Pink Lady

Pie, Pie, Pie!

     Monsters don't always come out at night. Sometimes, they emerge from within you. They stomp around your brand new Kentucky green grass starters and hawk lugies onto your butterfly-opening car doors. Angsty youths! Other times, they parade around the desert, searching for even the faintest signs of an oasis, a coconut, a hut, anything but their very own desert brewing from within their veins to their brains. Desperate lost souls! They could even tiptoe in the night, up the staircase, and into your bedroom. Just to stare at you from across the room, to imagine what it must feel like to be you. But, imagination alludes certain monsters. So, they trudge over to you and crawl into your skin, cramped, like a one-size-too-small Halloween costume. Your flesh stretches as if made from an old rubber, and the hollowness of your empty shell welcomes the intruder. The monster feels at home inside you. But, quickly, restless domination overcomes them and fills their thoughts with the whites of your eyes. Homicide runs through you faster than any blood cell could, and the thirst for a bludgeoning quench becomes overwhelmingly apparent. 

******

     An intoxicating scent of what must be an apple pie, of a Pink Lady, permeates from the floor below. You rise from the softness of your bed and follow its scent, as if commanded to do so. As you grow nearer, squabbles of chatter can be heard. However, the last step of stair interrupts the silent melody of both the chatter and the Pink Lady. It seems to echo forever, the screech of an old oak floor board. "Who are these people?!", you think to yourself. The shock on their faces seem to match the thoughts of your own. They peer across the room to behold their son in the living room on a very early Christmas Eve, looking deflated, depicting an odd visage of sagged skin and a gaunt face. "Hey, honey, what are you doing awake?", "Are you feeling okay?", "You look sick, oh no!", stated the old hag next to the man with an even more bewildered look. The man next to her did not speak and only continued to stare . "Is that the Pink Lady, mother?", as I made an obvious glance towards the Range oven. "Oh yes, a wonderful apple! But you must scurry upstairs now, or Saint Nicholas will gift you with nothing but the shards of coal!". The old hag and secretive man stood between the Range Oven and an island counter, decorated with half eaten cookies and an empty glass. A rather large knife lay beside the cookies' remnants. "Mom? Can I ask you something?", "Yes, anything, honey", "May I take a look at the pink lady?", Of course, you did most of the work, remember?", "I think so", I belted. The old hag opened the oven's hinge, grabbed her polka-dotted oven mitts, and raised the apple pie in front of me upon a grand plate of cast iron. The scent was unmistakable, the Pink Lady really was the apple of choice. But, the sight, the pie, it, well, seemed off. It was large and round, but with more height than your typical pie. And with strands of unknown origin, curling around the top of it. "Mother, can I get first cut, you know, because its Christmas? The old hag thought for a second, in an obviously tentative deductive reasoning, and decided, "Okay, Charlie, but you know the rules, your dad must taste it first, okay?", "Okay", I agreed. "But, I'll cut it first, right?", "Absolutely, my sweet boy". I took a few steps forward, steps that seemed impossible to control, but I managed and rummaged for the knife on the top of the counter, took the Pink Lady, and aimed towards it with the knife. I studied it more so after coming to grips with the knife's streamlined handle, an object of great potential pain and hurt. My eyes grew wide with an unmistakable excitement and surprise. It was a head; a human head. Obviously, from the neighbor 4 doors down, Sharon McDonnagal. I swung and cut upon the tender, rosy cheeks of Sharon's plump face, the Pink Lady, and diced and spliced the ancient neighbor until she was hardly recognizable. She resembled an awkward Freak Show Candidate or a victim, lost to the hardened tide of water and the jagged rocks of a coasted beach. The Pink Lady, now adequately cut into favorable slices, oozed onto the fork that I raised towards the secretive man's mouth. He didn't budge, not even a quiver, with no visible satisfaction at all. "Mother, can you please open father's mouth for me, please? "Certainly", so she opened his mouth wide with both her hands, and the first slice of Sharon, was placed into his mouth. However, the man, stayed in the same spot with the same look in his eyes, dulled, but full of the blue of the seas. The poor man's eyes must have been glossed-over for hours now. "Mother, were you the one to kill him?" I said with glee. "It was Sharon's idea, honey, isn't that so wonderful of her?", "Yes, mother, quite humorous", I howled. "Then, why must you degrade her skull into such a tasty treat?", "Well, honey, your father and her weren't behaving very saint-like." "Mother?". The old hag looked at the boy and tried desperately to not show hints of irreverence or disgust. "Yes?", and before she could muster anything else, Sharon, cooked and sliced, wriggled, "Boy, be careful, that woman is not your mother, sh sh she's a", she trailed. "She's a what?!" My cheek stung and a plop resonated from the floor. The hag's mouth retracted from her skull, bony, sharp, and slathered with thick saliva. To much an homage of a Chameleon's tongue shot and speed. "She's a monster". "Like me", I smiled.

******

     The boy did not sink or cower, unlike his jowls and his father, but instead, lurched towards the old hag with the large kitchen knife and concluded her life quite easily. Redness sparked from her undercarriage, spilling outwards and onto the surroundings of everything. The candles hissed, so the light faded to a dusk. Her blood even greeted my lips and taste buds, for I could taste the iron of my own mother's blood. And she tasted weak. "Did you catch any of that, father?

Reviews

[JayG]

Take a deep breath, this may sting. 😛

• Writing is both the outlet and the fork, and its guided by emotion which bleeds slowly through it all.

Perhaps, but for those who are unaware of YOUR emotions, YOUR intent, and, who can't know the emotion you would place into the reading, it's a lecture by someone unknown, providing data they've not been made to want.

The thing we pretty much all miss is that our schooldays writing skills are taught for one purpose: To make us useful to an employer. But since employers need reports, letters, and other nonfiction writing, the approach learned in school is useless for fiction—which has entertaining the reader as its goal. History books are written with those skills, and how popular are they?

Nonfiction is fact-based and author-centric, as this piece is presented. Fiction is emotion-based and character-centric. Its goal is to provide an emotional experience by making the reader live the events in real-time, as-the-protagonist, not hear about them second hand, formatted as a report of the events.

And as a side issue, using second person personal pronouns in an attempt to seem more immediate doesn't work because the one using them is the narrator, who's neither in the story nor on the scene. To make it seem immediate takes the skills of the fiction writer,

Remember, writers have been screwing up and finding ways to avoid that for centuries—developing a body of knowledge and technique we call The Commercial Fiction Writing profession. Dig into those skills and you learn to hook the reader and avoid the traps. Skip that step and you fall into those traps, not noticing that you do.

It's not about how well you write, your plot, or talent. And fully 75% of what's submitted to publishers and agents suffers the same problem, so you have a LOT of company. But...every successful writer faced and overcame that problem. No reason you can't as well. Still, you must, because nothing else works.

To help: Debra Dixon's, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict is a great first book on the basics.
https://dokumen.pub/qdownload/gmc-goal-motivation-and-conflict-9781611943184.html

And for what it may be worth, my own articles and YouTube videos are meant as a kind of overview of he traps, gotchas, and misunderstandings.

Jay Greenstein

- - - - - -
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

[Bobisnotmyuncle]

I've found this incredibly helpful, thank you very much! The sting burns so good.

[JayG]

That being the case, there's an even better book, In fact, the best I've found, though it's an older one.

Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer.

https://dokumen.pub/techniques-of-the-selling-writer-0806111917.html