A Mind in Motion

**Sometimes my dreams deliver awesome, twisted, stories for me to enjoy. This is one I had this morning** The old heavy rusted iron door unexpectedly slammed shut behind. Whirling around, lump of fear rising in her throat, she reached out for the handle in the darkness consuming her vision and tugged. But the door refused to move. “Michael,” she called out shakily, hoping he had heard the door close from where he had been just meters down the hall. “Michael,” she called again, louder, her tone growing frantic. How could he have not heard it? She called his name a third time, shouting it as she banged her palm on the door, the sound echoing around her. As the cacophony faded though, she was met with only silence. Shit! This had been a stupid idea. A very, very stupid idea. ‘Let’s go check out the abandoned haunted attraction on old man Miller’s farm’ , Michael had said. ‘ My dad’ll take us, even chill in the truck outside in case anybody else comes around’ , he...

*****As I have stated before, any stories I attempt to have publish, but do not succeeded in doing, will end up here. This is a two part series where I was to tell the same story from two different perspectives--making them, in the end, two different but intertwined stories. The first is titled - "It All Ended With A Bang" It all ended with a bang. But it had started with a boom. When his tiny apartment had rattled so hard he could hear it—as well as feel it—over the music blaring in his headphones, he had wheeled back from the multiple monitors at his desktop and had shuffled curiously to the large window in his studio apartment. There, squaring off like combatants in an arena, was a patrol officer and some shaggy haired guy on the street below. The lights from the officer’s motorcycle flickered off of his building and the neighboring one across the street in a shutter effect, making the two men move as if they were in slow motion—each punch, kick and shove illu...

     It was the way the wind blew in that told her something was wrong.      Lying there in her bed, the cats asleep in their various play boxes on the floor, the tv casting a soft light--its screen saver slowly bouncing around, the summer air pushed violently through her opened window--past heavy curtains--and rushed along her exposed skin--the force of it whistling in the still of night.      Her breath hitched and her skin prickled with goosebumps, the atmosphere around her suddenly charged with foreboding. Ears straining in the darkness, heart thumping hard between her breastbone and the mattress beneath, she listened to the trees rustling outside--garbage cans clanging against their restraints--not a single car passing down the streets.      She felt isolated and hyper aware.      This was the kind of moment one expected a rapping to occur on their door--having never heard someone, or some...

     She stared up at the colossus, it's dark metal almost translucent in the poring rain, while thunder crashed around them. Inky silhouettes of the surrounding woods danced and jerked about her periphery, flashes of lightening flickering like wild fireflies between them to cast eerie shutters of chaos and horror.      But she was unafraid.      Here, standing sentry in an abandoned farm field was their salvation.      She had heard the stories, from her parents, her school friends, even her teachers, of the mysterious mechanical giants who had once--long ago--faced the hoard and saved humanity.      They had not fallen from the sky, nor had risen from the ground below.      No, they had assembled themselves, one by one, unseen in abandoned warehouses--spontaneous creation in the absence of a creator--she had once heard it described. No one knew why. The magnificent creatures o...

It was an unsettling creature. This Unhallowed Noun that had been spouted at her in reverent tones while in the midst of such vile fledglings. Compared to them, it was the darkest and most disturbing of them all. It crawled under her skin like a parasitic lech, nestling itself deep into her bones, whispering accusations of truth in her mind that she didn't know how to acknowledge or even defend against. She had glowered at the ghastly thing, bold and proud as it crawled towards her, its long claws and sharp teeth bared intently. It chittered wildly as if it expected to share in conversation with her, its large obsidian eyes gleaming joyfully. When she remained mute, however, unmoved from her spot among the thicket--her fellow travels circled protectively on either side of her with quaking knees--it tilted its head, regarding her curiously, before pushing the word out vehemently. Mother. It was bitter on her tongue to even repeat. What kind of torment was this? To r...

They danced. In the haunting stillness of the abandoned house, they twirled, dipped, swayed and caressed like time had forgotten them. Shades of red, black and amber skin flickered between ethereal blue flames while soft--echoing music guided their whispering footsteps throughout the darkened house, filling the shadows that hid from the swelling moon consuming the skyline out broken window panes with whispers of ‘forever my love’ and ‘until our souls are born again’ . They danced. Their sunken eyes boring into each other with burning looks of longing, their ashen hearts thrumming with memories of stolen moments from a lifetime ago, and their transparent fingers gripping, tugging and digging into withered flesh and aging cloth with desperation as they moved like an endless foray. They knew not the state of their decay, their visions seared in a loop of enduring youthful ignorance that swung them like a pendulum between the living and the dead. For him...

     She found it haunting her first in the rhythmic footfalls of the old mare beneath her as they trekked under the fluttering eyes of the stars.       Tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump..      It was like an echo with a string tethered to a hook in her chest, tugging and pulling at her, twisting her around in her saddle looking for that familiar sound.      But it escaped her sight, ghostly in the silence, trailing them, whispering like a gentle breeze each time she turned her back on it to continue forward.      Tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump...      Then, like shadow spirits, it crept upon her in the night when the need to rest weighed her down until she could not longer resist. It churned the colors of her dreams--shifting muted skies to brilliant shades of blue and sands to honey and wheat--like eyes and hair she could never forget.      Tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump...