It's What Happens When You Write In March!

BarbarianKing

Knight of Narnia
Staff member
Knight of the Noble Order
When April comes
The flowers bloom.
When April's here
The springtime moon
Begins to cheer.

When April Comes
There's birds in flight.
When April's here
Lovers delight
Both far and near.

And in my heart,
And in my home
You're always dear
Sweet honeycomb
When April's here!
 
180° Turn.

This is a hard read. Please bear with me.

DWB

Going nowhere,
Driving while bleeding,
Draining the soul.
A love-hate victim
Of my own desires.

Chain smoker
In the age of quitting;
Her sins caught up
And roughed me up
And left me grieving.

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Spirit dying,
Giving up so slowly,
Cries out for shelter,
First-aid for my hope
And balm for my heart.

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Sleepless nights,
Mourning 'til dawn
The killing of a soulmate.
Stilled eyes stare back
In the rearview mirror.

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Wow. Gulp. This has never crossed my mind before with regard to you, but after seeing that poem, I can't help imagining you as Athos in "The Three Musketeers," carrying his private heartbreak with him.
 
Wow. Gulp. This has never crossed my mind before with regard to you, but after seeing that poem, I can't help imagining you as Athos in "The Three Musketeers," carrying his private heartbreak with him.
I think this was your 3rd strike because I wrote this over ten years ago so I'm not sure I carry any of this stuff anymore...which is a good thing really.
 
The Story of Ed's Torch from VODT

After thinking about it, I decided to rescue some improv stories I wrote as comical posts in other threads. I made a few changes, but here is the first one.

The following story was told to me by this Best Buy Salesperson who was pushing me to purchase their Black Tie Extended Warranty the day I bought my plasma TV. I was resisting him and told him that it doesn’t make sense to buy extended warranty on TV’s because they last a long time. Usually one replaces them only when new models or new technology replaces them. They rarely break down. He disagreed vehemently, and said he would tell me a story to illustrate his point. I think he knew (I don’t know how) that I am a Narnia fan but this is what he told me:

Story of Torch, Version 1.0

"The Torch that King Edmund found in Narnia when he returned in VODT is the replacement he got because he DID buy extended warranty when he got the first one," the salesman said.

(Pleeeeeeezzeeee look from me here).

"No seriously! Let me tell you, let me tell you.

I heard that the original torch Edmund left in Narnia was found by a couple of black dwarf brothers whose names were Trippletaunter and Slink.

Now, these were not ordinary black dwarfs. These guys were actually well... sort of self-taught engineers and master craftsmen who owned an underground forge where they made all kinds of home appliances and stuff. They sold their products at their local home improvement warehouse called The Castle Depot. In order to produce quality products, they provided employment to the most skilled of Narnian creatures. That is, until the local union took over and forced them to hire unskilled workers and pay them exorbitant salaries and retirement benefits for 8 daily hours of work with a couple of lunches and several breaks in between. This kind of arrangement pushed the small forge to the edge of bankruptcy so the dwarf brothers knew that they needed a good project in order to stay afloat financially, and they needed it fast.

To get back to the story of the torch, it goes that it was first found in some bushes by two lowly Telmarine privates. The privates, being humans and all, could not make heads and tails of the contraption when they found it for two reasons: The batteries were dead, and they were too chicken to press the obvious switch. The short conversation of the two soldiers who found it goes something like this:

"Whatchee found there Leroy?"

"Iono know, Bobby Joe, but it's shinny."

"What's it do?"

"How should I know, Bobby Joe! Do I look like a professur to ya?"

"Ow! Why ye smack me in the head with that thing for?"

"I want to see if it's as hard as it looks. But no, look, yer stupid head bent it. It's no good no more."

"Just toss it will ya? Let's go see what this new King Caspian wants, maybe there's free corn dogs."

"Ok, but I'm not getting near that leyon, aright?"

And so Leroy and Bobby Joe, not the brightest light bulbs in the Telmarine Army as you can see, tossed the torch back into the bushes just moments before Trippletaunter and Slink walked by. The dwarfs, having always a keen eye for shinny things, found it and took it back to their forge where they, for several weeks, made innumerable attempts to reverse-engineer the darn thing. They knew that this could be the sort of project that could rescue them so they tried to convert the torch into many useful things. Needless to say, they didn't succeed. However, their attempts were not a total failure.

The dwarfs did not get the torch to work again or made a useful home appliance out of it, but they succeeded in creating a little contraption that would take them a few days into the future, and a few days into the past. They called this contraption "The Escape From Today Shinny Thingy" otherwise known to most contemporary humans as a time machine. The silly dwarfs of course had this in theory only. They still needed to test "Shinny Thingy."

Test day arrived after many delays and calculations. But here is where a new problem arose. You see, Trippletaunter wanted to go to the future and Slink to the past, and they had a hard time agreeing where to go first. A few fistfights erupted due to this disagreement which caused even more delays. Finally, after many bruises and black eyes, they decided to put an extra button and label it "BOTH." They figured that this would enable them to go to the two time frames at the same time (this of course was the idea of another, not so bright, human technician that the union had forced them to employ at their forge).

Anyway, to make a very long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, story short, they tested the thing by pressing the BOTH button together.

POOF!!

They disappeared in a flash!

As soon as they were gone, the aforementioned human technician looked on his desk and there, for everyone to see, was the button labeled "RETURN", which of course the crazy employees had forgotten to install into Shinny Thingy because they were all out on their 4th break, per union rules.

After waiting for several weeks and eating all the supplies stored at the forge, all the hungry employees of Trippletaunter and Slink decided it was time to do something drastic: go to Cair Paravel and see if there were any more free Corn Dogs!"


So as you can see," finished the Best Buy guy, "this Torch that Ed got from Caspian in the new movie is a replacement that was sent to him. So it does make sense to get extended warranty in many cases. Sign here and here.”

Me: "Ok."




Stay tuned for the story of why Peter's sword glows blue, coming up soon.
 
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That was a riot--Castle Depot! And from what I know about labor unions protecting favored members from accountability, the part about the "BOTH" switch rang true amid the jesting.
 
This is going to be another short story. It's not quite finished yet, but I'll post this one part for now.

(EDIT: I hope narnia56 doesn't plagiarize my story and post it somewhere else as his/her own, as he/she did with other people's stories here on this forum. I'm watching you narnia56! Watching you!)

The Hermit

Part I

I seem to have this crazy luck of meeting weird characters that somehow know a lot about me and my interests. I don’t know how it happens but I always find them in the most unexpected places. I become instant and life-long friends with some of them. Others are in and out of my life quick as lighting but nevertheless, they leave a great impression forever. Take the next story for example.

This event happened right after the first clips of the Narnia movie, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader were being made public. One of them was the famous clip of Edmund holding what appeared to be Rhindon, which was glowing blue. Rhindon, as you know, is the name of Peter’s sword, the one he received from Father Christmas that amazing morning when he, his brother Edmund and his sisters Susan and Lucy found themselves in Narnia, long ago. I still recall all the hype that clip stirred. Fans of all ages were abuzz talking about glowing swords in Narnia and wondering what else the movie makers got completely wrong in the film. By this time everyone remembered Bilbo Baggins and Sting and inevitably, comparisons to The Lord of The Rings quickly became the talk of the forums.

It was during this hype, when opening night of the movie was still weeks away, that I took a long-planned trip to the Sierra Nevada in Northern California. The year before, my friend Francine began prodding me about taking this trip. And here I must tell you a few things about Francine.

When she was little, Francine was nicknamed Birdie because she was always doing crazy stunts to see if she could fly like a bird. Most of the stunts involved tying cardboard “wings” to her arms and jumping off the treehouse in her backyard while flapping her... er... wings. She never succeded, but she also never stopped trying. She grew up with broken ankles and ribs and maybe one or two lose screws, if you know what I mean. As she got older, she moved on to bigger, more dangerous, and crazier stunts that left me shaking my head in disbelief. Birdie was an unpredictable character. But she was a true and loyal friend and the biggest daredevil I ever knew.

Birdie one day suggested we should go retrace the mountain route taken by the luckless Donner Party (google it, as this is someone else’s story) because, as she put it, “it would be fun to see all the sky slopes the fools missed” which wasn’t a very nice thing to say about the Donner Party, but Birdie was Birdie. For a long time she excitedly talked about this trip and said that both her brother Frank (El Paco) and my girlfriend Yani should come with us.

I was very hesitant at first because I knew Birdie’s history of attempting dangerous things all the time. However, after much begging and threatening to stop being my friend, I agreed to go on this trip with two conditions: We would do it in the summer and we’ll have to ride the most comfortable RV, big enough to hold provisions that would last us three years. What with Birdie’s driving skills, El Paco’s navigational skills, Yani’s “cooking” skills, and my diagnosis of ADHD I knew that if we got lost it would take us at least that long to find our way back. Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned.

We didn’t set out on our trip until mid fall, which meant that the first snows had already fallen on our planned route and would not let up until at least next May. Then, the biggest “RV” we could afford was an old camper truck that barely fit the four of us standing up plus a few cases of Dr. Pepper, about six small cases of beef jerky, and a boxful of Doritos (Nacho Cheese flavor). And of course, a duffer like me HAD to have his Doritos with Cheeze Whiz, so I brought a few jars of that too. Why nobody thought of actually bringing real food is anyone’s guess. Yani showed up to meet us for the trip holding an inflated beach ball under her left arm. We all stared at her.

“What?” She said stopping when she noticed our incredulous stare. “What ya’all staring at?”

“A beach ball Yani? Really?” I said trying to sound as nice as possible.

“So?” she said passing right by me and tossing the ball somewhere into the truck. Then she turned to me and said in a calm and self-assured voice “We can play with it when we’re bored and pretend it’s summer.”

And none of us could think of any argument to the contrary.

By now you may be wondering what does Rhindon and a stupid trip to the Sierra Nevada have to do with each other, right? Well, hold on, they have a lot to do with each other. Ok, maybe not a lot, but there is a connection I assure you. It was during this trip that I found out that the movie people did get one thing right at least: Rhindon and the seven swords of the seven lords, do glow blue in Narnia. I’ll tell you how it happened so let’s get on with the story.

To be continued...
 
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The hermit, yes.

Ok, continues...

Part II

Birdie, Yani, El Paco and I set out for our long expected journey and after many break-downs and flats along the way, we finally made it to the Sierra Nevada. We were driving (with Birdie at the wheel) somewhere near Donner Lake and Donner Pass Road, through quiet mountain passes sprinkled with fresh fallen snow and, true to ourselves, we promptly got lost. The camper truck by this time felt stuffy and smelled of stinky cheese. El Paco blamed it on my Cheeze Whiz but we knew better. His dirty socks were all over the place.

As we go deeper and deeper and ever more lost in the mountain roads, Birdie got excited and began driving like she wanted to prove that the truck could fly off the next cliff. El Paco kept looking at his map, turning it sideways and around and saying that the main road was just around the next bend. I was trying to liven up the mood by attempting to sing a song:

“Row, row, row your... Oh LOOK! A squirrel!”

And Yani, bless her heart, wanted to stop and “cook” me some Doritos and jerky soup.

“Doritos and Jerky soup!” I almost squealed.

“What? What’s wrong with it?” she replied, obviously not amused at my reaction. “Food is food you know?” She said in a tone that showed she was not happy at all, and turned her head away.

I did not have the heart to tell her that Doritos and Jerky hardly qualified as food and that trying to cook them into a meal would probably be as unsafe as mixing unknown substances in a chemistry lab. In the end, what I feared all along happened. The truck ran out of gas and we were hopelessly lost.

When the truck came to a halt, we just sat there in complete silence for about twenty minutes. After that, we did what sensible people like us do when they find themselves lost: we blamed it on each other and began arguing. I said what everyone was thinking: El Paco had absolutely no sense of direction, and could not find North even if the sky had a huge “N” painted on. He retorted in an offended tone that I was the one not paying attention because the sky DID have a large N painted on. When I looked up, I knew he had a triumphant grin on his face when he said:

“Got ya!”

Ugh! I hate him.

Birdie, ever the daredevil, was convinced that the main road was just a short drop off of the nearby cliff. She was urging us to push the truck as fast as we could towards the edge and climb on it at the last second before the plunge.

Right.

Yani ended up in tears and said she didn’t care if we were lost. What bothered her most was that I was being mean from the very beginning when she showed up with the beach ball. And since her Doritos and jerky soup would have been wonderful, she didn’t understand why I kept saying no thank you.

After this, we didn’t talk to each other for about three hours and spent most of the time finishing the last of the Dr. Pepper and going into the woods to do our business in a hurry because it was really cold and we were not used to this rough environment.

Finally, to make it up to Yani, I decided to volunteer and hike in search of help. And here, to finally get into the story of Rhindon, I must get my friends and Yani out of it as they don’t figure much in the next part. To do that I must tell you that after I left (in the wrong direction as you will see), Yani decided to walk the short distance to the next bend and sure enough, the main road was right there! Once on the main road, they got a ride to nearby Truckee, where they hired a tow truck to bring the camper back to their hotel. There they spent the next two weeks luxuriating while waiting for the Nevada County Search and Rescue team to find me.

While my friends were being picked up on the main road, I was, once again completely lost and hiking in the opposite direction of the town towards the most desolate parts of the Sierra. Thankfully, Yani had given me a small bag with the last of the beef jerky, a half-empty jar of Cheeze Whiz, and her last Dr. Pepper. Before I left I promised her that as soon as we were back home, I would try anything (almost) that she cooked for me.

At first I tried to ration the little food I had, but the darn jerky was really tasty dipped in Cheeze Whiz so I ate it all up before nightfall and that made me thirsty so I drank the whole Dr. Pepper too. I will not go into detail about how terribly lost I was and how I spent the next few days and nights in the woods, hungry and alone. But I will tell you that after just one day wandering the mountains, all my food was gone and by then I was wishing for some Doritos and jerky soup real bad.
 
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A quick update

Part III

It was around my 4th day without food and water and I was about to collapse and possibly die when suddenly this old hermit-like figure appeared out of nowhere. He looked so haggard and wild and filthy that I thought some ghost from a nightmare had come to life and was about to get me. You can tell I had read too many books about epic fantasies and mythological, larger than life heroes when I began saying things like: What apparition is this? and Begone fiend, ‘ere your power’s end! and My doom has come to me!

If you have read those sorts of books, you’ll know that those sayings sound grand and epic there. Coming from me at this time, in the deplorable state I was, I must have sounded like a talking chipmunk. But no matter, the ghostly figure kept coming towards me, and in the midst of my delirium I thought I saw it smirk when I was saying such nonsense.

At first I tried to run away from it but like all weak fools who run from danger, I kept stumbling and falling to the ground. I was running on all fours when I tripped again. Then I was crawling, still trying vainly to get away. As there was no use in continue to do that, I gave up, stopped crawling, and tried to prepare for the end. Then a more foolish thougth came to my dehydrated brain.

I remembered that the heroes in those books, when cornered, sell their lives as dearly as possible and are killed only after they put up a mighty fight and have themselves killed several enemies before they fall. So I decided to be like those heroes and sell my life dearly too (I told you it was stupid). Once it was clear what I had to do I stopped crawling and turned around, and as I got up to fight this hermit or whatever it was that was coming towards me, I fainted.
 
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There was an author in a past generation named Shirley Jackson, who, when she was not writing horror stories, wrote humor stories which were funny because (like Bill Cosby's later comedy routines) they rang true to life. Mike, it is intended as a compliment when I say that this story of yours is like something by Shirley Jackson.
 
There was an author in a past generation named Shirley Jackson, who, when she was not writing horror stories, wrote humor stories which were funny because (like Bill Cosby's later comedy routines) they rang true to life. Mike, it is intended as a compliment when I say that this story of yours is like something by Shirley Jackson.

I will have read her work, especially the humor stories. I might learn a thing or two! :)
 
Update

Part IV

I woke up to an overpowering smell of stinky cheese. At first I almost threw up thinking I had fallen asleep on a pile of El Paco’s dirty socks. Next thing I noticed was the ghostly hermit sitting on a chair a few feet away from me, staring. My first instinct was to run away again but this time I was thinking more clearly and I realized that I was laying on something soft and warm (albeit smelly) so I figured that it was better to die here than on the hard, cold ground.

But the figure was not moving at all and only kept on staring at me. So I finally mustered the courage to ask

“Who...who are you?”

He didn’t answer and continued to stare at me for a few more minutes. Then he got up and went to an area of the room that looked sort of like a kitchen because of a frying pan and a couple of tin cups hanging from a hook by the wall. It was here that I began taking stock of my surroundings.

I noticed that I was laying on a what appeared to be a straw mattress laid on a wooden plank propped high by four tree stumps. The place was what appeared to be a wooden cabin with a low wooden ceiling and a dirt floor. The place was a mess. There were dirty clothes and boots all over and nothing seemed to be in order. I couldn’t help thinking about my old college dorm not long ago and hoped that that was the only thing I had in common with this hermit guy.

A short time later he came back with a steaming bowl of something and finally spoke to me with a gruff but calm voice:

“You need to drink this,” he said quietly. “You’re too dehydrated and weak to try to get up.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just said “Thank you.” But then I remembered Yani so I asked him, “This isn’t... like... Doritos and jerky soup... right?”

“Are you insane? I haven’t made that in a long time,” he sighed. “Been too long since my jerky ran out.”

Yani would probably love this guy.

I burned my tongue trying to drink the whole thing from the bowl at once so I slowed down. I thought it was milk as it had the consistency of milk, but it was sort of bitter tasting. However, I was hungry so I slowly finished the whole thing.

“Warm goat’s milk,” said the hermit. “It’s a shock at first for those who are not used to it but it will help you.”

“Where did you get goat’s milk?” I asked.

He spoke in short, sort of monotonous sentences. “My goat is just outside,” he said. “Right by the door. Gotta keep an eye on her. Too many dumb beasts in this country.”

“Is that why the stinky cheese smell?”

“No,” he said he said with a mocking smile, “that would be my boots.”

El Paco would also get along with this guy really well.

By this time, like you I suppose, I had too many questions, but I think warm goat’s milk has a natural narcotic effect because I was feeling sleepy again and could barely keep my eyes open. Before I fell asleep I was able to ask,

“How did you know about the goat’s milk and what do you mean by ‘this country.’ Where are you from?”

“Goat’s milk is very common in Narnia.” he said.

“The whatta wa...?” I managed to mumble right before I passed out again.
 
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