Don't Tell (Revisisted)

This is a piece I wrote a couple years ago, and I've been meaning to make some major changes to it, so I finally decided to get around to it. It's probably not completely done yet, there's still a few things I know I should change, and also I'll probably continue to do some minor fine-tuning still. Anyways, here's where it is for now:

Don’t Tell

=====“What’re you talking about?” Cory asks him.
=====“Do you remember what I fucking told you?” Damon hisses, and grabs Cory by his left shoulder.
=====“I….I…” Cory stutters. He tries to pull back from Damon’s grip, but his hand tightens around Cory’s shoulder. It hurts, his nails are digging into it.
=====“I told you not to tell nobody what you saw you little shit!” Damon’s yelling now.
=====“I didn’t!” Cory says, he’s shaking. “I didn’t tell nobody, I swear Damon!”
=====“Oh yeah?” Damon asks, and Cory can see his hand reach into his sweatshirt pocket. It comes back out; a gun’s in it.
“I didn’t tell, I swear, please, I didn’t! I didn’t!” Cory screams, he’s flailing around, trying to escape Damon’s grip.
=====Damon holds the cold barrel of the gun to Cory’s sweat-soaked head. “I told you not to tell, just one damn thing. I told you I’d kill you.”
=====“Damon, please!” Cory pleads.
=====“Damn fool,” Damon says, and he pulls the trigger.

=====Cory wonders why he always has to do this. He’s hunched over under the weight of his backpack, his feet move reluctantly over the cracked and worn sidewalk. He lifts one hand from the strap of his backpack to itch the back of his head; it always itches a few days after he shaves it; when the black stubble is barely visible on his coffee skin. He’s always hated walking alone, he wishes his mom could be there, wishes she could walk by him and hold his hand; wishes she could walk between him and everyone he passed to shield him like she always does when they walk around here.
The old man who’s always on the middle of this sidewalk asks him for some change, lifting his arm sheathed in a torn jacket to raise the old Styrofoam coffee cup in his constantly shaking hand, the few coins in it clanking. “Sorry,” Cory says as he passes him, he doesn’t bother to respond.
=====But it’s not the beggars or the addicts (or both—most the time they’re the same) that bother Cory the most, but the men on almost every street corner in this neighborhood. They stand, or sit on the stoops, wearing loose shirts or jackets and jeans. Even as Cory walks down the block towards the corner at the end he can see a few people pass them, two old black men in threadbare jackets and pants stop to exchange crumpled bills for a few small glass vials: Cory’s seen it enough times to notice them moving between their hands, even though they try to do it discretely.
=====Cory finally comes to the corner, and by the time he gets there both of the old men are already gone; they have what they came for. He walks by the men on the corner—it’s hard to call them men though, two are only a few years older than Cory. One of the younger ones sitting on a stoop says “red caps, ten a piece” as Cory passes, he’ll say it to anyone, young or old, black or white, rich or poor, it doesn’t matter to him. Cory doesn’t open his mouth; he keeps walking on.
=====His mom knows as well as anyone else that she shouldn’t let Cory walk home alone. Cory thinks about when these walks alone started. He can’t remember for sure, but he thinks it’s probably when his dad left, when his mom started having to work late. That’s not when it started he realizes though, Damon used to walk him home. He’d always come pick Cory up at school, Damon’s school was a couple blocks away. It’s been a while since those times though. At least a few months. Now Damon never walks him home, even though their mom thinks he does; Damon told Cory he had to keep telling her so, they both know she doesn’t want Cory walking home alone. Now Damon always comes back a couple hours later than him, probably hanging out with his older high school friends, Cory thinks, doesn’t have time for twelve year olds any more.
=====He misses those walks with Damon. They’d talk about school, mom, anything on their minds. It’s been a while since they’ve talked like that though, Cory’s not sure why. Damon’s been around less, he comes home just a bit before mom does, and he’s always up in his room or out with friends at night. But it’s more than that. He’s more quiet, never talks about school and his teachers and friends at dinner anymore, doesn’t hang out with Cory, watching TV or playing video games or just being there with him like he used to. Sometimes Cory tries to talk to him still, once he asked him about why he comes home late. He yelled, “Mind your own damn business!” and shoved Cory in the shoulder. He never used to shove him like that; Cory hasn’t asked him again since.
It’s as he’s thinking this though, that he hears it: the sickening crack.
=====He turns around, and sees two figures shrouded in black hooded sweatshirts holding metal bats. One of the men from the group on the corner he just passed is lying on the ground, clutching his shoulder. The two that are still standing lunge at the hooded attackers, trying to get the jump on them, but two swings later and they join their fallen companion. The bats rain down on them, blow after blow, dull thuds and loud cracks and blood splattering all over sidewalk and the brick walls of the building by them.
=====“Serves you right for being on our fucking corners, bitch!” one of the standing figures shouts at the fallen bodies, punctuating it by raising the bat over his head and smashing it into one of their backs—Cory thinks he can hear a rib breaking.
=====Cory is about to turn and run when one of the figures notices him. He looks at Cory, his crimson-coated bat suspended mid-swing. Their eyes meet. They freeze.
=====The second figure turns. “Come on, we gotta get the fuck outta here!”
=====The first figure remains still for a second or two, his gaze still pointed towards Cory. “Listen, don’t tell nobody nothin’ about this Cory,” he yells, his voice just barely wavering, “you do…I swear I’ll fucking kill you. You hear me?”
=====Cory remains silent, his mouth dry; he can’t open it to say anything.
=====“You hear me?!”
=====“Damon!” the other one screams.
=====“Shut the fuck up, I’m coming man!” Damon shouts back, and the two run off around the corner and out of sight.
=====Cory remains still for a few seconds, unable to move, unable to tear his stare from where his brother had stood a moment before and the three bodies. They writhe around on the ground, moaning in pain, holding varies body parts. One is crying as he holds a shattered kneecap. Finally, Cory takes his eyes away from the corner. He runs all the way home, his eyes darting around. His hand searches his pocket for his key as he goes up three worn wooden steps to his front door. He rams the key into the hole, turns it quickly, and bolts inside. The door slams shut behind him, and he locks it. He walks the last dozen feet to the couch and collapses onto it, panting for breath.
=====Cory stares at the black of the TV screen, unblinking for a while, until he finally thinks to turn the TV on. He starts to search the ground around the couch with his hand for the remote, when he hears the sound of a key rattling in the door. Must be Damon, he thinks. The door creaks open, and he can hear footsteps coming towards him.
=====“Cory, Damon, where’ve you guys gone off too?” Cory can hear his mother’s voice say from the kitchen. That’s odd, he thinks, she’s normally not home until at least two or three hours after he does, and it can’t have been more than a half an hour at most. He glances down at his black watch: 6:17, its been three hours.
=====“I’m in here mom!” Cory yells.
=====His mom walks into the room, and pauses in the doorway, one hand on the doorframe. “What are you up to?” she asks.
=====“Just about to watch some TV”
=====“Was school good?”
=====“Yeah, it was fine.”
=====“That’s good honey. I’m gonna go make us some dinner.” She takes her hand of the doorframe and turns to leave the room, but pauses to ask, “You know where Damon is?”
=====Cory pauses for a minute, the image of Damon standing there with the blood-stained bat in his hand flashes through his head. Don’t tell nobody. “No, I don’t, he’s probably just off with some friends and forgot what time it is or something.”
=====“That boy better be back soon is all I have to say” Cory’s mom says, and walks off into the kitchen. He can hear her turn on the stove and hears some pots rattling. He picks the remote off the floor and turns the TV on.
=====Cory’s mom is still in the kitchen, and the credits are rolling for the show Cory had been watching when the door creaks open again.
=====“Damon, that you?” His mom shouts from the kitchen.
=====“Yeah.” He says.
=====“Where you been at?”
=====“Just hanging out with some friends, sorry I’m late, none of us had no watches.”
=====“It’s okay this time Damon, dinner still ain’t ready. But you better not make this a habit, you hear me?”
=====“Yeah, I hear you.” He says, and goes up the stairs to his room. About a half hour later Cory hears his mom calling them for dinner. He turns the TV off and walks into the kitchen, his mom’s just putting the dinner out on the table. Damon comes down from his rooms a few seconds later and sits next to Cory in his chair.
=====“So, how was your day Damon?” their mom asks as she sits down.
=====“Good.” He says, popping open a can of coke and taking a sip.
=====“Any tests or anything?”
=====“Nah.” He takes another sip. “Or, yeah, just one in math.”
=====“How’d it go?”
=====“I don’t really wanna talk about it,” he says, his eyes fall to his plate.
=====“Not again boy, I told you you gotta start working harder again.”
=====“I know.”
=====“What’s been happenin’ with you Damon, you always used to do so well in school?”
=====“Look, can we just not talk about this right now?” His eyes remain stuck to his plate. A minute goes by with the sound of forks and knives on plates, of mouths chewing.
=====“How was your day Cory?”
=====“It was fine.”
=====“That’s good.”
=====“Hey mom, can I be excused?” Damon asks.
=====“But you haven’t eaten half the food on your plate.”
=====“I ain’t too hungry.”
=====She pauses. “Fine, go ahead.”
=====“Thanks,” he says, and puts his plate next to the sink before leaving.
=====Cory keeps looking down at his plate, his fork’s in his hand but he hasn’t eaten a bite in a few minutes. “Hey mom, I’m not hungry either. Can I be excused too?”
=====She sighs. “Yeah, fine, go ahead Cory.”
=====“Thanks.” He brings his plate to the sink and walks to the door. “I’m really tired, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”
=====“But its only—“ his mom pauses in mid sentence to look at the clock on the counter next to the sink, “—8:07.”
=====“Yeah, I know, just tired though.” He walks out and up the stairs to his room. He goes on his tiptoes down the hallway past Damon’s room. When he gets into his room he flips the lights switch off, gets in his bed, and pulls the blanket around himself. After trying for a while, he finally manages to get to sleep.

=====Cory is suddenly jerked awake by the sound of his door opening slowly. A hooded form walks up to his bed, in the dark he can’t see who it is. “Do you remember what I told you Cory?” he can hear the figure say. It’s Damon; he can tell from his voice.
=====“What’re you talking about?” Cory asks him.
=====“Do you remember what I fucking told you?” Damon hisses, and grabs Cory by his left shoulder.
=====“I….I…” Cory stutters. He tries to pull back from Damon’s grip, but his hand tightens around Cory’s shoulder. It hurts, his nails are digging into it.
=====“I told you not to tell nobody what you saw you little shit!” Damon’s yelling now.
=====“I didn’t!” Cory says, he’s shaking. “I didn’t tell nobody, I swear Damon!”
=====“Oh yeah?” Damon asks, and Cory can see his hand reach into his sweatshirt pocket. It comes back out; a gun’s in it.
=====“I didn’t tell, I swear, please, I didn’t! I didn’t!” Cory screams, he’s flailing around, trying to escape Damon’s grip.
=====Damon holds the cold barrel of the gun to Cory’s sweat-soaked head. “I told you not to tell, just one damn thing. I told you I’d kill you.”
=====“Damon, please!” Cory pleads.
=====“Damn fool,” Damon says, and he pulls the trigger.
=====Cory jerks awake in his bed. His pajamas are soaked in sweat; he’s shaking and he can feel his heart beating in every part of his body. His eyes dart around the room—it’s empty. He feels his head where the gun had been, there’s no hole. He takes a deep breath, then another, and with one last look around the room, he lies back down. He turns onto his side, away from the doorway, and curls up, pulling the blankets over his head. After a few minutes, he hears a knock at the door. His muscles tense up and he buries his head in the pillow and blankets.
=====“Cory, can I come in?” he can hear Damon say from outside.
Cory curls up tighter into a ball. The door creaks open, and Damon walks in, closing it just as quietly behind himself.
=====“Cory…you know what I said earlier today?”
=====Cory remains still, maybe if Damon doesn’t know he’s awake he’ll go away.
=====“Well…I just wanted to say…I’m sorry.”
=====Cory rolls over to face Damon, pulling the blankets from over his head.
=====“I shouldn’t’ve said none of that. I didn’t mean it, I was just scared. I’d never do nothin’ like that that to you. We brothers. You know that, right Cory?”
=====“Yeah, course we are.” Cory pauses for a few seconds. “You know, I miss those walks home from school we used to have.”
=====Damon pauses. “Yeah,” he says, his eyes fall to the ground, “Me too Cory.”
=====“Then why don’t you walk home with me no more?”
=====“You know it’s not that easy.”
=====“Why not?”
=====“Cause it’s not. You know mom’s been having a hard time paying for everything. I gotta help.”
=====Cory pauses for a second. “You mean she knows about it?”
=====“No, no, course she doesn’t. Most the time I slip it in her purse when she asleep, she doesn’t notice.”
=====“But why can’t you just work after school or something, why you have to be involved with…”
=====“You know it doesn’t work like that Cory. This here’s easy money, sometimes I don’t feel right about it, but I can’t just sit here watching mom worry about us all the time. It’s not forever, just for a bit.”
=====“That’s what everyone says.”
=====“I’m not like the others. This isn’t my world. You know that Cory.”
=====“Yeah, but Damon, today—“
=====“You didn’t see what you think you did.”
=====“Then what did I see?”
=====“Look Cory…nevermind, you wouldn’t understand.”
=====“Why?”
=====“You just wouldn’t. Listen, I gotta go, but…I just wanted to say sorry for what I said. Sorry for how I’ve been. For it all. Just…sorry.”
=====“Are you gonna stop?”
=====Damon pauses, his voice is soft when he finally speaks again. “No.”
=====“Damon—“
=====“—Look, I gotta get to sleep.” His voice is frail, Cory’s never heard him talk like this. He thinks he can see Damon wiping his eyes off with his arm in the dark.
=====“G’night.”
=====“Night.”
=====Damon leaves the room just as quietly as he entered, and Cory can hear the faint sound of his footsteps down the hall and his door closing. Cory stays where he was, propped up on one elbow on his bed, his blankets still wrapped around his body. He lies back down and rolls over onto his side. But he knows he won’t sleep tonight. Somehow he doubts Damon will either.

Fade to Black

=====At his level of exhaustion, everything began to blur together. The gray of the road melting into the black sky, his eyes tracing constellations between the pinpoint lights of the stars above and the streaks of white paint flying past him below. The cars streaking by him on the other side of the road blended together, a continuous mass of steel hurtling past. Tiredness demolished the walls that separated everything, and he lost himself in the unbridled speed, his consciousness drifting away as he became one with the motion that surrounded him.
=====Suddenly he became aware of truck. It was on the other side of the road, heading towards him. He couldn’t say why it distinguished itself from the chaotic blur of its surroundings, but he became fixated on it. His eyes slowly rotated to follow its path, leading it ever closer to him.
=====Something shifted. He didn’t notice it so much as feel it. It took him a few seconds to place what it was, but then it hit him: his trajectory had changed. He became vaguely aware of the fact that his hands had shifted ever so slightly on the steering wheel, almost imperceptibly, but just enough to skew the path of the car so that it intersected that of the truck. For a second, a thought fluttered across his mind, that maybe he should alter his path again, correct it. But he immediately rejected this idea. He could do nothing to alter the current situation—two steel cocoons hurtling inevitably towards each other in space. It had been pre-determined, pre-ordained, all he could do was immerse himself in the current of time and let it carry him where it would.
=====The truck honked, then seeing he had no intention of changing course, veered to the right to try to avoid him. He laughed at the sheer futility of the gesture; a pathetic, powerless act of rebellion against the laws of nature that had schemed to bring them together in this moment. His hands turned, his knuckles white from his tight grip on the steering wheel. The truck expanded in his vision, until it filled the entire windshield, its headlights flooding his eyes until he could barely see; but he still noticed the look of horror flash through the truck-driver’s eyes: finally, he too understood their fate.
=====The world exploded. Everything resisting the stop, torn apart by its desire to keep moving and the too-sudden necessity of stillness. Twisted metal and flying glass and broken bones and bloody mist. Pressure and pain and shattering and jerking.
=====The world exploded. And then it went black.

One Page Novel

Here's a one page novel I wrote for my fiction writing class:

Searching for an Idea

=====Whatever well Quinn had always drawn ideas for stories from in his head had dried up. He’d been at his desk for months, his eyes absorbing the white light from the empty page on the computer for hours on end until he could barely see anymore. He read books of every genre he could stand, watched dozens of movies, talked with everyone he knew to try to think of ideas, but nothing would come.
=====One day Quinn went to the supermarket, and standing in the checkout line with his groceries for the week, he was struck by the man in front of him. He couldn’t say why, he was completely unexceptional: average height, brown hair, brown eyes, his heavy black jacket and jeans completely appropriate for the chilly weather, everything about him only remarkable in its utter normality. But whatever it was, something about him made Quinn decide to follow him after he left.
=====For weeks Quinn followed him all day, on the subway to where he worked—a drab office building (which Quinn looked up and discovered was a mail-order office supplies store)—back to his home, a two story row house just like every other one on its block. On weekdays he woke up at 8 o’clock so he could get to the corner by the man’s house just before 8:45, when he would leave for work, and on weekends he’d sit in his car by the man’s house, trying to catch a glimpse of him in the window, and following him whenever he’d leave for any reason. He couldn’t say why he was doing all of it, but something in the back of his head told him that if he kept it up, a story would come to him.
=====One Tuesday, Quinn stood on the corner watching the man’s house, sipping his coffee as he had every weekday for the last month. But the minutes kept slipping by. 8:45 passed, then 9, then 9:15, and still the man failed to emerge from the door in the center of Quinn’s vision. He had almost decided to give up and come back the next day, when at 9:30 he finally came out. Quinn followed him down the street, and was surprised when he walked passed the subway stop two blocks from his house, and kept stolling down the sidewalk. Quinn followed him for almost two hours as he kept walking, sometimes circling the same area several times in a row, sometimes walking in a straight line for almost a half an hour on end.
=====Finally, the man stopped in front of what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse, in a run-down and seemingly uninhabited part of the city. Quinn stopped a block or so behind him, watching as he looked both ways, and then entered the warehouse. The minute hand made several revolutions on Quinn’s watch as he waited for the man to exit the building, before he finally decided to follow him in.
=====Quinn slowly turned the doorknob, cringing slightly as he heard the slight creak of the door opening. The air was stale, every breath caking the insides of his lungs with a thin film of dust, and he could barely see in the dim light. He took a few tentative steps inwards, when he suddenly heard an unfathomably loud popping noise, and felt a burning stab in his chest. He looked down at his shirt, and could see the faint outline of a liquid spreading across his shirt in the dark. Then he looked up, and could see the silhouette of the man standing in a doorframe a few feet away, the outline of what appeared to be a gun in his hand. And as Quinn felt his legs giving way beneath him, and the misty haze of sleep creeping into his consciousness, all he could think was…finally, I have the idea for my novel.

One Sentence Stories

Here's a bunch of one sentence stories I wrote for my fiction writing class:

After slowly starving to death for a week caught in a bear trap, the man couldn’t help but find it a little ironic when his head was bitten off by a grizzly bear.

He planned it meticulously for weeks, following his wife’s lover so his routine was burned into the back of his brain, buying a gun on the black market that could never be traced back to him, buying latex gloves so he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints, and spending hours upon hours thinking of everything that could go wrong, and how to avoid leaving any evidence behind no matter what ended up unfolding; it’s a shame he never considered his wife stabbing him to death while he was sleeping to run off with her lover a day before he’d finally settled on doing it.

His hair and clothing blanketing in white sheets of snow, he boarded the train with everything he owned on his back.

“Love is blind” was always one of Mary’s favorite expressions, at least until she married, and subsequently divorced, a blind man.

After years of grueling training, Oscar finally realized his goal of becoming an Olympic pole-vaulter, just a month before the bullet from a gun fired straight up into the air a mile away came crashing through his ceiling and painted his brains across the tablecloth of his dining room table as he was eating dinner.

Everyone he knew told him he should feel lucky, being one of only a few of the hostages that survived the shootout between the bank-robbers and the police, but even years later all he could feel was guilt.

They had told him the house was haunted, he was just surprised when he found out it was by a live pedophile who’d broken out of jail and taken refuge in the attic.

Sometimes, honesty is not the best policy, James thought to himself as he bled to death on his living room floor after his wife shot him when he told her he’d been cheating on her.

The scientist was horrified when he saw the hideous beast he had created in his laboratory, but at least it baked delicious cookies.

The hobo thought back on his illustrious and successful career as a movie critic—why did he have to give Gigli a rave review?

Just before the old man’s life trickled out of his pores and dispersed into the air, he looked pleadingly to the nurse and asked, “Couldn’t you at least give me some morphine?”

He’d always considered himself to be misunderstood, except of course by his best friend Franklin, the turquoise penguin that told him to steal people’s kidneys.

After years of writing, he was dismayed to realize that all he could write was morbidly ironic one-liners.

Amnesia (working title)

=====I re-entered reality. From where, I couldn’t say. I was immediately confronted with a strange series of facts. I felt intense pressure on my body— I was lying, face down, on something hard and cold; and there was something sticky on the side of my face that was on the ground too. I opened my eyes, and for some reason, this was when I became aware of the intense throbbing in the back of my head. As soon as I became aware of the pain, it dominated my consciousness, the acute pain stabbing through my mind and blurring my vision.
=====I focused my eyes and saw the dull glow of cement bathed in pale orange light. The cloying smell of garbage and rot crept into my nostrils. I reached to examine the back of my head, and found that my hair was matted down on my head with the same sticky substance that was on the ground around my face. Even the light touch of my fingers made me wince in pain.
=====I pushed myself up with my arms, and all the disjointed pieces of sensory information began to fall into place: I was lying on a sidewalk, it was night, and I had been lying with my face in a pool of partially dried blood. My blood.
=====I sat down on the sidewalk and surveyed my surroundings. There wasn’t a single person in sight, it must have been very late. I had no idea where I was, this garbage and old newspaper strewn, weathered looking city block didn’t look in the least bit familiar. Scanning where I had been lying on the sidewalk, I was slightly comforted by the fact that the blood was only in a small pool where my face had been: at least I hadn’t lost that much.
=====What the hell was I doing here? I tried to think back on the previous day, but all I found was a blank, empty space in my head where I knew it should have been. Everything that lead me to this moment had been erased from my memory, the pages where it was written had been set aflame and all I could do is feel through the smoke that still remained. But it didn’t give me any better idea of where I was. Or why.

Love Letter

Dear my radiant princess,
=====How I long to be with you again! To gaze into the shimmering sapphires of your brilliant blue eyes, to feel your soft whispers caressing my skin, to wind my hands through the silky, rippling curls of your auburn hair. I know it’s only been a day, but every second I am without you burrows into the crevices in my heart, and without your effervescent warmth, like water that has seeped down into the cracks in a rock and then freezes, these seconds excruciatingly expand, tearing my heart asunder. Every minute that passes without you being beside me, I fear that it will finally burst, and there will be nothing left but a cold, hollow space in my chest.
=====Do you feel the same right now? No, why do I ever bother to ask that question? Of course you do! Even though you’ve never told me, I know the answer—when I am with you, all my senses scream it to me. Our feelings have long since evolved past the need for affirmation from things as petty as mere words. I apologize profusely for even having momentarily having doubted you! How could I, your essence so is filled to the brim with sincerity, sometimes I am afraid that it will explode!
=====But, I can no longer bear to write to you much longer. Every word I write on this page is a dagger I turn on myself, stabbing to the very core of my being with the reminder of these pent-up emotions I so wish I could hide! So, I must bid you adieu, my sweet love, and, god-willing, I will be able to hold you in my arms tonight—given, of course, that I manage to scrounge together the necessary funds; but I am sure that I can manage to find a mere hundred dollars by then (see, I even know the price by heart!).
=====Pray that I may indeed acquire the money in the remaining hours of the day, so that I may see you again!

With unfaltering and undying love,
John