is known to cover one mile in two and a half minutes. But we don’t have time to watch this when Josh is standing behind a truck. A brown truck nonetheless. A brown UPS truck that has been sitting in his driveway for an undetermined amount of time. If you really want to know how long the truck has been sitting in his driveway for I will tell you. It has been there for five minutes. I know this does not sound like a lot, but a lot can be done in five minutes. You will find out later what was done.

After hearing what he heard, Josh turned back around at the truck in front of him. A few seconds later he heard the front door to his house open. He quickly dropped down to the gravel and loose stone to hide from whatever had just left his house. Josh knew it was neither his Mom nor Dad because the truck was the only vehicle in the driveway. He heard footsteps walk over grass and stone as they became louder. There were becoming louder because the footsteps were getting closer. This is common physics, F=MA. But we don’t have the time to quarrel about physics. As the footsteps got closer Josh crawled into Forsythia – Lynwood Gold shrub. What he saw did not surprise him, a person dressed as a UPS deliveryman. This man, we will call him Chuck, looked real official. He was wearing an issued UPS uniform that consisted of a brown vest worn above a cotton t-shirt with a short pair of brown shorts. On his feet was a pair of brown ADIDAS sneakers. He normally wore a size ten and a half but these sneakers happened to be a size too big. Chuck often felt like a clown walking around without makeup on.

As Chuck was walking to his truck whose license plate happened to read “4B28227”, he heard a voice shout from a nearby tree. “Hey, you!” the voice exclaimed. Chuck turned to the direction where the voice came from but could not see anyone. “Yo! What the hell do you think you’re doing!” the voice shouted again. Chuck responded, “Excuse me? Who’s there?” But there was no answer. Chuck had no idea who was creeping in the trees yelling at him, he did not care.

This distraction, thought of by Josh as he was crawling in the bushes, was just enough time for him to dart into the house and close the door behind me. “All I need to do is go back in time twenty four hours ago and place that recorder in the trees so it will be there to use again in this same situation.” After closing the door Josh took off his shoes and threw them at the wall. When his shoes made contact with the wall they were sucked in without leaving a scuff. These shoes would travel in the intestines of the wall and be expelled a few miles away where young children, too young to be working in a factory while being paid next to nothing, would repair them and make them look brand new to be shipped off back to where they came from via UPS.

1 comment:

  1. Wow. I really enjoyed reading this. I imagined Chuck to look like Chuck Heasly. Also, what a sad and horrible day for the snowpeople.

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