No Place for Crosstops

I am working out a couple of new short stories; one will likely (working title) be called "No Place for Crosstops." Yes, that is a Green Day musical allusion. Here are some possible opening paragraphs. I think I will do five, one for each work day this week. A guy with a wandering mind and a creative-impulse working overtime, spun out in this room, has gotta do something, eh? I'm asking for your help. Which one(s) seem(s) to draw you in, initially, more than the others (which implies, of course, I know, that they all might suck; this is the constant, worrisome dilemma of the contemporary storyteller)? You know?

Monday:

It was very good, very, until it all began to fade, as undetectably as a once-sparkling coat of satin paint slowly degrades, then pales away, all of this mainly unnoticed on the walls of any small, poorly-lit European salon. Mr. Obscure Writer reacted to the urgency he felt by gripping a cheap blue Bic, and he began to write sentences, scribbling madly, cursive not so polished, about what he had suddenly intuited while looking above a hazy, smoked gray London skyline. This time he believed that he could, if he were single-minded, if he could remain focused on a crucial point in time, finally tell it like it really is, perform like a refined and sensible imaginateer, and tell them all, as well, at long last, how it ought to be.

(What I am hearing in my head: Stereophonics, "Mr. Writer")
Play it:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnbb_zfIxBY


Tuesday:

He closed his eyes, and his inner darkness rapidly enclosed him, but he felt as sick (even sitting down in an overstuffed Victorian wing chair) as if he were spinning and stumbling in jagged circles crazily -- like some misbehaving little miscreant would perform when he turned round and round and round quickly till falling-down dizzy, even though he had been sternly warned by all not do so. Do not open them, do not peek for any reason, he thought he heard again, though he was absolutely by himself in the flower-scented room (well, the only breathing being at least) as he looked, sitting, all over, left to right, the well-tooled and burnished casket that now possessed the long-perished remains. It had been a cruel, thunderbolt of an insight -- what he had seen, with his own eyes -- when first he peered down, very reluctantly, perhaps cowardly is the better term to use, and saw what, or should that be who, was staring back at his face with a bleeding and pleading stare from the interior of the satin-lining of the burial box where, in all situations predictable and orderly, the dead one's head should have been resting, eyelids forever slammed down, brainlessly.

(What I am hearing in my head:  Green Day, "Brain Stew/Jaded")
Spin out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHP4TWIxx_I


Wednesday

They had been kissing in that way, that morning, for long and precious minutes like Caleb had often believed, yearned, that one day would be possible. But, then, she without warning rolled away from him, rotating mostly on her left hip awkwardly and too quickly, and she sighed heavily, with a disappointing frown, leaving him with his arms still curled out in a grasping semi-circle and confronting a sense of surprise and utter loss, like that complex sensation of the numb-jawed, wet, blood-sucking pop (but there is no real popping sound) when a useless tooth gets extracted from one's pried-open mouth. Displayed on the LG flat-screen monitor were the dazzling but frightening pictures of tall buildings burning down, with people jumping off of them from heaven-scraping floors. The CD player, set down low, with bass notes on heavy, was just at that moment rumbling with the smoky piano crescendo (Yoo-hoo-ooow-ewe) at the close of the cover of "Imagine," by the musicians called A Perfect Circle. Caleb and Gina had never been huddled together in a desperate and awesome moment of choice quite like this -- and the wicked, deceitful conspiracies that they had concocted to lead them to it, this naked decision point, lent the present tense a breathless, high-up-and precipice-dangling tingle deep in each of their undernourished stomachs.

(What I am hearing in my head:  A Perfect Circle, "Imagine")
Play it loud:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktv2C9vnRKU


Thursday

I have lived many fruitful and some fruitless years, and I never really thought it would happen, that I would actually kill off another person's smarmy existence. Other than my indefatiguably controlling and perennially pissed off former spouse, I had never really felt a bona fide temptation, like I would genuinely accomplish it (until lately), to murderously end the life of another, even one of the crudest and most cruel members of the human parade of losers who have invaded my life. And as an addict (euphemistically in full-blown recovery) you can imagine how outlandish some of those human dregs have proved to be. Whenever anyone asks me 'why did you do it?,' I invariably respond by claiming that he earned the shot, deserved it more than anyone I had ever met, and that I did our wounded race a humongous favor. Homicidal anger though is a shrieking, self-destructive, and nerve-fraying spin cycle, a topsy-turvy thrill barrell-roll of a ride as some call it, from which one never comes back wholly and which depletes one's self-justifying spirit indelibly. My plan called for me to pay out $5000 in untainted currrency, which I did, for a bullet to the back of a craphead's brain. But I learned something long hidden in my heart (after the money had been doled out) when, with my good hand and arm, and a trifecta of tiny white Oxycontin tablets, I cut another down, in an irresistible-impulse rage, with extreme prejudice, as they say. Too bad for me and my dim future that I did this deed in a church, as religious tune chimed on a Sunday morning, while a couple of hundred eyewitnesses looked my victim and me over with eyes agog.

(What I'm hearing in my cranium:  Green Day, "Hitching a Ride"")
Louder now: 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOy9V6vpNs&feature=related

Friday

It was the dream again, the one that forever made Agnese stare at the unthinkable. She was lost and wandering within a mysterious pine forest, at the base of the hill east of Montepulciano, her home village, and Agnese as usual could not find her way. A gray fog seemed blanket thick and icy sharp. Just like the one that now kept her home for single women, near day's dawning, out of sight from all mortal eyes. Agnese struggled to breathe nomally. Again she was searching, in this untamed forest that was rumored to have magical powers, for the confessional box where her all of anxieties and guilt would be relieved. Or so she chose to tell herself half-heartedly. Wild owls called out in shrill tones. Something big and menacing, and uncaged, and apparently bloody hungry, growled near her. The shadowed trees exhaled one then another, and another -- like lost souls randomly sighing. But the cold mists that she always discovered, in this bizarre night journey, prevented Agnese from beholding anything or anyone clearly.