# The Hearth Fire and other stories (Updated 5/24)



## ForceUser (May 10, 2004)

Hello again. This isn't a gaming story, but rather something I wrote for class. Seeing as how it's illustrative of the only writing I've had time to indulge in lately, I thought I'd throw it out there for the folks who enjoyed my Vietnamese Adventures Story Hour and other works. 

Moderators, if non-gaming related fiction isn't welcome at ENWorld, I apologize.

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*Aaron Isling* lived in a world of grays. Outside his bedroom window, storm clouds shrouded the sky and dumped misty rain on the terraced lawns and sport-utility vehicles of a sleek neighborhood of social climbers. He watched as a yellow-striped cat with a white breast darted across his new dirt lawn toward a neighbor’s carport. It was wet and tawny and thoroughly miserable. Aaron sympathized. He felt thoroughly miserable as well.

“Aaron! Get down here! There’s more to carry up!” Robert, his stepfather, commanded from downstairs. Sighing, Aaron clambered off the box he’d been sitting on and trudged out into the upstairs hallway. He stopped at the head of the stairs and glowered at the scene below.

Robert Bellsly, his mother’s second husband, stood in the doorway to the new four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom home, imperiously directing the movers who carried the family furniture into the house. It was so new that it still carried that peculiar smell of new houses, like stale garlic butter leather.  Aaron found it distasteful. What had been wrong with their old house? His old room had smelled like home. His new room smelled like sawdust and paint. 

“Aaron!” blustered Robert. He gestured harshly, as though striking the air with his open palm. “I said come here! There’s still dozens of boxes to bring in before you’re done. Now get to it. You can play later.”

“I wasn’t playing,” Aaron began, but his stepfather cut him off.

“Don’t back-talk me! Just do it!” 

“But it’s raining,” Aaron protested, unsure of where he was going with this, or why he was going there so vehemently. He knew the work needed to be done.

“Go!” His stepfather declared coldly. He pointed past the head of a struggling moving man who was trying to wedge the family couch through the front door. Aaron knew that further protest was pointless, that he had pushed Robert as far as he could dare. Further argument would elicit punishment. A tiny voice inside urged him on anyway, just to spite his stepfather, but Aaron was an exceptionally rational young man when he had to be. Annoyed for no reason he could articulate, he did as he was told, stepping through the kitchen, into the carport, and out into the hazy rain.

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“Coo-coo-coo!” said Aaron’s mother. “Coo-coo-coo! Who’s a good girl?”

The child in the crib wiggled her toes and gurgled happily. Aaron, standing outside the doorway, looked at the scene in disgust. Downstairs, a ballgame blared from the surround-sound stereo system, and Robert could be heard raging at the referee, who apparently knew nothing about calling plays. Aaron wondered how the referee could hold his job if he was really that bad.

“Aaron,” called his mother over her shoulder, “Run to the fridge and bring a bottle up, would you? Your sister’s hungry.”

“Half-sister,” Aaron corrected dully. He turned away quickly, but felt his mother’s hot stare between his shoulder blades as he bounded down the stairs two at a time. Her chastisement evaded, she called shrilly, “Don’t run on the stairs! I’m not paying for a broken leg!”

From the living room, Robert added thunderously, “Aaron! Stop running in the house!”

Aaron reached the kitchen and rebelliously took two quick steps and slid across the polished tile in his socks. He lost his balance and almost fell, but caught himself on the counter. He was very angry but couldn’t say why. He flung open the refrigerator door, yanked out a bottle of formula and slapped the door shut. The contents of the fridge rattled dangerously inside. He felt vindicated.

“Here,” he said to his mother when he returned.

“Watch that attitude, mister,” she replied. “I’m not telling you again.”

Aaron wasn’t sure if she meant his attitude toward his half-sister or his running indoors, and he wasn’t sure he cared. He looked at the infant in the crib. She stared at him, mystified, as if trying to figure out who he was and how he fit into her small world of bed and mother and playthings. She infuriated him. He waited until his mom turned away, then he crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at the child. Her face scrunched up, and then she kicked and flailed her tiny fists. When his mother began to comfort her – "Sshh, sshh. There, there.” – he fled to his bedroom. He felt a strange mixture of satisfaction and regret. As he put on his pajamas and climbed into bed he decided that tomorrow he’d be nicer to his half-sister. It wasn’t her fault that his dad had left. His mom had told him that they’d “grown apart,” but Aaron suspected she’d driven him away. And now there was a new stepfather and a new baby and a new house and a new school on the other side of town, and he didn’t know whom to blame. 

When his mother came by to tuck him in, he pretended to be asleep. She walked in briskly, folded the corners of his sheets under the mattress with several sharp motions, and left without kissing him goodnight. When she turned off the light and closed the door, Aaron felt lost, as though she was shutting him away for good.

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Aaron awoke sharply. He came instantly, vividly awake with total clarity. He opened his eyes and stared intensely at the wall across his bedroom. The Crab Nebula poster, eerie under the orange halogen light from the street lamp out front, stared back at him. His heart beat rapidly, and he lay tense and unmoving under the sheets, as though frozen in an ancient glacier. He realized that he was frightened and afraid to move, but he didn’t know why. He breathed quietly and listened to the stillness of the house. He found it to be unnatural. 

His old house had groaned when the wind blew or the cold settled in, the pipes in the walls had cracked their knuckles like old men when winter blew down, and the floorboards had creaked musical notes when you walked across them, every room in a different key. But this house, this new house, was silent like a tomb. They’d visited several times while it had been under construction, and he’d seen that the pipes weren’t made of iron, but of plastic and copper. The floors were carpet or tile over concrete, not hardwood. And the windows, double paned, hardly rattled at all when the wind blew. His old house had a personality, like an amusing relative that had taken up permanent residence, but this new house was dead. It had the personality of a zombie.

From the next room over, Aaron heard a bump. It was a muffled, shuffling sort of sound with a rasping conclusion. Inexplicably, he flinched in terror. Thoughts swarmed in his head. That was the baby’s room. Was his mother feeding or changing her, as she often did in the middle of the night? Had she fallen out of the crib? Maybe she had somehow climbed the safety rail and was lying on the floor right now, hurt. But why wasn’t she crying? Maybe she couldn’t. He lay there long moments, hoping that his mother and Robert had heard it too. Maybe they’d get up and go see what was the matter.

They didn’t. He thought about yelling, but he decided against it, imagining the trouble he’d get into if it turned out to be nothing. It probably was, after all, nothing. 

But then why was he so scared?

The noise thumped again from behind the wall, like someone was moving around a large object. He shivered. How could they not hear it? He realized that he’d been holding his breath, so he exhaled quietly, and was amazed to discover his breath frost away from his mouth visibly in the dim orange light. He shivered then, and realized that it was freezing in his room. He looked at the calendar on the wall next to the door. He could read it in the dim light. It said June.

He blinked and carefully rubbed his eyes, moving his body as little as possible. He realized that he’d begun to shiver, and if he wasn’t careful his teeth would begin to rattle and it would give him away and whatever it was that was in his sister’s room would come for him and that would be the end.

What was going on? He wondered desperately. Why am I thinking there’s something in the baby’s room? It could be nothing. It could be Robert moving furniture around. But in the middle of the night? On a Wednesday, when he worked in the morning? Maybe it was a burglar. But why, then, was it so cold? It felt frigid as November in Aaron’s room. 

The bump slithered across the wall again, long and insidious. Unconsciously, Aaron whimpered. The noise stopped immediately. 

Oh, no, he thought. He dared not breathe. Seconds stretched into eternity, and he waited. He felt a burning sensation in the back of his throat, and black dots swam before his eyes. He’d have to take a breath soon. 

The noise started up again, and he sucked in air carefully, parceling it out like a diver returning to the surface from the ocean floor. Something was very, very wrong. Mom and Robert hadn’t awakened. The baby wasn’t crying. And something was in the house, not fifteen feet away on the other side of a thin wall. 

A feeling welled up within Aaron then, and though he couldn’t describe it, he clung to it intensely, for it spread warmth and purpose through his limbs. With the utmost care, he peeled back his sheets and sat up. His feet found his slippers and he wriggled into them gratefully. He glanced around the room, and his eyes alighted on a dim bundle tucked in the corner behind his bed. Softly, he tiptoed to the bundle and gripped a nine-iron, part of a set of golf clubs forced upon him by Robert last summer. A successful man’s game, Robert had insisted, and one you’ll learn to play. Aaron thought about the snoring brute in his mother’s bed. For the first time, Aaron was grateful Robert hadn’t let him refuse.

The noise from his sister’s room continued, and now it had a harsher, more urgent quality to it, as though the perpetrator had abandoned being stealthy. Aaron sidestepped across his bedroom, turned the doorknob as gently as he could, and stepped into the hall. He realized that had this been his old house, the creak of floorboards and oil-deprived hinges would have already given him up. He trudged silently on the carpet toward the baby’s room, then stopped. Considering, he hurried as quietly as he could to the hall closet and retrieved a tall blueberry-scented candle. Fumbling urgently in the dark – for the thumps now came more quickly – he located the lighter and flicked it on. A merry tongue of fire licked the candle’s wick, and Aaron stood now and dashed toward his sister’s door.

Candle in one hand and golf club in the other, he burst into the room. The crib was no longer in the corner by the door, instead it now sat adjacent to the window, which was open to the night and blowing a cold wind inside. In the dark under the crib something moved on two legs, a quick pitter-patter of steps, followed by a tiny growl. Aaron flipped the light switch and nothing happened. Distantly he felt this should surprise him, but it didn’t. Instead, the warming flicker of the candle reassured him. Wielding his nine-iron, he half-stepped toward the crib and shouted, “Hey! Get away from there!”

He heard a trio of squeals then, like pigs gargling with soda pop, and two small, dark forms climbed out of the crib and landed wobbly on the plush floor. All three forms, like squat shadows, advanced on him and growled. When they growled, the sound they made cut deeper than a pack of stray dogs he’d once encountered. Instinctively, Aaron thrust the candle forward instead of the golf club. The creatures squealed and covered their faces, and Aaron caught a glimpse of piggish noses, slimy gray skin, filthy black hair and rotted, pointy teeth. Emboldened, he stepped into the room, the candle held in front of him like a talisman. The little monsters scattered then like leaves. One retreated to the window and climbed backward like a spider, its head twisted toward Aaron at an impossible angle. It snarled at him with feral rage and disappeared over the sill. Another dashed between his legs and into the hall beyond. Aaron jumped and yelped; its passage left an oily residue on the inside of his legs that could feel through his cotton pajamas. The third leapt at the baby’s closet where her diapers were stored. The door was ajar, and it bounded inside and slammed it closed behind it. As Aaron stood there in shock, the temperature in the room slowly climbed back to normal, and the light waxed dimly at first, then reflected glaringly off the room’s stark white walls. Cautiously, he approached the closet door and flung it open. The light revealed nothing but hanging baby clothes, stacks of diapers and a folded up stroller. Whatever had happened was over.

He looked at the crib from across the room. Silence. Fear gripped him then, not a fear for his own safety, but fear for the tiny person who had entered his life so abruptly and had been the target of so much of his anger and resentment. Hesitantly, afraid of a thousand awful sights that might await him in the crib, he stepped across the room and peeked inside. 

His sister lay swathed in her bedclothes and teddy bear blanket amidst the candy corn sheets and armada of plush animals. She appeared asleep. He reached down and touched her, and felt a startling coldness in her limbs. 

“Oh, no,” he said aloud, “No, no. I’m sorry.” Aaron felt like crying then, staggered by his failure. He dropped the nine-iron with a thunk, but then his sister stirred and yawned. Her eyes opened, and she stared around searchingly for a bit before coming to rest her gaze upon Aaron. When she saw him, she opened her mouth and grinned toothlessly. 

Later, Aaron’s mother was awoken by a thumping noise from the baby’s room. Concerned that she’d fallen out of her crib and hit her head, she woke her husband, and the two of them dashed out of bed, nightclothes aflutter, across the hall to their younger child’s door. 

What they found within amazed and perplexed them. Aaron sat in the rocking chair next to the crib, holding his half-sister gently, and feeding her from a warm bottle by the light of a single scented candle. A golf club stood propped in the corner next to the chair.

When they came in, Aaron smiled. “Sshh, he whispered, “she’s almost back to sleep.”

_~The End~_


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## ForceUser (May 21, 2004)

This is a piece of creative nonfiction I wrote for class. Creative nonfiction is a relatively new genre of literature that uses traditional fiction storytelling techniques to tell a biographical or autobiographical story. Enjoy.


“Three American Koans”


*I*

Red lights begin to blink as candy-stripe arms lower across the pedestrian walkway.  A rumble enters my chest and swirls around, taking up residence between my heart and lungs.  A turquoise cyclops thunders ominously down the tracks toward the concrete station.

It is a sunny afternoon.  I consider stepping in front of the train.

I don’t have a death wish.  I’m not suicidal.  I’m curious what it would feel like.  Two steps and a quick hop.  I’m fascinated.  The engineer wouldn’t have time to stop – she’s already slowing down.

I suspect I would bounce off the engine’s nose cone, flop a couple of times as I fell, and then scream as my ankle caught under the grille.  My leg would crack and twist instantly, wrenched apart into a mangle of blood and blue jeans, and then my entire body would grind under the train with unrelenting brutal momentum.  My guts would burst like a balloon.  My torso would flatten like a tortilla.  My head would pop off like a firecracker; or would it remain attached, gruesomely disfigured?

A shiver caresses my spine.  I take two steps back to ensure no one can accidentally shove me onto the tracks.  I am paranoid that way around heavy machinery.  Consider it a consequence of spending four years aboard an aircraft carrier.  I watched the USS Forrestal burn on videotape.  A crewman kicked a bomb across the flight deck while the fire raged.

The Coaster pulls into the station.  I leave Sorrento Valley and step into a world of north coastal commuters and air conditioning.

I don’t have a death wish. I’m just curious.  I am drawn to the potential for violence.  I am as violent as any American.  I cried when the twin towers fell.  I felt impotent shame when I saw naked abused Iraqi prisoners.  I won’t watch a videotaped beheading, though I’m drawn to. I call this having principles.

The Coaster snakes along the side of a hill on its way south.  I imagine how death would come if I pulled the red handle on the safety glass and executed an emergency evacuation.  Birds fly from treetop to treetop a hundred feet below me.


*II*

Armando Martinez spoke Nahuatl, a native language of the Aztecs.  This is what the campus newspaper says.  City Heights gangbangers shot him to death.  He got an “A” in Chicano studies.  I’m not sure what a Chicano is. 

He wore the wrong colors once but when he took them off people remembered. That’s why he died.  Wrong colors.  That’s why I didn’t see his story in the San Diego Union-Tribune.  Wrong color.

I am the right color.  I live in a North Park apartment with one roommate and a cat.  Armando Martinez lived in a one-bedroom flat with his entire family.  I have a Navy education.  He had a criminal record.  If I’d seen him on the street I’d have avoided making eye contact, but I wouldn’t have crossed the street.  I do have some pride. 

I’m not yet that ashamed of being born a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but give it time.  I’m still an undergraduate.


*III*

My dad saw a spirit last year.  My brother saw it too.  They saw the same spirit on different occasions.  According to them, it’s not a ghost.  I learned about it while visiting them in Louisiana.

This is my dad’s story.  He awoke one morning to sunlight streaming through his floor-length bedroom window.  He was lying with his back to the window, then he rolled over in an effort to get more comfortable.  This is when he saw the spirit.  He told me that it was naked and silver-skinned.  He told me that it must have been no taller than two or three feet because it stood at eye level with him while he lay in bed.  It was standing amid the flowers outside his bedroom window, looking in.  He described it as impossibly thin, with huge almond-shaped eyes, spiky black hair and tall pointy ears.  Its outline was hazy and indistinct. It looked like air.

The spirit stared at my dad for several seconds, and he lay there staring back at it. He says he couldn’t seem to focus on it.  Finally, it turned its head to the right and sunk rapidly into the ground and disappeared.  In profile, he said it had a long nose.

On shift that night, my dad spent hours drawing and redrawing the creature.  He settled on an image he felt best represented his encounter and hung it over his bar when he got home from work.  This is how I learned he’d seen a spirit.  I was lounging in his bar and saw the image and commented on it, and he filled me in.  To me, the picture he drew looked like a black silhouette of a slender, pointy-eared, spiky-haired creature.  He’d drawn a haze around it using a cross-hatching technique.  He’d drawn it in ballpoint ink and framed it.  I thought it could be a fairy.

I asked my dad what he thought it was. “Sh-t, son, I don’t know,” he replied.

I was on the verge of skepticism, but then he added, “Eric’s seen it too.”

My brother is an extremely rational person.  He works with some Air Force covert ops group.  My dad is a nut.  “You sure?” I asked.  I wanted to believe.  I wanted to believe so badly.

That night Eric and I drove to see some friends in Baton Rouge.  Our conversation went something like this:

“Dad told me about the thing he saw.  The fairy.”

“It’s not a fairy.”

“How do you know it’s not a fairy?”

“We don’t know what it is.”

“So it could be a fairy,” I pressed.  I played Dungeons & Dragons twice a week. I needed this.

“It’s not.”

“Well, it’s supernatural at least.”

“How do you know it’s supernatural?  We don’t know that.  We don’t know anything.”

I began to feel exasperated.  “Well, what do you think it is?  An alien?”

“It’s not an alien.  It’s…I don’t know what it is.”  He shrugged and smoked a cigarette.  I slouched in the passenger seat, annoyed.  I wanted to _know_.

I decided to try another tack.  I felt surreally outside of myself, like I was watching a movie starring us, and our characters were driving along a dark road at night, talking about spirits by the dim light of the dashboard.  I said, “So tell me what you think it is.”

“I dunno.”

“Can’t you take a guess?”

He puffed his cigarette and shifted his grip on the wheel.  I think he was getting irritated at me.  I didn’t care.  I demanded validation of my interpretation.  I knew what I wanted the creature to be.  I felt cheated for not having seen it myself.  Wasn’t I the one who lived in a fantasy world half the time?  It wasn’t fair.  I wanted to experience everything I could about this creature vicariously.  I pulsed with excitement and vague fear.

“I don’t know what it is,” he repeated, “I only know I saw it.  It exists.  It’s presumptuous to call it supernatural, though, because you’re assuming that just because humans haven’t documented and categorized it, it must be abnormal.  There’s a lot we don’t know about the way the universe works.  It could be as natural as anything and we’ve just never seen it before.  It might have a purpose that we’re unaware of.”

What a rational answer. I remained unfulfilled.

I decided to believe that the creature was some sort of nature spirit.  I hesitate to call it a fairy.  I wish I could do so without feeling inauthentic. I didn’t tell Eric that I wanted to know how it belonged in the universe as I perceived it.  I lacked the humility to accept what was told to me for what it was.  I took their stories as incontrovertible proof. Of what, I couldn’t exactly say.  I only knew that I desperately needed to believe that there was something more to the 21st century than fast food, American Idol and Iraq.

*


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## ForceUser (May 24, 2004)

The following story is a piece of microfiction. Microfiction is a subgenre of the short story, wherein a complete tale is told in 700 words or less. Happy reading.

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“The Window”

*Michael wrote*. The old Smith Corona typewriter clacked obstinately as he pounded the well-worn keys, putting his strength into each difficult stroke. The dingy lamp on the hutch cast orange streamers across the small room, and a dirty windowpane reflected it back inside, as if the darkness beyond refused to intermingle with impure low watt radiance. A smoky curl caressed Michael’s cheek, crawling up his arm from the ashtray that crouched against the Corona 4 Professional. He yawned, then rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

_“It’s a good story, Mike, but it lacks focus. I’m sorry, but we’re going to pass on this one. Yes, I know how long…I know. Look, you okay?”_

Michael glanced blearily around the room. At the foot of the bed sat his suitcase forlornly, half-unzipped with contents spilling out in a jumble. Underwear, tee shirts, jeans, junk. He stared at the clear plastic baggie. Almost out. He knew of nowhere in Fort Stockton that he could find more. The bag was well traveled, having arrived with him from Orlando in a dusty Toyota with cracked vinyl seats. 

_“I’m leaving, Michael. I told you if I found out you were on this sh-t again that I was leaving.”_

Outside on the llano, the wind picked up and rattled the tiny four-paned window. From here, it looked like the gateway to nothingness, a tiny pinprick of existence, beyond which lurked a black hole in space that hungered to suck him from his tiny room into oblivion. 

_“Yo, man, I tol’ you not to be smokin’ my sh-t. Motherf-cker! You tweakin’ right now. Oh, you think you all that? You gonna draw on me? Motherf-cker, I’m gonna…”_

Michael continued writing, and soon fell into that state of consciousness wherein the words just flowed, unconcerned with the vast sea of night around his small oasis of orange, fifteen-foot square puke green tile floor and hot plate with day-old refried beans blackened on its surface. He wrote of longing, and loneliness, of fear and regret, of irresponsibility and of knowing what’s right and doing otherwise. He wrote of sorrow, of cowardice, of lost time and true intentions. Above all, he wrote miserably of hope. The typewriter dinged and clacked like a whirring oracle, and he the interpreter of bones and chicken guts.

_“F-ckin’ take it, man. F-ckin’ go. It ain’t my sh-t, it ain’t my money. Stop f-ckin’ pointin’ that thing at me! I tol’ you I ain’t gonna tell nobody it was you shot Big Rob. I swear. I swear! I ain’t tellin’ nobody! I…”_

He wrote until the tips of his fingers ached from pressing hard upon the sticky old keys, until those familiar red-and-blue lights flashed through the window, a sickening staccato in counterpoint to his last feeble strokes. His hands shook as he signed off; the earth shook as the hellish whup-whup-whup of a helicopter accentuated the tumult outside. Voices blazed like fire through the walls, amplified and incomprehensible from feedback. He nodded, then took a final puff on the nub of his cigarette.

_“License and registration, please. Do you know why I pulled you over? Hey! Keep your hands where I can see…”_

He glanced at his work, but the words seemed blurred and distant. He took the 9mm out of his belt and walked to the door. Candy-colored lights strobed outside. Michael looked at the desk and felt a twinge of regret for not having time to proofread. Then, gun in hand, he flung open the door and stepped into the night. The world swirled around him, darkness as daylight.

_CLICK. “The hunt for an alleged killer continues… CLICK. “…is considered armed and…” CLICK. “Tonight on Nightline, a patrolman’s family mourns as…” CLICK._

Garbled words wafted toward him on the porch. Michael suppressed an involuntary shiver, then pointed the gun toward the brightest lights and squeezed off three rounds. When oblivion came, it came like thunder.


*


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