Progressive Story
Alright. Here it is… for those of you who asked.
So the rules and suggestions:
- This is creative writing–so BE CREATIVE!
- Keep it clean (use your (overactive) imaginations)
- Use Diction, Detail, Imagery, Syntax, and Tone to let the story speak for itself. We can all read, so don’t waste our time by TELLING. Telling is awful and evil and for people without imaginations. Why not SHOW us instead?
- You are required to post at least 3 sentences, but no more than 20. And these are real sentences, not those Zachglasser special sentences that use semi-colons (Kurt Vonnegut famously wanted to abolish semicolons; I never agreed with him).
- And let’s stay away from wildly erratic stories where we battle for the soul of the plot. Let’s work on twists with character and description–maybe even DIALOGUE! That sounds very exciting.
- I might add things later.
Let’s see where things take us.
Here’s your opener:
Normally you wouldn’t really expect it from a person like that but…
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Normally you wouldn’t really expect it from a person like that, but upon his quest to finally perfect the world, the normal schoolboy of Los Alamitos pondered about how to finally rid the world of its evils. Eventually, stumbled on a few ideas, the most prominent being the destruction of evil. But of course, since no one really knows what “evil” is, the schoolboy kept wandering and wandering in his thoughts. Every day in class, he would stare at the ceiling while other students would diligently scribble on their imagery worksheets. He couldn’t care less though, he just wanted to make the world perfect; he was tired of having to abide by so many rules just because the fact that if they weren’t there, evil would overrun society. Hell, even the upstairs bathrooms are almost permanently closed because kids smoke pot in there. There’s thousands of dollars just gone to waste. He wanted to rid evil from the world, to abolish it, ban it, exile it, but he did not know how.
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One night, everything changed when this boy had a dream. He dreamt of his face plastered upon the highest billboards all over America, from Los Angeles to New York and even to Wyoming. He would become the face of a company titled “Helping the World”. In this extraordinary dream, the boy was transported into a a large building, thirty-five stories high and made of steel. He was wearing a costume of some sort–something so futuristic that even he was unsure of what to call it. But in this building, which he learned that he was the owner of, there were fifteen gigantic machines equipped with laser pointers glaring out of them in neon tones of yellow, green, and red. Each of these machines was surrounded by Los Al teachers, who were apparently operating them. As he stumbled over to one of the machines, still completely unsure of what to expect, his jaw dropped down to the floor as he witnessed what was actually in front of him.
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As dark, gloomy clouds blanketed the town, as bright blinding flashes struck the ground, her eyes became the size of baseballs. Her indecisive eyes continually moved left to right, up and down. The wind howled, the curtains wavered back and forth and the window rattled. Only the claws of the tree revealed itself through the window, ready to grab its victim. Red eyes pierced through the glass and stared directly at her. The door slammed shut and she flinched, hesitant to look behind her. Little droplets fell from her forehead and her hands, but her body was as cold as ice. Rattling, trembling, shaking, stirring, anxiety. Fear.
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She woke up. Prying her eyelids apart, she began to percieve the world around her, as if she was just born and everything was new again. But nothing was. There was still the luminous clock on her bedside table. There was still the radio that fed her the news of the outside world. The doctors still hushed around in the ward, and the nurses still shuffled around, calmly. A nurse shuffled towards her bed and serenely took her blood pressure. A doctor passed by, and, noticing the nurse, walked towards her and whispered, “When she wakes up, tell John,”
“She changed her name to Joanna before the operation, doctor,” said the nurse.
“Oh, ok, Joanna, tell Joanna that the operation was a success when she wakes up.”
Joanna said, “I’m up, doctor….
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The sound that escaped her mouth sounded distant, weak, subdued. The pitch was higher, as if she had just inhaled a balloonful of helium. “I’m up,” she repeated, this time with a hint of annoyance upon her voice. She just wanted to know what was going on. As if on cue, the doctor grinned.
“The operation was a success Joanna.”
Her eyes widened, her pupils dialted from the white light that emmitted from the operating lamps. A bit confused about the reference to a Joanna, the patient continued, “How long will I need to stay in the hospital for before I can return to school? A tonsillectomy can’t keep you in here for that long, can it?”
A spark flashed in the penetrating eyes of the doctor. “You are John…I mean Joanna. Aren’t you?”
The doctor’s heart sped up as he uttered the fateful words, sweat emerged in droplets upon his forehead. His breathing, which quickly became heavy and shallow, was easily detectible by the patient. Something was wrong.
“No, my name is Jake. Why do you ask?”
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The droplets on the doctor’s forehead changed to torrents at the response. Rivers cascaded off his forehead, splattering the meticulously clean floor in fat drops. He quickly glanced at the nurse beside him, who studied the chart in front of her with a heavy frown. All of a sudden, the doctor’s eyes widened again, and the sweat was gone just as abruptly as it arrived. No way was he going to get punished for the same mistake again. No, he is going to hide this one even if it takes everything within his power.
“You are recovering from an extremely rare condition,” the doctor began. “Although I understand this may be difficult to accept right now, but you have been absorbed in an extended lucid dream as a result of your concussion. It is common for the dreams to be so vivid that patients are often convinced that it was in fact reality, but you must believe me that it was all a dream. You are Joanna, not Jake, John, or anyone else. You have always been Joanna.”
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Joanna contemplated this for a moment. Surely it couldn’t all be a dream, no, not at all. Phantasmagoric scenes flashed through her mind so vivid, so real. There was Kindergarten, the chicken pox epidemic, going to Disneyland, Christmas presents, that awkward first date, procrastinated assignments – the month long grounding following them, football games, toilet papering the next-door neighbors. Her mind flooded with memories some good, some bad, but “Joanna” was not a part any one of them. Worry slowly started to build. Feelings of abuse and violation flushed her mind making her face to burn scarlet and eyes brim over with tears. No, something was wrong here.
She struggled against the nurse’s restraining arm to sit up. Worry transformed into panic that engulfed her body and soul. Her arms shook violently as she attempted to prop herself up. Suddenly, her soft tears erupted into painful sobs and she collapsed back onto the bed. The nurses and doctors congregated at the bedside nervously buzzing, talking. Convulsed in emotions, Joanna forced down a spastic gulp and was amazed to experience the familiar searing rip in her throat she had been suffering from before the surgery. She took a minute to compose herself.
“No,” she whispered, “You’re wrong.”
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The scene then flooded her mind. It was dark. It was cold. She had met with the shadowy figure within the narrow walls of the black alley. Something had drawn her here to this sinister figure, some mysterious force, some baleful current flowing through her blood. Perhaps he was the Black Man himself, come to test and to torture.
The knife. Her throat. Yes, the knife, the knife. Why had he done that? So desirable, yet so deceptive. What stark reality! Drawn to the depths of iniquity, suffering from inclination to darkness. Why had she this wretched blood?
The dithering doctors paused and looked into each other’s eyes. Tremulous hands fell straight along the sides of white coats. Dr. Goodman uttered under his breath, “Could she be remembering?” Clipboards of information were passed along, and chains were brought out by stern-faced doctors. They had been given strict orders.
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Breathing heavily, she drew her fingertips to her throat. Feeling her skin where the knife had once laid. Numbness was all she felt as she watched the men inch forward clicking the handcuffs open. By now she was too weak to move, all she could do was lie there listening to the thumping of each heartbeat. This can’t be happening, she said to herself and that was the last she remembered of the hospital. When she awoke she found herself in a…
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dimly lit room, huddled in the corner against the back wall. A layer of flies coated the white ceiling in a multitude of black patches, as the darkness that tainted her soul. She lifted her eyes slowly and peered around the room. A bald light bulb flickered and buzzed above a rectangular table, which cast its blurred shadow upon the cold, hard, cement floor.
Dr. Goodman sat across the other side of the table, though only his grayed outline appeared in the lack of lighting. He held his clipboard and examined the attached papers interestingly. He cleared his dry throat and said, “It is time we begin the questioning, Joanna. Please take a seat.”
The girl started to speak, “It’s not Joa–”
Its shimmer caught her eye, and she felt the heavy weight and piercing pain within her chest immediately. The knife. By his side.
What infernal plot has consumed her being!
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Dr. Goodman continued to walk closer and closer to the her. She started to shudder as she had no idea what was going on. She was confused on why she was in the room and being interogated. Dr. Goodman peered over her shoulder and asked, “where were you on October 31st at 11:37 pm? She started to think about this yet she could only concentrate on the bloody knife that Dr. Goodman was holding in his hand. She started to answer his question when suddenly…
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an assistant burst into the room choking for breath.
“Dr. Goodman! There’s been a breach in sector 7b. All the contaminated specimens are running loose throughout the laboratory!”
Dr. Goodman contemplated the situation and suddenly staggered into the wall, as if he had been clubbed at the base of his neck. The knife dropped to the ground and suddenly levitated and impaled the Doctor. Blood spurted everywhere and Joanna/Jake/John gasped. Suddenly the air was rent open by screams up and down the hallway outside. J/J/J saw the knife levitate again but this time, noticed a shimmer of refracted light extending from behind the Doctor’s corpse. It began moving toward J/J/J…
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joana was horrified by the scene that had occurred in front of her. Not only had Dr. Goodman been hacked to death by a floating knife and was now laying on the floor in a pool of his own blood but now that same bloody knife was now floating towards her. She looked around for any means of escape but the only way out was throught the large, metal doors that were behind the knife. But when it was only 6 feet away she saw out of the corner of her eye…
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she saw that the knife was really being controled remotely by a crazed man that previously worked for the prolific burger chain, which can be commonly reffered to as McDonalds. The only reason that she noticed that he had worked for McDonalds was due to the tattered 1/4 pound wrappers that he wore as his clothing. Reacting before thinking, Joana charged the oddly dressed man and he skipped away with a womanly groan. Tackling him to the ground, she furiously and curiously asked the man what his intentions for brutally killing Dr. Goodman were. She grabbed him by the collar and his shrieked then stating crazily that, “If I offed the Doc. I would get normal clothes and my house wouldn’t be the dumpster behind PETCO anymore!” To her amazement, she burst into laughter and commensed in scraping off some of the residual cheese left on one of the wrappers with her teeth. Unvailing a secret knife, the man cut off Joana’s leg and blood spirted out of her severed blood vessels. Dropping to the ground, she lay helpless…
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All she could think about was the man, the murder, the theft of innocent lives. Reality slowly ticking its way back into the mid of the crazy Joanna, she was able to yelp and scream slowly but progressivly moving towards the steel door. Cries of “Goodman, you will pay” surrounded the dreary setting as Joanna gasped her breaths of consciousness. As Joanna’s eyes moved closer and closer to shutting- as if she was holding the wieght of the world on her poor eyelids- she could only think to herself……
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“WTF!?! All I ever wanted to do in life was make a good progressive story, to utilize my tropes, explore literary strategies. That’s it. One simple goal. But no, these cursed dream decimators have ruined everything. It is as if my whole life was being written by some nutty teenagers, I mean come on! Floating knives, random unexplained sex changes, what is this? Some kind of bad telenovela? Now all I need is some crazy girl named Rosalinda with a totally screwed-up family.”
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And then, all of a sudden, in the rapid heat of things, in the torment of the impending AP tests, it happened. Swine flu. It ravaged the terraces of Los Alamitos High School, spreading from math to English, encompassing all that was sacred in the students’ sacred sanctuary of school.
Joana took a glance at all of the mindless cheerleaders panicking around with face masks and pills and syringes, as usual, but this time it was different. She saw him. Goodman.
The little bit of mankind was only left in Los Alamitos, and Goodman had to be rid of. After a period of 3 months, Joana had buttressed her arsenal of weapons, and now it was time…time for revenge.
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Sweet, sweet, glorious revenge. The kind that can only be born of a soul so twisted with the strain of prolonged concentrated suffering that it is hardly even be called human. Indeed, it is more the vengeance of a sharp shadow of cruelty, dealing out its justice with a cold and gruesome gavel of malice. As Joanna had once heard the great Sean Wang say, “Ain’t no justice like a vigilante justice!”
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