she sits in a stream. cool water. no place to go. why do they hate me so much? i'm only nice to them. i never told her i hated her, but she always says she hates me. you're no good, mother said. you don't do anything. what if i don't want to do anything? isn't that all right? no. fine. then i'll leave. water runs through me like i'm transparent. no way out, now. just sit in the water and think.
it comes from the woods. black and bestial, horned head, black skin like metal. she's so beautiful, sitting there in the water. like a statue of flesh. i don't like daylight. why does it always have to be light out when the pretty ones come?
i don't want to be alone anymore. mother, don't hate me. i just want to be young. dad hates me because you do; he does what you say. is that what you want me to be like?
i don't know why i like pretty ones. my fingers are thick and solid as they tense together. she is tiny compared to me. sunlight pushes through the trees. my red eyes ache, but i'll look at her anyway.
i love him, mother. i'm sorry if you hate me for that. i know you will, that's why i haven't told you. just leave me alone.
so pretty, so so pretty.
it comes out of the trees. the dirt and grass around the stream sink beneath its giant feet. she sees it, but cannot scream, like her voice has been taken away and placed into a tiny little box. it looms over her, the shadow blocking out the light of the surrounding world.
what are you? i don't know; i want you. why? because you are like me daughter. you have a daughter? once.
the girl cannot speak as the thick, cold arms sweep her up out of the stream. her blue dress is like soft skin, pressed against her body. the breeze is cold, and she shivers, putting her arms around his neck, though his neck is too big for her to hold. she doesn't know why she is holding him. he carries her off, out of the sunshine, out of all she has ever known.
i love you. i love you, too.
© 2007 Steven Montano
Sunday, August 26, 2007
A Strange Piece of Prose....
I find that, when I write short fiction, it tend to be extremely.....odd. Part of it, I think, is the strange avant-pop movement that was poisoning my brain all through college. Part of it is that I'm just naturally weird. But a big part of it is that I've always looked at short fiction as being less like a story and more like an exercise, and when I write short fiction I tend to worry less about substance and more about style. (Oddly, I often find that my short fiction tends to actually possess more substance than my longer works, probably because I'm not worrying about and meaning manages to come through naturally, rather than being forced.) Currently, I'm still working on "Thorns", the second story in the "Dirge" collection. In trying to decide what to post this week, I was a bit torn between posting another excerpt from "Darker Sunset" (I'm still deciding whether I want to re-post everything from the old blog or just continue apace) or something new, but since everything for "Thorns" that has yet been produced is still in a hand-written state, I decided instead to do something very, very old. "Gorgon", which features one of my favorite monstrous creations (the beast described herein has appeared in my old Marvel Superheroes RPG campaing, a novella called "The Crossing", and as a fictional character in the original version of "Darker Sunset"), was written later in my college career, during a long bout of depressed bachlerhood and in the midst of my "so Gothic I'm dead" period of my life. I'd also been reading a lot of e.e. cummings at the time, which explains the "artistic" lack of punctuation. Anyhow, enjoy.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
A Vision of an End
Already it fades.
Four unicorns: black and silver, gray and pale. A field. A sky made of lavender and a wall of leaves.
She speaks. Her voice shines platinum in the dark.
"I see. Trees."
There is a mountain of jet and hoarfrost, embalmed with icewinter clouds.
Four women, fair, skin as milk and moon. They sit in the marsh grass, bare feet in the chill water. A gentle wind caresses them like loving hands.
They bear memories of empire; of tall dark buildings soaked in black rain; of the shadows of tall men.
She sits in a parlor and dreams.
She sees a sky in motion. She sees Donnis, palest of them all, return to the sky through a portal of cloud. She is an angel, falling up.
The unicorns descend, and the four women must escape through the silver haze and marsh. They cannot move fast enough, cannot hide in the soft fingers of the trees.
Even as they pass into a door made of silver silk, she knows that they will not all make it, that Donnis is lost. The pale girl falls to the earth and is consumed by the unicorns' hunger, trampled beneath their black hooves. She sees the reflection of Donnis' screaming face in the unicorn's mirror-glass eyes, and she is left shaken and dizzy and alone, floating through these images, desperate to stay a part of them even as her senses return.
The crackling fire of the parlor holds her vision. When she looks back up through the fog, the sky is open and vast and filled with another memory that plays before her.
Marching men stand assembled before a grim edifice, a sliver of shadow under dark stars and a dark sky. Rain falls and punishes them on the steep steps that ascend from the heart of a black city. They march to an elevated field filled with swords and felled men that drink in the earth, a place of creeping shadows that bleed into the other place, the place she knows, the marsh of soft grass and trees laden with moisture, of silver haze and white dresses and girls with auburn hair.
She senses that the worst days have already passed, but all she can see is Donnis, falling, up into a sky of tears and leaves. A birdcall pulls her back to the parlor, and the flames into which she stares.
Of course none of this really happened, but it is the only memory she has of Donnis.
Once I woke from this dream, I stared at my wife as she slept, and thought of my children, and realized that this dream was a vision of an end. The last words I'd said to each of them the night before was "I Love You", so if the end I'd seen was my own, I decided I would be ready for it.
© 2007 Steven Montano
Four unicorns: black and silver, gray and pale. A field. A sky made of lavender and a wall of leaves.
She speaks. Her voice shines platinum in the dark.
"I see. Trees."
There is a mountain of jet and hoarfrost, embalmed with icewinter clouds.
Four women, fair, skin as milk and moon. They sit in the marsh grass, bare feet in the chill water. A gentle wind caresses them like loving hands.
They bear memories of empire; of tall dark buildings soaked in black rain; of the shadows of tall men.
She sits in a parlor and dreams.
She sees a sky in motion. She sees Donnis, palest of them all, return to the sky through a portal of cloud. She is an angel, falling up.
The unicorns descend, and the four women must escape through the silver haze and marsh. They cannot move fast enough, cannot hide in the soft fingers of the trees.
Even as they pass into a door made of silver silk, she knows that they will not all make it, that Donnis is lost. The pale girl falls to the earth and is consumed by the unicorns' hunger, trampled beneath their black hooves. She sees the reflection of Donnis' screaming face in the unicorn's mirror-glass eyes, and she is left shaken and dizzy and alone, floating through these images, desperate to stay a part of them even as her senses return.
The crackling fire of the parlor holds her vision. When she looks back up through the fog, the sky is open and vast and filled with another memory that plays before her.
Marching men stand assembled before a grim edifice, a sliver of shadow under dark stars and a dark sky. Rain falls and punishes them on the steep steps that ascend from the heart of a black city. They march to an elevated field filled with swords and felled men that drink in the earth, a place of creeping shadows that bleed into the other place, the place she knows, the marsh of soft grass and trees laden with moisture, of silver haze and white dresses and girls with auburn hair.
She senses that the worst days have already passed, but all she can see is Donnis, falling, up into a sky of tears and leaves. A birdcall pulls her back to the parlor, and the flames into which she stares.
Of course none of this really happened, but it is the only memory she has of Donnis.
Once I woke from this dream, I stared at my wife as she slept, and thought of my children, and realized that this dream was a vision of an end. The last words I'd said to each of them the night before was "I Love You", so if the end I'd seen was my own, I decided I would be ready for it.
© 2007 Steven Montano
Introduction: A Sort of Writer
Since the primary focus of this blog is going to be to self-publish my otherwise largely unpublishable works of fantasy, horror and other silliness, I thought it would be best to start off with a bit of background on my so-called skills.
I started writing when I was a senior in high school. My first attempts at fiction were solely dedicated to the horror genre, and, in a word, said attempts sucked. Luckily, with persistence and a ridiculous number of hours dedicated to pounding out short stories and a (thankfully unpublished) Michael Moorcock style fantasy novel entitled "Demonsbane", my skills have grown somewhat, even if I have been out of practice for the past two years or so. I majored in Creative Writing in college, where my style took a decidedly verbose turn into modern fantasy and fantasy-horror hybrids. It was while I was in college that I attempted the first draft of my dream project, a dark fantasy titled "Darker Sunset" (consequently, this project bears no relation to the Dungeons & Dragons "Dark Sun" campaign setting aside from an unfortunate similarity in titles). After nearly 700 typed pages and a dreadful realization that the project had lost all direction and focus, I scrapped "Darker Sunset" and focused instead on writing fantasy roleplaying game supplements, a venture which produced the extent of my published works to date. I have since completed numerous short stories and two novels, practically all of which remain unpublished, primarily due to a lack of effort on my end in regards to submitting these works off to the appropriate parties. (Those few submissions I have sent off have been summarily rejected, and will require some more work before they get sent off to the firing squad again.)
But then some fool invented the internet. Now you don't have to have an agent to publish yourself, or even skill, for that matter. All you need is a computer and an internet hookup, so beware!!!
Recently, I'd started posting excerpts from my second (completed) version of Darker Sunset over at my old Myspace page, and I'll likely continue that trend over here. In the meantime, however, I'm going to post a recent short story that isn't so much a story as it is a recording of a dream. This piece may not make a profound degree of sense, but I enjoyed writing it, and it's actually become one of two framing stories for a plan short story collection that I just recently started began work on (and that I'll likely be publishing here as each respective work is completed). Enjoy.
I started writing when I was a senior in high school. My first attempts at fiction were solely dedicated to the horror genre, and, in a word, said attempts sucked. Luckily, with persistence and a ridiculous number of hours dedicated to pounding out short stories and a (thankfully unpublished) Michael Moorcock style fantasy novel entitled "Demonsbane", my skills have grown somewhat, even if I have been out of practice for the past two years or so. I majored in Creative Writing in college, where my style took a decidedly verbose turn into modern fantasy and fantasy-horror hybrids. It was while I was in college that I attempted the first draft of my dream project, a dark fantasy titled "Darker Sunset" (consequently, this project bears no relation to the Dungeons & Dragons "Dark Sun" campaign setting aside from an unfortunate similarity in titles). After nearly 700 typed pages and a dreadful realization that the project had lost all direction and focus, I scrapped "Darker Sunset" and focused instead on writing fantasy roleplaying game supplements, a venture which produced the extent of my published works to date. I have since completed numerous short stories and two novels, practically all of which remain unpublished, primarily due to a lack of effort on my end in regards to submitting these works off to the appropriate parties. (Those few submissions I have sent off have been summarily rejected, and will require some more work before they get sent off to the firing squad again.)
But then some fool invented the internet. Now you don't have to have an agent to publish yourself, or even skill, for that matter. All you need is a computer and an internet hookup, so beware!!!
Recently, I'd started posting excerpts from my second (completed) version of Darker Sunset over at my old Myspace page, and I'll likely continue that trend over here. In the meantime, however, I'm going to post a recent short story that isn't so much a story as it is a recording of a dream. This piece may not make a profound degree of sense, but I enjoyed writing it, and it's actually become one of two framing stories for a plan short story collection that I just recently started began work on (and that I'll likely be publishing here as each respective work is completed). Enjoy.
Welcome!
It takes someone to smack you on the head sometimes to realize that you need to do something. In this case, it took my good friend Wes creating his own new blog (check it out at http://lyoncage.wordpress.com/) to make me realize that I need to do the same. Myspace really has become something of a pain, between the endless spam and the numerous times that my account has been hacked into and used to send spam out to others. While I think Myspace has some nice features, something simpler should suit me just fine, since I'll primarily be using this blog to post excerpts of my writing, my thoughts on games that I like, crazy stuff that the family is up to, etc.
I've never been the most dedicated blogger, but I'll make a genuine effort to keep on top of putting up regular posts here at Daezarkian's Dungeon...when in doubt, I'll just post an excerpt from the novel, since I have enough of that done to keep up all busy for quite some time.
Thanks, Wes, for showing me the light -- later, Myspace!
I've never been the most dedicated blogger, but I'll make a genuine effort to keep on top of putting up regular posts here at Daezarkian's Dungeon...when in doubt, I'll just post an excerpt from the novel, since I have enough of that done to keep up all busy for quite some time.
Thanks, Wes, for showing me the light -- later, Myspace!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
