Exercise 30: The Unexpected Day

[Creole Ned]

Exercise 30: The Unexpected Day

Write a scene or story about a day that does not go as planned.

Due Monday, December 14th.

[Creole Ned]

Given the response, I think we'll put the exercises to bed for awhile.

[russellmz]

hopefully you can start them up back after the holiday.

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, this is not unexpected given the time of year.

[Rimbo]

I think we're all a little pooped post-NaNoWriMo. :)

[Creole Ned]

But we were the only two that took part in it. :P

I am working on #30, actually. I finally got an idea I liked. I may have it done before Christmas.

[Acid]

I have to get back into this, Ned. I went through a bit of an emotional hell over the past couple of months and just couldn't get writing. Things are getting better, and I'll jump back in soon, I promise.

[Creole Ned]

I'll put up another exercise early in the new year.

[Acid]

I wrote something sort of in the vein of this exercise. It's a short-short, so I'll post it here.

Suicide Life
By Joel Durham Jr

You realize that all of life is pretty much pain after spending a week without a decent night sleep because of nightmares. By the end of that week, you have waking flashes in your mind's eye of things like your children, hanging from dead trees in a leafless forest, screaming and bleeding as shadow beings rip off pieces of their flesh.
That's when you realize life can be judged solely on how much pain, psychic or physical, you're in at any given moment.
Images you can't flush out of your imagination, like your recently dead grandmother, reduced to dust and bones and a toothless, eerily black maw, crawling across your ceiling toward you.
They're what I dubbed my happy thoughts. People tell me to think happy thoughts to flush the demons from my head, but these, they're the only thoughts I have anymore.

There's a hesitation wound on my wrist. It's been there for a week. I think it's infected, as it's bright red and it doesn't look like it's healed in the last couple of days. In fact, it looks worse. Maybe it will kill me after all.

I'm here for one reason: fear. The same fear that I have of the vivid imagery that flickers in my increasingly addled mind. Fear of death. I had it all planned out. Pills, dozens of them, half a bottle of Jack. When I chickened out, by some fucking instinct for self preservation, I suppose, I grabbed a knife and hacked at my wrist. Not across the visible veins--that's not the way to salvation--but vertically, tearing my way toward the juicy arteries in between the bones. But I didn't get deep enough before I pussied out of that, too.
I didn't expect to be alive anymore by now, but I don't have the balls to end it.

So instead I sit here at 3:44 in the morning of a random Tuesday and, while wide awake, I see my darling wife, burning. Completely aflame. Her eyes are melting. As she writhes, she screams, and her lungs burst. A sickening gush of hot air blows my hair back.