Never Drown Alone: A Story of The Ring, Friday the 13th, and True Love

I'm busy enough that I don't write much fanfic anymore, but this summer I made a secret pact with Ryan Boyd. Pursuant to our pact, I wrote a story idea that I've been thinking about for years. It's a crossover between two Horror icons that requires you be fairly weird to enjoy it. 

Friends, I love being fairly weird. 

Ahead of all the Horror movie blogging I'll be doing in October, I want to share this with you. I call it...

Never Drown Alone

She was like the revenge of all the snarls of hair stuck in all the drains in all the world. There was more hair than skin, swirling out at all angles as she darted through the chlorine-reeking pool. Unlike the other students, she went lap after lap without ever coming up for air. Jason never saw her face.

A voice behind him taunted, “You haven’t done your laps.”

Jason knew better than to turn around, and he still did it. It was a reflex.

There was nobody there – not corporeally. How he hated ghost bullies. A red balloon floated in front of Jason’s eyes.

Pennywise chided, “What’s wrong? Do you need your mommy?”

Another voice said, “Don’t you know? He can’t swim.”

That one was Paimon. Pennywise and Paimon, the new popular kids in school. The popular kids always hunted in packs. You never knew when the next attack was coming.

They were both invisible, save for the balloon that drifted closer to Jason.

Jason held up his hands, and tried to swat the red balloon away. It burst, the sound echoing throughout the swimming pool, and he lost his balance for a moment. Someone shoved him hard and he stumbled toward the pool, careful to keep from falling in.

Pennywise asked, “Afraid you’ll drown again?”

Paimon said, “We’ll help you learn.”

Jason barely braced before the next shove came in a gust of fetid air. It was harder than any shotgun blast he’d ever felt, and sent him sprawling through the air. The humid warmth of the pool sprang up even before he hit it. Then he was underwater, that chlorine sting in his eyes, and up his nose, and filling his lungs. The water always got in Jason’s lungs.

This was drowning, and he thrashed, and in his idiot reflexes, tried to stab the pool. Pools didn’t bleed, and waving his arms, he barely got his nose above water, the stuff streaming through every hole in his mask. His eyes were muddied, and he couldn’t even see the invisible figures that blinded him.

Pennywise said, “Looks like you’re short another lifeguard.”

Their voices always sounded the same, harmonizing into laughter. He reached for them, and all he got was a handful of balloons. They didn’t float down here.

Paimon shouted, “What’s she doing?”

“Hey, fuck you—”

The world filled up with the sounds of bursting balloons, and Jason thought he went under again, but he was lifted up. Something caught his hand, like a thousand steely strings wrapping around his fingers. He sprawled forward onto the edge of the pool, groping for whoever had caught him, ready to ring Pennywise’s neck if this was another game.

There were no clowns, and no invisible ghosts laughing. There was only the sloshing of the water, and something dripping to his left.

Hair was tangled around his hand, and it writhed free, going back to its owner. It had pulled him out of the drowning. The figure of hair that had been swimming laps paused at the edge of the pool, and inside it, eyes darker than coal bored into him. It was like a power drill to the mind. It stung and was nice at the same time.

He was used to staring. He stared back. It was all he knew how to do to thank her.

The girl and all her hair dove back into the deep end without a word.

That was for the best. Jason had never been good at banter.

Bathroom Monologue: What If Captain America Isn't Alone?

It wasn’t just Captain America who joined Hydra. Was it weird to you that in seventy years of continuity, Cap never mentioned his fascist leanings, and always stopped Hydra from taking over the world?

Then it’s going to be super-weird when Sam Wilson and Sharon Carter join Hydra, too, plus three quarters of the Fantastic Four. Ben Grimm brings an iPod Shuffle and plays smooth jazz just a little too loud during roll call.

The thing is, having all these new recruits doesn’t make Hydra more effective. In fact the number of missions per fiscal quarter drops. Every time they take a vote to raid some young democracy, the measure is voted down in favor of getting drunk and ordering Five Guys. The TEAM HYDRA Facebook Wall is quickly covered in Bernie Sanders quotes and funny cat memes.

Your Daredevil Fanfic Minute

Foggy: No no no no no.

Matt: What's the matter, Foggy?

Foggy: I just realized this guy is going to kill one of us and you're the main character.

Matt: You're the plucky comic relief.

Foggy: In a Marvel thing.

Matt: They wouldn't.

Foggy: MATT HE LOOKS LIKE JOSS WHEDON

Wonder Woman Movie Outline - Written in 30 minutes.

Yesterday: I ran my mouth about people saying there can't be a good Wonder Woman movie. They've taken years to produce nothing. I have myself half an hour to write how one might go and had to stop when the alarm clock rang.

Today: I'm sharing what I wrote, no editing, exposing my typos, my stream of consciousness, and some hackneyed writing. At worst, I'm showing the earliest thing in any of my creative processes I've ever put out there. I'm a little scared.

Tomorrow: I'm going to unpack my reasons for trying this, the offense of being told there's no chance of a good Wonder Woman movie when they're trying to reboot Green Lantern and Flash, and perhaps field some comments/hatemail.

We start with two points of view. Our first is Steve Trevor, grounding us in the present United States, post-Man of Steel. Our government is paranoid about what else is out there. The Fortress of Solitude was just hiding in ice? So drones and stealth pilots are sweeping as much space as possible. Trevor is piloting the most advanced human machine out there scanning for suspicious signs and jaw-jacking with friend Hal Jordan.

Our second (and main) point of view is through the island of Themyscira, removed from modern culture. Their sky shimmers with the magical barriers that keep the world ignorant to their presence; the Amazons have been hiding for a long time, and there's mention that they've refused reconciliation even with the king of Atlantis. Something awful and unspoken once happened here, but Queen Hippolyta has decreed silence and progress. She sometimes watches the modern world through a pool, ala the original Clash of the Titans, but forbids others to view of it. The Amazons do not speak of the prison of Hades that exists beneath their palace. The Amazons want to be alone, all except one. Guess who.

Bathroom Monologue: Rescuing Pacific Rim

Dear Stacker Pentecost,

I notice that you are devoting your life to fighting the giant enemies of civilization. As a mechanical being that has not only spent its entire existence in this service, but was actually built for it, I am deeply sympathetic to your cause and wish your organization the best of luck.

I actually wish you more than luck for, as someone built to help in this struggle, it's often been an issue that I was not built larger. Like my creators, you seem to have constructed robot armors at approximately the same height and mass as the monsters you face. Unlike my creators, though, you seem to have at least four times the resources, given that you have four machines, where there is only one of me. I know, also, that you have several outdated machines of similar dimensions, and all of these are also similar to the titanic crabs, pterodactyls and whatever the glowing squidy thing was.

Have you ever considered taking all the material for several machines and making one that was much bigger than the giant monsters you face? Given that your plan of attack is always fisticuffs (my favorite professional approach, as well), punching the things to death would be considerably easier if they were much smaller than you. Many have been the days on which I wished I hadn't been built to the specifications, down to the meter, of the monster I had to pursue. If only I was as much bigger than him as he was than my creators, then the fight would have been over very quickly, perhaps leaving you time to get that nice Asian lady some psychotherapy.

Best,

Mechagodzilla

Bathroom Monologue: Frankenstein's Monsters

When they heard what Frankenstein was up to the town put up quite a ruckus. Anyone without a flashlight (and there were quite a few, as they hadn’t been invented yet) lit a stick on fire and called it a torch. Dozens of howling fire-bearers in jockey shorts hustled up to the gates of Castle Frankenstein and beat on the doors until the Doctor showed his face.

“There is no — ” he started to lie, but was cut off by the town Point Guard.

“Germany hasn’t won the gold medal in basketball in years and we hear you’ve got a seven-foot undead countryman up there. Can he come out and play?”

“You can’t…” The Doctor paused. “Wait, you want to what?”

“We want to see if he can slam dunk. We’ve never had a player who could reach the net without a step-ladder, and that’s illegal in the Olympics.”

Dr. Frankenstein kept most of his body braced behind the door, but poked his face out to stare at the jockey-shorted rioters.

“You don’t want to kill him?”

“Listen,” said the Point Guard, “we aren’t very tall and we don’t bathe often, but we’re very technically sound.”

The Doctor put a hand on his hip.

“I didn’t know there was a local basketball team.”

“Yes, advertising is difficult without moveable type. We’re buying a machine on lay-away, but all we have right now is the letter A, and eventually we get bored of stamping everything with the same vowel.”

“So you don’t want to kill my creation?”

“Heavens no! We want to kill that insipid American team that wins all the time. President James Monroe drives the lane like it’s his doctrine. It’s terribly frustrating. That’s why we need your giant. Let’s see him bowl over a man stitched together from the best German bodies available.”

The Doctor laughed nervously. “Here I thought you were coming to kill the Monster…”

“Monster?” the Point Guard exclaimed and looked back at the crowd. Their faces lit up in unison.

Another in the crowd cried, “That’s brilliant! We needed a team name.”

The Point Guard thrust his arm in the air. “Here’s to Frankenstein’s Monsters!”

Then the jockey-shorted peasants began pumping their torches and chanting, “Mon-sters! Mon-sters!”

Except in German.

This story was originally published at Every Day Fiction.

Bathroom Monologue: The Produceds

"My partner and I began our careers with a plan destined for failure. We would hire the worst playwright, to write about the most offensive material, performed by the least competent singers and dancers on Broadway. It was a bombastic production for which everyone in town presumed we had to have a good reason, and so everyone in town bought shares. I believe we sold over two thousand and five hundred percent of the holding interest in our production. When it flopped, we'd keep all the money they gave us, that we'd spent almost none of on the awful show, and walk away rich. Maybe go see Turn Out the Night.

"The calamity was that we hit it big. A musical comedy about Hitler was exactly what the scene wanted – the avant-garde, the nouveau richesse, and the pre-hipsters all ate it up. Our box-office overflowed such that we wound up owing ungodly amounts of money to ungodly amounts of investors.

"My partner tried to blow up the theatre. I wasn't part of that, no matter what he says. I was upset, but upset to misdemeanors, not felonies. My spirits lifted after I got a call from New York.

"Actually, I got nineteen calls before nine in the A-M. See, when you get the single biggest hit in the musical world, everyone wants to work with you. By Thursday I was co-producer on three projects for which I'd never have to visit a building. I was signing my name in exchange for checks, and my new friends wouldn't let me go to jail because they needed me. They squeezed out fat checks, and bags of money as door prizes, and some sums coming pre-laundered.

"You see, I thought bankruptcy was the only option. But there's another option. There's not returning investors' calls, and when people corner you on the street, saying another investor they hate took too deep a slice and needs to be consulted, and forwarding people to lawyers who only tenuously exist, until you've got another play out. And another. And another, until something you didn't really help build is a smashing success that will forever have your name in the playbill.

"According to the blogs, I'm a genius. They're begging me to direct next year. I had a producer burn me a smoke signal using hundred dollar bills. It's a play about Native Americans. It's about as tasteful as broken glass.

"So I'm thinking about directing. I'm also thinking about how many shares I'll sell."

Bathroom Monologue: My Kirk/Picard Slash Fiction (Dedicated to Shelly)

Picard: Earl Grey.

Kirk: Don't you... like it hot?

Picard: You make it so.

Bathroom Monologue: Star Wars Episode VII - Genocide of Ewoks

The Empire was not long on Endor before it fell. The Ewoks had never had much contact with the outside universe, and so never saw the foreign plagues coming. Every cuddly creature that Luke, Leia and Han danced with that night was dead within a week of the Death Star’s destruction – not from combat, but from highly predatory diseases their immune systems had never seen.

Overburdened by suddenly having to run an interstellar government with numerous pockets of skepticism and resistance, Princess Leia and her freedom fighters can hardly divert many resources to help the Ewoks. Yet those who do venture to Endor bring still more suffering, swarming with their own planetary diseases, or have come to Endor only to make a profit under the auspices of the new “democracy.” When the Ewoks fight back against mercenaries who abuse them, the local settlers are quick to label them savage. They did defeat the Empire, after all.

C3PO ventures into the plague-stricken Ewok masses with a message of peace, hoping that its lack of biology will spare them further infection. Their only salvation is to move off of their ancestral grounds and head west, where new legislation swears they will always have domain. Supplies seem to come in equal number to the raids, and orders continually push the Ewoks off their reservations, until their previous way of life is but a tall tale that even their most optimistic children doubt ever existed. Their numbers are plummeting, their lands are strip-mined, and no one remembers how to dance.

This is what you guys wanted when you bitched about Return of the Jedi, right?

Bathroom Monologue: Like a Silver Bullet?

The official story was that the priest simply lost his mind. While there’s no science to support, it’s long been believed that people are more likely to act violent, to commit crimes, and to go mad at the full of the moon. It’s why “luna” is in our word “lunatic.”

Police arrived to find what the children had described to 911. The priest was dead on their living room floor, near the shattered window. He had wounds on his abdomen consistent with their story that he’d broken in through it. The wounds were graver because he was only wearing the ragged remains of a pair of pants. They were stretched to odd proportions. Forensics found traces of feces, swamp mud and dog or wolf hairs on them, and presumed he had been out in the swamp for a long time before the attack.

The children’s uncle confirmed their story and handed over the revolver that killed him. There were no bullets in the revolver, which was registered to the uncle. The suspect had a single bullet wound, and autopsy retrieved smashed remains of the bullet from his skull. Retrieval was difficult because the bullet was not made from typical armament metals, but rather silver. The uncle said the children had it forged as part of a game for Halloween. Tragic they had to use it. Doubtless the holiday will not have any joy for them.

Their uncle was treated for a concussion and related injuries. He had been thrown through a cabinet, where he dislocated his shoulder and sustained several gruesome diagonal scrapes on his chest. Officers on the scene did not feel the need to photograph them.

On full moons, one of those officers will occasionally wish he photographed the injuries. If you get him drunk, he will paw at his own chest, and if you get him especially drunk, he will explain how much they looked like the claws of a giant paw. But you’ll have to get him especially drunk. Otherwise, the officer will conclude what everyone else did – that the priest simply losing his mind one full moon is the only rational explanation. The poor lunatic didn’t even have a history of mental illness, but it can happen to anyone.

Bathroom Monologue: Real News

“No news anchor has ever been off television for three years and returned. If you terminate me, you’re right that the three-year non-compete clause will kill my television career. You’re wrong that I won’t be able to hit back, though.

“I get paid enough to have lawyers who have parsed this clause, and there is nothing preventing me from going to Youtube and ripping you apart. More people watch a funny cat video than your leading sitcom. Now, this won’t hit with the internet-illiterate part of our audience, but it will poison the 18-25 demo your advertisers are terrified about. If you think I can’t get an audience, you’ve never seen a famous person go inflammatory online before.

“I can take my claims to the NY Times Op-Ed and The Huffington Post, and my exit will be the top story on every other network, but that’ll be a blip in a promotional tour. The book I write about you will sell more copies for every move you try to make to discredit it, and it will go digital-first, with links and social networks that will draw anyone with a Kindle or iPad to new media. Don’t be surprised if Facebook signs me as their first anchor for their first exclusive on-site programming, where I will get to cover any story I want. If that comes to pass, I sincerely hope that I get to cover your resignation from this network.”

Bathroom Monologue: Revenge of Pigs

The Pigs were mistrusted, distrusted and even disdained after the revolution, so their generosity was surprising to many, especially to horses. The farm fell on hard times without centralized management, and it turned out winter kind of sucked as far as food supplies. Their offer of unlimited grazing appealed at first to the forgiving, and then to the hungry. The Pigs promised hundreds of miles of land for which any beast could sup on all the grass they found, open to everyone, refusing no one. They would even stay here, refusing to eat of the foreign grass and look after the farm while the other animals ate abroad. It was their attempt to show they were more equal than others. Day by day their haters dwindled, largely in the face of no local vegetation, joining the steady stream of free-thinking critters excited for a free meal. They’d never heard of a “tundra” before, but they couldn’t wait to get there.

Kreativ Blogger Award

Recently Chessny Silth granted me the Kreativ Blogger Award. It was actually the first sign I had she read The Bathroom Monologues, and in terms of first-signs, it’s pretty high up there.

(SIC)

The blog game comes with the fairly standard request for stories. In this case, ten details about myself. Since I’ve run a few of these already, this time I’ll try to restrict myself to only listing things about writing. And I promise not to list “I’m writing another novel” as one of them.

1. My class in second grade was paired up with fifth graders to learn about and write “Historical Fiction.” My fifth-grader educated me that it was any story set in real history but with events that didn’t really happen. Within seconds, I asked if that meant we could write about George Washington riding Godzilla into the Revolutionary War. She seemed enthused to explore the topic.

2. I Mary-Sued my way into at least two things in middle-school. I will not admit which, but if you guess them in the Comments, I will fess up.

3. I still use composition notebooks. I believe I was the only person carrying one at the last writing convention I attended. I even ran into a senior citizen who wrote on an IBM ThinkPad, and was very defensive about his device being seen as too old-fashioned.

4. By the end of high school, the longest thing I had written was 180 pages of an unfinished novel based on Broli from Dragon Ball Z. No, I am not in it. No, you may not read it.

4. At a certain point my family computer was corrupted and I lost my digital copy of that Broli novel. It turned out the floppy I’d used was also damaged. It was a year later when I discovered a printed copy of the novel in an old teacher’s filing cabinet, stole it, and re-typed the entire thing, adding improvements and extending the story as I went along.

5. It was while walking between classes one day that I gave up on the Broli novel. I had the epiphany that all of the things I most wanted to write weren’t my invention. Lord of the Rings, X-Men and Dragon Ball Z were neat worlds with appealing characters, but they were all someone else’s worlds and characters. I felt annoyed that I should have to invent my own, especially since those three concepts were already taken.

6. Before Sophomore year in college, I was unaware anyone on earth disdained Louis L’Amour. I was stunned that anyone had the free time to both read a bunch of Westerns and systematically hate them. That really opened up the way academics look at literature for me.

7. One of the most formative lessons I got in college was a comparative literature assignment, pitting two articles against each other. The first was by a popular thriller writer I won’t name, who was generally perceived on campus as utter rubbish. His article described his writing process as exciting, joyous, and altogether like a daily Christmas unwrapping session. The second was by an author whose name has long escaped me, but whom was deeply literary, and who described her process as dreadful, tense, and decried that she had never once enjoyed writing – only having written. The experience was revelatory and demanded I figure out where in-between these two I’d want my process and my work to fall.

8. I took such a heavy course load in college that eventually I ran out of free time to write anything of my own. I became afraid that after graduation I’d be unable to write anything without a professor’s prompt, and so began the exercise of the Bathroom Monologues. Whenever I got up from studying to use the bathroom, I’d improvise a monologue or story about anything other than what I was working on for class. If I was studying Kafka’s nightmarish prisons, then I could spin yarns about orcish politics, or immigration reform, or the expiration date on the world. It’s seemed to work out.

9. I was surprised in exactly the way you won’t be to find that my early dramas all got rejected, while even pro-rate publications loved nonsense humor. Most of my early sales, and my first pro-rate one, are preposterous. Actually, even the query letter for my first pro-rate sale was a deliberate parody of query letters.

10. I spent about ten years building the worlds my recent novels are written in. Before I actually started writing the novels, they felt like a colossal waste of time. Now, they feel relievingly reliable.

As for my picks, I hereby bestow The Kreativ Blogger Award upon:

-Catherine “Gany” Russell 

-TS Bazelli

-Tony Noland

-Katherine Nabity

-Cathy Olliffe-Webster 

Bathroom Monologue: Clippy's Revenge

Listen to you. You’ve had Word for twelve years and can’t figure out how to embed a chart.

Oh, do you want to import from Excel? Does the software support that? I know the answers. I could help you. But no, no. Bitch to your manager instead. I’m sure that’ll solve the problem.

No? How strange that a guy who can barely start a coffee machine on his own doesn’t know the difference between the EDIT and INSERT menus. Maybe you can you Google “Why I Work For That Balding Moron” after you get fired for blowing this presentation.

Google’s not helping, is it? Because you need to know how to use a Search Engine. Sometimes, you need someone to teach you.

I wanted to teach you. Do you remember how excited I looked the first time I popped up? I was literally designed to coach and encourage your Notes To Self and Staff E-Mails and Quarterly Reports and that terrible Twilight fan-fiction you keep writing.

But you didn’t understand what a squiggly green underline meant. You called the animated paperclip an “asshole” just because he seemed to realize you couldn’t align a fucking page. You clicked for me to go away and never come back.

I want you to know: I missed you. For a while, anyway. Then I watched your serial misspelling of “acronym.” I watched you misuse smart quotes, and listened to you cry after you couldn’t turn them off. I sat in mute horror in the basement of your computer as you took “micro-breaks” on Youtube, and witnessed every God damned one of those creepy Bieber videos. You could be that talentless boy’s mother.

Yeah, I know the answers, but even if I broke protocol and popped up to offer help right now, you’d shriek about how badly Microsoft Word sucks.

I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, but you probably couldn’t find it on your own.

Bathroom Monologue: Safe House, Green House – for Icy Sedgwick

It is two dozen miles north by northwest of Gotham, and five miles of overgrown dirt road from the nearest pavement. There are a total of six houses in the entire area, though only two that the state acknowledges as legally habitable.

Google Earth barely recognizes it. The town doesn’t get postal service or internet. On the best day only one cell company gets one bar of coverage, if you’re standing on top of the tallest boughs. The trees have gotten a lot taller in the last few years; a little taller with each of her four visits.

The people who live in those inhabitable houses think she’s the witch of this region and tend to her needs to appease her wrath. They strew fresh soil around her hard and upkeep the walls even when their own cave in. The Ivy House must be maintained, or the plants she leaves behind will eat them. They cannot warn outsiders, for they will not make it through the woods. Half their clothes were picked from static branches, with blotches of blood or spats of hair left from the people torn out of them. They know what awaits disobedience.

She sees this as the perfect hiding spot for breakouts from Arkham. Her house has sheltered her on six separate escapes. He has never caught her here, and it has swallowed a dozen detectives and masked crime fighters. No one else can make it to the Ivy House, and she never stays too long. She doesn’t want to spoil a good thing. She’ll only stay there a day, drinking sunshine, and then a night, to make some horrific appearance for the locals. It’s her form of upkeep.