Post by Malcolm Selder on Dec 26, 2010 21:29:41 GMT -5
Can't very well leave this empty, can I... (Well, I can, but that's no fun.)
Aaaannyways, I'm an awful poet (*stares enviously at Ashemir/Harhunt and Saber*) so odds are, you guys'll be getting short stories from me. Like this one.
Hopefully it doesn't suck, but if it does, I would love to know why because it's really hard to fix stuff if I don't know what's wrong. (I'd especially like some opinions on the ending; I rewrote it once and I want to know if it turned out well.) Here goes nothing...
((Pfghfhtphthhh so long))
“Bottom of the ninth, three men on base, two outs, so-on- and so-forth,” announced the batter in a mocking imitation of an actual game. He flicked aside the brim of his baseball hat, assuming that a backwards cap made him seem more ‘cool.’ Coolness came at the cost of a constant squint; the sun shone at its brightest with no clouds daring to intrude. “The fate of the game depends on Ricky Selder, world’s greatest batter.”
“Yeah, ‘cept the ‘world’s greatest’ can’t hit shit.”
The pitcher, a pessimistic high-school senior, earned himself a fierce glare. “The poor away team is stuck with the world’s lamest pitcher, Dave Johnson,” Ricky continued, his tone consistent and cocky. “Folks, I think we can all see where this game is going.”
“It ain’t goin’ anywhere!” Dave threw his arms in the air with over-exaggerated frustration. “Hell, it ain’t even started yet.”
“You’re jealous.” Ricky rolled his eyes. “C’mon, gimmie a pitch.”
Dave tossed the ball into his glove, made a show of winding-up the pitch, then, just as Ricky was opening his mouth to complain, whipped the ball across the field.
Ricky was more on-the-ball than he seemed: bat collided with ball, erupting into a crack that echoed far enough to start a baby crying down the street. The ball soared straight over Dave’s head, flying into the peak of its arc.
“Home-run, baby!” Ricky whooped, already beginning a victory lap while Dave pouted, trying to ignore his friend’s obstreperous cheering.
However, both boys froze when the oh-so-familiar sound of shattering glass overshadowed Ricky’s victory dance. The duo slowly, reluctantly turned to stare at the source of the noise.
The beautiful, cloud-free sky was literally flickering like a broken television’s last gasps. Slightly north of the sun, which had dimmed to the point where one could stare at it without going blind, the baseball had wedged itself into a crack that had branched off into the previously-perfect sky. In the stunned silence of its discovery, the crack dropped a small chip of glass, the piece falling to the grass with a muffled thump. The boys followed it as if they’d hit the most expensive window in town.
The sky blinked twice more before going out entirely and drowning the entire town in darkness. Every piece of scenery, buildings and people alike, had disappeared, except for the two lone boys on the field. The street of row houses was just blank space, Dave’s apartment wasn’t even a shadow, and the gas station sign down the street that shone from dusk to dawn twenty-four-seven was a mere memory. The town, the horizon, and the sky had suddenly ceased to exist.
They could have stood there forever, jaws dropped, neither loudmouth willing to pipe up, had someone else not broken the silence.
“I knew it!” sang a voice that was far too cheerfully cocky for such an apocalypse. “I just knew you two would screw something up today!”
Finally clawing his way back to reality, Ricky shook his head and rubbed his eyes to confirm what he was seeing. The only three people in the world as he could see were himself, Dave, and the approaching figure, someone vaguely familiar from school hallways. “What did we do?” Ricky whispered, not daring to raise his voice further.
“You broke the fourth wall, that’s what!”
“Oh, and what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dave snapped, glaring back at the only person who could infuriate him enough to draw his mind off the broken sky. “That your fancy wizard telepathy again?”
“Clairvoyance, actually,” the ‘wizard’ corrected, casually strolling through the empty town.
Aster Asterix (he named himself, it means something about stars) was the school eccentric, a supposed wizard who showed off his genius at any opportunity he could make. He would have been the school punching bag as well, but the last guy who’d insulted him had spent the next week at home with the worst flu anyone had heard of. It was winter, and there was a little bug going around, but that bully avoided Aster like the plague, and his posse followed suit. Since then, Aster had just been ‘that weird wizard kid.’
Now he also held the title of ‘third person left on what remains of Earth.’ His cloak (technically just a cheap poncho cut into a cape and tied at the neck with a worn black shoelace) billowed out behind him, the glued-on glitter-stars refusing to shine. He stared at Dave with the same mildly-bitter expression he gave most people. “I didn’t know you believed in magic. How’d you know?”
“Telepathy,” Dave said, managing to keep a straight face through his seething sarcasm.
“An-y-way...” Aster chopped the word into syllables, slowing it down so he could word his exposition. “...You two broke the fourth wall, shattering our connection to the author. You also deleted the entire setting. Let’s just be happy you didn’t wipe out the characters, meaning us. We can fix it by—”
“Wait, wait,” Dave interrupted, shaking his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Ricky squinted, still staring at the sky. His eyes still held that glazed look. “I don’t see any audience,” he said, tilting his head childishly.
Rolling his eyes, Aster went on: “You’re not supposed to see them. Only people with extraordinary powers can see through dimensions.”
Dave rolled his eyes. “And I bet you’re special enough to see ‘em, huh?”
“Of course,” Aster said, nodding.
“And they’ve been there how long?”
“About seven minutes or so,” Aster said. “Don’t worry, it’s only for the course of the story. Completely temporary.”
“How comforting,” Dave muttered.
“Now for the problem itself. In ‘layman’s terms–’” The phrase came complete with air-quotes. “–you two just erased our world. We’ve got to rewrite everything and wrap up the plot so the story can end properly.”
Ricky blinked, finally dragging his gaze off the shattered sky. The understandable idea amidst all the confusion helped him recover his wits. “Writing? We have to write?”
“I hope not!” Dave snorted. “I barely got a C in English.”
“No problem,” Aster replied confidently. “I can handle all of it. Just tell me what kind of adventure you guys were up to and I can continue it from there.”
Neither boy said anything.
“Oh, come on. You guys had to have been doing something interesting, exciting, and downright scintillating!”
“Well, we were gonna play baseball,” Dave explained, absently scratching the back of his head.
“If we’re rewriting stuff, can you put us in the MLB?” Ricky gasped.
“That’s too boring,” Aster said, shooting both suggestions down like slow birds in hunting season. “We’ve got to do something cool, something that’ll keep the audience’s attention!” He took a moment to clear his throat, more for show than purpose, and began:
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
Before Ricky could ask how the hell someone could manage to speak in italics, the thick darkness surrounding them suddenly swirled, creating a giant whirlpool of color above their heads. Dave and Ricky turned to the sky, jaws dropping as the colors began to fade into darker, more ominous shades. Midnight blue, foreboding purple, dusty grays, and horror-forest greens twirled in the once-empty sky while a few pin-pricks of white tossed about in the swirl.
“The rain poured out of the sky relentlessly, pounding on the mansion’s roof with enough force to drag the weaker shingles down in the waterfall that cascaded off the edge.”
Even as the words rolled off Aster’s tongue, the colors in the sky dropped, splattering onto the blank horizon. Like paint on a canvas, the colors hit the empty space and stuck there, dribbling down the ‘wall’ until they suddenly halted wherever they deemed fit. Dusty, rotten gray painted a giant, Victorian-style mansion while separate blobs flew onto the building and decorated it with sepia windows and doors, moss and ivy, maroon shingles, and a tarnished gold door-knocker shaped like a fierce lion. Smaller gobs of paint jumped through the windows to work on the house’s interior while a jet of glinting white sketched cracks into the glass and spider webs cowering beneath the lip of the roof.
The background was painted much more quickly. If Ricky had to compare it to anything, it was like the giant bucket at the local water park, the one that collected water for one suspenseful minute before washing away all the excited little toddlers and drenching the unfortunate parents. He flinched, anticipating the downpour of grassland, but felt nothing. When he opened his eyes, wild, untrimmed grass tickled his ankles and a forest of trees stretched out as far as he could see.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Aster had continued to narrate. “A bone-chilling breeze brushed by the two small-town boys, who—“ He paused, glancing back to his two comrades. “I assume you two will want jackets?”
Ricky shivered, feeling the aforementioned breeze. A few late splotches battered the trees with gnarled bark and crows. The whole place was a clichéd horror movie’s intro. Part of him expected some credits to roll by while the camera slowly zoomed in on the mansion door. (Knowing Aster, every single title would be in his name. Actors wouldn’t get credit until the final reel.) “What the hell is this?” Ricky asked, ignoring the question.
“Damn,” Dave whistled, echoing his friend’s surprise. “And I thought what we did was weird.”
“It’s the setting for your new adventure,” Aster declared proudly. “I used the spacial distortion from the rift in the continuum to—”
"Short version?” Dave requested.
Sighing, Aster skipped the occult explanations and got right to business: “You will valiantly explore the haunted house and discover it to be inhabited by the ghosts of its former owners, and that flows into your multiple exploits and escapades in which you will narrowly avoid death, and finally escape to rally the townsfolk against the poltergeists. Now do you want jackets or not?” He paused, then brightened with what could only be called the “Light Bulb of Inspiration”. “Should I put it in old times? Like Dracula’s era, perhaps? I could get you some tattered farmer-boy clothes and it would look just—”
“Wait a minute!” Dave exclaimed, forgetting the chill. “All that horror crap’ll take forever!”
“Well,” Aster pouted, “what would you suggest, Mister Genius?”
“Something quick. And simple. Nothing that’ll take us forever to figure out.”
In the ensuing moments where Aster and Dave silently brainstormed, Ricky took his chance to catch up with what was happening and make a suggestion of his own: “What about a cowboy story? They’ve got quick draws, and that’s got ‘quick’ right in the name.”
Dave nodded. “That’s good.”
“I saw a Wild West movie once,” Aster mused. “It was that one with the guy.”
Dave feigned interest. “The one who did the stuff in that place?”
“Yeah, that one. Anyway, I suppose I could whip up an old-style town.”
With a final, forlorn look at the conjured mansion, Aster brushed a loose strand of hair from his face (for show, of course) and spoke in the same, confident tone as before.
“The small town lay just a few miles out from the river, home to just under a thousand dream-seekers yet to win their way into the urban town. Down by the most crowded street in town, the only one with a saloon, a group gathered on the dusty roads and awaited the bloodshed that, by this point, was inevitable.”
All the colors, Ricky noticed, were sucked away much faster than they spread out. He counted only two one-thousands before the mansion was vacuumed away, shrinking into the blackness and then exploding into a whole new color swirl. This tornado, however, was filled with tans, browns, a bubbling froth of sky-blue, and a little cloud-powder. As a last-minute addition, a few drops of cactus-green spurted out from the eye of the storm.
Again, the buildings were the first to arrive. Oak boards printed out left to right and top to bottom, stacking up into creaky buildings too unstable to reach a third story with roofs that probably leaked more than teenaged gossip. Then the bucket dumped out a tidal wave of grainy sand for the ground, the paintbrushes dragged some streaks onto the windows, and the cacti shot out like paint gun bullets to add some color and life to the horizon.
The scenery’s final touch was the town’s population. Ricky hadn’t been paying much attention to Aster’s non-stop rambling, but he caught a mention of a crowd, men and women alike, with bated breath while they waited for the showdown to begin. Then a splatter of screaming crowds, dressed in the musty, dirt-stained, nineteenth-century outfits that every cowboy-movie deemed a necessity, drowned out the rest of the narrator’s descriptions.
And then came the piece de resistance, the bad guy. A human-sized booger of color dropped down from the sky, hovered above the ground for one breath-stopping moment, then burst into the story’s antagonist.
The word that described him would not be ‘evil’, nor ‘malevolent’, not even just plain old ‘mean’. The only words Ricky could pin on the guy were ‘cliché’, ‘unoriginal’, and ‘downright stupid’. He had the dark-brown cowboy hat, the lanky, all-limbs look, the bow-legged, thumbs-in-pockets stance, and the stupid handlebar moustache that no one was ambitious enough to change. He turned, scraped a gob of saliva into his throat, and spat a huge loogie into a spittoon some fifteen yards away. It smacked the side of the vase with a cartoonish ‘ping.’
Another shocked inquiry had just begun crawling up Ricky’s throat when a serious command from Aster stopped it in its tracks.
“Don’t move.”
More from surprise than compliance, Ricky froze. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Dave do the same. Before he could even think to wonder why stillness was so important, a sudden blast of liquid color barreled into his side. It felt like a direct hit from a fire hose while lead shoes held him steady.
It seemed like a whole minute passed before the spray stopped, but Ricky was pretty sure his heart had stopped with fear during the time, and he could only have lived a couple seconds. When he looked down to see if any bones looked broken, he realized what had happened.
His jeans had been replaced with pants that flared at the ankles and matched the color of the dark-brown building roofs around him. His shirt was yellow and plaid, and his inner child squealed at the reminder of Toy Story’s Woody. His boots had spurs, his belt had a knife tucked in it, and a pistol in a holster hung casually off the right side of his hip. He didn’t even need to see the wide-brimmed hat on his head.
Dave was in a similar ensemble, only his shirt was a plain tan dress shirt, the only decoration being a few stitches on the collar. His hat looked like it had been thieved straight from a movie warehouse.
Ricky snickered, staring at his friend’s hat. “That hat get ten gallons?”
Dave grimaced. “Shut up. You look just as dumb as me.”
Patting the top of his hat, Ricky smirked. “No, I don’t think my hat could compete in a cloud-catching contest with the Empire State Building. That makes you dumber-looking.”
“Hey!” Aster yelled, drawing both teens’ attention to the top of the saloon. The narrator, of course, got to sit and watch from atop the roof, far from any danger. “No anachronisms! They didn’t have skyscrapers back then!”
“Yeah, well,” Dave shouted back, jerking a thumb towards the antagonist who had frozen with the rest of the scene once Aster went off topic, “at least they had originality! Where’d you get this guy, Cliché Central?”
“Maybe I would’ve been a little more inspired if we’d stuck with the abandoned mansion!”
“Alright, already!” Ricky shouted, exasperated. “Can you two stop fighting so we can fix this? I’m tired and hungry and I wanna go home before I miss the Sox game!”
“Gladly,” Aster said. He brushed a nonexistant wrinkle from the front of his shirt before covering his mouth with his hand and–
“This town ain’t big enough fer th’ two of us!”
The words looked as through they should have been Aster’s, but instead they came from the harsh, grizzled tone of the villain cowboy. Judging by the smirk plastered all over the town clairvoyant’s face, however, Ricky guessed this was another narration trick.
“Really?” Dave said, rolling his eyes. “Now all we need is a tumbleweed.”
“Noooo,” Aster replied. “The tumbleweed comes in the silence just before the quick draw.”
“Speaking of, can you write me up some shooting skills so this can be quick and clean?”
“First of all,” Aster sighed, “gunshots are hardly ever clean. Second, your characters have already been written, so that’s beyond my administration.”
“Written? By who?”
Aster folded his arms across his chest. “If I knew who he was, I would’ve made him write me smarter sidekicks.”
Dave tipped his hat back to give Aster a cold glare. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said. “But you really can’t do anything? I haven’t shot a gun in my life. I was kinda depending on your eccentricity to get us through this.”
“Too bad, so sad. What about Richard?”
The third member of the party shrugged. “I went hunting with my dad once,” he admitted, a bit hesitant. “I mean, it wasn’t a quick-draw, and I wasn’t in the wild west with an invisible audience or–”
“What, you’ve got stage fright?” Aster asked. “Backing out? I mean, we can just live permanently in the Wild West, stalked for eternity by an invisible crowd. Doesn’t that sound pleasant?”
Ricky grimaced. “Uh, no.”
“Alright then. Good luck!” Aster clapped twice, then dropped back into his narration:
“The two duelists went back to back, facing down two ends of the same street. The crowd willingly parted to give them space.”
Something hit the world’s ‘play’ button, sending the entire scene back into motion. The crowd backed off, Dave included, while Ricky and the villain took their places, spurred into motion by Aster’s voice.
However, before the ten paces began, Dave snuck out from the crowd to give his pal a few words of advice. After a swift bout of furtive whispering, Ricky nodded.
“But, wait,” he whispered back, “is that even allowed in quick draws?”
“Does it matter?”
“Well, I–”
“Do you want to go home and enjoy a nice dinner with your family or get shot in a shoddy Wild West town?”
“...Go home.”
“There you are, then.”
With a final nod of agreement, the duo parted ways, leaving Ricky to go back-to-back with their tale’s villain. The teen checked that the pistol was still in its holster and readied himself, trying to ignore the fact that the villain’s back was warm and sticky with sweat that soaked through both shirt and vest. He desperately searched the crowd for a glimpse of Dave, but all he saw were crooked-toothed strangers with dirt on their pants, bags under their eyes, and all the wordless excitement of a plotless action-movie’s viewers.
“Ten paces!” barked a voice from somewhere in the crowd. One man broke into the front crowd, apparently the acting-referee for the event. Right on cue, a tumbleweed tumbled on by.
“One!”
Ricky peeled away from his adversary and took a shaky step forward.
“Two!”
He nearly slipped on the ground because there was so much dust.
“Three!”
The crowd went silent, save for the sound of their collective breathing.
“Four!”
From the rooftops, Aster still related the whole ordeal like a sports announcer, only he didn’t have the jocular tone.
“Five!”
Ricky swallowed, regretting it when the lump in his throat rolled down his neck like a wad of sandpaper.
“Six!”
In the crowd, Ricky finally spotted Dave’s ten-gallon hat sticking out. (Either the fad hadn’t caught on, or Aster enjoyed making Dave look dumb. Probably both.) Just the recognition of his friend’s presence steadied Ricky’s steps.
“Seven!”
“Do you want to go home or get shot?”
“Eight!”
“Go home.”
“Nine!”
“There you are, then.”
“Ten!”
The world froze. Aster must have used a similar phrase, because the blowing dust seemed to halt in midair and the crowd didn’t even breathe. For those few seconds, everything waited for the referee’s signal. Ricky held his breath and mentally practiced his plan.
“DRAW!”
The villain immediately turned around, lifted his gun, and shot.
Ricky ducked.
He turned on one foot and slid the other out in front
of him so that when he dropped to his knee a moment later, it looked as though he’d slid into home base for the winning run. At the same time, he reached for his pistol and prayed that he could remember all that his dad had told him.
His assailant’s shot, intended to strike the heart, sailed past with a speed that snatched the hat from Ricky’s head. In the meantime, Ricky took aim at the villain’s chest and pulled the trigger.
Still recovering from his enemy’s surprise move, the villain didn’t react in time to dodge. The bullet barreled into his gut, and he doubled over from the pain. Two more shots drove through him, one just above the first and the other into his heart.
He fell to a chorus of gasps from the crowd. Defeated, he lay there until his heart spilled its contents and had nothing left to beat for.
In the meantime, the mob whispered amongst itself, each individual wondering if that was fair or not. Ricky threw a concerned glance to Aster, who responded with a reassuring smile and a thumbs-up.
By the time Ricky turned back to the group, the people had swarmed to him, offering pats on the back and congratulations. Even Dave stepped forward, wiped the scowl off his face, and offered his pal a pat on the back.
“I told you it’d work,” he shouted over the roar of the crowd.
After a couple more minutes and a promised round of booze on the house, the group dissolved and instead flooded into the bar to drink and re-enact the scene. The three outsiders stayed in the street.
“Well?” Dave inquired, staring up towards their narrator.
“Good show, Richard!” Aster said, giving the victor a round of applause. “Anyway, we’re just about done here. I just need to end the story so we can recreate our town.”
“With benefits?” Ricky asked, an eager grin on his face.
“Sure,” Aster sighed, smiling. “Just a few, though.”
“So,” Dave interrupted. “How long does an ending take?”
“Oh, not long at all. I remember most of the town fairly well, and as you’ve heard I’m an expert with words.”
“Yeah, okay, sure.” Dave sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Hurry it up, then, I’m hungry.”
“Hey,” Ricky began, “how tough would it be to write me a pizza for dinner?”
“Shhhh,” Aster hissed, closing his eyes and concentrating. “I’m writing.”
Dave glanced over at Ricky, then rolled his eyes. “Writing how–?”
He cut off the sentence mid-word, his scathing wit cancelled by a sudden jet stream of color in the previous old-time sepia. Both he and Ricky halted, for what would hopefully be the last time that day, to watch the scene.
Anyone watching the scene off the movie screen would have said a variety of colors drizzled across the screen, but in the moment, it looked like every crayon in the box melted together and labeled ‘Rainbow.’ Vaguely, the colors formed type-font letters that snaked across the Wild-West scenery, filling it with a dizzying array of disorganized colors, alphabets, and symbols.
Ricky watched, spellbound, until his eyes began to water and he remembered to blink. In the instant his eyes closed, the letters overtook everything in sight, then vanished. He looked out onto the town he’d lived in all his life. Same row houses, same Dave’s apartment, same gas-station sign, and, most importantly, same unblemished sky. They were back in the field again, the bat and ball laying innocently at Ricky’s feet.
“Everything’s just like before,” Ricky said, grinning
“Well,” Aster replied, “everything except for your household’s dinner schedule. You’ll be having pizza, and David was invited to visit.”
“Awesome! Thanks!” After a moment, Ricky leaned over and nudged Dave with his elbow. “Whaddya say?”
“Fine,” Dave grumbled, staring at the ground. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Aster said, just as cold as Dave’s gratitude. “I suppose I ought to go home then.” He started to turn away, then paused and glanced back. “You two aren’t planning on causing any more trouble, right?”
“Nope!” Ricky chirped. “I learned my lesson! Tomorrow, we’ll play soccer!”
Aaaannyways, I'm an awful poet (*stares enviously at Ashemir/Harhunt and Saber*) so odds are, you guys'll be getting short stories from me. Like this one.
Hopefully it doesn't suck, but if it does, I would love to know why because it's really hard to fix stuff if I don't know what's wrong. (I'd especially like some opinions on the ending; I rewrote it once and I want to know if it turned out well.) Here goes nothing...
((Pfghfhtphthhh so long))
“Bottom of the ninth, three men on base, two outs, so-on- and so-forth,” announced the batter in a mocking imitation of an actual game. He flicked aside the brim of his baseball hat, assuming that a backwards cap made him seem more ‘cool.’ Coolness came at the cost of a constant squint; the sun shone at its brightest with no clouds daring to intrude. “The fate of the game depends on Ricky Selder, world’s greatest batter.”
“Yeah, ‘cept the ‘world’s greatest’ can’t hit shit.”
The pitcher, a pessimistic high-school senior, earned himself a fierce glare. “The poor away team is stuck with the world’s lamest pitcher, Dave Johnson,” Ricky continued, his tone consistent and cocky. “Folks, I think we can all see where this game is going.”
“It ain’t goin’ anywhere!” Dave threw his arms in the air with over-exaggerated frustration. “Hell, it ain’t even started yet.”
“You’re jealous.” Ricky rolled his eyes. “C’mon, gimmie a pitch.”
Dave tossed the ball into his glove, made a show of winding-up the pitch, then, just as Ricky was opening his mouth to complain, whipped the ball across the field.
Ricky was more on-the-ball than he seemed: bat collided with ball, erupting into a crack that echoed far enough to start a baby crying down the street. The ball soared straight over Dave’s head, flying into the peak of its arc.
“Home-run, baby!” Ricky whooped, already beginning a victory lap while Dave pouted, trying to ignore his friend’s obstreperous cheering.
However, both boys froze when the oh-so-familiar sound of shattering glass overshadowed Ricky’s victory dance. The duo slowly, reluctantly turned to stare at the source of the noise.
The beautiful, cloud-free sky was literally flickering like a broken television’s last gasps. Slightly north of the sun, which had dimmed to the point where one could stare at it without going blind, the baseball had wedged itself into a crack that had branched off into the previously-perfect sky. In the stunned silence of its discovery, the crack dropped a small chip of glass, the piece falling to the grass with a muffled thump. The boys followed it as if they’d hit the most expensive window in town.
The sky blinked twice more before going out entirely and drowning the entire town in darkness. Every piece of scenery, buildings and people alike, had disappeared, except for the two lone boys on the field. The street of row houses was just blank space, Dave’s apartment wasn’t even a shadow, and the gas station sign down the street that shone from dusk to dawn twenty-four-seven was a mere memory. The town, the horizon, and the sky had suddenly ceased to exist.
They could have stood there forever, jaws dropped, neither loudmouth willing to pipe up, had someone else not broken the silence.
“I knew it!” sang a voice that was far too cheerfully cocky for such an apocalypse. “I just knew you two would screw something up today!”
Finally clawing his way back to reality, Ricky shook his head and rubbed his eyes to confirm what he was seeing. The only three people in the world as he could see were himself, Dave, and the approaching figure, someone vaguely familiar from school hallways. “What did we do?” Ricky whispered, not daring to raise his voice further.
“You broke the fourth wall, that’s what!”
“Oh, and what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dave snapped, glaring back at the only person who could infuriate him enough to draw his mind off the broken sky. “That your fancy wizard telepathy again?”
“Clairvoyance, actually,” the ‘wizard’ corrected, casually strolling through the empty town.
Aster Asterix (he named himself, it means something about stars) was the school eccentric, a supposed wizard who showed off his genius at any opportunity he could make. He would have been the school punching bag as well, but the last guy who’d insulted him had spent the next week at home with the worst flu anyone had heard of. It was winter, and there was a little bug going around, but that bully avoided Aster like the plague, and his posse followed suit. Since then, Aster had just been ‘that weird wizard kid.’
Now he also held the title of ‘third person left on what remains of Earth.’ His cloak (technically just a cheap poncho cut into a cape and tied at the neck with a worn black shoelace) billowed out behind him, the glued-on glitter-stars refusing to shine. He stared at Dave with the same mildly-bitter expression he gave most people. “I didn’t know you believed in magic. How’d you know?”
“Telepathy,” Dave said, managing to keep a straight face through his seething sarcasm.
“An-y-way...” Aster chopped the word into syllables, slowing it down so he could word his exposition. “...You two broke the fourth wall, shattering our connection to the author. You also deleted the entire setting. Let’s just be happy you didn’t wipe out the characters, meaning us. We can fix it by—”
“Wait, wait,” Dave interrupted, shaking his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Ricky squinted, still staring at the sky. His eyes still held that glazed look. “I don’t see any audience,” he said, tilting his head childishly.
Rolling his eyes, Aster went on: “You’re not supposed to see them. Only people with extraordinary powers can see through dimensions.”
Dave rolled his eyes. “And I bet you’re special enough to see ‘em, huh?”
“Of course,” Aster said, nodding.
“And they’ve been there how long?”
“About seven minutes or so,” Aster said. “Don’t worry, it’s only for the course of the story. Completely temporary.”
“How comforting,” Dave muttered.
“Now for the problem itself. In ‘layman’s terms–’” The phrase came complete with air-quotes. “–you two just erased our world. We’ve got to rewrite everything and wrap up the plot so the story can end properly.”
Ricky blinked, finally dragging his gaze off the shattered sky. The understandable idea amidst all the confusion helped him recover his wits. “Writing? We have to write?”
“I hope not!” Dave snorted. “I barely got a C in English.”
“No problem,” Aster replied confidently. “I can handle all of it. Just tell me what kind of adventure you guys were up to and I can continue it from there.”
Neither boy said anything.
“Oh, come on. You guys had to have been doing something interesting, exciting, and downright scintillating!”
“Well, we were gonna play baseball,” Dave explained, absently scratching the back of his head.
“If we’re rewriting stuff, can you put us in the MLB?” Ricky gasped.
“That’s too boring,” Aster said, shooting both suggestions down like slow birds in hunting season. “We’ve got to do something cool, something that’ll keep the audience’s attention!” He took a moment to clear his throat, more for show than purpose, and began:
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
Before Ricky could ask how the hell someone could manage to speak in italics, the thick darkness surrounding them suddenly swirled, creating a giant whirlpool of color above their heads. Dave and Ricky turned to the sky, jaws dropping as the colors began to fade into darker, more ominous shades. Midnight blue, foreboding purple, dusty grays, and horror-forest greens twirled in the once-empty sky while a few pin-pricks of white tossed about in the swirl.
“The rain poured out of the sky relentlessly, pounding on the mansion’s roof with enough force to drag the weaker shingles down in the waterfall that cascaded off the edge.”
Even as the words rolled off Aster’s tongue, the colors in the sky dropped, splattering onto the blank horizon. Like paint on a canvas, the colors hit the empty space and stuck there, dribbling down the ‘wall’ until they suddenly halted wherever they deemed fit. Dusty, rotten gray painted a giant, Victorian-style mansion while separate blobs flew onto the building and decorated it with sepia windows and doors, moss and ivy, maroon shingles, and a tarnished gold door-knocker shaped like a fierce lion. Smaller gobs of paint jumped through the windows to work on the house’s interior while a jet of glinting white sketched cracks into the glass and spider webs cowering beneath the lip of the roof.
The background was painted much more quickly. If Ricky had to compare it to anything, it was like the giant bucket at the local water park, the one that collected water for one suspenseful minute before washing away all the excited little toddlers and drenching the unfortunate parents. He flinched, anticipating the downpour of grassland, but felt nothing. When he opened his eyes, wild, untrimmed grass tickled his ankles and a forest of trees stretched out as far as he could see.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Aster had continued to narrate. “A bone-chilling breeze brushed by the two small-town boys, who—“ He paused, glancing back to his two comrades. “I assume you two will want jackets?”
Ricky shivered, feeling the aforementioned breeze. A few late splotches battered the trees with gnarled bark and crows. The whole place was a clichéd horror movie’s intro. Part of him expected some credits to roll by while the camera slowly zoomed in on the mansion door. (Knowing Aster, every single title would be in his name. Actors wouldn’t get credit until the final reel.) “What the hell is this?” Ricky asked, ignoring the question.
“Damn,” Dave whistled, echoing his friend’s surprise. “And I thought what we did was weird.”
“It’s the setting for your new adventure,” Aster declared proudly. “I used the spacial distortion from the rift in the continuum to—”
"Short version?” Dave requested.
Sighing, Aster skipped the occult explanations and got right to business: “You will valiantly explore the haunted house and discover it to be inhabited by the ghosts of its former owners, and that flows into your multiple exploits and escapades in which you will narrowly avoid death, and finally escape to rally the townsfolk against the poltergeists. Now do you want jackets or not?” He paused, then brightened with what could only be called the “Light Bulb of Inspiration”. “Should I put it in old times? Like Dracula’s era, perhaps? I could get you some tattered farmer-boy clothes and it would look just—”
“Wait a minute!” Dave exclaimed, forgetting the chill. “All that horror crap’ll take forever!”
“Well,” Aster pouted, “what would you suggest, Mister Genius?”
“Something quick. And simple. Nothing that’ll take us forever to figure out.”
In the ensuing moments where Aster and Dave silently brainstormed, Ricky took his chance to catch up with what was happening and make a suggestion of his own: “What about a cowboy story? They’ve got quick draws, and that’s got ‘quick’ right in the name.”
Dave nodded. “That’s good.”
“I saw a Wild West movie once,” Aster mused. “It was that one with the guy.”
Dave feigned interest. “The one who did the stuff in that place?”
“Yeah, that one. Anyway, I suppose I could whip up an old-style town.”
With a final, forlorn look at the conjured mansion, Aster brushed a loose strand of hair from his face (for show, of course) and spoke in the same, confident tone as before.
“The small town lay just a few miles out from the river, home to just under a thousand dream-seekers yet to win their way into the urban town. Down by the most crowded street in town, the only one with a saloon, a group gathered on the dusty roads and awaited the bloodshed that, by this point, was inevitable.”
All the colors, Ricky noticed, were sucked away much faster than they spread out. He counted only two one-thousands before the mansion was vacuumed away, shrinking into the blackness and then exploding into a whole new color swirl. This tornado, however, was filled with tans, browns, a bubbling froth of sky-blue, and a little cloud-powder. As a last-minute addition, a few drops of cactus-green spurted out from the eye of the storm.
Again, the buildings were the first to arrive. Oak boards printed out left to right and top to bottom, stacking up into creaky buildings too unstable to reach a third story with roofs that probably leaked more than teenaged gossip. Then the bucket dumped out a tidal wave of grainy sand for the ground, the paintbrushes dragged some streaks onto the windows, and the cacti shot out like paint gun bullets to add some color and life to the horizon.
The scenery’s final touch was the town’s population. Ricky hadn’t been paying much attention to Aster’s non-stop rambling, but he caught a mention of a crowd, men and women alike, with bated breath while they waited for the showdown to begin. Then a splatter of screaming crowds, dressed in the musty, dirt-stained, nineteenth-century outfits that every cowboy-movie deemed a necessity, drowned out the rest of the narrator’s descriptions.
And then came the piece de resistance, the bad guy. A human-sized booger of color dropped down from the sky, hovered above the ground for one breath-stopping moment, then burst into the story’s antagonist.
The word that described him would not be ‘evil’, nor ‘malevolent’, not even just plain old ‘mean’. The only words Ricky could pin on the guy were ‘cliché’, ‘unoriginal’, and ‘downright stupid’. He had the dark-brown cowboy hat, the lanky, all-limbs look, the bow-legged, thumbs-in-pockets stance, and the stupid handlebar moustache that no one was ambitious enough to change. He turned, scraped a gob of saliva into his throat, and spat a huge loogie into a spittoon some fifteen yards away. It smacked the side of the vase with a cartoonish ‘ping.’
Another shocked inquiry had just begun crawling up Ricky’s throat when a serious command from Aster stopped it in its tracks.
“Don’t move.”
More from surprise than compliance, Ricky froze. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Dave do the same. Before he could even think to wonder why stillness was so important, a sudden blast of liquid color barreled into his side. It felt like a direct hit from a fire hose while lead shoes held him steady.
It seemed like a whole minute passed before the spray stopped, but Ricky was pretty sure his heart had stopped with fear during the time, and he could only have lived a couple seconds. When he looked down to see if any bones looked broken, he realized what had happened.
His jeans had been replaced with pants that flared at the ankles and matched the color of the dark-brown building roofs around him. His shirt was yellow and plaid, and his inner child squealed at the reminder of Toy Story’s Woody. His boots had spurs, his belt had a knife tucked in it, and a pistol in a holster hung casually off the right side of his hip. He didn’t even need to see the wide-brimmed hat on his head.
Dave was in a similar ensemble, only his shirt was a plain tan dress shirt, the only decoration being a few stitches on the collar. His hat looked like it had been thieved straight from a movie warehouse.
Ricky snickered, staring at his friend’s hat. “That hat get ten gallons?”
Dave grimaced. “Shut up. You look just as dumb as me.”
Patting the top of his hat, Ricky smirked. “No, I don’t think my hat could compete in a cloud-catching contest with the Empire State Building. That makes you dumber-looking.”
“Hey!” Aster yelled, drawing both teens’ attention to the top of the saloon. The narrator, of course, got to sit and watch from atop the roof, far from any danger. “No anachronisms! They didn’t have skyscrapers back then!”
“Yeah, well,” Dave shouted back, jerking a thumb towards the antagonist who had frozen with the rest of the scene once Aster went off topic, “at least they had originality! Where’d you get this guy, Cliché Central?”
“Maybe I would’ve been a little more inspired if we’d stuck with the abandoned mansion!”
“Alright, already!” Ricky shouted, exasperated. “Can you two stop fighting so we can fix this? I’m tired and hungry and I wanna go home before I miss the Sox game!”
“Gladly,” Aster said. He brushed a nonexistant wrinkle from the front of his shirt before covering his mouth with his hand and–
“This town ain’t big enough fer th’ two of us!”
The words looked as through they should have been Aster’s, but instead they came from the harsh, grizzled tone of the villain cowboy. Judging by the smirk plastered all over the town clairvoyant’s face, however, Ricky guessed this was another narration trick.
“Really?” Dave said, rolling his eyes. “Now all we need is a tumbleweed.”
“Noooo,” Aster replied. “The tumbleweed comes in the silence just before the quick draw.”
“Speaking of, can you write me up some shooting skills so this can be quick and clean?”
“First of all,” Aster sighed, “gunshots are hardly ever clean. Second, your characters have already been written, so that’s beyond my administration.”
“Written? By who?”
Aster folded his arms across his chest. “If I knew who he was, I would’ve made him write me smarter sidekicks.”
Dave tipped his hat back to give Aster a cold glare. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said. “But you really can’t do anything? I haven’t shot a gun in my life. I was kinda depending on your eccentricity to get us through this.”
“Too bad, so sad. What about Richard?”
The third member of the party shrugged. “I went hunting with my dad once,” he admitted, a bit hesitant. “I mean, it wasn’t a quick-draw, and I wasn’t in the wild west with an invisible audience or–”
“What, you’ve got stage fright?” Aster asked. “Backing out? I mean, we can just live permanently in the Wild West, stalked for eternity by an invisible crowd. Doesn’t that sound pleasant?”
Ricky grimaced. “Uh, no.”
“Alright then. Good luck!” Aster clapped twice, then dropped back into his narration:
“The two duelists went back to back, facing down two ends of the same street. The crowd willingly parted to give them space.”
Something hit the world’s ‘play’ button, sending the entire scene back into motion. The crowd backed off, Dave included, while Ricky and the villain took their places, spurred into motion by Aster’s voice.
However, before the ten paces began, Dave snuck out from the crowd to give his pal a few words of advice. After a swift bout of furtive whispering, Ricky nodded.
“But, wait,” he whispered back, “is that even allowed in quick draws?”
“Does it matter?”
“Well, I–”
“Do you want to go home and enjoy a nice dinner with your family or get shot in a shoddy Wild West town?”
“...Go home.”
“There you are, then.”
With a final nod of agreement, the duo parted ways, leaving Ricky to go back-to-back with their tale’s villain. The teen checked that the pistol was still in its holster and readied himself, trying to ignore the fact that the villain’s back was warm and sticky with sweat that soaked through both shirt and vest. He desperately searched the crowd for a glimpse of Dave, but all he saw were crooked-toothed strangers with dirt on their pants, bags under their eyes, and all the wordless excitement of a plotless action-movie’s viewers.
“Ten paces!” barked a voice from somewhere in the crowd. One man broke into the front crowd, apparently the acting-referee for the event. Right on cue, a tumbleweed tumbled on by.
“One!”
Ricky peeled away from his adversary and took a shaky step forward.
“Two!”
He nearly slipped on the ground because there was so much dust.
“Three!”
The crowd went silent, save for the sound of their collective breathing.
“Four!”
From the rooftops, Aster still related the whole ordeal like a sports announcer, only he didn’t have the jocular tone.
“Five!”
Ricky swallowed, regretting it when the lump in his throat rolled down his neck like a wad of sandpaper.
“Six!”
In the crowd, Ricky finally spotted Dave’s ten-gallon hat sticking out. (Either the fad hadn’t caught on, or Aster enjoyed making Dave look dumb. Probably both.) Just the recognition of his friend’s presence steadied Ricky’s steps.
“Seven!”
“Do you want to go home or get shot?”
“Eight!”
“Go home.”
“Nine!”
“There you are, then.”
“Ten!”
The world froze. Aster must have used a similar phrase, because the blowing dust seemed to halt in midair and the crowd didn’t even breathe. For those few seconds, everything waited for the referee’s signal. Ricky held his breath and mentally practiced his plan.
“DRAW!”
The villain immediately turned around, lifted his gun, and shot.
Ricky ducked.
He turned on one foot and slid the other out in front
of him so that when he dropped to his knee a moment later, it looked as though he’d slid into home base for the winning run. At the same time, he reached for his pistol and prayed that he could remember all that his dad had told him.
His assailant’s shot, intended to strike the heart, sailed past with a speed that snatched the hat from Ricky’s head. In the meantime, Ricky took aim at the villain’s chest and pulled the trigger.
Still recovering from his enemy’s surprise move, the villain didn’t react in time to dodge. The bullet barreled into his gut, and he doubled over from the pain. Two more shots drove through him, one just above the first and the other into his heart.
He fell to a chorus of gasps from the crowd. Defeated, he lay there until his heart spilled its contents and had nothing left to beat for.
In the meantime, the mob whispered amongst itself, each individual wondering if that was fair or not. Ricky threw a concerned glance to Aster, who responded with a reassuring smile and a thumbs-up.
By the time Ricky turned back to the group, the people had swarmed to him, offering pats on the back and congratulations. Even Dave stepped forward, wiped the scowl off his face, and offered his pal a pat on the back.
“I told you it’d work,” he shouted over the roar of the crowd.
After a couple more minutes and a promised round of booze on the house, the group dissolved and instead flooded into the bar to drink and re-enact the scene. The three outsiders stayed in the street.
“Well?” Dave inquired, staring up towards their narrator.
“Good show, Richard!” Aster said, giving the victor a round of applause. “Anyway, we’re just about done here. I just need to end the story so we can recreate our town.”
“With benefits?” Ricky asked, an eager grin on his face.
“Sure,” Aster sighed, smiling. “Just a few, though.”
“So,” Dave interrupted. “How long does an ending take?”
“Oh, not long at all. I remember most of the town fairly well, and as you’ve heard I’m an expert with words.”
“Yeah, okay, sure.” Dave sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Hurry it up, then, I’m hungry.”
“Hey,” Ricky began, “how tough would it be to write me a pizza for dinner?”
“Shhhh,” Aster hissed, closing his eyes and concentrating. “I’m writing.”
Dave glanced over at Ricky, then rolled his eyes. “Writing how–?”
He cut off the sentence mid-word, his scathing wit cancelled by a sudden jet stream of color in the previous old-time sepia. Both he and Ricky halted, for what would hopefully be the last time that day, to watch the scene.
Anyone watching the scene off the movie screen would have said a variety of colors drizzled across the screen, but in the moment, it looked like every crayon in the box melted together and labeled ‘Rainbow.’ Vaguely, the colors formed type-font letters that snaked across the Wild-West scenery, filling it with a dizzying array of disorganized colors, alphabets, and symbols.
Ricky watched, spellbound, until his eyes began to water and he remembered to blink. In the instant his eyes closed, the letters overtook everything in sight, then vanished. He looked out onto the town he’d lived in all his life. Same row houses, same Dave’s apartment, same gas-station sign, and, most importantly, same unblemished sky. They were back in the field again, the bat and ball laying innocently at Ricky’s feet.
“Everything’s just like before,” Ricky said, grinning
“Well,” Aster replied, “everything except for your household’s dinner schedule. You’ll be having pizza, and David was invited to visit.”
“Awesome! Thanks!” After a moment, Ricky leaned over and nudged Dave with his elbow. “Whaddya say?”
“Fine,” Dave grumbled, staring at the ground. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Aster said, just as cold as Dave’s gratitude. “I suppose I ought to go home then.” He started to turn away, then paused and glanced back. “You two aren’t planning on causing any more trouble, right?”
“Nope!” Ricky chirped. “I learned my lesson! Tomorrow, we’ll play soccer!”