[El Zilcho]

One Shots
The principle is simple - a theme or idea is set and you write a small piece on it, before posting your own word for the next person to elaborate on. Your piece can be anything, written in any style. This exercise makes writing fun and breaks it down so that the drudgery of planning a complex story or examining whether your characters are believable is momentarily forgotten. Writing for writings sake.

Remember to leave a word or two at the end of your piece so the next person can keep it going. I'll begin:

The Hotel

[Mokrie Dela]

ok lets do it!

EDIT: Zero editing, so there will be typos or grammatical errors. I jst took the theme and run with it (as per the idea?). I'm acually quite happy with it.

And guess what? It was FUN



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I grew up in the most shady part of town. Some people used ocean tapes to sleep, or white noise machines, but I regularly fell asleep to the sound of sirens. Every now and then i'd hear what could only be a gunshot. It was unremarkable to me though. That was where i lived, where i always lived, and where i'd live for a quarter of my life.

Like any other kid i'd wander around after school, or f*cking about during the holidays. There was this street - Hunter street, just off the main road, by the old pier that jutted out into the river like a broken finger, unmoving, forever malleted by abuse. There was an amusement park - just a small one - but that shut down. People died there, or so i heard.
But what sticks in my mind was the hotel. That old building, a product of the prohibition era, they say. Al capone visited it, they say. Some say he still visits, once a year.

I dont know what happened there. It closed, and had been all my life. I got the creeps driving past it. It always felt like night, even in the middle of the day. The hotel was the moon, albeit emittin no light, and the only tide it had control over was the one on which my fear rode. Trepidation? Temptation.
Inevitabley, we went inside, me and Mark. The paint was faded on the outside - no one knew what colour it had been - but inside was even worse. I remember once finding damp on my window - that horrible green/black sludge that comes from moisture. Mould. The lobby - i assume it was a lobby - was covered in it. The floor - once... I don't know - was eroded by time. Whatever compound held up the visitors' feet was now crunchy. Like walking on stale biscuits.

It stunk too. Like an old river. Perhaps the smell was the old river. I don't know. We began moving through the dark, forboding building. Today, now living a hundred and thirty three miles from that place, I'm a composer for the film industry. I make music for films. For games - well, one game. Jesus, when i was a kid the only game out was Pong. Now they're virtual life simulators. I can't tell the difference between life and games....
But, looking back, one of my works always springs to mind. MY life is spent now thinking of songs to go with scenes. My memory is tied to a piece i called 'Walking'. It starts with a slow walk through the C Minor chord on a Grand Piano. Strings play the role that bass guitars do these days, and a muted trumpet plays a slow harmony, quiet.
My memory's couple with that score. The dark, dismal corpse of a once proudly standing hotel, now scared by storms, but dust and by damp - that and any druggies or hobos that sought shelther there.

Mark led me upstairs. We were scared but we were kids. We had to explore it. We rounded a corner into one of the room and Mark just disappeared. I heard him yell, i heard a crack. In my mind A guitar also joins the mix and chellos take the low note responcibility, the song getting louder. An ominous drum sounds as a crash echoes throughout time.
Mark's crying. Where the f*ck is he?!
I remember turning and running downstairs.
I never saw Mark again, and I never returned to the Hotel. No body was found and to this day I ask myself what happened. Why didn't i stay and help him - or find him?

They tore the hotel down last month. Or was it last year? It was around Christmas. I remember watching.
Then the newspaper offerend me chills, which my spine accepted. They were fitting a new foundation on that site where, buried under where the hotel stood, as a body.

I found out yesterday that it was Mark's. The curious thing? It was buried underneath where the hotel was.




Battlefield

This post has been edited by Mokrie Dela on Wednesday, Apr 11 2012, 15:55

[Tyler]

Nice bit, Mokrie. Aside from some grammatical errors it flowed well for something without any revising. This was a fun little thing, I'm glad you guys decided to try it again. Hope we get it off the ground.

__

Red curls and green eyes. No matter where I am in life I'll always have that woman to go back to. Those playful lips that hid a cute little gap in her teeth. Sometimes we'd both get the time to head out past the city limits and just lay down in a field next to an old silo. We stepped along virgin grass and pulled each other around for a kiss every five seconds, it seemed.

That old silo - with the accompanying barn, must have been abandoned since the dust bowl. There were tons of farms out here like that, left to natures devices. Katy - that was her name, moved her arms around me closer as we laid down on top of an old Dark Side of the Moon blanket I set on the ground. Her skin rivalled my own paleness, though she wore it much better than me. On those nights we'd name stars and talk nonsense like young lovers do.

Of course I'm not there any more. Neither is Katy, as those last letters told me. I understood why she couldn't do it - too many shared memories in that town. That ghost town. Katy moved on to bigger places and nicer crowds. She deserved the high life, though. And she still does. Maybe after all this I'll give her a call and we can talk about what we've been up to, although I suspect my answer will be more cynical.

You can't really help yourself when you've spent nearly five years away, fighting for lives you never meet. It's not their fault but the blame needs to go somewhere, and all the PFCs are too stupid to even realize I'm yelling at them. Most of the time those kids are more lost in memories than I am. These kids - these children aren't ready for yelling and killing and dying. None of us are. Why can't we be like those generations that went into war smiling?



Railroads

[Mokrie Dela]

I won't take this go (leave it open for others) but I liked that. At first I couldn't see how it related to battlefield (coming up with a decent word is hard) but then I saw
I absolutely love that last sentence!

Btw what's a pfc?

[Tyler]

Yeah, I went with a pretty stock way of introducing it but I couldn't be bothered with using some kind of allegory like x = a battlefield.

[Ziggy455]

What the f*ck did I just write?

The railroads of the town hadn’t been used for years. The Earth had reached up and begun to resurface over most of the track with large weeds and upshot rows of generic planting. The town itself was the same in its state. I remember the first time I had walked down those tracks with that girl. The one with bright blue eyes that pierced each and every man-child of the high school, the girl who had spent night after night with me as her company. We would constantly walk down the railroads overlooking the huge lake that was tranquil and beautiful. It was the only thing that seemed to have life residing in it back then.

We walked down the road and I watched her in her jeans and baggy red jumper. Her blonde hair flowed down her shoulders. We walked hand in hand and would watch as the trains came by. That was when I was nineteen. We shared a kiss and a single tear came from her eyes. High School was ending and we were all to leave. We made love to each other on a lookout point, the railroads ended close by and it wouldn’t be long until a new train would come rambling by. We promised to stay in contact, to stay true.

Many years rolled by and I returned to this town. I’d hit the jackpot with my career as a writer and had sold my fair share of books. But the cash didn’t make me happy and my heart yearned to go back to the railroads and find that place we made love. I returned to the place and found only weeds and growth. The tracks had been left abandoned years ago and so with it everything had been forgotten. It was only when I’d received a call about that girl of mine, that one I never stopped loving. The caller told me she’d come back to this town, and she seemed broken somehow. Like the railroads here, they had both lost their purposes years back and had succumbed to nature.

Edit: Sorry man.

Darkness

This post has been edited by Ziggy455 on Thursday, Apr 12 2012, 21:19

[AceRay]

Um, I was going to write something but you need to make a new theme Ziggy.

[Mokrie Dela]

I'll let ace take his turn, just posted to say I found that kinda sad ziggy. It weren't that bad

[Eminence]

QUOTE (Ziggy455 @ Thursday, Apr 12 2012, 20:52)

What the f*ck did I just write?

I thought this was really good, Ziggy. You've got a strong, powerful central metaphor and in exploring it you provide us with an entire backstory and character arc; really solid stuff for three quickfire paragraphs. One thing I would say is to not make the metaphor so obvious. Towards the end you really explained in plain words what the whole theme of the story was, and with a little more subtlety it could have held a lot of power.

[Ziggy455]

QUOTE (Eminence @ Thursday, Apr 12 2012, 21:34)

QUOTE (Ziggy455 @ Thursday, Apr 12 2012, 20:52) What the f*ck did I just write?  I thought this was really good, Ziggy. You've got a strong, powerful central metaphor and in exploring it you provide us with an entire backstory and character arc; really solid stuff for three quickfire paragraphs. One thing I would say is to not make the metaphor so obvious. Towards the end you really explained in plain words what the whole theme of the story was, and with a little more subtlety it could have held a lot of power.

QUOTE

Towards the end you really explained in plain words what the whole theme of the story was

To be honest that really is one of my biggest flaws. I elaborate waaaay too much with things near the resolution and it just makes everything seem forced and expositional. Thankyou for the feedback though. Only took a mere five minutes.

This post has been edited by Ziggy455 on Thursday, Apr 12 2012, 22:46

[AceRay]

here I go.

Darkness

I reached out in front of me and waded through the darkness of the tomb. The air wasn't like normal air. It was thick and dense. I felt like grabbing a ball of it and stuffing it down my throat. My eyes still hadn't managed to adjust the light, making me bump into things. I was still clutching the keys to get down here in my. In the distance, I could hear something creaking in the distance.

"Riley!" The voice was like a pair of steel hands clasping round my neck. I spun around to see Horace, holding a candle. His aged face was rough and his beard reached his chest. I was relived and frightened at the same time. The light from the candle was blinding almost I could practically see a ghost float around behind it. It was dancing. "What are you doing down here?"

"Just looking 'round, sir" he was always disappointed when I came down here. A part of me thinks he understands, the way he looks at me during the service. I hand him the keys and he musters up the courage to speak

"Now, lets get out of here" eager to get out, I trudge past Horace, knocking the candle of his hand. It rolls down the floor to the other end of the tomb. It revealed the monster that was hiding.

While I only saw him for a fraction, he reminded me of a Minotaur, wandering round a labyrinth with no aims or intentions. He was put there specifically to stop going there and I wish I didn't venture out into the darkness. The last thing I heard was Horace letting a small whelp, before I got head butted across the room, the last essence of my soul left my body. All that remained was darkness.

Colossus

[Otter]

Colossus.

The mountain rose like a colossal wet, shaggy dog and the earth slid, taking trees, roads, buildings and him.

It was a hard day at work and he had vowed to make it the last. Tomorrow he'd quit. Kaput. Stephanie had mismanaged his time (again) and he was doing the work of two men and getting half the respect he deserved. Half the salary, too, if he thought about it. He chose not to. Even in the release of resignation facing all the facts at once can be painful.

He drove home (late) thinking about how he'd explain the decision to his wife but knowing that she'd be happy and perhaps they could take that vacation now and don't worry everything's going to be OK, and he started to cry. Sobs contended with bursts of laughter in his car on this lonely stretch of road at this late hour when most of his coworkers were already fast asleep.

It would be fine, in the end, he was sure of it. He had skills. He was young. He knew people. It would be fine.
The rain fell in a steady shower, gusts of wet and cold. The way ahead was dark and uncertain. He pulled over to let the worst of it pass. Would she really be happy for him? Or would she first give him that look? That fleeting glare of disappointment before she could will herself to play the good wife and console him.

The rain lifted. He released the emergency brake and fired the ignition and crept back on to the road. The streetlights flickered. Normally a flickering light is easily dismissed but sometimes, like when a shadow moves on its own accord or an animal moves in an unexpected fashion, the breaker in your conscious mind is tripped. This is not right.

Driving forward he sees the lamp at the top of the hill go dark and he muses that perhaps he could go to work for the city. Then the next lamp blinks out. No more light in the distance only a massive stretch of darkness that eats towards him. Fast. The trees in front of him are briefly swaying grass in a strong wind. It would be fine.



Adventure!

[TinTinn]

AceRay, It was a good read. The idea about the darkness really represents fear and confusion. Damn, Otter posted after Ray, all well.

Okay, let me try.


Adventure

The glove box rattled continuously and created a bothering distraction. I leaned over from the free steering wheel and snapped at it with my hand, "Well that was a bad mistake," I heard a voice come from the silence that seemed so authentic. Every item in the box collapsed onto the passenger's seat in a lump, "Joe, keep your eyes lit on the road," the ghost like voice added. This spooked the young man and provoked him to get back into driving position, Joe stared over the dashboard into the open and dynamic landscape around him.

The suspension on the car was incredibly weak, "Oh no, not again, another distraction," that imaginary thought climbed back into reality, "Optimistic Voices" from 'The Wizard of Oz' began to play in Joe's head. Joe sighed as he focused on his review mirror, "Are you sure you're going to make it to your destination?" it asked again. The hay fields lapped over one another which soon formed a wheat paddock, a beautiful scenery for the drive to the hospital. "Do you feel proud, about becoming a father,"... Joe replied, "Of course," still listening to the rusty squeaks of the suspension, "Well you better stay focused, because the next distraction will be your last,"... finally, peace and quiet. Time for the mind to speak for itself and banish all negative thoughts, all negative dream characters, no more distraction.

..."So what was your name again"...

.....

Grandfathers Pipe

This post has been edited by TinTinn on Friday, Apr 13 2012, 01:46

[Ziggy455]

@Otter: Brilliant little read this was. Nicely written, a punctuation error or two but f*ck that. Marvellous, I love the way his mind flits from pessimism to optimism back and forth.

@AceRay: Brilliant, I love how you play on what the mind sees in the darkness, are shapes really like that or is it just our minds? Brilliant little structure and I got a sort of old explorer theme from it, like 1920s but that was just probably my mind.

@TinTinn: Cool little piece man although adventure didn't seem to fit in with this it was still good. It was more of a psychological metaphor of perception? That was my interpretation anyway.

[TinTinn]

QUOTE

@TinTinn: Cool little piece man although adventure didn't seem to fit in with this it was still good. It was more of a psychological metaphor of perception? That was my interpretation anyway.

It was an adventure through the mind and an adventure through the physical realm. The ending for the piece can be good or bad in the viewers description; either in the physical or mental realm.

[Mokrie Dela]

Grandfather's pipe.



The house is cold. The power's been cut off, with no one paying the bills.
I stand in the living room, with the bad decor, the mismatched furniture. Still the house smells of him. That smell of old people, but mixed with tobacco.
For years we tried to convince him to stop. He refused of course. Stubburn fool. Even when the doctors told him he still carried on. And now he's paid the price. The selfish....

It's our job to clear the house out. His will gave that duty to us. Everything i touch feels cold. I get chills up my spind.

I pick up the WWII helmet from the cabinet. As i run my fingers across it i feel the deaths of a hundred men, good and bad. Scars of war feel like little bumps and scratches. But of the hundred deaths, the most recent fatality is what bothers me.
I set the helmet back down with care as though it's a priceless antique, which in my mind it is.
Then I see it. On the coffee table. The little tin, and the pipe next to it. The fool! Why couldnt he listen to us? He'd probably still be here!
My mother of course is at home, her eyes shedding a perpetual rain of greif. My father's at the pub. He's too selfish to confort his own wife. Thankfully my aunt's conforting my mum. I take it upon myself to do the duty of the clear out. I hate it but I'm a good son. She deserves one after all.

I collapse of the chair, the pipe in my hand. I tamp the powder down and light it, smelling that horrible but missed smell. That's when the floodgates open. I begin crying, the tears of a hundred dead, the tears of oppression and revolution, of victory and defeat.
He's gone, he's really gone!

The man who'd fought for the world's freedom against NAzi Germany, who'd suffered the horrors of war, and had finally found happiness until his wife died. The man who survived that, the man who was indestrucible. Hitler couldn't kill him, the death of his childhood sweetheart didn't kill him. A house fire didn't kill him. A car crash didn't kill him.
But his pride, his foolish stubburn pride did.



Theme (How could i forget that!?)

Sports Day

This post has been edited by Mokrie Dela on Friday, Apr 13 2012, 11:57

[AceRay]

Gonna need a theme there Morkie.

Great story btw. Its sad and reflective, it really makes me feel about the main character.

[Mokrie Dela]

Thanks Ace.

Theme's added - how did i manage to forget that!? Sorry bout that

[Ziggy455]

Sports Day, oh how I loathed Sports Day! Each year I’d be sat down in with the rest of the kids who were deemed too unfit to compete in the heavy races like the five hundred meters and such. I sat there pulling grass out of the field, my horizontally challenged friend, Butch, next to me. Butch has to wear a helmet on Sports day since last year when he lost the egg and spoon race. He noticed the winner of it was the same douche that had won the thousand meter sprint and the long jump. Edward Constable, the schools popular guy and ladies man.

I nudged Butch as he slumped next to me. “f*cking Constable!” he nudged me back “Does my nut in you know?” he said to me as he began to punch the grass. I empathized with the poor guy. Butch was a little strange, some would say he had autism, I just think he had the unfortunate destiny of being socially awkward, but I liked him nonetheless. And he wasn’t one to back down from a fight. “I know, but what are you going to do?” I said emptily looking at Constable being praised. Butch began to whisper to himself rapidly and I knew a little bit of an anger spout was to arise. “Butch chill it!” I said warily but he hit the grass harder. “No!” he yelled, running off suddenly and sprinting towards Edward faster than I had ever seen before. “Butch no!” the next few things that happened did so in slow motion.

Butch ran forward and head-butted Constaple head on in his chest and sent him flying backward, air barely escaping him in or out. Somebody grabbed Butch and I ran forward down the track, unknowing a race was going on. I sprinted and noticed I was beating the other racers. I yelled after Butch, crossed the finish line and was met with applause. That was when the head teacher grabbed me by the collar and slung me into detention with Butch. We suffered for months over that spectacle. Edward however never bothered to acknowledge Butch again which he had no quarrel with. Back to next year, with Butch’s helmet firmly set on his head I asked him if he was going to make a repeat of last year. He merely looked at me with a smile and told me “Whatever anybody says we both won last year, didn’t you get a first place prize for the race?”

Surprisingly I had received one in the mail and an invitation to join the track team. All thanks to my friend Butch and his head.

Lets mix it up!

Unexpected Homosexuality

This post has been edited by Ziggy455 on Friday, Apr 13 2012, 17:13

[Dr-Mayhem111]

The Hotel

Countless nights of silence and shallowness have gotten my feelings from calm to completely terrified of what was going to happen. Maybe it was paranoia or maybe I sensed something happening in the hotel before it happened, it turns out, guess number two was the correct answer. It was 3:15 am and I was asleep but having no dream, just multiple images going in my head. Images of horror, people dying, young children full of fear running for their lives, screams of terror echoing from down the hall and in the background was a grotesque creature in the back tracking a trail of blood towards the innocent, and next.... was me. I soon ran out of room 13 which was my room and quickly made my way to the lobby and up to the exit doors, but they were all locked. All the windows were closed and couldn't open. Everybody in the hotel was dead, families dead, the staff dead, innocent scared little children dead, and I was the only one alive. With no way out it was official........ I was trapped inside with a murderous demon loose in the hotel. How will I survive?

This is all I have, tell me what you think.