This morning I'm completely hyped up at the prospect of seeing Bif Naked tonight in concert (for, I think? the third or fourth time). It's no secret that I have an absolute voice-crush on this singer* so I was thinking of using one of her 'first-lines' as today's Flash Fiction prompt.
If you want to hear the voice, here it is**, and here's the line for the prompt:
He keeps looking at me with his groping, watching eyeballs.
* Seriously, I love voices that have lisps, slurred syllables, rough, etc... in other words, before they get all their personality/individuality trained out of their voices. If I like a singer, often I only buy their first and second album before their voice has been trained into snore-inducing near-perfection boringness.
** Too bad there wasn't a video of her actually reading... but this is the cut straight off her first album. This may not be her best work, or even a great example of her voice, but this 'poem' at the end of her album makes me laugh, like every single time I hear it, and that's never a bad thing :)
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ReplyDeleteHe keeps looking at me with his groping, watching eyeballs. At least it feels like that; Felix has a humanoid head, but no features to speak of and wrote asking for my help in antique cursive handwriting and wearing a perfectly fit suit. He – Felix was definitely not an It – needed help, having been charged with protecting the home of the late magician Anthony Subaro. Constructs can do many things, but one made without a face can’t appeal zoning changes.
ReplyDeleteThe magicians house was a literal fifteen storey stone tower though it at least lacked a moat or drawbridge. To outward eyes the building was a simple three-story home with an unkempt yard in the middle of what was slated to be a condominium development. That much made sense, but Felix kept flexing his hands in a hungry manner and keeping too close to me for comfort’s sake. I hadn’t known Anthony personally, but I had been told that his death had been gruesome even for a magician and none of us exactly die in bed of natural causes.
All the paperwork I need to alter is in a neat pile inside the front door on an orate oak side table. The hallway boasts stone floors and archways, everything clean and tidy without a hint of dust in the air, the stone and wood bright and polished to gleam under indirect lighting.
I don’t flinch as the door closed behind us. I turn and offer Felix my second-nastiest smile. The construct feels hungry, needy in the way of small children, but falls back a step against its will.
“I asked the wind and stones how he died on the way here. He was old, Anthtony, in the final stages of life,” I say.
This time the empty place where a face would be gives me nothing at all, the emptiness telling enough.
“I imagine he threw up a lot as his lungs and stomach gave out. Broke things. Fell. Dropped them,” I say, and the construct flinches with each verb. “You kept the place so neat and he was ruining it so you killed him and polished his bones until they gleamed.”
Felix doesn’t move, but his eyes are burrowing into me now in a silence heavy with words.
I reach, and the house offers up what I need to know. I speak the Words to unmake it, and then Felix as well.
“The development will go ahead. Rest. Sleep,” I say, and push power into the command that will leave my throat aching for days.
The construct shudders. All its needs fall away against my will as it sinks deep into the floor with barely a ripple as the tower begins folding in on itself like polite origami. The front door tries to keep me inside, Anthony’s last revenge, but I make it let me out.
For a moment I think I feel groping eyes staring into my back, but the moment passes as I walk down the driveway.
Okay, cool, yet gross at the same time.
ReplyDeleteLOVED the image of the tower folding itself up like 'polite origami' ;)
Okay, now I've got like 6 story ideas from that image...
...but I was a little disappointed. I wanted to see Felix try to eat/attack your magician with his creepily flexing hands...
The folding origami was added at the last moment. I'd altered Felix from the first draft [it had undertones of Felix being male for specific and ugly reasons I figured unnecessary to the story] so his motive became more being destroyed than anything else; I will probably make it longer when I post it to tumblr and include Felix trying to protect the Tower from the magician because that is what he was made to do but i had hit the 500 word limit :)
DeleteFor a late addition, it was pretty awesome.
DeleteYou are definitely taunting me by posting snippets of this magician story ;) Can't wait to read a cleaned up/full version :D