IntShoWriMo 2016 Prompts: Day 1

You are renting a room in someone’s house as you transition to living in a new city. The owner tells you that basement is absolutely, 100% off limits. You don’t bat an eye at this request, until you start hearing noises from the basement at night. After several week of this, you sneak downstairs to see what’s going on. Finish the scene. — Writer’s Digest

Sorry, but swimmers are not allowed to ... — Writing.Com

You see a light at the end of the tunnel but it’s everything but inviting. It seems to possess a personality with an evil aura who is more likely to eat you up than convey you to safety. How did you get in the tunnel in the first place? Who is in the light? Do you yield to the glow and its evil presence? Write your story. — Akpan

In a world of crime, you alone have the ability to shoot things from your hands. Fireballs, ice, you name it. Only, what comes out is completely random. — Reddit

Day 1: Toxic

Today’s Prompt: Fifteen years after a toxic spill in a small town, strange things are happening.

                                                                                                            —Courtesy: Writing.Com

Word Count: 1,534

A man was standing in the middle of the road when her SUV came bumping along busting on the scene from a sharp corner. She was doing approximately, 120 miles an hour and barely had time to coordinate her reflexes and slam down the brakes to avoid running over the man who as it turned out was totally unaware of the situation. All he did was stand by and watch like the whole incident was playing out on one of those big screens you spotted at a movie drive-in. Her final thought, before she rammed the bumper into the railings and went flying off the road into the cliff below, was, Oh God, I’m going to die. Not this way, oh God, please. She was wrong on both counts.

            “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”

She opened her eyes to blinding darkness. She was lying face up on a bed. She said the only thing that felt reasonable in this peculiar situation. “How did I get here?” And immediately, her mind supplied an answer. I must have survived the drop off the cliff. “What’s that rumbling sound? Is there a mill of some sort close by?”

            “No. that’s the sound of the train coming down the track. And don’t worry, nobody’s catching a train today, the rail’s a few miles off this place.”

Something struck her funny about the voice talking to her. It had the timbre of a child’s voice yet, bore the weight of maturity.

            “Where are your parents?” She turned her head as much as the racking pain in her body allowed her but all she made out in the darkness was a silhouette.

            “I am my parent. Who are you? Where are you from? How did you get here?”

            “My name is Ayara.” She didn’t know if she could trust this strange personality but given the circumstance, she didn’t have a choice. “I had an appointment to meet a client. Shortcuts are my fetish.” She shrugged like that ought to explain the details.

            “Shortcuts can be wrong cuts.” The kid-man said, not unkindly.

            “I stayed in the middle of the road. Okay, I admit I leaned a little too hard on the pedal but the road was deserted.”

            “Explains a lot about your predicament.”

            “Don’t give me lip. I know I’m a guest but I’d have been in some meeting if that vagrant wasn’t standing smack down in my path.”

The reply was low when it came. Ayara couldn’t believe she heard right. “You should have knocked him down.” He said.

            “What did you just say to me?”

The kid-man bent over and whispered into her like he was afraid somebody might overhear him. “What I said Miss, is that you should have run him over then gone ahead and met your appointment. Che sera sera.”

Ayara let the words piece themselves together into sensible whole rather force them into a traditional pattern of rational thought.

            “It was a plot to waste him so you and some bastard as sick as you are made him stand there. Then it would look like a roadkill and the driver takes the blame and you and your murderous crew walk.”

            “It was best for everybody. For him.”

            “Why?”

            “They come back.”

            “Who?” And then the truth dawned on her. “It’s some kind of sick ritual isn’t it?”

            “What it’s called doesn’t matter. Names often go with faces and we got no face to save here, in any case. They come back. That’s the important thing to keep up your sleeve. But you, Miss, was supposed to splatter his brains all over the sidewalk and by the time the sun comes the next day, that’s two days ago, he would heave been reborn a new man. A kid. Like me.”

Ayara had stopped listening when the kid said, ‘two days ago’. She was ticking off the days on her mental calendar. “You mean I’ve been out cold for three days?”

The kid-man ignored the question. “He would have started over another lifecycle if you have listened to your instincts. But now, Nicholas is dead indeed. Disintegrated bit by bit like a vampire in the heat of the sun. by sparing him, you killed him.” He slammed his fist into something close to where Ayara’s head lay, hard enough to startle her. She heard an object topple over and crash to the floor.

The silence hung on the air like shed skin. After some moment, the kid-man walked over to where Ayara lay in bed in semi-paralysis. She flinched.

He sat at the edge of the bed but didn’t touch her. Up close, Ayara searched his face to see if she could make out his features in the darkness. All she was more confusing then she would allow herself to believe. It’s the darkness. Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking over what the man-kid had said, ‘We have no face to save.’

            “A few years ago, not quite twenty years, we had a factory in this town running tests and all kinds of illegal researches that would raise the eyebrows of every Rights and Activist association. And it did. I remember there were a few court cases to get them to pack up and leave town. But you know the way it is with high profile cases, envelopes changed hands and the matter…”

            “What kind of tests are you talking about?”

            “Cloning. Human cloning through the use of nuclear energy. Of course, the fallout came as the Rights groups had predicted. Folks in the vicinity of the factory when it happened… let’s just say, they would have been better off if they’d died immediately. The factory owners quit the site and left us to count our losses.”

            “Was the man on the highway one of them? Is that why you sent him out to die?”

            “Close your eyes.”

She obeyed, dutifully. He slid off the bed and she him move across the room. There was a faint, sharp click, the sound of someone throwing a switch and the light came on.

            “Open your eyes,” the man-kid said not unkindly but his voice had taken on a grim tone.

He was standing in the middle of the room. It was where she spotted him when she peeled off her eyelids. He was a kid, alright no doubt about it. And now the full weight of the phrase he’d spoken earlier, the one she’d kept someplace in the backburner of her mind came thrashing every wall of well-constructed ideals to pronounce itself justified. She thrust her fingers into her mouth and bit down hard. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. A scream that would have paid out for forever. “Names often go with faces and we got no face to save here,” the man-kid had said.

The thing standing in the middle of the room called up Ayara’s childhood memory of an episode of Daffy Duck which featured the hand of the cartoonist drawing the series character fitted into weird costumes. At one point, it had Daffy Duck bickering incessantly. The cartoonist took his eraser and wiped out his beak. The man-kid had two holes where there should have been a nose. A face with no visible features.

            “How do I hear when you speak since you have mouth? Is this a form of some sick joke?”

            “You been hearing my voice come through as fine as wine in summertime and you haven’t guessed the difference in the resonance?”

            “Telepathy.” She half-screamed the word like it would ease the terror. “We’ve been communicating through our minds. Neither of us has actually spoken a word all day.”

            “They say ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ it had to find a way to fit into the natural sate of things. Here we are never dying and never actually, living. And if you would have it, the vagrant you thought you saved by throwing you jeep over the cliff was my brother. I died a few months ago. Got killed is the appropriate word but here I am. I came back. We never marry. We have no use for reproduction since we never die. We do not feed. With no mouth, who needs food, right?

            “I guess those bastards achieved what they aimed at if only they hadn’t out and left town in a hurry. Maybe, someday, we the hybrid would be the only ones left in this world.”

            “Miss, are you okay? Miss, wake up.”

Ayara woke up to see a traffic warden bent over her and shaking her looking deathly serious.

            “Are you okay? What happened here? Can you talk?”

She looked around. She was back inside her SUV but the scene was different. Even her clothes had been changed. It couldn’t have been a dream. She has got to find a way to prove it. While the cop was still fretting over her, she tried to move and something fell out of her blouse landing on her lap. She fetched the piece of paper and turned it around. It bore an inscription.

            “We got no face to save.”

It was a confirmation and a warning lumped into one message.

Eneh Akpan

June 1st, 2014

DAY 1: Recall

courtesy: annyas.com

The Situation:

You are thrown back into your past, but you find it totally different than what you recall.

From Writing.Com

Word Count: 2,104

The street where his cat was killed after it got run over by a jeep traveling hell-for-leather and whose driver was apparently on suicide mission, was just around the corner by the Kitchen Akwa Ibom–a diner serving local chow. Levi was certain of this piece of information, as he was certain of his own name. He also knew if he stepped across the road into the opposite house, the Michaels would be there, sitting by their TV set as always like some sort of ritual or listening to Cruise Control–a call-in radio program which featured old school music. The Michaels were retired civil servants whose children had grown up and flown off.

Sunshine was of the sociable variety and a game of soccer would probably be up at the ‘field.’ The ‘field’ wasn’t a standard-sized soccer pitch but a piece of undeveloped land a bunch of guys cleared out and converted for the love of the game. He also knew he would have been a part of the pack hustling for the round leather ball if a twist of fate had not reversed his chances.

A mechanism of an origin beyond the natural had transported him through time, several years back in his childhood. It seemed appropriate; Levi couldn’t quite say he understood why, for him to be back where he was. Cornrow had been home to him. In his heart, it would always be home. He had walked all the way up to the gates where his childhood home stood, the building where he’d grown up with his two sisters. The place was an expansive job and a few distant relations crashed there with their families. It was what in Nigeria is called an extended family. Levi always felt lost and confused living alongside all the crowd of people. As a child, he had been shy and abashed though, he couldn’t consider those any of his unique qualities this late in life. These thoughts played on his mind when a familiar voice dragged him out of his reverie.

                “Leviticus,” a man called out to him in a Barry White voice. “Where are you going with your fine-looking butt this fine afternoon, boy?” It was a pleasantly quiet afternoon and the warm air carried the voice over to where Levi stood sliding open the wrought iron gate. It was Mr. Rhodes, the guy who took care of the flowers and Levi would recognize that voice a million years from that when. He turned to throw a wave to Uncle R as the kids fondly called him but was surprised to see Uncle R’s back instead. He was looking the other way and waving at a figure running up from the opposite angle. It was Levi’s childhood self. The reality slid way down into his heart like silk; Levi was the only one who could really see these people, none of them could see him.

                “Hey, Levi. Big guy,” Uncle R said.

                “Hello, Uncle R. And how’s that garden of yours?” Uncle R was an inch shy of obsessed with his flowers.

                “Playing around with all these plants gets me hungry,” he said, patting little Levi’s hair. “And where are you headed, Big Guy?” Uncle R asked little Levi again.

                “I need to talk to J,” Levi’s younger self said. Jasmine also known as J, was Levi’s childhood best buddy.

The older Levi watched this exchange with peaked interest. In his memory, Uncle R was an aging fellow and a little on the flabby side. The man before him wasn’t just younger but frail as well. Levi guessed that whatever happened loss of memory was going to determine how his little adventure through time turned out.

                For a brief second, Levi was caught in a conflict; should he go up with his younger self to J’s house? What did he hope to find there? Eventually, he opted for his childhood home especially, his bedroom. He didn’t know why he picked that option but the same mechanism which had jaunted him through the vault of time seemed to be at the helm of the ship of affairs. Little Levi was already off and a few distance from their point of meeting.

His bedroom’s door was wide-open and there was a racket going on in there by the sound, mostly female voices. Levi picked up three different tones of voice but couldn’t tell for sure if there were more or less speakers. He picked out the voice of his mom in an instant. She had a hell of a shouting voice on her. They were all speaking at the same time in what is technically termed a shouting contest.

                “Hey. Check this out. I gave this to him when they brought him here. Had no idea he still had it stored up someplace after all these years,” said one woman. Levi couldn’t place whom the voice belonged to. And what did she mean by ‘when they brought him here?’ What in the world was his mom who was officially dead this moment in his past, doing going through his stuff? And what could be so electrifying about clothes, his effects, to keep three women enthralled all afternoon? Levi had registered the voices of Aunt Becks and Aunt Stephanie.

                “He grew up to be a special one, didn’t he?” The voice was possibly Aunt Becks’. “He and his computer wizardry.”

That made Levi feel good. Hearing somebody mention his specialty made him feel good. Yet, he couldn’t recollect when he discovered his love of the machine even now that he’s become so damn good in computer programming and earning a life out if it.

                  “And very respectful of his elders,” Aunt Steph said.

              “It’s hard to imagine and I speak on a personal level that Leviticus could pick up such ingenious traits at such a tender age,” said his mom whom Levi pictured as a slim beautiful young woman.

                “Oh boy, take a look at this? Ain’t they cute?” Aunt Steph’s voice came out in a shrill cry like someone surprised into joyful outburst. “It’s a picture of the kid and his dad.”

‘Dad?’ Levi halted in his tracks with one leg poised in the air like the picture of a man snapped while taking a step. ‘Dad?’ He went over the word again in his mind.

And as if in response to his inner questioning, a man of about the same height as he with an athlete’s biceps bust on the scene and strolled into the room, walking right through Levi like he wasn’t present there.

                “Dad?” Levi said out loud. Last time he checked his dad passed away before he was born. He never even knew the guy. A crack must have appeared in the fabric of reality or… The pain in his legs, which was still hanging above ground level was becoming unbearable and he let it drop to the floor.

Levi stepped into his childhood bedroom. This time, it was his jaw. It dropped like an elevator and almost touched his chest. The woman he saw standing beside his bed with the two women wasn’t his mom or didn’t look the way he’d imagined his mom. His room hardly bore any semblance to the input his memory fed into his mind… something was different… something was terribly wrong… out of sync was a better phrase for this scenario.

The three women and the man they called Levi’s father were all beaming at a picture probably the one that showed Levi with his father. Their joy was written all over their faces. They were almost like young boys watching porn yet, the affection they expressed seemed to spill forth from Levi himself. He couldn’t explain it but it was like he saw what he wanted to see.

Levi’s mother was a beautiful young African woman. She had a charming sweetness about her. It was the sensitivity of a loving mother. His two aunts were the two most adorable personalities he had ever known. And the way they went through his pictures made his grown up self feel loved and cherished.

                This is the home he had come back to. It was the home he always saw in his dreams. The home he now found impossible to detach himself from. A thought occurred to him; Where were his siblings and the other members of his extended family? He still regarded the man the ladies called his dad with a little suspicion.

The question which haunted him the most was this one: Why had Fate or machine pulled him through Time’s portal to witness this moment? What was he doing back here? Levi reasoned there had to be some kind of lesson to be learned because the scene played out before him was far from a dream. It was as real as daylight only difference was he was the exclusive individual within that reality who could visualize both existences of the past and the future. Or was he?

Levi worked as a software developer at a computer game company. He got assigned to develop a new and advanced game. Levi had delivered on the project and called it Recall. It was a virtual reality and he’d designed it to mess with the player’s thought wave. Levi had programmed the game to a point the player could use it to rebuild his own past reality. Goggles that came with the game injected fluid into the player’s system, which messed with the brainwaves and recreated the most repressed of the player’s memory. The downside of the project was similar to most human feats where the inventor tried to play God. The game had gone awfully wrong. When Levi started messing with reality, something that had no business playing games heard and came knocking.

On the day he put the final touches to his game, Levi had tested it personally and got himself sucked into his virtual reality. Except it didn’t end there, he was thrown into his actual past to encounter his younger self and face the truth he’d somehow managed to suppress all these years. It was give or take, time traveling. A thing Levi himself never anticipated.

The game instead of keeping him trapped in its circuits released Levi into his ‘invented’ past. A past which in reality–our reality–only existed in Levi’s imagination.

On his way to the other side of reality where first we encounter the young developer beating his path back to his childhood home, he’s already been brainwashed as a result of a minor brain injury incurred from an accident which cost him a partial memory loss. He invented a new past for himself nevertheless, what should have stayed dead returned from the subconscious to haunt the living.

We cannot change who we are, only decide what we do with the knowledge of who we are. Levi is about to discover the humiliating power of the reality he toyed with. And that the past cannot be unlived despite its wrenching pain.

Memory came rushing in on Levi.

He never had a happy family. His mom was fat, way too fat to allow much movement. She died of a heart attack in his teens. He never knew his dad. He passed on when he was an infant or so his mom told him. He had no brothers or sisters so when his mom cashed in her chips he was all the family he had.

As Levi stood in his bedroom, the bedroom his invention created for him, he saw the paints peel off the walls, the small room stretched out in an almost endless hall, several beds in long rows appeared aligned against the walls. This was the boys’ dorm of The Michaels Foster Home. It was a private-run foster care for homeless kids. Levi had grown up in a foster home. With no father, no mother, no aunts. This was his extended family.

His dad was the man who adopted his best buddy, J, the girl Levi had hoped to marry someday. No wonder his twisted mind visualized the man as his dad. Aunt Becks and Aunt Stephanie were both housekeepers at the foster home. And they were indeed nice people. His mom was really his mom only his mind pictured a deflated version of her. Levi stole jewelry from the matron’s safe. Ran away from the home, and got himself involved in an accident. Much of his memory was wiped clean like a slate after the incident and he’d had to start over and build his life on untruths. None of his current friends and colleagues knew his identity.

Eneh Akpan

June 1st 2013