Thread: I Don't Know What to Call This

"It was a dark and stormy night on the Bering Sea. Lightning struck the waves and glanced from cloud to cloud like a loosed Jack Russell Terrier after a three-month stint in a full body cast, brilliantly lighting the roiling water like a flashbulb of electrifying intensity, or even just a camera flash, only faster, pushing the darkness back into its hole just for the instant it crackled. Thunder rolled its threatening but innocuous symphony, echoing in the trenches of the ocean's tumultuous surface just exactly as a ping pong ball would bounce down a long, dark alleyway where a lecherous, rather malnourished man waits, glittering knife in hand, for the young boy to chase his ball into the darkness. Yes, that is exactly what the thunder was like."

"Are there going to be Shrieking Eels? Because I would really like some notice if there are going to be Shrieking Eels," plied the old man listening to this sultry tale of weather's romance.

"Hush, Uncle Bo, there are no Shrieking Eels. That is another story entirely, and William Goldman would quite possibly not really like it very much if I borrowed that element of his masterpiece for my own telling. Now let me continue. We were just getting to the first character."

"Anyway, you get the idea about the stormy part. It was also very dark. Dark as the eyes of a Great White shark, or a giant squid, or a Barbie doll. Well, not a Barbie doll, but more a sort of traditional sort of doll, with those dark buttons for eyes, you know the ones. The darkness was thick, and encroaching, and leering, and somewhat voyeuristic, as most darkness is. Why do you think it comes up to watch while married couples-"

"Ah, finally the good stuff!"

"If you don't quit interrupting, Uncle, I'm going to leave, and then you'll be all alone with that matronly nurse who wants to bathe you. Do I make myself abundantly clear? As in like crystal decanter, sort of clear? I'll do it, you know I will, you lecherous old fart."

The slim old man, grown thin from years of Ensure through a straw, shrank back into his armchair. He did not want the matronly nurse to bathe him. She always tried to scrub his bits too hard, and her hands were rough from decades of cleaning and wielding that horrible, horrible scrubbing brush. Bo nodded, letting his nephew (who wasn't really his nephew at all, but we may or may not get to that a little bit later. It depends whether or not it comes up again, we'll see) continue unchallenged.

"Where was I? Oh, yes, the darkness. It was very intense, frightening in its intensity actually, and in some spots, where even the lightning was afraid to venture, even just the little leftover tendrils, it lived. It had lived for years. Or, well, it seemed like years. Because really it had only been something like around ten hours or so, because it was still autumn and the sun still came up. Anyway, that's not actually relevant. What is relevant is the small boat that thrashed this way and that, floundering in the bullying, smashing waves much like a flounder flounders on the butcher's block just before its head is chopped, rendering it a meal instead of a little animal to feel sorry for.

"In the boat there was a man and a dog. The man was dead, which really made him a corpse of a man, and the dog was not, which made him the lone survivor. The dog we shall call Jerry, even though that was not his name, but since the only man who knew his name is now dead, a corpse, we will just have to make do. Jerry was just now having to make a really very tough sort of decision for a dog. It had been over a week since his owner had fed him, or even moved, actually, and Jerry was beginning to get very exceedingly hungry. He really did love his owner, and was quite exceptionally loyal, but the corpse that had recently—give or take a week—been his trusted master was really starting to smell incredibly appetizing.

"So appetizing was the scent, in fact, even dampened and muted by the endless rain—I did mention the rain didn't I? No? Well, yes, it was raining, too. Quite common in storms, I think—and splashing salt water, and so terrible Jerry's hunger, that he was just about to finally take the first of many much anticipated bites, when a great crash and a subsequent, and very loud, rending rent the air. It made itself noticed even above the never-ending crashing and slapping noises of the waves, the booming exclamations of the thunder, and the rumbling of poor Jerry's stomach.

"The boat had just landed atop a large rock in the sea, you see, and that rending was the rock, which was sharp, you see, tearing a great rent in the hull of the boat. So great was the force that the two (the boat and the rock, that is, not Jerry and his master's corpse) collided with each other with, in fact, that Jerry's master's unknowing corpse was flung far out to the port (which is the left) and lost forever. Jerry himself was somehow flung right the opposite direction, which was starboard (that is right, which is logical, since it is, last I checked, the opposite of left), and into the briny depths of the forming trench.

"Much to the poor Labrador Retriever's surprise, though, it was not sea that he found his ever-so-suddenly-fortunate paws touching, but stone! For the boat had crept nearer and nearer to the shore, and the rock upon which it met its inevitable demise was, in actual point of fact, only one of many at the base of a large, looming cliff. This cliff was so large, so looming, that it defies description by either of these terms, and instead I feel compelled to simply note that this cliff, or cliffs as they were in actuality, were insane. Insanely tall, insanely craggy, insanely wide, insanely impenetrable, insanely unclimbable—especially for the four-legged canine at their foot! In short, pretty utterly insane. They might, in fact, even be called Cliffs of Insanity, if one were not afraid of copyright infringement or other-"

"I have to use the bathroom," interrupted a small, wizened elderly man sitting in the group of armchairs next to the ones occupied by Uncle Bo and his visitor.

"That's it! I'm going. I can't stand these damned interruptions any longer! I will come back next week to finish the story, Uncle Bo."

But Uncle Bo was already fast asleep, a small trail of chocolate-flavored Ensure slowly oozing from the corner of his slack mouth.

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Edit: I'll be posting random short writings here, most of which will be posted elsewhere first, probably, so they may not be in order.