just tossing this out there

Frank took another pull on his cigar. He swirled the cup of whiskey in his hand, contemplating another sip but deciding against it. He set the glass down on the small table and stared into the setting African sun. Finally, he opened his mouth, but stopped abruptly. After a long pause he spoke, "Jim. I need that Rhino."
Jim sat across from him, each sitting low to the ground in their folding chairs. They had been afield for eight days already. Neither man killed their quarry yet. Both had traveled half-way around the world to bag their mark. After a long manly silence, Jim took a pull from his brandy flask. "I know Frank, I know."
Thick manly plumes of smoke rose from the smoldering ashes of the campfire as the sun plunged headlong into the savanna. Both men retired to their respective dwellings for the night. Each lay his rifle by his bed.
The night passed too slowly for Frank. He woke twice in a cold sweat. His dreams kept bringing him back to Madrid, back to the Plaza de Toros. He couldn't get the death-bellows of the bull out of his head. It called to him across time. The shear ferocity with which the innocent bull was hacked apart filled him with near-divine fervor. The savage grace of that final skewer, the warm splash of fresh blood, and the bewildered look of the bull all stuck in Frank’s consciousness. He woke in a cold sweat. He needed that Rhino.

that only makes two-hundred-fifty-one words, technically it is a microfiction, but I guess I can write something else if I have to.

take that kathleen!

...get it?

EMU!!!

This is an Emu. Emus survive by eating various plants and insects. They stand up to two meters tall and have a top speed of around 31 miles per hour. Some people find emus absolutely terrifying. Isn't that stupid!

independent piece 6 intro

Let's see if Jake can't get this one right. That said, lets get to the introductioning. This is the second chapter of a longer piece, the ending and plot for which I am definitely not making up as I go. Don't worry if you missed the first piece (independent 4) and judging by the comments on that piece I'm guessing that most of you did (and who am I kidding, there's not even anyone reading this right now, I can say whatever the hell I want.) So yeah, the story is pretty easy to follow and it's pretty much just "The Monkey's Paw" rehashed and slopped on a plate for you enjoyment. I'll probably write a third piece to bring it all together and the mother may or may not become significant, I haven't decided yet. Can anyone guess the surprise twist ending yet? HINT: if you can't guess it, chances are you're some kind of baboon (unless I get a really good idea for a clever tricky twist ending than I'll use that and blow your mind.) But again, it doesn't really matter what I say here because I can almost guarantee that no one is reading this.

independent piece 6

The father was overjoyed at his success, the results were more than he could have hoped for. He had been well instructed in the process of command, he knew what was needed, orders. Without orders the boy he had made was nothing more than a terra cotta in miniature. His first order was an easy choice, "Speak." Once commanded words began to flow freely from the boy’s mouth, no sentences or complete ideas just a babbling stream of words. The golem looked to his creator for approval as the nonsense poured from his mouth. After a moment’s pause our sculptor orders his puppet to stop speaking. For a moment he feared he would have to destroy the abomination, but he could not bring himself to kill it. Not when it looked so much like the son he lost, he couldn’t lose him again. Months passed and the creature stayed locked in the basement, daily the sculptor would descend and spend hours working on the perfect order. Eventually he struck upon the perfect combination of commands to make the boy act as much as a child as he appeared. It did everything a boy should do; it spoke like a child, it fought about bedtime, it tracked mud inside, it could do everything a boy could do except for grow. The creature could not age as a child should, it was a static being. To avert suspicion the father would remake his child monthly, adding or cutting away bits of clay to make the boy appear to grow regularly. With each new physical incarnation came new orders allowing the young golem to age as if here were a thing of flesh.
The father knew that his deception would only last so long, eventually little boys become little men and they leave their fathers behind. The golem would have to leave eventually and what than, he couldn’t be rebuilt and re-ordered if he were living alone. It was the most difficult decision that our father had been forced to make since his son was first taken from him, but he knew what he had to do. He would have to destroy the golem before he reached an age of independence. He would have to watch his son die again, but this time it would be different.

This is a cat. Cats have sharp claws and teeth and don't like people. They eat food when it is left for them and run away when it isn't. People LOVE cats, keeping two or even three cats in a single house despite their being totally worthless. Isn't that stupid!

belated april fools day joke, NOT my actual screenplay

Jim I Need That Rhino: The Movie

Frank takes another pull on his cigar. He swirls the cup of whiskey in his hand, contemplating another sip but deciding against it. He sets the glass down on the small table and stares into the setting African sun. Finally, he opens his mouth, but stops abruptly. After a long pause he speaks

Frank:

Jim. I need that Rhino.

Jim sits across from him, each sitting low to the ground in their folding chairs. They have been afield for eight days already. Neither man has killed their quarry yet. Both have traveled half-way around the world to bag their mark. After a long manly silence, Jim takes a pull from his brandy flask and speaks.

Jim:

I know Frank, I know.

Thick manly plumes of smoke rise from the smoldering ashes of the campfire as the sun plunges headlong into the savanna. Both men retire to their respective dwellings for the night. Each lays his rifle by his bed.

The night passes slowly for Frank. He tosses and turns in a cold sweat. His dreams bring him back to Madrid, back to the Plaza de Toros.

Narration over flashback montage:
(Morgan Freeman if possible)

He couldn’t get the death-bellows of the bull out of his head. It still calls to him across time. The ferocity with which that innocent bull was hacked apart filled had him with near-divine inspiration. The savage grace of that final skewer, the warm splash of fresh blood, and the bewildered look of the bull had all stuck in Frank’s consciousness.

Back to present:

He wakes in a cold sweat.

Frank:
(hushed, direct to camera)
I need that Rhino.

independent piece 5 intro

this piece wasn't nearly ready for publishing quite yet but since you decided to be all responsible and actually grade us based on what we've done I had to make that sacrifice. But I will finish this up eventually. I've always liked villain duos like this where you have a dumb guy and a dumber guy and the two of them would just be funny if it weren't for the fact that they were bad people. I still haven't nailed down a setting for this story (Philidelphia is just a place holder, as is the name Blackeney) and I'm not too sure where the plot is going just yet but I think it's definitely going to be fun and I expect quite a few (more) people are going to get hurt very badly. Play your cards right and some of you might get cameo rolls in there somewhere.

independent piece 5

Cobblestones. They can get awful slick when they’re wet. And it had been raining for days before the two men showed up. Funny how that works isn’t it. Like the good lord just knows when something bad is about to happen. Both men walked steady though. The two of them were nothing more than black silhouettes and than they were gone. The day they left was unprecedented in the files of the Philadelphia Police Department. Once the weather broke people started heading outside to enjoy the sun. It seemed that not an hour went by without someone turning up a corpse. At the end of the day, exactly seventeen bodies had turned up. Some dead from injury, some from exposure, but all had been savagely mauled. But that was how the two men worked. For them, this was a warning.
Misters Blakeney and Click were brutes of the worst kind, the lowest sort of muck a gutter has ever spawned. Mr. Blakeney was a short man of shorter wit, with an infinite capacity for violence and a penchant for what he took to be the finer things in life. Mr. Click was possibly the only man Mr. Blakeney could honestly call an inferior and definitely the only man he could call a friend. Mr. Click was large, even by strong-arm standards, and had a peculiar peccadillo for frail blondes and straight razors, though only rarely both at once. Between the two of them they had committed crimes innumerable, but they liked to boast that they were together responsible for just over a thousand victims, be they murders, beatings, or "defilements" (a word Mr. Blakeney liked to use in reference to the trick Mr. Click performed with his straight razor, among other things.)

independent piece 4 intro

This is just the first chapter (and intro) to what I hope will be a full story one day. Can you guess the surprise ending yet (hint, it's really obvious.) I was just watching the X-files the other day, cause that's what I do everyday, and they had a cool one about a golem on and I had nearly forgotten about that little myth and I thought it was pretty cool. Than I started thing about it and I wondered, "what would happen if you ordered a golem to be human." So I decided to write a story where it happened. Should be a grand old time.

independent piece 4

In the old legends they used to talk about golems, men of mud without souls or minds. Only the purest of heart could make a golem, though only the most conflicted would want to. The process was simple enough, write a secret word on the hand of a clay entity you wished to animate and it would live. Without the ability to reason or think, the beast would obey any order given it with complacent obedience. Here’s an interesting conundrum for you to ponder, what if you ordered the creature to feel guilt, what if you ordered a golem to be human?
I assume, of course, that you have no idea, so let me relay to you a little story. Eighteen years ago a very pure man was faced with a very tragic circumstance. His wife had a son. They were overjoyed at the birth and the child was the apple of their eye for several years. But at age three the boy was taken ill with a fever. His sickness lingered for months. Driven nearly mad by grief his parents were pulled apart nearly to a break. The boy died and his parents were finally driven apart. His mother leaves our story for the time being. Our grieving father carried his sorrow with him for weeks. He had consulted doctors while his son lay dying and they had lied to his face, so he turned to the only other truth he knew, his faith. Priests and rabbis and monks and clerics of every faith and they all assured him that his young son was healthy and whole in the kingdom of God, but his sorrow still remained. It drove him further and further away from what he knew. He left his life behind and devoted himself in full to finding the answer to the question of death. His studies took him far from home and far from the common understandings. On one such trip afield he found himself in Prague and it was there that he first encountered the legend of the golem.
An old manuscript all but forgotten in some musty basement had been recovered not too long before his visit and was causing a stir among the local educated elite. Some claimed it was a parable, others dismissed it as a foolish folk-tale, but a small minority claimed it as fact. The manuscript contained detailed instructions for the creation and command of a golem as well as long narrative meant to warn would-be sorcerers. When our searcher heard about the book his interest was captured. He went to speak to preeminent scholars and well-respected rabbis about the legend and they all told him to abandon it, even the few that believed the legends warned him that it could only end in tragedy, but he was persistent. After much searching he found a man in Hungary who was willing to teach him the ceremonies he would need. When he was able to animate small clay birds and cats without complications his teacher told him he had reached the end of his education and he was ready to make his golem.
Since the passing of his only child ten long years had elapsed but the pain was still raw. It was without hesitation that he began the work of summoning his creature. He decided to start at thirteen to account for the years that passed, and once decided it was a simple task of sculpting the clay. He worked day and night without rest perfect the clay puppet he wished to incarnate. The final product was perfect, it was a flawless human child, only made from clay. Once finished, the closely guarded words were carved into the doppelganger’s wrist and the breath of life was breathed on the boy and he awoke.

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the greatest authors of our lifetimes, his writings were brilliant commentaries on life and the human condition. He died at age 84 from irreversible brain trauma. Isn't that tragic. Rest in peace Mr. Vonnegut.

Reilly style piece

When we’d left the house that morning my father had told me that we were going to take a tour of the area he grew up in, as the day wore on I realized that this wasn’t a tour of an area, it was a tour of a time. As were walking across country roads and past shops whose names I couldn’t pronounce, every so often we’d stop. We would stop at grocery stores, or gas stations, or vacant lots and he would point and tell me about what used to be there. "We used to ice skate there in the wintertime," he’d say, or "that abandoned garage there is where your great-grandfather used to work."
I was looking at abandoned warehouses and crumbled houses while my father was looking at his past. Ever inch of that town had a story and very few of them were pleasant. We saw the house his grandmother had lived in, which was still in good repair; mostly because my uncle still lives there. It was only a block from my grandparent’s house and took about two minutes to walk to. Next my father took me to the town center. Front and center was an empty warehouse that once housed the most successful business in town. It had closed down after it went bankrupt. Then we walked down by the lake where my father remembered so much about his own childhood. He told me about his daily ride to the train station along that path, and he told me about the hours that he had spent swimming in the lake. As we walked around the lake he talked about walking here at night after arguing with my grandfather and how the darkness made him think more clearly. After we left the path we walked through the new part of town, the part that was built on a burial ground of memories. At every turn there was a house built on the field he played tag at and just past every row of houses was the forest he used to explore. I saw the house he grew up in and I saw the house his friends had lived in.
While we walked I started to get a sense of how he had come to be where he is today, that is to say thousands of miles away from any semblance of his own youth. He had escaped from the falling community he had grown up in and left for his own life far far away. And his detachment had shielded him from being trapped in his own back yard. He was one of the lucky few that ever make it out of small town life and he was much the richer for it.

Lee-style poem

Heliotrope

My father’s hands work quickly
Bisecting orange rind, and twice again
His nails dig into the cuts and peel
The segmented orange falls apart
Little half-moons of Florida sun

Every night his heliotropic routine went on
A silver boat through orange waves
His vorpal pocket knife was lethal
And every night the orange fell apart
Like little half-moons of Florida sun

pop culture

BAMF, SNIKT, THWIP. If you can place any two of those words you’re probably a giant loser and you should probably jump off a cliff. All three of those words were onomatopoeia developed and made famous in the funny-books. Back in the good old days a scampering little child could frolic down to the local apothecary to paw over the latest offerings from the grand-masters down at Marvel and DC. Today a comic enthusiast has to scuttle into the seediest bookstore they can find and make the long walk of shame to that lonely back corner where they store the comics. The sad little rack past the dime-a-dozen sci-fi pulps and well beyond the bodice-ripper-romances, right next to the "EMPLOYEES ONLY" door that leads to a loading dock. The seedy back corner into which intellectuals dare not tread.
I was a late-comer to the genre, having not much cared for the color-drenched cacophony that "big kids" read. I was far more interested in the action figures. Loved the action figures, still do, probably always will. It was only recently that I even purchased my first comic book (or "graphic novel" as I called it at the time.) But that first one hooked me. It quickly got to be a bad habit. Soon enough I would blow through hundred-pagers in a single go, often needing two to get that same thrill. By the time I realized I had a problem, I had spent well over a hundred bucks on picture books (not to mention buying tickets to every comic book movie they could sling out.) I was a full scale junkie.
The next step in my journey was to reason my addiction away like a good little zombie. Here’s what I’ve got so far; comics are the only true American art form (jazz doesn’t count and few American authors are worth reading,) super heroes are the modern pantheon, and vigilantism is just seems so damn satisfying. I felt a little bit like I was tapped into some sort of mythos, like some pagan novice hunched over a giant fire listening to the old crones telling well-worn stories about familiar characters. It was like, for once, I had jumped on a ship while it was still sinking instead of jumping head-long into the water looking for wrecks. I may have missed the grand opulence of the Titanic, but I was damned well going to be there for the glorious plunge into history. I was among kindred spirits and we were having a grand old time.
It took a while before I made the other connections, like my love of B-movies (I keep Bruce Campbell’s Army of Darkness on my nightstand) and my rather niche wardrobe (I only own three non-black shirts, one of which is gray,) which led me to the realization that I was "that guy." You know; the one that spends every afternoon hunched over a keyboard, actually prefers Deadpool to Batman, and memorizes the family trees of people who never existed (and corrects people on the subject.) Now I just need to find a convention somewhere near here to go to in some sort of costume to connect with other people like me. Which brings us back to; BAMF, SNIKT, and THWIP. If you correctly identified; Nightcrawler’s teleportation sound, Wolverine’s claw extension sound, and Spider-man’s web-slinging sound, you may just be another "that guy" and we should hang out sometime and play a little Gauntlet, before you jump off that cliff.

independent piece 3 intro

Now this piece is a fine way to kill two birds with one stone. First off, it knocks off an independent piece; and second off, it takes care of little piece of nothing I’ve had floating about on my computer for some time. I’d had six lines written and than BAM writers block, than I found out about a little marvel called "rhyme royale." All I needed to do was add one line and mix up the line structure so the rhyme worked and POOF we had a literary masterpiece. Take that King James I of Scotland. Not what’cha might call "good" or "readable" but what can ya do?

independent piece 3

One of northland one of south and one from far-off shore
Within my ‘salem soul, that most a-harmonious place
The three of them and all of me eternally at war
The southern one has beauty pure the farthest one has grace
But still the northern one has all a truth of soul and face
Three fates, three furies, my wyrd sisters three
Always and forever more they shall never let me be