Sunday, August 15, 2004

New Story

The Following is the introduction of one of the characters in the story that I am working on right now. This is a rough draft, and is pretty short, but I thought I'd share it with yall.

The Head was yelling again, but then, it was always yelling.

The only times that it seemed to stop yelling was when it was chanting, or on a few occasions, to stare at him as if to see if he was paying attention.

He wondered if this was what it was like to be schizophrenic. He thought that having a ghostly severed head that only you could see and hear that floated around you and was constantly yelling had to qualify you as some kind of crazy.

A severed Indian head, of the Tonto variety.

When it started, it wasn't even a head at all, just a voice, quiet as a whisper, but seeming to gain volume every moment.

The voice had started two days ago, the night he got the news of his father's death. He'd put down the receiver and that was when it started.

He'd almost shit himself when he woke up the next morning and the Indian was staring at him, its black braids hanging down on either side of his face, its eyes slits as it scowled down at him.

He supposed something like this shouldn't really surprise him, the Canon men had a history of instability. His father, Earl, had gone crazy when he turned forty, at the death of his father. Eddie was just getting a three year head start, that was all.

After Earl lost his marbles he'd just retreated back into the woods on his property, becoming a hermit, rarely coming into civilization at all.

His father had lived in the woods until he died, hunting for game and fishing in the creek that bisected the property.

Earl owned quite a bit of land, 150 acres, now Eddie owned quite a bit of land.

Goddamnit, could it please stop yelling for a minute to let him think?

It just screeched on and on in whatever language it spoke, berating him like an angry parent, it's black eyes bloodshot and wide.

Now it was floating in front of him, yelling into his face. It liked to do that when he was trying to drive, or talk to someone, or sleep.

Eddie's mother left his father a year into his self-imposed exile. His father had let her have everything but the land and a few mutual funds that he'd kept whose interest covered the property taxes.

Now the land and the funds were his, and here he stood in the living room he'd grown up in--a place he'd sworn less than five years ago never to set foot in again--plastic covering the furniture just as it had when his mother had left, the only difference between then and now in the house was a thick layer of dust and a crazy loud ass Indian head, dripping its ghost blood on the shag carpet.


No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...