Post by Pingu on Jul 1, 2015 4:42:29 GMT
This is the story that I read for you last Skeleton chat. I am open to critique or feedback as to what you all thought. This piece will be worked on as a personal challenge. I love the concept but it's written when I was an 8th grade kid, I think I can make this a good character study at the very least. Still deciding which direction to take it but expect updates and drafts.
66-days.docx (20.14 KB)
Sixty-Six Days
As a small child mother always told me that I need to strive to be, “right with God”. That we both needed to be prepared for the times to come, the rough times that paved the way to the end of the world. This was the late 80’s, and as all small children are want to do, I cherished and obeyed my mother. I could not conceive of possibility in which she could be wrong.
But wrong she was, as I would slowly learn. As I spent my childhood bounced from one compound to the next, spending hours upon hours, of every waking day, learning His word. Hearing of the visions the Almighty had gifted to these men society shunned, while at night being taught the “skills” I would need at the fast approaching end. I was slowly learning the truth.
The truth that every rapture, every beast, every profit, every single thing that should have come to pass was a lie. And these lies slowly unveiled to me the decayed truth in every profit’s words. That there was no God aside from the one man created to control and abuse the sheep that would flock to these false words.
So, as my once shadowed childhood bloomed into my thorny adolescence, I knew that the days my mother saw in her madness, visions put there by evil men, were false. That the end of times would not come, and if it did no man of the cloth would see it coming.
Even with this knowledge, I could not break my mother from her contentment. To do so would break her heart, a heart filled with only love. So I stayed, the flower of my life mirroring that of a rose who tries to bloom at the end of a long winter.
So as 2012 rolled by, and I sat there watching her wither away before my eyes in the harsh florescent lighting of the hospital, I kept the truth to myself. Her final words spoken to me from between dry cracked lips, attempting to make eye contact from behind cataract eyes, haunted me.
“John, make sure when the end comes you’re right with God”.
It would be days before she died, but I could tell when the breath left her lips expelling this final wish that she had left my world. Her final moments, my thirtieth birthday, spent holding onto the lie that sapped her of her everything. As I walked from the hospital, onto the frozen streets, I glanced only once back to my mother’s final home. The pale glow of the hospitals cross blinded my eyes, a false symbol adorning what should be a temple of science, while my mother’s final words burned their way into my very depths.
Be right with God? What a joke. My mother’s God took and took from us. He bled us dry while giving nothing in return, nothing save a broken set of lives. Every profit had stolen her profits, along with them a piece of her. Every wise man that proved false sent her searching for another who would be true, also sent her spiraling further down. In the end, in that cold emotionless hospital room there had been nothing left of the woman I once knew.
Therefore it came as no surprise that at the end of her shattered life the only one there to recognize that she had even lived was me. I sat there alone in that empty parlor, a place that reeked of rose oil and myrrh in a failing attempt to cover the stench of death that lingered ever present within. It was here in the house of death that I cursed His name and forever lost my only connection to this world.
Even in death my mother still strove to work the Lord’s will on earth. She had left all her belongings, the small amount of money she had left, everything to some profit down South. Leaving me with nothing, save the few memories I still had of her before the fall and the ever growing emptiness inside of me. So when I finally was ushered out from the parlor, and directed towards the plot where they would lay her remains, I ran. With no destination in mind, I just kept going forward until my feet would carry me no further.
The year following her death was a blur. I had used the skills learned as a child to survive on the streets. Learning to use the same false words of kindness and broken promises I learned from all those wolves of my youth to make my living. The streets were kind to me in that they easily forgot about you; people simply ignored you, and as it always would the world just went on. I was ready to simply become just another lost soul adrift in the sea of man when it happened.
It was a cold late November evening, and I had taken refuge in a local bar. It was always easy to get a drink around holidays, as the place filled with tourists easy turned to kindness by a stranger’s woe. I had spun a tale and charmed the first beer of the night before I had realized it was my birthday, and the anniversary of her death. I found myself hoping I could turn my birthday heartache into at least a half dozen more drinks, I needed to forget again.
Then I saw him on the television.
Enoch.
Another man, this one down in Texas, who knew the world, was doomed. The scrolling words on the bottom of the screen told me that we all had just sixty-six days left in our miserable lives. Just sixty-six days before god would save all his faithful, punish the wicked, and bathe the Earth in his forgiving flames.
I was about to ask the barman if he’d change it back to sports, hoping that something like Nascar was on to sate my growing anger. Something in the way people starred in anticipation of a wreck or some possible carnage reminded me of childhood and home.
Then I saw her. There on the screen as the new camera panned out, just over the left shoulder of the newest false profit. A woman with joyous tears in her emerald eyes, with her raven hair pulled back into too tight of a ponytail, a woman who clearly made her own clothing. A woman who was almost a spitting image of mother, mother as I remembered her from my youth.
That was the moment my life changed. In sixty-six days, that prophesized day the preacher said the world would end would be just a day like any other. Of that I was certain. The only person meeting their end on that fated day would be the man who stood before me on the television. For in sixty-six days I would kill Enoch.
God’s divine reckoning might not be coming to Texas, but mine was.
I hope he is right with God.
66-days.docx (20.14 KB)
Sixty-Six Days
As a small child mother always told me that I need to strive to be, “right with God”. That we both needed to be prepared for the times to come, the rough times that paved the way to the end of the world. This was the late 80’s, and as all small children are want to do, I cherished and obeyed my mother. I could not conceive of possibility in which she could be wrong.
But wrong she was, as I would slowly learn. As I spent my childhood bounced from one compound to the next, spending hours upon hours, of every waking day, learning His word. Hearing of the visions the Almighty had gifted to these men society shunned, while at night being taught the “skills” I would need at the fast approaching end. I was slowly learning the truth.
The truth that every rapture, every beast, every profit, every single thing that should have come to pass was a lie. And these lies slowly unveiled to me the decayed truth in every profit’s words. That there was no God aside from the one man created to control and abuse the sheep that would flock to these false words.
So, as my once shadowed childhood bloomed into my thorny adolescence, I knew that the days my mother saw in her madness, visions put there by evil men, were false. That the end of times would not come, and if it did no man of the cloth would see it coming.
Even with this knowledge, I could not break my mother from her contentment. To do so would break her heart, a heart filled with only love. So I stayed, the flower of my life mirroring that of a rose who tries to bloom at the end of a long winter.
So as 2012 rolled by, and I sat there watching her wither away before my eyes in the harsh florescent lighting of the hospital, I kept the truth to myself. Her final words spoken to me from between dry cracked lips, attempting to make eye contact from behind cataract eyes, haunted me.
“John, make sure when the end comes you’re right with God”.
It would be days before she died, but I could tell when the breath left her lips expelling this final wish that she had left my world. Her final moments, my thirtieth birthday, spent holding onto the lie that sapped her of her everything. As I walked from the hospital, onto the frozen streets, I glanced only once back to my mother’s final home. The pale glow of the hospitals cross blinded my eyes, a false symbol adorning what should be a temple of science, while my mother’s final words burned their way into my very depths.
Be right with God? What a joke. My mother’s God took and took from us. He bled us dry while giving nothing in return, nothing save a broken set of lives. Every profit had stolen her profits, along with them a piece of her. Every wise man that proved false sent her searching for another who would be true, also sent her spiraling further down. In the end, in that cold emotionless hospital room there had been nothing left of the woman I once knew.
Therefore it came as no surprise that at the end of her shattered life the only one there to recognize that she had even lived was me. I sat there alone in that empty parlor, a place that reeked of rose oil and myrrh in a failing attempt to cover the stench of death that lingered ever present within. It was here in the house of death that I cursed His name and forever lost my only connection to this world.
Even in death my mother still strove to work the Lord’s will on earth. She had left all her belongings, the small amount of money she had left, everything to some profit down South. Leaving me with nothing, save the few memories I still had of her before the fall and the ever growing emptiness inside of me. So when I finally was ushered out from the parlor, and directed towards the plot where they would lay her remains, I ran. With no destination in mind, I just kept going forward until my feet would carry me no further.
The year following her death was a blur. I had used the skills learned as a child to survive on the streets. Learning to use the same false words of kindness and broken promises I learned from all those wolves of my youth to make my living. The streets were kind to me in that they easily forgot about you; people simply ignored you, and as it always would the world just went on. I was ready to simply become just another lost soul adrift in the sea of man when it happened.
It was a cold late November evening, and I had taken refuge in a local bar. It was always easy to get a drink around holidays, as the place filled with tourists easy turned to kindness by a stranger’s woe. I had spun a tale and charmed the first beer of the night before I had realized it was my birthday, and the anniversary of her death. I found myself hoping I could turn my birthday heartache into at least a half dozen more drinks, I needed to forget again.
Then I saw him on the television.
Enoch.
Another man, this one down in Texas, who knew the world, was doomed. The scrolling words on the bottom of the screen told me that we all had just sixty-six days left in our miserable lives. Just sixty-six days before god would save all his faithful, punish the wicked, and bathe the Earth in his forgiving flames.
I was about to ask the barman if he’d change it back to sports, hoping that something like Nascar was on to sate my growing anger. Something in the way people starred in anticipation of a wreck or some possible carnage reminded me of childhood and home.
Then I saw her. There on the screen as the new camera panned out, just over the left shoulder of the newest false profit. A woman with joyous tears in her emerald eyes, with her raven hair pulled back into too tight of a ponytail, a woman who clearly made her own clothing. A woman who was almost a spitting image of mother, mother as I remembered her from my youth.
That was the moment my life changed. In sixty-six days, that prophesized day the preacher said the world would end would be just a day like any other. Of that I was certain. The only person meeting their end on that fated day would be the man who stood before me on the television. For in sixty-six days I would kill Enoch.
God’s divine reckoning might not be coming to Texas, but mine was.
I hope he is right with God.
