Protected: Crazy – Draft #3

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Try Again – Draft #2

“Okay, so this guy, Julian, he’s standing in the middle of the bathroom, won’t move a muscle, and he just won’t stop screaming about germs and how they’re keeping him glued to the floor and they’re never going to let him go home, right? And talking to him won’t work, trying to touch him to lead him away freaks him out more, being nice and gentle, nothing’s working. It’s useless. So my friend, Ian, just turns around and walks out of the room. No explanation. Just storms out in a huff and it’s quiet. And then, thirty seconds later, door slams open, Ian comes barreling in and just tackles Julian, sends him flying across the room.

“Julian slams against the wall and after a second goes, ‘What the hell just happened?!’ and Ian’s just like, ‘They let you go, run!’ So Julian gets up and he’s doing this little hop so the germs can’t get a hold of him and then he just makes a break for it, out the door and gone. Completely gone. And I… actually, you know, none of us have seen him since. I hope he’s okay.”

Untitled Art House Project – First 2 Pages

A cigarette burned bright in the dying light of the cemetery. The day had already been cold and overcast, but as the rapidly disappearing remnants of sun dropped, the temperature fell and drew more attention to the tiniest pinpricks of light: a lit cigarette, a pair of headlights on the side street, a ringing cell phone. Three people stood in the middle of the darkening cemetery at the foot of a freshly dug grave. One of them, a young man flanked by two women, took a drag off the cigarette and the end burned bright for a moment before dying down again, while one of the women sent the call on her cell phone straight to voicemail.

“You shouldn’t smoke, Casey,” said the woman without the phone and placed her hand on his shoulder. Casey let a balloon of smoke escape his mouth and disappear into the atmosphere.

Eye Contact – Draft #1

A state of emergency had been declared in the city of Denver, but the Denver airport was in a state of desperate boredom. Every flight was grounded until further notice due to severe weather conditions, and, until the roads were cleared of all the snow, no one was even making it to a hotel. 48 hours after the last flight had made it to the tarmac, the stranded travelers had seen everything the airport had to offer them and were officially entering the realm of the stir crazy. Scott Macadaan was probably the only one fully prepared to embrace the situation.

“Still stuck. Not paying for internet. Tell Dr. P I’ll get my paper in when I get there,” he texted his friend and roommate back at school in Texas and turned back to the netbook on his lap. He had two windows up: one was an internet browser (he had bought a day’s worth of internet when he had been told he would be delayed “for a little while” and was debating breaking down and buying more), the other was a Word document with three lines written. The latter was the paper he had told his friend would be turned in when he got there — a 12 page paper on communication between different cultures assigned three weeks ago. In the tradition of the thousands of students who had passed through those dorm halls before him, Scott had decided to take advantage of the extended ski season and spent his spring break snowboarding in Montana and never even touched his paper.

For the sake of his college life, Scott really hoped this state of emergency never ended.

Sara, Smile – Draft #2

It was wet and cold the first time Sara Syphanthong went to The Note. Surprised and unprepared for a sudden flash of rain in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood, she ducked under a nearby overhang and surveyed the businesses along the street. A bar, a club, an adult video store, and various other adult-themed businesses flashed their neon lights and drowned out the dim “CLOSED” signs on the deli, bookstore, barbershop, and other family friendly businesses with sensible hours. The bar promised Budweiser and Miller Lite and a jukebox sang a song by AC/DC inside, the adult video store had Jingle Balls III for sale and Cookie’s Crisp back for a limited time only, and the club had a two-drink minimum and played live jazz. Sara didn’t have enough money for drinks and a way back to her apartment, and the bar seemed full enough that they wouldn’t notice a loiterer near the bathroom.

Arms folded across her chest to keep out the cold, Sara glanced along the street, and then ducked into the jazz club. She had always preferred jazz to classic rock.

The grimy romanticism of a down and out little club off the beaten path of most of New York City appealed to Sara. She loved images of speakeasies and Prohibition-era nightclubs, back before smoking went out of style and even lawbreakers adhered to a dress code. Back when men in hats and ties sat at the bar surrounded by women in tight dresses, smoking cigarettes from long cigarette holders as they sipped gin brewed in the bathtub of a man with no proper knowledge of brewing, and a voice like Dorothy Dandridge’s and a trumpet like Dizzy Gillespie’s serenaded the strangers at the bar from behind a veil of smoke rising from their manly cigars and dainty cigarettes, there wasn’t a single picture that wasn’t beautiful to her. Times were bad but the music was good and the company was stimulating, and they forgot about their broken hearts and homes and they found something to smile about.

Sara, Smile – unfinished

Sara sat in the back of the club, watching the musicians through the veil created by her artfully mussed hair and chewing her nails. She wondered what it was like to go to these kinds of clubs before smoking went out of style and the men on stage were barely visible through the cloud of cancer rising from the audience. Dark silhouettes serenaded these strangers with music and lyrics heard nowhere else in the city of New York, and the brains from which they came remained anonymous and untouched by outside influence. Back in the day when times were bad and music was good, back when everyone had troubles to drown in booze and tunes, places like The Note must have been hopping. The dance floor would have been filled with couples holding onto each other for dear life, and bitter onlookers tried to hide them from view too by lighting up another cigar or cigarette and puffing away. Kids were strictly forbidden, but if an 18-year-old slipped in, then who were they to turn away another broken heart or lost soul?

That was what it must have been like back then. But it wasn’t anything like that now. Now it was clean, healthy, law-abiding. The music was still the same in the technical sense, but the youthful faces of the musicians belied no experience with pain and heartache. Had they been obscured by smoke, maybe they could fool some of the audience. Not Sara Syphanthong. She got up to leave.

Using Religion – Draft #1

“I think you use religion wrong, Dad.” Zac Elyashkevich watched his father from the side of the road. The hood of the decade-old minivan driven by Stas Elyashkevich was propped up, with Stas himself hidden behind it. He stuck his head out long enough to peer at his son and continue the conversation they had been having before the car rolled to a stop on the slight incline.

“How do you use religion wrong?” Stas said. He spoke with an Eastern European accent, tempered by years of Western European and American living. It made him understandable to most, yet still exotic and interesting — more so than a man with a New England or Midwestern accent, at least. “God is a personal thing, you can’t use Him wrong.”

Try Again – Draft #1

“Okay, so this guy, Julian, he just won’t stop screaming about germs and how they’re keeping him glued to the floor and they’re never going to let him go home, right? And talking to him won’t work, being nice and gentle, nothing’s working, so my friend, Ian, just walks out of the room, and it’s quiet. And then, thirty seconds later, he just comes barreling in and just tackles Julian, sends him flying across the room.

“Julian goes, ‘What the hell just happened?!’ and Ian’s just like, ‘They let you go, run!’ And Julian just gets up and makes a break for it, out the door and I… actually, I don’t think we’ve seen him since.”

Crazy – Draft #1

I hear noises in the night. Loud clangs and eerie howls fill my previously calm and quiet evenings and I’m forced to lie there and accept their presence. No one believes me when I tell them there are creatures outside my high-rise apartment building, clamoring around my fire escape and calling to each other every night. They tell me it’s a dream, it’s cats, it’s teenagers; they say I should get more sleep, ask me if I had anything to drink or ate something weird before bed; they tell me I should see someone about this, maybe they can give me something to make it all go away so I can get to sleep; they wonder if I have a history of mental illness, but they don’t ask that, because they don’t want to hear if I do.

They never ask me if I like them. And while the answer is no, I don’t like them, I don’t like their mournful calls and I don’t like their clumsy footfalls and how often they slam into my window and keep me from drifting off to sleep, I like how much I’ve been able to accomplish since they showed up. It’s amazing how little sleep you need to finish that design for work, with nothing but infomercials and Jackass reruns on TV and no spontaneous calls to go out for the night.