Falling

She lets the book drop through her fingers to the floor and stares straight ahead watching the red lights streak by in the darkness. The train rocks her away from the seat and back; she rolls her spine along the plastic to absorb the motion, taking it away from the train. She watches him, in the seat across, his gaze shifting from the book, to her, and back to the book. His eyes rising and falling but never meeting hers like a dawn never reaching noon.

He waits for movement in her shoulders, a muscle twitching or contracting, but they are unmoving. His dark eyes come up from the book on the floor to her chest, inches below her neck, where the first indication, a pull or shift beneath her shawl, would signal that she is bending forward to pull the book from the floor. He feels sparks bursting beside his ear and feels them popping through the shirt covering his shoulder, as though sprites and fairies were setting quarks to spinning or playing jai-alai with neutrinos. They were spitting out plasma which would cost him a loan later today, when he couldn’t think straight while filling out the application. The shawl was pulled tight around her neck; realizing he is staring at her chest he looks up and feels awkward seeing that she has been watching him.

She does not change her expression when he turns red and sheepishly rubs together his hands covered in wood-stain. The train stops and she rises from her seat, walking smoothly through the doors onto the platform toward a stair with the string of elves trailing behind her in the air. He looks back too late to see the girl - head wrapped in a hive of dreadlocked hair, hemp twine, and beads, - waiting, shaking with anticipation, dart her hand out from beneath a dark poncho to grab the book, and all he sees is the dirty floor.

Momentary Disruption

Sorry, nothing to see here, move along. (Ok, it'll be back at some point, so come back then).

If the System Were Named Sampson: A Venture Brothers Fan Fiction

Deftly swinging a broom has only limited applications but in the instances where those applications come into play they really do make one stand out.

The point of Brock grabbing the broom was to try not to kill the cat, but to swat it enough times that it wouldn't want to fight anymore. To punish it, without termination, what with all that business of mice and men concerned with their plans we find that despite thought towards the path action leads down strange paths and suffice to say intention does not too often find itself getting the better of the outcome, as it were. It could not for instance overcome nature. For nature decreed in making graceful, sleek and often strikingly beautiful the cat, and with those gifts the cat was made arrogant and haughty, such as it is that through this, the cat's own natural enmity for all non-cats other than its master, it has become legendary for ire. They are species known for their spitefulness and outwardness of hatred.

This is simply the way of things after all.

So after Brock first brought the broom down on this particular cat's skull, he was, as a cat lover, affected, though by being Brock, he was not affected as another might. His affect processed according to his nature, which much like a cat's, is contrary often even to being unkind. Perhaps this explains some reason for his affinity for felines; their reflection of his self. Brock's response is entirely after the fact, in the reflection, in the brief moment of account Brock takes with each life, discerning insight in conjunction with the application of power, understanding the balances that scale within the universe.

Brock crushed the skull of this cat without too much psychological transference, so what, if anything, can really be said about contrariness without entering into wormholes of tangential causation is not a line for this page. He modulated the speed of the swing while the broom already arced through the air, seeing a murderous lack of restraint in the eyes of the cat and the scent of an acid boiling in the cat's mouth, twisting the broom from the flat to the outer edge where the metal guide would stave in even a coconut.

The cat's skull cracked under the force of a broom being swung which is impressive to say nothing else, and Brock stalked off through the train to find the cat's owner for some thoroughly justified retribution at being required, per his nature, to terminate the cat. Of course the largesse of this cat was a nature fueled with enmity and a modified physiology, so its' skull did not so much as repair as filled in the splayed, fractured portions, widening the cat's head and in the process its' maw, and shuddering its' body as a cat will do when stretching the thing got bigger to accommodate its bulkier and toothier anterior, to stalk after the non-cat it was most spiteful toward at the moment. This of course being Brock.

The cat tore the leg off a porter who was changing the bedding in Brock's cabin. The porter died hearing a Door's song in the cabin nearby, and the cat waited for Brock, waiting to tear his face off and claw out his eyes.

Brock found the cat's owner and held him by the jaw dangling between two cars of the train, letting the man's bare feet knock against the ties and stone beds of the tracks. He said nothing while staring into the man's eyes, letting the wind of the moving train spread cold against their faces and finally whispering to him harsh and menacing as he lowered him onto the tracks in front of the wide steel wheels.

The cat leapt out at Brock as he entered the cabin, going first for the eyes, scratching at Brock's arm as it was caught in mid-air, hissing and spitting while Brock stuffed it into a sheet and beat it against the walls of the cabin. It grew and its bones knit together once more larger and stronger as Brock carried it towards the front of the train, struggling to tear its way free as Brock reached the engine room. It tore free of the bag as Brock grabbed the back of its neck and clamped a jumper cable run off a line to the train's diesel engine to its spine.

Brock now regretted only having already dispatched the car's owner.

This is the first time I have ever written fan fcition. It will likely be the last.

I'm Not Saying I Attained Enlightenment at New York Comic Con but...

Well, I am the burning elation of exhaustion and excitement. I dare not actually try to make anything at this point, since I am far too overcharged, but nothing a nice day of the job won't cure (ok, that's a lie, I did write for about an hour or so last night, but it was just mind-garbage).

I used to feel like this after my residencies in the Grad School days. We'd burn through 8 or 9 days, talking about books and writing, just a pack of little Prometheus' and Promethea's in the woods of Vermont spinning in circles as we carried the light down the hill, and when it was all done, after 6 or 7 hours on the road, always glad to be home where everything was soft and warm the only thing I'd feel was that we'd burned, held over the coals and our minds flashed, cerebro-spinal fluid glowing with the luminosity of imparted wisdom and the shared passions, spent and delirious and washed in the rains of a rebirth.

NYCC was like that for me this year, for the first time really. I went in raw and tired, stressed on too many fronts, and unsure of what I was going to do. Which is perfect sometimes. It is the state you have to be in to summon angels and demons, the state Gautama reached under the tree when the wheel opened up and he saw himself at its center. In comics, it is the place Jack Frost reached when fighting the King of All Tears, stepping out, but coming back having seen it all. You empty your cup and wait for it to be filled.

I'm not saying I attained enlightenment at New York Comic Con, but I came out the other side to stand in the rain and knew it was good.

For the first time in a long time, I am happy to have been royally screwed over and out of two jobs I loved. One was simply a political game I hadn't known I had to play, one was because my bosses boss was an asshole. Both times it knocked me flat on my ass, because I still had the Kool-aid in me, and that tends to turn to poison when it sours. So I like my job now, but this job is just a job, and I am going to do it well for a while, and then I am going break free of it and I am going to write, and that is very encouraging thought. Because if I hadn't been screwed over in those two jobs that I loved, I wouldn't presently be more determined than ever cut my own path and work on the things I want to work on, not the things someone else tells me to.