Ok, so I never quite got the hang of the longer stuff - I tried, with not all that much success and being the lazy arse that I am I left it alone and did more short stuff (poetry for want of a better word). Until recently. I got into an email conversation with a friend at work and she was telling me that she had to make up stories on the spot for her little girl based around random things. I jokingly said it didn't sound so hard...and so she sent me a reply with three words at the bottom 'woman, bike, dog' - challenge 1...
To my surprise, the resulting (very) short tale popped into my head pretty much complete, I know it's kind of generic but given that it got done during the day at work around phone calls and meetings I don't think it's horrible.
So I guess I'm saying be gentle (for the many reasons above ) and if there's any interest I'll post up challenge 2 (they get longer and take longer each time btw, challenge 3 is currently about 6000 words...
So then, challenge 1:
It didn't hurt as much as she thought it would. She hadn't ever really had much in the way of a pain threshold; hadn't ever really been hurt come to think of it, not really. This was different though, this was a whole world of different and it hadn't been as bad as she'd expected.
If he'd had those plastic ties; her mind was fidgeting, scrabbling around for something, anything else to think about, to 'do' while she worked. Anything else, not quite - always the negative first wasn't it, never the upside? So why the glass half empty, he hadn't had the plastic ties had he? No, and the rope wasn't up to much either.
She dug herself with the glass again and her mind went mercifully clear as she concentrated on 'don't'. Don't cry out, don't drop the piece and don't, for the sake of all that is holy, stop. With an unpleasant smile that she wouldn't have recognised as her own if she'd been able to see it she started up again.
He wasn't very good at this. Again with the negative but she was deeply grateful. Grateful for the rope not the plastic, old rope not new and perhaps most of all for the water, or more to the point, the glass it was in. The hood, an old and not overly clean pillowcase as it turned out, had been pretty straightforward. Even with her hands behind her she was still flexible enough, god bless that barbie bitch on the workout video after all, to bring her legs up and pin a section between her knees. She lost some hair in the deal but beggars and choosers as someone had said.
She had been surprised how bright it was initially, she had convinced herself it was night but then she thought she'd heard that time sense was the first thing to go. There was just the one window, high up on the wall facing her. Too high a voice in her head had whispered. She'd looked around for something to stand on and that was when she'd seen the glass of water. It wasn't immediately obvious, there was no glowing arrow pointing at it, no sign saying 'break in case of kidnap'. It was just a glass of water. In fact, her first thought had been that she was thirsty, followed closely by how was she going to get to the glass given her current situation?
When it finally dawned on her she had closed her eyes and sat, utterly still for as long as she could, listening. She was trying to remember the sounds from before, from the hood. Had there been any, if so, what? She was underground, the high window, the bare concrete floor and the rough set of stairs leading up to the only door had pretty much confirmed that. Had there been footsteps, conversation, anything? She couldn't remember. The glass was to her right, sat on a crate, she shuffled herself round, half hopping on her backside and had to stifle a laugh with just a little to much crazy in it. Slipping the toe of her right boot through a gap between the slats she eased back. The crate was either empty or had very little in it as it tilted easily, the glass following the motion a moment later it's contents hitting the floor just before the glass itself. It made mercifully little noise but she still sat there looking up, waiting for a reaction, the sound of a chair pushed back from a table, of footsteps coming across the floor to where the door was. There was nothing.
She'd known which piece she'd wanted almost immediately, it was from the bottom of the glass and so was thicker, with a wicked looking curved edge that glittered at her where it had broken. She scraped at it with her heel and it spun over the floor towards her. She cut herself once trying to pick it up and then proceeded to do so again moving it into position. It was sharp though and the cuts were clean, she could feel the wetness more than the pain to begin with, then the dull throbs began. She worked.
He hadn't locked the door.
She actually didn't believe it to begin with and thought her hand had slipped on the handle because of the blood but the door cracked open the slightest amount before she caught it and actually closed it again in her nervousness. Imagine the irony that little voice almost crooned in her head, if it was on a latch before and you've just locked it. Panic slammed into her at this and she whipped her hand away from the handle as though it had burnt her. Shut up she spat at the little voice, no reply. Get a grip she thought to herself and actually giggled as she looked at the partial bloody handprint on the door handle. The door opened again and she squeezed up to the tiny slice of light, more windows up here, still day, she was trying to bend her vision past the edges of the door and frame, trying to see all of the room. Looking for him.
It was a fairly normal looking room, dining table on the far side, sofa and possibly an armchair in the space in front of the door. Someone could be sat in the chair or asleep on the sofa, laid out on it. She couldn't tell. Where was she going to go though, back down the stairs? Easing the door further open, praying for silence, pressing herself into the gap, forcing herself through the smallest possible gap. She is completely silent, on her toes, every muscle wound uncomfortably taut. She doesn't actually cry out but she can't help the sharp intake of breath as her hand tightens on the piece of glass; even partly wrapped in a torn off sleeve it still bites greedily into her palm. She freezes and looks around for the source of the noise. Outside, it was outside. It wasn't in here, with her, she was ok, she repeated this to herself in an effort to get her legs moving again. Finally they did and she slipped fully into the room, eyes hunting everywhere for a door, for another person.
He was on the sofa. Her legs stopped again and she had to concentrate to keep them from folding under her. She had stepped just far enough into the room to see around one end of the sofa and as she did so she saw the top of his head. He was balding, what hair he had left looked lank and seemed to hang together in strands. She couldn't move her legs, they weren't hers anymore. She leant. Inch by inch she could see more of him, he was facing away from her and the mound of his belly sank him into the sofa. She swayed back, almost overbalanced and fell over backwards. His trousers were round his thighs. There was a limit to what she could deal with today and that, she decided, was beyond it. Whether as a result of the visual or the thought of what that visual meant for her if she stayed, her legs were back and she used them. She backed away from the sofa, eyes never leaving the back of the head on the sofa. She jumped as she edged into one of the chairs around the dining table and at that point her nerve broke. She turned and gave up all pretence of quiet as she slammed into the back door, fumbled at the handle and half kicked the door open. She didn't look back. She stumbled onto a rotting porch and missed the first step, as she sprawled into the dirt thinking 'I'm out, I'm out', the little voice spoke up again, it sounded like a scolded child, a smug, scolded child. 'There was a noise from outside wasn't there?'.
Edward 'Eddie' Johns wasn't going to be any more trouble to Clare Brooks, or to anyone else for that matter. It was a heart attack. A big one. He was not a small man and he'd done very little to offset the burgers, the cigarettes and the booze over the last three decades. If it wasn't the physical exertion of grabbing the girl off her bike and bundling her into the van that had tipped him over the edge, then his vivid thoughts of what he was going to do to her certainly had. The first paramedic into the house had looked at 'Eddie' and shouted back to his partner in the yard 'this one went out having a good time!'
Her head had bounced off the ground when she fell, she hadn't got her hands up in time. She could already hear the low rumble as her teeth sank into her tongue. 'What's a little more blood?' she thought to herself, the crazy from earlier was back and had brought friends. The rumble got louder, turned into a growl and she rolled to her left instinctively as the growl became a bark. She desperately tried to orient herself as she lay there, her head still swimming from it's recent meet and greet with the ground. The dog was on her before she'd managed it though and she dragged herself to one side as it snapped long yellowed teeth at where her face had been. She was seeing everything in slow motion, feeling everything in acute detail. The rocks digging into her back as she thrashed around, the dirt sliding around her heels as they scrambled for purchase. The dog was on top of her, she could feel it's weight heavy on her, the nails on it's paws peeling skin from her stomach, her chest. It was snapping at her face repeatedly, it's teeth crashing together, drool hanging in ropey streams and flicking around as it followed her frenzied movements. Something flashed to her right as she twisted her head that way, avoiding another vicious lunge. She was somehow still holding the piece of glass. She brought her right arm up and in with as much force as she could muster and felt a primal satisfaction as it hammered into the side of the dog.