Home Again Home Again

I am sitting in an American airport on a layover before making the final flight home. I will be waiting in the Indianapolis Airport for a few hours to pick up my wife, and then I will be home with my kids. I really enjoyed Ireland but I gotta say,

AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

That really about sums it up. Although I do wonder if anyone enjoys reading the random bits that I always start with. I am thinking of switching the posts around so that the story comes first. I am also thinking that I should title the posts with the story title. If any of you have an opinion, I would love to hear it.

I will be posting other bits about my trip but for now, I am tired and I am going to keep this short. I just want to share one bit of good news.

I have received confirmation of one of my new stories, “Wild Feast”, being selected for inclusion in an Upcoming anthology from Siren’s Call Publications. This marks my fourth piece with that fantastic group and my first acceptance of 2013. It was a great piece of mail to get while I was on my trip and I can’t wait to share the details with you once I have them.

Until I do have them, cheers.

L. E. White

Foreign Fare

As my wrists burn from the strain, I am forced to admit to just how much of an idiot I am. You always hear stories about stupid tourists, but I always thought I was too smart for that. I always thought that I would be smarter than that.

Now, as I hang from the ceiling, I realize that I am just as stupid as every other penis carrying card member of the, “I think with my dick” club.

She was so beautiful, walking towards me in that skirt, her hips swinging from side to side so much that I thought about the time when I got two cats to fight inside a burlap sack. Her hair was long and curly and it bounced up and down on her shoulders as she came closer.

When she got closer, I noticed that the bouncing of her hair was matched by by the bouncing of her breasts. I assume my jaw must have dropped open when I realized that she wasn’t wearing a bra under that thin shirt. I know the rest of me reacted to that knowledge but I figured she noticed my gape mouthed stare when she asked me if I saw something I liked.

It was cold, but she still stopped to talk to me. I don’t remember saying much that made any sense, but she laughed and asked if I wanted to join her for a drink.

I was so focused on her body, I can’t remember if I answered or just nodded.

The rest of the night was a blur. I have images of drinks and flirting and gentle touches where finger tips brush the back of one hand or another but nothing more specific.

Until I woke up in a drafty old castle, chained to a ceiling with a nasty headache and the realization that I was in serious trouble.

I hear the clicking of heels on stone as she approaches. I don’t want to show any fear, but I am shaking so bad my teeth are chattering when she comes in.

“Oh, you poor darling, are you cold?” She walks over, and runs her hands up and down my back. Looking into my eyes. “Would you like me to let you go?”

“Please.”

She smiles and her eyes smolder. “First things first, I think I want to warm you up a bit.”

Her hands are wandering around to some of the most distracting places.

“Would you like me to warm you up?”

“Please let me go.”

She stops allowing her hands to wander and undoes my pants. The change in tactic is sudden, but she is really giving it her all to change my mind. I can’t help but to react when she raises up from where she was kneeling on the ground. “Are you sure you want me to let you go right now?”

I answer without thinking. “Please don’t stop.”

“Are you asking me to warm you up?”

“Yes.”

She kneels back down and pulls my belt out of my pants. Then, this angelic looking creature shoves it into my mouth as a gag before she walks away.

I am hanging, gagged, with my pants around my ankles, as I listen to the clicking of her heels fade away and return. She walks around the corner and that is when I start trying to scream around my gag. I realize how stupid I am and it is too late to do anything about it.

She is wearing a hungry smile and carrying a gas can.

Up Up and Away

Top O the Morning

I am sitting in the airport, attached to the free wireless, about to board a plane to New Jersey.

Thanks to the influence of an old friend, I always pronounce this as “JoySee”

From there I will be heading to Shannon Ireland and then to work at my employers facility there for a week.

What amazes me is how everyone seems to think travelling over is so great. Why would a long flight and a car ride to another computer docking station be a good thing? I am not going to sight-see. I am not going to go exploring on of the most interesting places in the world. I am simply flying to another cubicle.

I just see this as my job.

On the other hand, my wife is already there and because of that I will get to have my girl with me. That is something I think is worth its weight in gold. Everything is better when she is around.

So, I am about to fly out and I will have this weeks post done. I am glad that I remembered to do it now. This way, I don’t miss my self-imposed update schedule.

You all enjoy your week and I hope it goes well. Wish me luck.

L.E.White

Shadows

The lights are flickering. Not strobe like, but enough to be disorienting. It is dark outside so the only way to see as I move through the terminal is by that damned flickering.

More than half of the bulbs aren’t even trying to flicker.

I am afraid of the shadows. If what I saw on my way here is any indication, then those things come out of the dark spots. Each pillar, each potted plant and the space under every row of benches scares the shit out of me. Whatever they are, they live in the shadows. If we shine a light into the darkness, all we ever see is a smear from the blood that was just spilled.

No monsters, no bodies, nothing but a smear or a puddle.

I watched a pale, bluish arm come out of the shadows and drag Keith behind the wall. He didn’t even have enough time to get a good scream out before I heard a sound that reminded me cleaning fish.

I saw Shannon ‘s face when a hand with long fingers wrapped around her head. Those fingers had to many joints, and they wrapped around her head like ribbons in a little girls hair.

I vomited when it squeezed and her brains shot out her ears . If I had time, I would change my pants to get the gooey stuff off of them, but I don’t dare go anywhere to find more clothes.

I have some batteries and I have a couple of small flash lights with a tourist logo on them. I just hope they will get me to someplace open and sunny.

But there are a lot of shadows between me and the doors. There are a lot of dark spots.

And there aren’t any other people. I am alone, the place is quiet.

Except for the sound of something crawling along the floor.

Crawling towards me.

It still feels like last week

It feels like last week. Meaning, that I am so far behind that it must still be last week. I don’t have time to write much so this will be short.

I am swamped, if I told you I would send you something, I will, but later.

I leave for Limerick Ireland on a work trip Sunday. I will land on Monday and go straight to work. One week on site and then back to the states.

See you all later. I am trying to edit a story for submission. This week’s story is one of the first short stories I wrote. I have submitted it a few places to rejection but I still like it. Here you go everyone.

L. E. White

Clockwork Angel

We stood there looking at it with our mouths hanging open. Considering how long we stood there, every one of us should have choked on a fly. Stunned by the beauty, complexity and sheer size of it; not one of us could have formed a coherent thought; we just stood in silent amazement. Staring as our lights glinted off of the smooth surfaces of the prize we had discovered.

Neither Indiana Jones nor Benjamin Franklin Gates had anything on us. We had found the clues. We had made the connections and we had surrendered jobs, family, money, blood, sweat and tears to stand here. In a sense we had given our lives to be here.

We were in a room that was hundreds of feet tall and hidden below a little church in Greece. We were about three quarters of the way down the wall on a stone platform. The church was old and said to have been built on top of the site of an ancient shrine. The tunnel we had used to get here had been a carved spiral staircase that was connected to a crypt in the cemetery beside the Church. The platform had been carved out of the rock as the chamber had been cleared, a polished nightstand for a sleeping giant. There were a variety of metal bands laid into the floor and wall, forming an intricate pattern that looked similar to a modern circuit board.

The clockwork angel was enormous and made of something that looked like bronze. It knelt on the ground as if in a silent prayer. Spider webs as thick as a down comforter stretched over it, almost as if the arachnids had tried to hide this marvelous work of art.

“Are you ready to start it up?”

The other three looked at me with a mix of confusion and surprise. They had been in such awe of what we saw that it was as if they had forgotten what we planned to do in coming here. In an instant their confusion was replaced with excitement and anticipation. This was what we were here for. Each of us pulled out our key and began looking for its lock.

I looked at the tiny thing in my hand. An intricate metal disc with ancient writing carved into it. I had found this in a flea market in Indiana almost ten years ago. It was the pendant in a necklace that consisted of a leather thong that someone had threaded through one of the holes in the top. The seller had said he found it in a storage unit when he had cleaned it out. I gave the guy two bucks for it and started trying to figure out what the symbols were. From the moment I had looked at them I had thought that they were more than just pretty squiggles. So much time had been spent looking before I discovered that they were written in what was supposed to be Olympian. The Greeks had believed that their gods lived on Olympus. What almost nobody knew was that they had their own language that was unique from ancient Greek.

After years of searching, I had stumbled across a book that told of an ancient medium that had been given the language. His book had proved to be difficult to find. After months of searching I had discovered that the only known copy was in a university museum in France. While I was there trying to decipher the disc I had met Paul, the owner of another key. Paul’s family had been collectors of old crap for generations. I was looking for other old books when he saw my necklace. The discovery of the second puzzle piece had kept me going when I had been ready to give up. Over the years we had met Sam and then Emily. Each key held more clues to the nature of our quest. We continued researching for years with little success until about six months ago when Emily had found our breakthrough. The old map had named this hill the Daemons Perch.

Now I was here with the owners of the other three discs. We had pieced the riddles and clues together to get here. Each key was unique, meaning that there would be four places to put them on this platform to trigger the machine. According to what we had translated from the keys this was the daemon of hope; a gift from Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, to his people centuries ago.

I was following one of the metal bands set into the wall when Sam found the first of the key holes. There was a slot in the floor that separated one of the metal bands. Beside it was an inset metal plate with an etching of my disk.

We all helped him to wiped the dust and grime away from the spot. Once the crack was cleaned out I slipped the disk in and heard a click as it fit into place. There wasn’t any of the key above the floor for me to get a grip on if I tried to remove it. Just like that, it was gone.

It didn’t matter. Now that we knew what we were looking for we were all on our hands and knees searching for the places to put the other keys.

Sam’s key was the last and he smiled at all of us as he dropped it into place. After a moment or two of nothing happening a low vibration could be felt in the floor. There was a hum in the air that sounded like electricity in an old radio. Another minute and we could see the metal bands beginning to glow. We were all standing at the edge of the platform. The others started shinning their lights around to see what else was changing but I decided to turn mine off and get a better look at the glowing symbols.

As I peered into the darkness I could see the glow spreading along the metal bands that had been set into the walls. It was like watching water run down a window. The light crawled around and down the walls. As the minutes passed I moved to the wall to get a better look at the bands while the others stayed near the edge, watching as the light reached its way down to the angel. The bands in the walls were covered in the same cryptic writing that the disks had been. The symbols themselves were glowing brighter than the rest of the metal. I pulled a notebook out of my pocket and started to make a rubbing of one of the bands when we heard the shrieking of metal rubbing against metal and I dropped the paper from hands now slack with wonder.

I joined the others at the edge but was driven back by great jets of steam that sprayed up as the angel began to awaken. Grinding metal and clicking gears produced a deafening cacophony that could be compared to hundreds of railroad cars all crashing together. How the other three stayed at the edge of the platform I will never know, but I was pinned flat beside the entrance to the stairs as if I had been crucified right there on there that wall.

The great thing began to rise up. A single glowing symbol, Omega, stood out from the center of its massive forehead. As the magnificent winged machine stood the plates that made up its surface shifted, as if a shiver had caused goose flesh to spread across its skin. At every joint, great wheels and gears could be seen moving against one another. Springs, as small as my arm and as great as a bus, joined to the feathers of its wings to make hundreds of different angles to catch the winds. Everything about the giant was beautiful. The glowing light of the chamber even caused glinting lights to dance across the angels lines like lightning in a summer sky.

It stood straight, placing the platform at waist level. Wind and dust and great sheets of spider web buffeted us as the wings twitched a little. Watching this, you would have sworn that it was preparing to spread them out to fly. The mystic glow kissed its wings, sending a kaleidoscope of lights around the room. I was mesmerized to the point of paralysis. So fixed that I had forgotten to even breathe; gasping for air when my body demanded it.

Sam broke from his stupor at the edge of the platform and had the presence of mind to raise his camera and start snapping photos. The flash reflected off the angel and then again off the bands in the walls. The great head creaked and groaned as it turned to look down upon the platform where we stood.

The angel bent its knees to lower its great head closer to us. The idea of having this bronze titan looking down upon us was as terrifying as it was inspirational. After all these years we were face to face with a machine of legendary stature. This moment was humbling in a way that was beyond description.

It took a few seconds but then the moment was gone and the titan stood straight again. With one smooth and terrible motion the clockwork marvel raised its right hand up above the platform and swatted down like it was trying to kill a fly. To it, we may well have seemed like flies, there is no way to know, but in the second that it took for the monstrous mechanical marvel to slap the platform we were on Sam turned and looked at me in shock, not fear, but shock. I saw his face and realized what was happening with just enough time to take a step along the wall so that I stood in front of the doorway. One step in that one second was all the time that any of us had.

The gigantic hand hit the stone and knocked most of it off of the wall. My companions did no more than start to raise their voices before the sound was stopped and replaced by what could sounded like the god’s hammer breaking a stone. I was deafened by the noise and thrown backwards by the force of the blow. I hit the stairs and felt a single sharp blast of pain shoot down my legs before I felt nothing in them at all. I could see the odd angle between my knee and ankle. A bend in the leg where there was no joint but at that moment it didn’t matter. I was much too concerned with looking out at the metal monster that had just squashed my companions.

The angel didn’t seem to notice me so I drug myself the few feet to the edge of the doorway where the platform had just been. I could not stand so I laid down on the floor and turned to look up at the beast without poking my head out of the door. My fear was that it had seen me evade it but I had nothing to worry about. It did not bother to look back down but instead turned to look up the shaft. I watched in morbid fascination as it took hand holds on the other side of the chamber and began to climb towards the surface.

I drug my worthless carcass back to the stairs and started the long and exhausting climb to the surface. The light from the glowing metal wasn’t bright enough for the glow to extend into the stairwell so I climbed up through the suffocating darkness with no idea of how long it would be before I saw the sky again.

When I at last saw the light seeping in around the edges of the door at the top of the stairs I began to cry. A new burst of energy pushed through me and I struggled up the last of the steps. I drug myself out of the old crypt and thanked god when I saw the rising sun. We had broken into the crypt at night to try and avoid detection which meant that it had taken me all night to climb out of that hole. I pulled my way to the edge of the cemetery and propped my back against a stone so that I might see the town where we had rented rooms.

What I saw though was smoke and rubble. A few small fires burned in what had been the village but now there was nothing to speak of. Standing in the middle of that tiny hamlet was the angel. The clockwork beast towered over the remnants of the little town. It looked around as though it had lost a pen on the floor before its head to the side as though listening. The great bronze monstrosity drew its fist back and punched the ground. The strike came down with such force that it made ripples on the surface of a puddle a short distance away. Whatever, or whoever, it had heard was no more.

It spread those unbelievable wings and beat down with them. The force of the gale that those wings created was so strong that I felt it in my hair despite the distance that separated us. Rubble and what looked like bodies flew out in a great rolling cloud as the angel’s wing beats did the impossible and lifted its massive frame into the air. The sun reflecting off of it was blinding to the point that I had to close and shield my eyes. A moment later the glare was gone and I could look at the thing as it raised high into the air before flying to the east; towards the next closest town.

I sat there in shock at what we had done. The machine that was supposed to be the angel of hope from an ancient Greek god was now destroying everything in its path. I looked in brainless fascination at my bloody pant leg for few minutes before I realized that my blood was still leaking out. I had no idea how much blood I had lost and was too tired to care. I knew that my actions had caused this destruction. That I was responsible for all the lives which that thing would take before someone destroyed it. I was getting cold. I felt like I had been out camping in the morning frost. The last thing I thought before a sleepy darkness claimed me was that the symbol on the angel had been appropriate in its irony.  For Omega was indeed the end.

Wind up and pitch

As I said, work is getting crazy. I have about ten minutes to write anything.

I received a rejection on my last one sentence story. It did make it into the final consideration out of around three hundred entries so I am happy about that but it is still a rejection. Those suck but writing goes on. I will post it below for this weeks content. I do like it better than the others. You can find them Here and Here.

I also did my first live reading of my work this last weekend. The Bloomington Writers Guild is hosting a “First Sunday Reading Series” where they have three local writers come in and read their work. This is followed by an open mic for anyone interested in sharing.

I was the first to read, and while I don’t normally have any trouble being in front of a crowd, it has been a long time since I did it. Fifteen to twenty years I think.

So, my adrenalin shoots up and I am shaking so bad that I had to rest my Kindle on my leg so that it was still enough to read from. I hope it wasn’t all that obvious but I assume it was.

Why? Because hope is the denial of reality.

After that, things went well, I received some positive feed back and a few people expressed interest in my work. Overall, I was happy.

Also, I loved my Kindle. Being able to mail my text to myself and read from it instead of flipping pages was awesome. If you are going to be doing something like this yourself, I would recommend you use a Kindle. Fantastic tool for the job.

L. E. White

As Dan lit the candles, forming a seven pointed star with the imaginary lines drawn between them in his mind’s eye, he focused on his breathing, slow and steady, rhythmic and carefully timed, using the cadence of his breath to help raise the power that he would need to cast the spell that Amy had designed, the spell that she was supposed to have helped him cast, the spell that they would have used to change the world, and in changing the world, to have bound them together for all time, in ways so few souls had ever been woven together; but not now, not after the needles and the tests and the radiation and pills and hospitals and the cold, cold morning when she didn’t open her eyes and smile at him; no, not after all of that, now she wouldn’t be casting this with him which meant that he would have to go into the void alone, ignoring his fear and sorrow, to fix the things that they had discovered were broken, so that, despite the fact that nobody would ever know it, the world would be safe for other lovers.