Shmee.Me

The finale of The Pen!  You can read part 1 and 2, here and here! Or don’t…

I stood there trying to force myself to move, to speak, to do anything at all, but I was too scared.  These little humans looking at me expectantly, but still with so much animosity.  The girl that closed the door stepped closer, “You brought the pen.  You must be here to work on us.”  She reached in to her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.  At first it seemed small, but the more I looked at it the longer it got.  It was the story of her life.

It was meticulously written, every detail about this girl was filled out.  Some things were scratched out and replaced, lines tweaked, but it was all there.  All but the end.  The story just stopped.  I looked at her, “what do you want me to do?”  As I said that the box grew cold, but I knew that it was the pen inside growing even colder.  “Finish us”, the girl said softly, “We need to be free.”  The pen went from cold to hot.  I was barely able to hang on to the box.  The pain was intense.

I wanted to say no, to flee this place, but their eyes went from angry to sad, so I grabbed the little nightstand and sat on the couch.  Then I mustered my resolve, and pulled the pen out of the box.  The pen was angry changing from hot to cold, shaking in my hand, but I was able to put the pen to the paper, and I wrote the line, “After a long and happy life, she died peacefully in her sleep.”  I looked up, and she was gone.  Seeing what had happened all the little people started pushing forward with their stories in hand.  Clawing and pushing their way towards me.  With every ending that I wrote, the pen would punish me more.  My hand ached.  I was both burned and frozen by the pen’s jade surface.  The pen grew heavier trying to force me to loose my grip.  Making each mark was a struggle.

The church was also changing.  The glimmer that had kept up its façade was unraveling, revealing crumbling walls and holes in the roof and floor.  It was falling apart around me.  The light that shone earlier was fading, and I was trying my best to write in the dark.  As the darkness grew so did a shadow.  It was slipping out of the office and creeping its way towards me.  Every story finished brought it nearer.  With only a few pages left to go it enveloped me.  I felt as though I was choking on its darkness.

As I finished the last tale the shadow collapsed on me.  I couldn’t move or see.  All I knew is that I was now lying on my back holding on to the pen.  The darkness was forcing its way down my throat.  The pain the pen was causing was so great that I was starting to loose all feeling in my left side.  My body was shutting down.  I had finished the stories and the pen was going to kill me for it.  Then I remembered that I had gotten gas before driving all the way out to Custer, so fumbling in the dark with all the strength I had left I pulled out the receipt and wrote on the back, “Suddenly the jade pen crumbled!”

I woke up some time later.  The church was just a shell, rotten and decaying, and there was a small mound of little jade rocks on top of my severely scarred  hand.   Their were pieces of paper strewn about.  I gathered them up and buried them in the jade box next to the “Condemned” sign outside the church.

My obviously fictional (or is it?) short story about The Pen continues! Hey! Stop booing!

As I pulled up to the old church at the end of Stein Road, I couldn’t help but be surprised.  I was expecting the dwelling of the previous owner of this pen to be dark and foreboding.  Not to mention the woman who ‘sold’ me the pen talked about the church where her aunt lived with such dread, I assumed there would be bats hanging from the steeple.  Instead this small building would be best described as quaint, cute even.  The only thing that was giving me pause was that the lights were on.

I exited my blue Isuzu, jade box in hand, and knocked on the front door. Silence. Excessively silent.  The trees weren’t even rustling.  The only sound was my breath and beating heart.  I was about to turn and leave, but then a terrible idea entered my brain, “Why don’t I just try the handle?”  My common sense was screaming at me, “don’t do it you idiot!”  But my curiosity got the better of me.  My thumb pressed down on the leaver, and I gave the door a small shove.  It gave no resistance, and it opened smoothly and quietly.

The door opened to what was the sanctuary, but had since been converted in to living space.  After the owner had passed away, the family had divvied up and sold all of her belongings, so there wasn’t much in the way of furniture, just an old Victorian couch on one side and a stand-up piano on the other.  The piano looked like it was bolted to the floor, which explained why it was still there, as for the couch, who knows.  The office in the back must have been converted in to a bedroom, due to the fact that it contained an overturned mattress and a small nightstand.

With the church seeming to be a dead end, I decided to leave.  When I got back to the door, a question jumped to front of mind, “how is there light with no lamps?”  I turned around to find my answer, but instead I was face to face with a multitude of small people.  I don’t mean small as in children, but as in doll sized.  They were everywhere, and they did not look happy to see me.  I tried to step back through the door, but I could feel them pressed against my legs.  I was surrounded.  I spun around just in time to see a small girl close the door.  She looked at me, and then the box, then asked, “Are you here to work on us?”

 Read the thrilling (hopefully) conclusion here!

How about a little short fiction this morning? No?! Well who asked you!

It started when I was at a garage sale.  I had spent money earlier that day on a Sega Master System (money well spent), but I saw a sign for just one more rummage sale on the way home, so I was looking around on the 25¢ and free table.  There was the usual collection of junk:  broken toys, scratched workout DVDs, and more than a couple well used ash trays, but before I was about to leave I noticed a jade box.  Or what looked like a jade box.  There is no way a real jade box would be 25¢, or so I thought.

I picked up the box and looked at it.  It seemed real enough.  The stone felt cool and smooth to the touch, and it was heavy like a rock box should be.  I lifted the lid and there was a jade pen sitting on a bed of satin.  Surely this pen and box were in the wrong section, or maybe there was something wrong with the pen.  I went to grab the pen, but as soon as I touched it I felt cold.  Like I had jumped naked in to a snow bank.  I pulled my hand back.  “It is November, there must have been a breeze”, I muttered to myself.  I reached back in and took ahold of the pen.  I was cold again, and the weight of the pen was all wrong.  Not the weight exactly, the pen seemed like it had the right heft, but it felt so much heavier.  My hand was holding it with ease, but it was all I could do to hang on to it.  I put the pen back and closed the lid.  Willing my body to warm itself.

“There is no way I am taking this thing home!”, I thought defiantly, but just as I was setting the box back down on the table I heard a soft far away voice, “help us…”.  It was the voice of a child.  I looked around to see who had said it, but there was no one there.  No children, and oddly no other shoppers either.  I looked back at the box and flipped it’s lid then reached down and touched the pen with my index finger.  This time the voice was nearer and louder, but all it said was, “Please!”.  I dropped the box.  It hit the driveway with a thud, but it didn’t break or chip.  It just sat there, and if I didn’t know better I thought it was looking at me.

My mind raced.  I didn’t even want to pick it back up, let alone take it home, but that voice.  It sounded scared, alone, and it said ‘us’.  There was more than one person in trouble.  I reached in to my coat pocket and pulled out some gloves and put them on.  Then I gingerly picked up the box.  I walked up to the cashier’s table, but as I approached the woman looked at me with panic in her eye’s and said, “It is free, just take it!” I nodded, “Trust me, I am not paying for it! But before I go, I need to know everything there is to know about this pen”.

Dun, dun, dun!  Read part two here, or if you want to skip part two read part three here!