Every Classic Novel Sucks Except Pride And Prejudice.

Every classic novel sucks except Pride and Prejudice.

They aren’t good. They’re mind numbingly self important. They’re fucking boring. A list of “classics everyone should read” is no different from a list of objects you can shove under your toenails for fun and torture.

I have a Literature degree and I said it.

Fog

Anna woke up to screaming. She tried to stand but her body refused to respond, not even to turn her head. Only her eyes responded to her insistent need to do something, run, hide, fight, anything but lay on the hard, frozen pavement. Opening her eyes revealed only a heavy, oppressive fog obscuring everything around her, including her legs.

The screaming echoed through the fog, seeming to come from all directions at once, though it was weakening, coming in coarse gasps and underlying tears. The fog almost seemed to have a presence to it, pressing down on her, choking her, and making it difficult to breath. The screaming matched its rhythm to her breathing, cutting off suddenly when she began to cough. It’s me, I’m the one screaming. Her newfound insight seemed to be the cue her body needed to make it work again. She wished it hadn’t.

Searing pain raced up her limbs, burning her nerves, boiling her blood, tearing her muscles, and shattering her bones. Another more primal scream escaped her raw throat and the coppery smell of blood overloaded her sense of smell. The pain forced her back to arch, her hands clenched tightly, scraping her knuckles against the sharp pebbles littering the road, hardly registering over the other sensations overwhelming her system.

It stopped as abruptly as it had started. Her body dropped down hard on the pavement, and her breath came in short, deep gasps as though she had just run a marathon. But she could move now. She slowly pushed herself up, using the yellow guardrail next to her to lean on while her shaking legs adjusted to her body weight as well as the fog. The fog that seemed to cling to her like spiderwebs in a long-abandoned tomb. She left smears of blood along the guardrail, dark red coating the bright yellow.

Glass and gravel crunched beneath her feet, loud and distant at the same time. A car, there should be a car, she thought. She continued to stumble forward, searching with her hands and feet as much as with her eyes.

The crumpled wreak of her car fuzzed into being in front of her, ghostly and ghastly. The crumpled front looked like it had attempted to plow through a mountain and failed. The windshield no longer existed and the steering wheel was crushed into the driver seat along with the driver side door. Where she had been sitting, buckled in. She looked down at her chest and found herself staring at the torn, bloody shirt imbedded in her skin with chips of glass and a narrow metal rod. Her hand rose of its own volition, shaking violently as it tried to grasp and pull the rod from her left breast. Her blood slick hand only slid along it, but she knew already what it meant.

She lunged from the rail to the car, its blue paint barely present between the gouges in the carbon fiber. Her hands found the cold, wet vehicle, and she inched her way around to the driver window. Cold. Enough time had passed for the car to cool off. Her hair prickled, covering her in goose bumps as the cold had not and sending a shiver down her spine. She knew what she would find, but she needed to see for herself.

She reached the door where it had been forced at least six inches into the cab. Her eyes closed involuntarily, putting off the inevitable for a few extra seconds. Then they opened and she saw her own body, slumped into the passenger seat and covered in blood. From this perspective she could see her chest was crumpled into itself, her head hanging limp against her shoulder.

The screaming began again, something so primal and full of fear that the fog shifted away from her, afraid of her. Then, gathering itself into a swirling mist it engulfed her slowing only when she had been consumed entirely.

plot twist: the introverted character who doesn’t like big social gatherings or speaking in front of people is still an introvert by the end of the story because introversion is not a character flaw and it doesn’t need to be overcome 

Much zen, so love

https://instagram.com/p/Bj56KW_Hm-Z/

"Mama, you're here! I missed you so much!" The young, shaggy brown haired boy shouted as he ran up to a woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties. She held her arms to catch him when he ran into her, knocking her onto her heels.

"Hey, honey, I've missed you, too," she gently smoothed his disheveled hair so she could see his still baby blue eyes. His head reached up to her stomach now. "My goodness, you've grown like a weed, how old are you now, Taylor?"

"I'm six, Mama," he pulled back from her, just an inch, "you've been gone forever."

"I'm sorry baby, I didn't mean to. I never wanted to leave you. I just couldn't take you with me." She paused before asking her next question, her voice fill of an emotion Taylor had only heard from all the other adults when she first left. "I didn't expect to see you again for a much longer time, how are you here?"

"I dunno,"he replied. "I just kinda of woke up here," he looked around as though for the first time. Everything looked really fuzzy, like when it was raining and foggy at the same time. The little he could make out looked a little bit like the house, the one he has been brought to only a few weeks so. The window for the bedroom he shared with two other boys, one in middle school and the other in 2nd grade, was the easiest to see though it was on the second floor. He even thought he saw the blond hair of the younger boy as he tried to hide while still looking out. Taylor figured he only watched so he could tattle on kids who broke the rules. There were a lot of rules here. More than the other two places he lived before. Mrs Williams seemed to like it when kids broke the rules. That meant she could spank them and send them to their room with only a peanut butter sandwich and water for dinner. Taylor hated her.

"Are you here to take me away, Mama? I don't like it here very much. They're so mean."

"Oh sweetie, I don't know. That depends on you."

"Trauma room 3!" A woman in green scrubs yelled to the growingly crowd of similarly dressed people. They all ran into a room to their left, splitting up into teams of two at different points in the white and steel room. They were immediately followed by the paramedics pushing a gurney with a small, bloody body barely covering half the bed. They talked loudly over the general chaos to give report to the doctor and nurse helping to guide the gurney.

"On the count of three," two people in green reached across the bed in the middle of the room to grab the sheet below the child, "one, two, three!" The two paramedics and two ED staff lifted and pulled or pushed the child from the paramedics' gurney to the ED one.

"He's lost at least a liter of blood," one of the paramedics said before stepping back to let the swarm of nurses, techs, and doctors replace them and the bed.

"Stacy, go get three bags of O-neg from the lab!" The woman at the foot of the bed called out, sending a young tech running out of the room. "Travis, you got that?" She asked without turning to see if the man furiously clicking and typing at the lone computer had indeed heard her.

"3 bags of O-neg, entered and acknowledged,” he reported back to her. “What are his vitals?" A tech yelled out a series of numbers. Without pause the man at the head of the bed began to call out various injuries and treatments. They had done this dozens of times just this week and knew what they needed to do. “We’ve lost his pulse!” The man at the head of the bed interrupted himself. One nurse pulled out a stool from beneath the bed and a second stepped up on it to start chest compressions. With each push on his chest bright red blood spattered from a deep gash on his head and pooled beneath him from multiple cuts and scrapes on his torso. “Where’s that blood?” the woman at the foot called out.

“Here!” Stacy wheezed and passed a small ice chest to the nurse next to the IV pole. The controlled chaos around the bed continued, people calling out observations, what they were doing, and the condition of the child.

“What do you mean it’s up to me, Mama?” Taylor asked with a quiver in his voice.

“You’re hurt really bad, baby. If you stay here with me you’ll be here with me as a six-year old kid, for even longer than I was gone,” she unwrapped her arms from around him then kneeled down to be face to face with him. “You won’t grow up, you won’t find someone to love, or have kids of your own.”

“That’s okay, Mama! I don’t want to go back,” he began to cry. “Mrs. Williams doesn’t like me. She hurts me all the time.”

“Oh, Taylor, sweetie, she won’t be in your life forever.”

“I don’t care. I want to stay here with you,” he stated with finality. He crossed his arms and his little jaw jutted out. He glared at her, daring her to try to change his mind.

“Okay baby, you don’t have to stay,” she stood up and held out her hand for him. He eagerly grabbed it, his hand disappearing inside hers. “All you have to do is walk with me, but don’t look back, okay? If you look back you’ll have to go back for a little while longer.” He nodded and started to drag her the direction they were facing.

“I’m calling it,” the green clad woman at the foot of the bed said with a weary sigh. “Time of death is eighteen twenty-four,” she stepped back to Travis, no longer needed to direct any of the activity around the small, pale and bloody body on the bed. “Could we have done anything else?” She asked him quietly. He only shook his head, “auto v ped, the fact we got a heartbeat again is amazing,” he patted her hand, “you did everything possible.” She nodded slowly, not bothering to blink back or hide her tears.

I would like to add a shop in Washington. I haven't been there in several years, but I still remember it as the coolest comic book/game shop I have ever been into. The staff were all super helpful and I didn't feel like I was treated differently because I happened to have two x-chromosomes.

Olympic Cards and Comics

4230 Pacific Ave.

Lacey WA, 98503

360-459-7721

This might not be quite a “nothing to prove"… but I thought it might be good if we shared our experiences with gaming/comic/book etc stores that created and supported women-friendly spaces—not women-only geek spaces, necessarily, but stores where women are treated as equal and welcome participants...