Unfinished stuff

Okay, I'll admit it.

I just wanted to post something so that I could reassure myself that one day, I will in fact get back here and make more posts. So have something that could maybe go somewhere more than where it is, but probably won't. I'm working with another New Orleans story at the moment, but it's been slow going.

Still, here's something.

Confrontation

Deep in the heart of the city there are two men who are about to fight. They are in an alleyway off of the main drag, and the night is cool and growing cooler, so that steam wafts up from the sewers. It has recently rained, so the one guttering light sparkles on the ground, casting strange shadows on the scene. The two soon-to-be combatants could not be more dissimilar. One is of medium height, with slicked back blond hair that may or may not be the result of artificial coloring. He is clean shaved, and he is very obviously angry. Everything about his posture is aggressive, from the way his fists are clenched to the way his jaw has tightened. He is positively vibrating with anger, and rocks back and forth on his heels, ready to fight.

His opponent is a mountain of a man who seems positively bored. He leans against the wall of the alley, with the slightest hint of a smile on his face. One hand is in his pocket, the other taps out some unknown beat on his thigh as he waits to see what is going to happen next. The dampness of the wall is starting to bother him, so he shifts slightly from time to time, but beyond that he seems perfectly willing to merely allow his antagonist to work himself into a violent frenzy.

The shorter man has by this time very nearly gotten to the point where his opponent's casual posture and seeming disinterest in the entire affair is enough to get him to attack. He takes a step forward, ready to begin the fight...and then he stops. Something holds him back, and for reasons he is entirely uncertain of, he begins to feel afraid, terribly afraid. The taller man has not moved, nor has any part of his expression changed from the polite smile he has worn since walking outside of the bar.

It's the eyes. They stare back, and behind the passive gaze there's a flicker of something dark and angry behind it. It becomes suddenly clear to the shorter man that this man that he is about to fight has been toying with him the whole time. Behind those eyes there is a madness, a monster that is struggling against its leash. That's why he'd been smiling. It wasn't to provoke him, it was a smile of anticipation. A chance to become, for a moment, that monster that was otherwise kept safely hidden and controlled. To cut loose and indulge all the dark urges normally kept secret.

The taller man has not moved from his position against the wall, but his opponent suddenly finds himself apologizing, stuttering and quickly fleeing the scene. The one remaining sighs, and puts his other hand in his pocket. For a moment, he shudders and shakes his head as if to clear it. Then he too exits the alleyway, on his way to another bar. Someone's bound to want to fight him sooner or later.

Rubidoux

The Cold War Kids have motivated me to finally get around to writing something about New Orleans and magic and all the fiddly bits in between. So here's the beginnings of it, because while I think this would do for an introduction to something that I haven't gotten around to writing yet, I also think it stands pretty well on its own. We'll have to see if I do anything else with it.

Nawlans

It was common knowledge that to go to New Orleans was to invite trouble upon the heads of the unwary. It was even more common knowledge that this fact did not stop legions of the unwary from going down to the city every year. This was almost a problem—almost, because even though so many unwary came down, many became wary with alarming speed once they arrived. New Orleans tended to do that to people; it was part of its charm, or allure, or whatever you'd wish to call it.

Much of it came from the music, of course. The blues, jazz, these were forms that found a home quickly in the streets and small, smoke filled clubs that litter the New Orleans landscape. Tiny restaurants serving what they all claimed was the best damned gumbo in the city sat comfortably alongside derelict apartment buildings and old, run down townhouses. The city was alive—not in the way New York was alive with the pulse of its people, or London with its ancient history and forgotten monuments—no, New Orleans was alive in the way it collected filth and dirt; the humidity and smell of the nigh-constant party that now takes place ever since people got too lazy to figure out the precise date of Mardi Gras and decided to hold it year round. It smelled of people, their sweat and their blood. It smells of magic, if you happened to be sensitive to such a thing.

The tourists generally were not, but those who'd grown up in the city knew. Some even went beyond merely knowing what magic smelled like, and knew how to make it work for them. The old voodoo priests in silk top hats, pinched from dumpsters and castoffs, who kept their true names secret, walked down into the markets looking for chicken heads and vials of blood bought from questionable sources and obtained through even more questionable methods. Sorcerers lounged in coffee houses, tracing runes of power into the spilled sugar to scry out the location of some essential component that would make their ascents to power complete—or would aid another in his ascension to power, assuming the price were right.

Those who desired to become powerful yet lacked the knack for it could often be seen knocking on doors that were invariably opened by shifty looking individuals. If he had the right payment, and if he made his case, and if whoever lived inside whichever building he went into was in a good mood, then a deal could be done. Other times there would be a brief shout, followed by silence, and a little while later someone would wake up in an alleyway wondering why his wallet was missing. New Orleans police filed an incredible amount of mugging reports every year, but not one of the older members of the force ever expressed surprise over the amount. Indeed, the entire police force had more than a little inkling as to what went on in the odder corners of their city, and had even more of an inclination to let it happen.

It would not do to offend the sort of people who would be disturbed by any sort of crackdown.

A New Month

That means a new post! It's been pretty quiet over here, I'll admit. I shall try to make an effort to update this as much as I seem to update the CPPA (which if you haven't joined, I'm very disappointed in you and will continue to be disappointed in you until you join).

So here, have a story I wrote!

Endings

When I was younger—say in my late teens, early twenties, somewhere thereabouts—I hated the idea of stories ending. Stories were not supposed to end, because when stories ended I couldn't be with those characters any more, save in revisits of previous events. Revisiting an old book is still something I love to do these days, but a sequel, now there's where I'd always get excited. A chance to see what an old character was doing now that the problems from the first story had been resolved.

I think that's why I loved mythology so much, because a character from one story would inevitably pop up in another, and then another, and then another. But even these characters would eventually die, or merely be forgotten. I followed the path of Hercules through all of his mythological exploits and was crushed to discover that even he died in a story, struck down by his own hand, more or less. The heroes and gods had a shelf life—the Norse gods knew what would bring them down, and waited for it until it came, the Greek gods were replaced by Roman gods, which were in turn replaced by the Christian God, who, I fear, doesn't have much time left before the Science God steps in and replaces him.

It was good, therefore, to discover authors like Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman brought the gods back and gave them new adventures, new things to do. Unfortunately not even they could restore the old gods to their former glory, and that problem, the problem of stories ending, would continue to nag at the edges of my mind.

It got to the point where I would refuse to say goodbye to people I'd met, even if I knew full well I'd never see them again. I could not bear to admit to myself that the story was over, not even when I fell in love and (just as quickly, I fear) out of love with a young girl in a math class (or somewhere, I do not recall her well at all).

Stories end, and you no longer can see what the characters are doing with themselves. Some authors took the easy way out and merely ensured that their characters were all dead by the time the story ended, so that there was never any doubt as to what they were doing once the book was over: they were mouldering, that's what they were doing. It would be silly to ask after them, because the dead don't talk (at least not most of the time).

My distaste for endings continued for some time, and eventually grew so large that I began to refuse to finish anything. Movies, books, games, all were placed to the side where they could never end. I got into a fair amount of trouble over it all, especially when it came to books. I was supposed to read books for class, and I never finished them. Not once.

I determined that no matter what happened, my story would not end. The rest of the world could bring their stories to a close, but I would be someone who would never stop. It would be difficult (or more accurately, impossible), but failure was for other people.

And so it came to pass that late one night I found myself walking home, when some street toughs stabbed me in the heart and stole my wallet. I would have given them the wallet without a fight, but I suspect they got carried away. I died, but because I was not willing to end my story, I appear to have stuck around. I have stuck around for the past two hundred years.

So long as my story never ends, I will continue to stick around. As I'm the one in charge of ending my own story, I can merely walk away and leave the whole thing incom—