Lockdown
Soon she is calmer and a little woozy and walks through the expanse of second-story hallway past the giant art deco ferns and mirrors, calling people one after the other and slurring into voicemails because no-one seems to be home:
That son of a bitch locked me in the house again. Come over and knock in a window. One of them by the roses; he won't see. Be a dear. Call me.
Outside there is a swimming pool but she cannot get to it.
2. That way she tells him: I surprised a thief trying to enter from behind the rose bushes. He was halfway into the kitchen when Ma and Pa Ketel and I arrived. He was wearing a black and white striped sweater, a beret and a black mask. I was going to call the police but I didn't think I would be able to identify him in a police line-up and would not want to be complicit in the tragic undoing of an innocent. I climbed through the window to make sure he was gone.
And he congratulates her and tells her to be more mindful of her safety when she surprises a thief and says we should move the roses away from the house or hire guards and then he complains about the neighborhood going to hell because of the proliferation of imaginary meth labs run by the children of the Mexicans on staff.
3. If this goddamn plunger would just stick to the glass I can pull it inside when I cut it. I've seen this work in movies.
Over and over she hits the window with the plunger. As she grows angrier, more hair falls from its bun.
4. She enters the pool house. She considers changing into swimwear but it's freezing outside. She flips on the lights by the pool. A few leaves float on the surface of the water. I shall tell the pool boy about this tomorrow.
She imagines the conversation with the pool boy: he pushes her back against a wall and she says “No, no” weakly while wrapping a leg around him.
5. Across the yard is a garage filled with cars.
6. The water is heating. Soon it will be like amniotic fluid. She will float amongst the leaves, her nightgown billowing in slow-motion, and look into a cone made from stars.
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Author's Note
an experiment in putting the fun back into dysfunction.
Other stories by stephen hastings-king
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I like this, Stephen. The use of the connected, yet broken scenes is unique and interesting. You also managed to pack in a lot of interactions through her thoughts, even though she's alone the whole time.
This is spooky, evocative, and very compelling. Each step stands alone but together they are inexorable. The mood changes neurotically. Rewards multiple re-readings. Thanks for posting this.
"...and look into a cone made from stars." Nice!
Thanks much for the reads, comments and faves.
This is playing around with a straighter form than I usually use, so I'm curious about how people perceive things.
The main character is drinking throughout the story. The idea for the form is that it doubles the fact that she's getting (dangerously) drunk and also allows the narrative to swing into and out of her state of mind---so you get to "see" her. But you don't get correctives to her drunken flights---you just move from interior to exterior within the same space.
The social detail is about trying to shape the who that you see when you stage her.
In my mind, she's a bit "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" but a North Shore Society variant. She's wealthy and unhappy and bored and not terribly pleasant.
I also thought the piece was funny when I made it...
Since you said you're still working on this one, I'll add a couple comments. I really like the first sentence, plus 4, 5, and 6. I might like 5 to the point of swooning with joy if you choose not to tell us what to this reader (by this point) is true in her mind, ie that there's no place for her to go.
The change to first person didn't work for me on 3 AND I had to read that section three times before I understood what was happening.
2, similarly, I had to read a couple times, and left that section uncertainly concluding that she's imagining what she WILL tell him and sort of gets lost in the reverie so it's like it happened.
Interesting..thanks for the comments. What I've already done is take out the second sentence of no. 5. You're right about that. You have no. 2 right---the idea is that she's been drinking vodka and is slipping into a place in which the present and subjunctive are interchangeable. No. 3 balances against the telephone message, I think. I wanted it to be a jolt moving from 2 into 3 in part because I wanted the time-frame of the story to stretch at that point, so creating an interpretive problem seemed a good idea.