Quicksand - Part 11

Minty stood in the field. It was the field now, the only one where Craven Lorne ever seemed to meet her. He found as he'd learned to expect to find her, staring mindlessly into space, unaware of just about everything around her.

She looked at him as he approached. “Hello, Craven Lorne,” she said.

Craven was surprised but not alarmed. He was getting used to Minty's airy voice. “Hello, Minty,” he answered. “I thought I'd find you here.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

Craven couldn't decided if she was agreeing with his thought or its conclusion. She was so infuriatingly vague. “Quite,” he said stiffly.

“Do you kill me today, Craven Lorne?”

“As if I would tell you when.”

“Don't.” There was a change in her voice; she was almost pleading with him.

Craven wondered if she meant don't kill me or don't tell me when you're going to. With Minty, it was impossible to be sure.

He stared at her. She stared back.

“You do not wish to,” Minty said.

“Not really, no,” Craven admitted. “Well, not that. It's not that I don't want to kill you; I do. And I intend to. But—” He looked around the field, at the blue sky, at the big, shade tree in the distance and let out a long sigh. “But I shall be sorry to see you go.”

“You should kill me now,” she told him. “Fast, like a Band-aid.”

“What?”

Minty turned her head on its side. “It will hurt less,” she explained.

Craven Lorne sneered at her. “Why would I want to hurt you less?”

“Not me.”

Craven determined that the best thing he could do with that final piece of conversation was ignore it. “I will kill you,” he told her. “But not today. A little bird tells me you have some powerful friends.”

She didn't answer him.

“Rumour has it that Daisy Chain came to your rescue quite recently – and I imagine that Charm-Charm wasn't far away. The same bird tells me they're not far from here. The rumour is that the rabbits are launching a full-scale military campaign against raiders, that they're even getting humans involved.”

Minty didn't answer and Craven took her silence as acquiescence.

“They're probably lurking in the bushes right now, waiting for me to make a move. Of course, I won't give them the satisfaction.”

Minty stared. The only sound in the stale air was the whirring of her eye. After a moment, she said, “No.”

Craven, again unsure what she meant, ignored her. “But rest assured, when they're not around, when your bodyguards have abandoned you, I will be there and I will catch you out.”

Craven was tired of being the one left standing in the field. He turned on his heel and marched into the forest, sure that Minty was watching him go and not daring to look back to confirm it.

 If you enjoyed reading this, stop by next week for another instalment. You may also like my published novel, Aigaion Girl ... a story of the end of days, available here.

Quicksand - Part 8

“You like Dust.”

Craven Lorne couldn't be sure if it was a question or a statement and asking Minty for clarification rarely yielded any useful result. “Yes, of course I do,” he agreed – or answered, he couldn't be sure. “Who doesn't?”

She regarded him with her signature head-tilt. “I don't.”

Craven Lorne narrowed his eyes at her. “Really? I find that hard to believe.”

She didn't answer him.

“So, are you a teetotaller, then?” He laughed what he hoped was cruelly. “You've never tried Dust?”

“Tried. No.”

To Craven's mind, the conversation had already been going on too long. There was something about that field. It was usually so deserted, so stiflingly hot, so devoid of all life except for plant and insect – humans or no, it made him almost too tired to taunt Minty, too lethargic to think about torture. It wasn't like that now. There was a slight breeze, a change in the air, and the pleasantness of the afternoon made him disappointingly unwilling to argue or annoy.

Even putting aside Craven's schemes regarding Minty's downfall, she was not his ideal conversational companion; he was made uncomfortable by their joint attempts at small talk and became even more so when their dialogue turned serious.

There was something so judgemental about her electric green eye and unwavering stare, like she was always sizing him up, like she was some kind of divinity, in charge of his fate and trying to determine how best to punish him.

He deserved punishment. He knew that. He had made some bad choices in his life, gone down some wrong paths – but so what? Everyone had. It wasn't as if he was the only raider in Nod. It was practically the only viable profession anymore. That wasn't his fault. Craven Lorne had not introduced the human race to the printing press, he hadn't given them reality TV. He hadn't provided them with Fox News and the Internet. He hadn't told them to keep breeding until there were over seven billion of them, constantly dreaming, continuously pouring their misconceptions and misinformation into his world, making his life harder. No, they had done it all to themselves. And the wars it had caused, the civil unrest, that wasn't his fault either. So yes, the world had turned ugly. People did what they had to to get by – no one could blame them for that.

“It's not as if I enjoy it,” he told Minty.

“Dust?”

Craven Lorne stared at her. The stupid, broken rabbit doll. She had no idea what she did to him.

 If you enjoyed reading this, stop by next week for another instalment. You may also like my published novel, Aigaion Girl ... a story of the end of days, available here.

Awful

Last night, I had the worst dream ever. Among the things one generally faces in a horrible dream (inability to escape, plans being continually thwarted, people attacking my dog), I dreamt that someone was trying to take my stories away from me. My dad had found out that if I don't write for extended periods of time, I'll start to hallucinate (this actually happens to me; I'd literally go crazy if I couldn't write), and in an effort to preserve my mental health, decided to remove from me all means of writing until I got over my insanity. Because this was a dream, and subject to dream logic, he was also taking away the stories I'd already written, gathering them up on hurridly-written, ink stained pieces of paper - and as he took them from me, the stories themselves winked out of existence; he wasn't taking the physical stories, he was taking their very being, past and present.

I should mention that my dad is a writer as well and would never do this in real life, even if it were possible - but that's not the point, as far as my relating my dream is concerned.

I just find it interesting, and further proof that I've chosen the right profession, that my worst nightmare consists largely of my not being able to write - not not being recognized for my writing or having my writing scorned and criticized, but simply having my writing taken away. It reinforces my long-held belief that my intentions, when it comes to writing are, and always have been, pure.