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Here it is. The last entry before NaNoWriMo. It starts Tuesday. I'm quite nervous. I'm going to have to write about 1500 words every day in order to make the number of words I need. Wish me luck.

The house of delight leered at me from my spot on the sidewalk. We lived there once. No longer a house of delight, but a shabby monument to a brighter time.

I always swore that I didn’t believe in a higher power, but it took only a taste of sacrifice and suddenly I am praying for hope, relief, another chance, freedom. There has been no answer yet. So I’m here, standing in front of the house and wondering where you are.

Remember when the rooms of this house held us in a warm embrace that seemed to keep the world at bay? Now, the world has invaded our togetherness and we didn’t survive the invasion.

I admit that I saw you. You saw me, too, but I pretended not to notice. I am conflicted. Not sure whether to hold on or to let go. But you. You were laughing and carrying on with friends. I had to swallow a pitcher of bitterness at the knowledge that while I toiled without you, you were happy without me.

I hoped to come here to the now decrepit house (was the paint always peeling? Did the screen door always hang crooked?) and let go. But I am here now and just as conflicted as before.

I want to hold on.

I want to let go.

Failure

This story I just sat down and wrote. I had no idea what I was going to write when I started, I just did it. Anyway, it probably needs some work.

Last week I said that I would be writing a longer story in installments on my blog. However, I have come to realize that NaNoWriMo is starting in just a couple of weeks and when it does I want to be able to focus on the story that I have been thinking about. That is the one that I will be posting in installments on this blog. At least, probably. Since I'm going to fully participate in NaNoWriMo this year, I need to make sure that it isn't against the rules to be posting the story here as well as wherever I'm supposed to post it. (For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's National Novel Writing Month every November. The goal is to write a 50 000 word novel in 30 days.) Anyway, enjoy this short story and I'll have more for you next week.

The hallway was silent and dark. Four pictures hung along one wall. Pictures of happier times. Alice walked slowly down the hallway, her expensive shoes clicking loudly on the hardwood floor. She paused for a moment by each of the pictures on the wall.

The first was of her grandparents at their wedding fifty years ago. It was black and white and faded, but the happiness shining out of her grandmother’s eyes as she clung to her new husband hadn’t faded in all the years since.

The second photo was of her mother on her wedding day. Her mother wore a beautiful ivory white dress. Satin and silk draped over her body and flowed down the red carpet that lined the isle in the church where she had married her husband of thirty years. She smiled like she had a secret.
The third picture was of her older sister. She had been married on a magnificent day in July five years ago. The sun shone brightly in the sky and it seemed that the flowers had all bloomed just for her that day. Roses and carnations and lilies. Pink and red and orange. Not a single cloud marred the perfect blue sky. It was all for her.

The last picture that she stopped at was her own. She smiled at the photographer with such exuberant joy. It had been barely eight months since the happiest day of her life. Alice scrutinized the image of herself, laughing in the arms of the man she had married. They had been so perfect for each other.

She reached up and removed the picture from the wall.

Ann-Louise's Story - Chapter 1 "The Beginning"

I'm sorry that I again missed a week. I haven't been very good at writing every week. I think the problem might be that I don't really like writing short stories. I like writing longer pieces. So today I am posting something that I wrote a long time ago. It is the beginning of a story that I haven't finished. What I am planning on doing now is taking one of the stories that I have posted the beginning of and continuing to write and post only that story. If you have a request as to which one you would like to hear more of, please post or send me a message (though I'd really like it if you posted since I haven't gotten any real posts yet).

Anyway, this is the beginning of Ann-Louise's story. It is only the first scene from the first chapter. Let me know what you think.

“You want to know why I did it, don’t you?”

The young man at the door nodded. He had never been to this house before, had never met the woman at the door, but he had come here for information that only she could give him.

She stood aside and said, “Come in, Kevin.  Would you like coffee?  Or would you prefer tea?”

“Tea, please.”

“I’ll put the water on.”  She led the way into her kitchen.  “Twenty years is a very long time.  You look like your father,” she said, pausing to look at him.  His dark hair was quite short and small rectangular glasses perched over strikingly blue eyes.  His black and white suit was impeccably tailored to his wiry frame, and it looked like he kept well in shape.  She shook her head and turned back to filling the kettle.  “Anyway, it seems like a lifetime ago.”

“It was.”

He sat down in her sparkling kitchen and watched as she set the water to boil on the stove.  Her sleek black hair held a few strands of grey that wouldn’t have been there before and though she was looking away from him now he had seen her green eyes were still bright with life.  She really wasn’t all that much older than he was at forty to his twenty; everything that had happened made it seem like there were more years between them than there was.  He watched the way her slim body stretched to reach the cups on the top shelf and seeing her fluid, no-nonsense movements reminded him of something his father had once told him.

“He told me you were graceful, that you used to dance.”

She nodded.

“I think he was half in love with you.”

She smiled and shook her head.   “No, he wasn’t.”

They were silent as the water finished boiling and she poured two cups.  They added their own milk and sugar and she asked him, “Shall we go into the living room?”

“Here is fine.”

“It’s a long story,” she warned.

“Here is fine.”

 She nodded and took a sip of her tea.

“It really was so long ago.  It seems almost to have happened to another person.  But I remembered it all, as accurately as it is possible to remember something with twenty years between then and now.  I knew that, one day, you would come to me and ask me this question of why.  And I knew that, those nine months we spent would force me to answer.”

She took another sip of her tea and looked at the young man across from her.

“You’re looking for truth, Kevin.  Beware that this is what you’re going to get.  It may not be pretty, and it may not be what you’re looking for.”

When he nodded, she looked away from him into a past that he could never see.

“The year was 2039 and my friend, Lucy and I were looking for jobs.  I still find it slightly ironic that the 1930s and the 2030s were decades of severe economic depression for Canada.  As my history teacher would later tell me, there are no new ideas in Canadian history.

“Lucy was a beautiful girl with long blonde hair and the kind of a body a man would kill for.  She was gorgeous.  She had gotten involved with someone a couple of months before and he had gotten her pregnant.  Then he left and we were on our own again.

“Needing money, we went to the last place either one of us wanted to be.  We didn’t want to get caught up in the controversy surrounding the place.  But they paid good money.  Kwan Dynastic is what would eventually help turn the economy back around for Canada, since the whole world wanted what he was supplying.  First, they offered jobs, which Canadians from all over came for.  Then, by putting a lot of money back into the country, the company put Canada back on its feet.

“Lucy and I, however, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.  We didn’t know our lives would be irrevocably changed as a result.  It was our fault, I suppose.  We never asked what the consequences were until it was too late.”  She shrugged.  “Plus, we were desperate.”