Novella

[Nrg800]

Well, I take this as the off-topic forum area. So I guess it will be an okay place to put this. Basically it's a little novella I'm writing, because I'm always bored and I need a project... So yeah I don't really have a title of this yet, and it is very much a work in progress, that I started today... It is kinda from two point of views, both first person, and there are two main characters in the novella. Basically it chronicles a man's quest for revenge for the murder of his wife. And half of the story is first person from the avenger, and the other half is from the murderer. I apologise about this being slightly graphic, but I want to set it up for a story with two antagonists, because I'm creative and such!

Novella

Rational, ordinary people generally don’t believe in superstition or the paranormal, but in extraordinary circumstances the mind can fathom a variety of explanations, that would seem, to logical reason, absurd. And there are few circumstances more open to irrational foresight than isolation in deep sequoia forest, hearing the hoot of owls, and voices. Or maybe they are the whispers of wind.
---------------------------------------------------
It has been 4 years, 7 months and 15 days since anyone’s seen my wife. It has been 4 years, 7 months and 16 days since I’ve seen my wife. It has been 4 years, 7 months and 17 days since anyone’s seen more of my wife than smears on burnt metal.
It’s amazing how quickly a human mind can go from a working, oiled machine to an emotional lump of tissue. I assume few people can sympathise: maybe wives watching on TV as the twin towers fell down, knowing their husbands were in it; or being the driver of a car and crashing your passenger into a tree. But I know, I can sympathise, I have experienced total internal calamity three times. The first time was when the police told me my wife had been killed. The second was when I was made to identify my wife, or what was left of her. Half of her head was crushed; her neck had been broken, causing her head to dangle grotesquely from her neck; one of her collar-bones were jutting out her torso; there was a yellow pussy fluid leaking from the hole in her head; and I could see her brain, grey and cold: it was as if I were looking through a broken window. That was all they let me see, the rest was covered in a sheet, but I could see that her outline was broken and her bottom half was shattered. And the third, the third was when the police told me that they didn’t have enough evidence to convict her killer. I knew who he was, the police knew who he was - Steven Boysen. But our justice system states that one is innocent until proven guilty. Duck our justice system! Duck the police! I have waited 4 years, 7 months and 17 days to get my revenge. The dish has gotten cold, and what better way to enjoy dessert. ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, who said that? I think it was the Spanish, and they were right. Revenge ripens, and you have to pick your time, if you judge it wrong you get a sour rock, or you get a tasteless mush, which are both almost unsatisfying.

For the better part of 5 years I have watched him. He has become my life, my job, my obsession, my hobby. I know him better than he knows himself. He lives his life, so what. I analyse it. He goes to the bar on 72nd St, I’m there I saw him leaving and I beat him there, but always in the corner or waiting outside, he mustn’t see me. I’ve known him for long enough, and I know that if he sees me, he’ll kill me, or get someone to do it for him. He never went anywhere without his bodyguards, there he was, in his ‘good clothes’ at the diner, a women wrapped around his torso and the bodyguards on either side of him. That was the problem, the bodyguards, without them I could just shoot him and be done with it. Not that I wanted it to be that lenient to him. But I could never get him alone, and that was another problem.

Steven Boysen, he was the problem too, what started it all, what turned my life around. I was an IT consultant for a big biotechnology company, and she was a Kindergarten Teacher, her eyes were beautiful, when a child was crying, she only needed to look at them and they would sober up. Her eyes conveyed things that mere words could never say. They told anyone that looked into them that everything would be alright, that they were loved and that no matter what happened people would still love you. In her entirety she was beautiful, she could launch a thousand ships, and burn a city. Her name was Stephanie, and she was shy, but she would laugh. The children she worked with always put a smile on her face, and when she smiled, you would just about melt. I dream about her someti - I dream about her a lot. I see myself looking into her perfect eyes and kissing her lips gently, but as I kiss her, her face would contort and age and I would wake up, feeling dried tears on my cheek, not just tears, my whole pillow was damp, I would weep. Even in a dream, ones escape from realty, some part of me had known the truth, and cried for it. If I’d been drinking it would all come pouring out, normally in the toilet bowl, sometimes before.

That Bastard, he ducked up, that’s all that happened, and she was there to see it. She went to the police to testify and then the next day she got in her car, and it exploded. Protection my ass. The police had filed away everything that was left, in case new technology came out, but I don’t want them to pin him anymore. I want him to die, with my hands around his neck. My mind conjured the image of my wife’s misshaped head and then an image of myself shooting Steven Boysen in the testicles, seeing the charred hole in his pants, reveling the disfigured remains of his genitals, hearing the scream of pain and then stomping with the heel of my boots down on the remainder.

I spent the rest of that morning in bed - good ol’ Steve’s not going to disappear in a morning - thinking of increasingly absurd things I can do to good ol’ Steve. By the end of the morning I was imaging myself directing good ol’ Steve and his good ol’ bodyguards down a detour, and plunging them off a cliff, or directing them into a tunnel drawn on a rock wall, all the while twiling a comic mustache, or dressed as Elmer Fudd.

A detour. A detour


ALSO: There are censors on here, I didn't actually type duck.

[Tintola]

OMG (stands for Oh My Gargoyle, being a devout atheist) I can't make up my mind whether you are a brilliant writer or one sick puppy. Anyway I'm happy to have read it before someone has it deleted as not suitable for a bird forum, (couldn't you have thrown in a Blood Finch or crow or something? Although you did mention an owl, so maybe it's relevant. ) I was sitting in the finch lounge when I started to read it but I was clawing the walls by the time I had finished. I think you might have a great future in writing once your therapist works through a few "issues" with you. Might be a work in progress though and take a while.

[mickw]

Whoops, you missed one!......I think it ducked when you were editing

Pouring rain here for days.....Cant do anything outside.....Good read.......beats tidying up my Animal Keeper log books

[Diane]

I love your beginning "hook", it gets the reader intrigued straight away. Maybe you should send some of your writing to a publisher and see what they say.
You may even already have your title. "Whispers of wind" or "Wind Whispers"

And on another note if you can write that well......where are my articles for the newsletter?

[Nrg800]

Thanks, I think! I normally like to think of myself as a more jaunty writer, but I've read ALOT of Stephen King lately, and yes, I'm trying to set it up so you see the person who's wife died as an antagonist, and it takes alot to over-ride the empathy one generally feels for him... Also, I'm also trying to make it seem as though the incident had turned him emotionless, and somewhat psychopathic. When I establish that he's mad as bats I imagine it will become more... less, less 'oh my god why does he think that'.

[Diane]

Do you watch Dexter on Foxtel? That is set up where the viewer sympathises and wants him to succeed even though he is a serial killer.

[Tintola]

Writing this at 1.57 am ???? GET SOME SLEEP!

[TheFinchMan101]

Writing this at 1.57 am ???? GET SOME SLEEP!

Lol tintola, remember this forum is an hour behind as well cause of daylight savings here in nsw. So that probably means he put it up at 2:57.

[Nrg800]

And didn't get to sleep untill 3:30. Who needs sleep? All you need is enrichment and Kate Bush!

[Tintola]

Yeah.. You can sleep when you are dead, Eh?