Instructions: Read the following chapter and leave a comment (or email a comment to connor@connorcoyne.com) detailing:
- What you’d like to see happen next in the plot
- What makes you curious about the lives of Candace, Krista, and Charles Clamp.
- What ideas or themes you’d like to see explored.
I will gather your comments and consider them when I write Chapter 3, which will be posted at 3 AM on Friday, May 6th.
Project overview HERE.
Recommended: Watch the following video full-screen. Make sure that annotations/captions are
Instructions: Read the following chapter and leave a comment (or email a comment to connor@connorcoyne.com) detailing:
- What you’d like to see happen next in the plot
- What makes you curious about the lives of Candace, Krista, and Charles Clamp.
- What ideas or themes you’d like to see explored.
I will gather your comments and consider them when I write Chapter 3, which will be posted at 3 AM on Friday, May 6th.
Project overview HERE.
Start the two embedded videos (see NOTE) concurrently.
Watch them simultaneously.
Instructions: Read the following chapter and leave a comment (or email a comment to connor@connorcoyne.com) detailing:
- What you’d like to see happen next in the plot
- What makes you curious about the lives of Candace, Krista, and Charles Clamp.
- What ideas or themes you’d like to see explored.
I will gather your comments and consider them when I write Chapter 2, which will be posted at 3 AM on Friday, May 3rd.
Project overview HERE.
Instructions: Read the following chapter and leave a comment (or email a comment to connor@connorcoyne.com) detailing:
- What you’d like to see happen next in the plot
- What makes you curious about the lives of Candace, Krista, and Charles Clamp.
- What ideas or themes you’d like to see explored.
I will gather your comments and consider them when I write Chapter 3, which will be posted at 3 AM on Friday, May 6th.
Project overview HERE.
[NOTE: Play the following clip for the duration of this chapter.]
But Charles isn’t dreaming. He is day dreaming. January is not his favorite month of the year. Neither is March. But February? February is okay. Good thing it’s February, although this February seems to be awfully warm.
Looking out through the evening curtains out toward the gray dawn, gray rain sweeps down the landscape. The air broom pushes waves of the stuff, in thick fleets, up his porches and against his door. He has to laugh. The porch overhang is at least six feet — maybe seven — yet the winds are long enough to sleet sting his storm door.
“It has been in the seventies or the forties or the twenties all month long,” says Errol.
“It reminds me of our days at war.”
“Don’t remind me about that,” says Errol. “It was hell. A nightmare.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” says Charles.
He walks to the fridge and gets out a can of Steel Reserve.
“You want one?”
“No thank you. Not after what happened to our dear friend John. Do you know that they propped his body up in a chair for me to find? Ghastly.”
“You won’t say no to a beer. Even a cheap one like this.”
“Very well, friend, but only because we were at war together.”
“To the war!”
“It was hell.”
“It wasn’t all bad.”
A creak from the bedroom over Charles’ head. Someone else is here. A burglar? Prowling about on the second floor?
“I don’t know why they even bother,” he says. “Nobody has anything worth taking anymore.”
“Oh, don’t be a damn fool, Charles. It’s your daughter and granddaughter. They’re staying with you now, remember?”
“Clark? Are you here too?”
“I am, but we’re shorthanded on deck and you know there’ll be hell to pay if Bligh finds a man drinking below deck with a storm afoot.”
“Yes sir! I always did respect you first among the officers.”
“Really, then why do you spend so much time drinking with those layabouts?”
“Long months at sea.”
“What would your daughter say? Your granddaughter? Your wife?”
Charles looks down at the silver can. It isn’t empty but he crushes it between his fingers, and brown liquid bubbles up and runs over his hand.
“You know that my wife is dead, sir.”
“My condolences to you, then. My wife is dead as well.”
“I know that you are married, sir.”
“I have only one wife, Charles, and she has been given as a gift to the mountain and the air.” A wet silver glint in the man’s black-and-white eyes.
Charles shrugs, sadly. “My wife was a gift to the cancer.”
Charles sets the beer can down on the floor and wipes his palms on his… dress? Why is he wearing a dress? He moved to a closet door with a mirror on the inside. Oh. It’s a bathrobe. He picks up his damaged beer can, still half-full, still ripe, still delicious. He goes down into the basement with its tropical calendar and palm fronds and Tiki masks.
“It’s a disgusting mess up there,” says Marlon.
“It’s clean down here,” says Charles, offended.
“It’s the only place you’ve bothered to clean in a long, long time.”
“I’m working on it!”
“You’ll never finish.”
“Well isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black! I swear, you Christians get meaner with each passing year.”
Marlon shakes his fat head. “It isn’t so. Men have always been… beastly things. Monsters, even. It used to be a vogue to hide it, but in our brave new world, honesty is preferred.”
“Well I always liked a more gracious sort of honesty.”
Marlon laughs. “Gentle fool. Your generosity is… well, it limits you. You have hungers. It would not be evil to follow them.”
“You weren’t always so bitter.”
“No,” Marlon concedes. “Not before the war.”
“Not during the war,” corrects Charles. “Those South Sea islands… I’ve never seen a man so romantic as you were when they stationed us off Tahiti.”
“I have never been in such a beautiful place in my entire life. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And the people were beautiful too.”
“I will always cherish the memory,” says Charles.
The two men clasp hands. The rain drums against the roof outside. Then, monstrous feet start stomping furiously in the kitchen overhead.
“Oh, Christ, it’s that baboon again, how I hate him,” says Marlon.
“I’ll go shut him up.”
“Get off my ship!” screeched a mad-faced, sunburnt Mel. “I am in Hell!”
“Shut the fuck up!” shouts Charles, smacking him across the face with his empty beer can. Mel drunkenly stumbles backwards and falls into a stack of old newspapers. All comes tumbling down.
“I’m sick of putting up with your shit, Mel!” calls out Charles. “Now you can shape up or get out. In fact, I’m putting you out. Pack your bags and get the hell off of my ship. I’m the one who’s in hell, with your swearing and stomping about!”
“Dad?” Candace stands on the stairway, looking at him with worry. “Who are you shouting at? What’s going on?”
Instructions: Read the following chapter and leave a comment (or email a comment to connor@connorcoyne.com) detailing:
- What you’d like to see happen next in the plot
- What makes you curious about the lives of Candace, Krista, and Charles Clamp.
- What ideas or themes you’d like to see explored.
I will gather your comments and consider them when I write Chapter 3, which will be posted at 3 AM on Friday, May 6th.
Project overview HERE.
Krista’s dreams are more sophisticated than her ability to describe them. They start and finish with storms. She remembers storms from last summer. She doesn’t remember them in her head (she was only two). She remembers them in her stomach.
Oh, when she eats too much too fast (which she does often, because she is always hungry) she tends to swallow a bunch of air with her hot food, and so it makes a storm and flood in her belly and she hears the chaos burning below. She understands a thunderstorm, even if she doesn’t know the word for it. “Boom booms,” she says. “They’re bad. They’re a no no.”
The first dream is a dark dream. Krista’s mom drags her down to Erik’s house. Krista and Erik don’t get along very well. Erik likes to play with Krista’s toys when he comes over and that’s a no no too.
And then one time Erik pushed Krista.
“You pushed me!” she shrieked. “He he! He pushed me!”
“Now settle down, Krista,” said Krista’s mommy, and Erik’s mommy had a mean look on her face too.
“He pushed me! He pushed me!”
And Krista pushed Erik right back.
Erik started to scream and sob.
Krista’s mommy plucked her off the floor and said: “How you like it if I pushed you? It’s not nice! Don’t push people!”
And set Krista roughly on her feet.
Krista didn’t like that at all. It made her angry. So she pushed Erik a second time, and Krista’s mommy used Krista’s First-Middle-and-Last Name, and stomped her down to Erik’s bedroom and spanked her little bottom til it stung and kept her in Erik’s bedroom for long enough that the monsters had started to crawl and swarm beneath his shaggy carpet.
It wasn’t nighttime — not exactly — but it was dark in there, and the monsters were slick and sinuous around her feet and ankles. The demons and the sneaky things. Snaky things. And that’s how Krista felt about Erik’s room when she had her first dream.
The dream: There’s going to be a Big Party and it is at Erik’s House. Erik and his mommy and Krista and her mommy are at the house on the day before the party making decorations. Erik wants dinosaur decorations. The mommies cut them out of green construction paper and tape white eyes and black claws on them. Run green ribbons through them. Erik pokes Krista with his finger and she bares her teeth at him. Then it’s time to eat. Then it’s time to go to sleep, and the little kids are going to sleep in Erik’s room. But Erik cries because his room is haunted. That’s okay, Erik can stay with his mommy in his mommy’s room.
But what about Krista?
Well, she can’t stay in her own room, because her mommy has already gone home and left Krista at Erik’s place. So Krista will have to sleep in Erik’s room all alone. In Erik’s room, the crazy candy lights phlash on and off, and she just knows that there’s evil in there.
When Krista lies down to sleep, she closes her eyes against the lights, but they are so bright that they bleed through her eyelids and stick on her eyeballs.
Hotter than coals and range top burners. Hotter, even, than imagination.
And it starts to rain icy rain from the big things’ twisted lips in the windy dark, and Krista feels like she’s on an iceberg.
It is that cold.
And that’s just the first dream.
Krista was playing games with Erik once in his back yard and he sat down on a pile of dirt and stuck his finger up his nose.
“Do this,” he says, wiggling around in there.
“No, my mommy says no, nasty bad!”
“You poke hard enough you scrape your brains.”
But Erik is more than a whole year older than Krista, so he understands things that she does not.
“Nasty,” Krista says.
She looks around toward the house, the weeds in the backyard and the dirt — Erik’s house is never as nice as Krista’s house — and wishes that her mommy was nearby. But there is no mommy near here. Just the yellow spike flowers and the blue skies and the white clouds and Erik.
Erik laughs. He pulls a big booger out of his nose and puts it right in his mouth. He laughs some more.
The second dream:
The reluctant sun dawns bright and swollen. It is too big. It is too close to the earth. Because it is too close it means that there is more sunlight. The sunlight burns more water off the oceans. More water means more clouds. More clouds mean more thunderstorms. And so it keeps coming and coming, bigger and bigger, closer and closer, until the whole world is going to be wiped out by the biggest storm that ever was ever ever.
There is only one safe place in Akawe, because the storm is so big that it is going to blow all of the city away. The one safe place is the tallest building in Akawe. In the deepest basement. Krista and Krista’s mommy go to the tallest building. They go there with Krista’s grandpa. She doesn’t like him because he smells funny and acts strange.
They have to go to the top floor to get registered, and all of the children there have to take a bath because they don’t want any nasty dirty kids going down into the basement and getting everybody sick. But Krista doesn’t get to take her bath for a long time, because she and her mommy are helping grandpa walk up all those flights of stairs. By the time they reach the top floor the storm is a brewin’. By the time Krista is ready to take her disinfectant bath, the storm has hit Akawe. A wide wave, surrounding around, a circle wave that closes smaller and smaller, swallows and swallows, and the city gets swallowed up by the huge wave.
And everybody runs for the exit, except Krista cannot run because she is still in her bath. Her grandpa can’t run because he is too old and sick to make it to the elevator with the crowd. The elevator doors close. The bell dings. They’re going down, down, down, to the safety of the basement. They will live.
But Krista and her grandpa will not. They know that as they hear the fury of the storm spirals in great banks of jagged rain.
“It is just you and me,” says grandpa.
“Save us!” says Krista… or she says something like that.
“I can’t,” says grandpa. “I got dodos.”
And skeletons start falling out of the sky as well.
“If you want, you can eat some of my booger too,” said Erik, on that summer day, a long time ago.
“Nasty,” said Krista.
“It was a big one.”
“You know,” said Erik, “my own grandpa not crazy like yours. He’s going to take me fishing.”
“Gross,” said Krista.
In the small dining room, the lights flick on again.
“Baby, are you okay?” asks Candace.
Krista stares up from the floor at her mommy. The sleeping bag has been put in the only free space between the narrow dining room table and several stacks of book-filled boxes. Above, the clip clip clip of the ceiling fan.
“I don’t like that thing,” Krista says, pointing at the fan. “I want, I want, I want to sleep with you mommy.”
Candace sighs. Runs her hands down her face. She’s exhausted after her argument with Mark at the restaurant. Exhausted from having to deal with her dad. Exhausted from…
But Krista’s lower lip starts to tremble.
“Okay, fine,” says Candace. She picks her daughter up and carries her up the stairs to her own childhood bedroom, where they will share a twin bed that had belonged to Candace twenty years back.
Krista can more-or-less see Erik whimpering in the darkness under the ceiling fan.
