Fiction story Part 2

This is a continuation of the last story. There are some details I'm still working out. The basic ideas are there for me, though, and there are some story points I have in mind. 
I almost faint again after he says that, but he catches me in his surprisingly strong arms and slowly lays me back on the bed. I look up at him as if seeing him for the first time again, unsure of what he had meant. He must see how afraid I am, because he looks concerned.

"I expect some memory loss is to be . . . expected . . . after so long of a slumber as you have endured. We shall remove the rest of your bandages and see about reintroducing you to the world, my dear." He reaches under the bed again and returns with a needle. "Please do not be afraid," he assures me, "I mean you no harm." Something in my gut urges me to trust this stranger I only just met. I let him approach the bed with the needle. He injects a small shot into my arm. "This should refresh your parched throat and aching stomach, as well as enhance your equilibrium." I do feel refreshed as the shot takes effect. The good doctor then tells me to stand up, if I can.

After I'm able to stand, he grabs one end of a bandage and starts twisting it away from my body. As he does so, I revolve around in circles; this motion makes the removal somewhat easier. Almost dancing around in circles, the bandages were slowly coming off. "Yes, there we are," he quips, "I should dare believe you would have enjoyed this game as a little girl." I wonder at his sanity still, and my own for a moment, as I had no memory of any childhood as a girl.

As we finish unwrapping the bandages, I feel lighter. I stop twisting and I stand naked and disoriented before my benefactor. As I look down on myself, my form is not as I remember it: I appear to be a young girl.

As I swoon as much from exhaustion as shock, the doctor grabs a robe and catches me in one motion. He consoles me as he wraps me in the warm cloth.

"There, there, my dear. I should dare say this is the first time you have had a chance to stand on your own in quite some time. Come this way and warm yourself." He leads me to a room to the left of where I had lain, a room I realize he entered from when I woke up. There are ceramic cups scattered across a small table and a roaring fire next to some wooden chairs. The furnishings are nice enough, but this room doesn't look like a room in the same building as the room we just came from.

"Sit next to the fire," he gently recommends. I do like he says and sit down on one of the wooden chairs covered in a hand-sewn seat cover. My doctor rushes to the table and quickly pours a drink from a jug he retrieves from underneath the table. "Here, drink. It will warm you up some." I am hardly of any mind to refuse his assistance, although a smarter person might have refused a drink from a stranger. Still, I couldn't help trusting this kind old man, though in my memories, I had never met him before the last several frantic minutes.

The cup is not hot to the touch. As I drink it quickly, thinking it will be cold, it becomes hotter on the way down. I shudder slightly at the change in temperature of the drink, and my new friend barely suppresses a guffaw.

"Ha! Yes, it quite a strong drink to one unaccustomed to the kick. Not the strongest I have, mind you, but it will wake you up." I look at him with a confused look and he suddenly seems embarrassed. He frowns and then goes over to the right corner from where we had entered. He takes an old blanket covering off the wall, revealing a metal wall behind it. He pushes a button and a refrigerator opens. He takes out a little bit of food and puts it on a plate for me.

"This is not much, but it will suffice to feed you for now." I don't recognize the food, but it looks like fruit. I give them a try by his recommendation and they actually taste pretty good. I eat quietly as he watches.

"There's a girl," he says, as I finish the plate. I didn't realize how hungry I had been until he offered me food. I'm still not used to being referred to with a feminine pronoun, but I can't object as I look like a girl.

"As I said," he continued, there is some expectation of memory loss. I notice you are . . . disoriented . . . and that is okay. You have been asleep for a long time. I will offer you what assistance I can to restore your memories and learn what you may have forgotten. I have a library in the basement," he looks at a rug not far from where I'm sitting, "and these books will serve you well in your merger back into society." I still trust him, but I am increasingly confused.

"You should clean-up and prepare for the first of your lessons, though I will mercifully start slow."

He directs me to a small enclosed space not far from the table. It was a metal box that I hadn't noticed that reached the ceiling. The door creaked open revealing a rusty floor and walls. There were some openings in the ceiling.

"Not the most ideal conditions, but adequate none-the-less." He frowns again as he looks into my silent face. "Well, yes, I suppose you desire some privacy. I will leave you to it." The look on his face is so sad, but I don't have time to worry about him because I'm dealing with my own tenuous grasp on reality at the moment. I step inside the box and remove my robe, discreetly placing it outside the door. If I hadn't been shocked before, I am now, as I see my naked body. I decide to try to adapt and trust my "father" for guidance, if that's who he thinks he is.

Fiction Part 1 TBD

This is something I've been working on for a while, but have not worked on in a long time. I've read some books that change my attitude towards some of it, so I'm coming back to it with a fresh viewpoint. I've thought about rewriting it in the third person, but I don't know that I want to give the guy a name to begin the story. I guess I could just use pronouns.
Again, some of these are based on actual events, while this one is obviously not.
Edit: Worked on some tense stuff and changed the tone. The narrator's tone didn't seem consistent from the introduction to the body, so I've changed it some.


I'm 32 years old and I live by myself. I work at a huge retail chain and I have no life. The money's not great where I work, but the hours are long. At the moment, I'm walking the ten miles to my one bedroom apartment, because my morning shift at the store is over. It's raining and my car is in the shop, and the buses don't run today, and I can't afford a taxi. When I get home, I have a few hours of television to look forward to, before I stay up late on the computer and wake up tomorrow to do it all over again. My glasses are wet, just like the rest of me, and I can barely see. I could cry and no one would know, because it's so wet; and I want to, because it's cold and wet, and I have nothing to live for. I resist the urge, because men aren't supposed to cry, or at least that's what my father always told me. He didn't tell me that my life would degrade into a pathetic string of events just uneventful enough to be short of a tragedy, but also so devoid of activity that it couldn't be anything else. I'm thinking of these things as I cross the street to get to my lonely quarters. Trying not to cry, I pull my hands close to my shivering body. I barely have time to take my last breath before the oncoming car hits me. This should be the end, but it's not.

I wake up, enclosed in a space so tight I feel claustrophobic. Around me is a glass enclosure not unlike an oxygen tent. The glass is arranged in plates that seem to be intricately wedged together with a series of bolts. I'm wrapped tight in what seems to be medical bandages; they cover my entire body, though I feel like I can move. My head is also wrapped up with a heavy object on top of it, like a makeshift helmet. I imagine I'm in a hospital. Surely I'm hurt if I'm wrapped up like this. My body feels lighter than it was, and looks lighter from what I can see, no doubt a result of a period of convalescence. I have several tubes hooked up to my body as well. Although my body is lighter, my head feels heavier. I seem to have more hair on my head, another indication I have been out of it for some time.

As I wake up, alarms sound and machines begin to stir. From my left, an elderly man enters the room, but he doesn't look like any traditional doctor or nurse. He's wearing stitched-together clothing that looks homemade. He has large glasses and looks at me with a shocked expression. The old man quickly checks the beeping machines and motions me to stay still. I try to respond, but I've lost my voice; it's probably been since I was awake. The machines he's working at frantically are rusted and look more like appliances than hospital equipment. I stay lying down like he told me to and watch him closely. He pulls levers and presses buttons until I feel a pressure in the atmosphere lifted that I hadn't even noticed. I feel freer, but I still remain in bed. My new elderly friend presses a final button and then seems content to watch me in my clear prison. As he watches, the walls of the small bed area begin to buckle and the interconnecting plates move apart. Instead of a hiss I hear a pop, as the bolts slowly unscrew and the plates separate.

The walls slowly complete their separation and pull apart. As I'm exposed to the naked air for the first time, my caretaker slowly walks up. He enters the bubble and slowly reaches under my bed to pull out what looks like an oxygen mask. He places it around my face and head; then he begins to remove the tubes that are connected to my body. There is not an unbearable amount of pain as he removes the tubes, but I wince just the same, weak as I am. I feel a little afraid of my apparent savior, although I feel vaguely safe. He puts his hands to my covered forehead and seems satisfied by what he feels. At first I think it's a simple medical gesture, but I soon realize he is showing concern. I've never met this man, but I guess he cares for all of his patients.

When all of the tubes are finally removed, the doctor cleans the small breaks on my skin. The skin that is treated looks like it's healing already. When this gentler application is finished, the elderly man finally speaks.

"I'm going to remove the dressings on your head, so I just need you to sit up for a moment, okay?" He speaks as if to a child, and I wonder what state I was in when I arrived at this weird hospice. I nod my head, even as I do as he asks; my earlier attempt at speech had been met with a lack of success. The man carefully removes the bandages from my head until I feel a slight jerk to my head. The helmet I felt earlier had been removed. Then, he starts to remove another layer of wraps and stops to talk to me again.

"If you are up to it and sufficiently refreshed I will remove your breathing assistant, so I can get all of the tape off, all right?" I indicate that this is fine, even as I continue to notice the peculiar nature of his words. The good doctor removes my "breathing assistant" and continues to undo the trappings of my medical enslavement. As he finishes this procedure, long locks of dark hair fall to either side of my face. I felt like I had more hair, but I must have been under a long time for my hair to get this long. The doctor put a hand to my chin and inclined my face to meet his. His face is lined with the marks of age, but it was clear he had once been a handsome man. He looks at me compassionately and addresses me in a most particularly strange manner compared to what I had ever been used to.

"Good morning . . . daughter."

Poetry/Fiction "I Wish I Could Lie Tonight"

I'm going to start posting some fiction and poetry writing. Some of this is based on actual events and some of it is obviously not. 


I Wish I Could Lie Tonight


I wish I could lie to myself tonight

And say I don't miss you at all.

I wish I could lie tonight

And think I didn't mess it up with you.

I wish I could lie tonight

And say that none of this bothers me at all.

I wish I could remember when anything went right.

I wish I could forget when I met you

And how beautiful you looked that night.

I wish you didn't make me smile

I wish you weren't so damn cute

I wish I could forget how much I'm fond of you.

I hope you will see me again

But it probably won't matter by then.

You'll have met someone else

And maybe I will too

But she won't be you.

I don't deserve someone

who makes a room glow like you do.

I heard music playing on the night I met you

And it's not because we were in a crowded bar.

I can't say I liked you then

I just knew that maybe you could be a friend.

But it looks like I messed that up too.

I can't lie tonight

'Cause it wouldn't be right

I can't lie tonight

'Cause I don't want to hurt anyone else.

I can't lie tonight

I'm gonna miss you for a long damn time.

Slam Dunk of a Book

I was not very far into Bill Simmons The Book of Basketball before I realized that I would love it. Besides the fact that Simmons is obviously a Bill Russell fan, I could tell that this was a writer who appreciated the sport even more than I did. The matter-of-fact analysis combined with the unapologetic jabs at some of the all-time greats make this book informative and enjoyable.

The bread and butter of the book is the proposed reinvention of the Hall-of-Fame called “The Pyramid.” Simmons breaks down the top 96 players in NBA history. You may not agree with his entire list, but he makes his arguments well (he convinced me in a few paragraphs in the Iverson section, where I was originally quick to disagree with him on first seeing where he ranked him). I know Simmons himself would change his own list based on the 2010-2011 season, having even written some about it in his blogs. Specifically, Dirk Nowitzki would be a little higher having won a championship finally. Possibly, Jason Kidd would move up as well, for the same reason.

The section on Dominique Wilkins especially caught my attention as an Atlanta area sports fan. He captured the heart and essence of what it was like to see Dominique play, while at the same time addressing his short-comings and the frustrating aspects of his career. I am a huge fan of Dominique, and Simmons take on him is fair and thrilling at the same time.

I’m still not finished with this book (it’s 700-something pages), but I already know I need to own it. (Side note here: the book is littered with footnotes and I am also reading every last one of those. It almost makes the book twice as long and it is affecting my own writing style. I pretty much just wrote a footnote.) I checked it out from the library after almost buying it a few times at the bookstore. If the Pyramid was not worth the price of admission alone, the "What-If?" section could keep an NBA fan entertained for days. These are the things NBA fans talk about; this book can rightfully call itself the Bible of Basketball, one of its self-stated goals. Anyone regretting the loss of Basketball should read this book to remind yourself why you like the sport.  

No Bones About it

I recently started watching the television show Bones. I had watched a few episodes here and there, but I decided to start from the beginning and watch the series in order. Here are some of my impressions.

The show has some obvious parallels to the X-Files, a series I followed quite closely at one point. Besides being broadcast on the same network, the shows are also similar in that the subject of each series is a man and a woman who work for the FBI in various capacities. While Bones isn’t about aliens like X-Files often was (at least the first two episodes I watched were not), Bones and Booth do have discussions about their cases in a fashion similar to the way Mulder and Scully did on X-Files. The woman in the pair is even the forensic scientist, much as Scully was. The nature of the discussions even seem to be similar, with one character basing her opinions on scientific facts (Scully and Bones) and the other character basing assumptions on “gut feelings” (Mulder and Booth). The sexual tension is even there, though Bones seems to hit the ground running, where as X-Files kept viewers on the edge of their seats for years concerning Mulder and Scully’s relationship, or rather their lack of one.

In the pilot episode and “The Man in the S.U.V.,” Bones is seemingly already interested in Booth. The writers waste no time setting up Bones and Booth as sexual foils of each other. To compare the series to X-Files again, while Mulder and Scully certainly had their sexual tension in the beginning, initially the title characters were rarely shown dating anyone, much less each other. In the second episode, Bone’s friend Angela is already spying on Booth for her, though without her permission. (Incidentally, I don’t mind admitting I have a slight crush on Michaela Conlin already, the actress who portrays Angela.)

Bones succeeds where other shows about crime do not in sustaining my interest: It’s not boring. As I have mentioned, I loved watching X-Files, but what I liked about that show wasn’t the criminal investigations as much as the interaction between the characters. Watching a man and a woman interact in an intelligent and respectful discussion about a situation was intellectually engaging, and this is the experience I am getting discovering Bones. From these early episodes, it seems the title characters are at odds on some key issues, but so were Mulder and Scully. I see parallels with Bones and Mulder as well. Both of them have lost family members and are driven to law enforcement as a result.

To sum up my early impressions of Bones, I have to say my opinion is very positive at this point. I wonder if the series can maintain its progression, as some shows lose some steam after several seasons. (I don’t need to go further than my own mention of X-Files for an example.) Also, I often lament that television shows currently running are either reality shows or crime dramas, neither of which (with a few exceptions) I am particularly interested in, but I could see myself tuning in to watch this show on a weekly basis.