Amateur Story Time?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Every so often I’ll write a short story to amuse myself or explore an idea. I just stumbled on this one I had all but forgotten. It’s so weird, mindless AND pointless, I thought, why not share it with the Dope! For whatever it’s worth.

It’s Science Fiction. And, well… you’ll see.

WARNING: Spelling and grammar errors may abound! (tabs don’t work, so I’m using paragraph spaces)

Through The Never

Amos pulled his car up in his driveway, made way past the "For Sale" sign on his front lawn and proceeded to the front porch of his 2,500 square foot home in the hills to check his mailbox for bills and the usual junk.

Since the mail hadn't arrived yet, he pulled his empty hand from the mail box and looked across his street to see his elderly neighbor leering back at him. *Fuck that guy,* Amos thought. *What's his problem?*

Amos wasn't what you would call sociable. It's not that Amos was a bad person, it's just that he didn't care for strangers who were curious about his personal business, and neighbors were the epitome of his neurosis.

He'd lived five years in this cramped subdivision, although most people would've considered it sparse and even quiet. But for Amos, if his neighbors were in earshot, then it was too close.

It was time to move to somewhere more *private.* He couldn't wait to get the hell out of here, and in fact, he had it in his mind to call his lazy-ass realtor, right now, to drop the asking price by a few grand. If that would get him out of here sooner, then he'd take the hit.

He opened the door of his soon-to-be-sold home, walked in, then closed it immediately behind him. He heard a *hssss-thhhhhck* as his ears adjusted to the pressure. A low bass-note thrummed somewhere deep within his body. The august mid-afternoon sunlight that had been smoldering through his living room window until this moment immediately went black. Now that his expensive, suburban house wasn't tied to a massive object, such as the earth, everything inside his home –- including himself –- became weightless.

So naturally, yet quite unnaturally, he began to float.

• • •

2

• • •

He had no clue as to what was happening. For all he knew, he was having a heart attack or an aneurism, and this must be what it felt like when you checked out. Amos wasn't afraid. When something inexplicable happens, fear typically isn't the first reaction. It's confusion.

Gravity being pulled out from under a person, so suddenly, like a rug out from underneath their feet, the first thing their brain tells their body is that they are falling. To Amos, not only did it feel like he was falling, but that his house was dizzily spinning around him. So, he did what most people would have done -- he puked.

What didn't immediately stick to his face, the acrid blob of half-digested General Tso's Chicken from that day's lunch coalesced into something that might have been considered interesting, if not beautiful, had you not known what it was. His vomit streaked away from him at a very good clip. He saw tendrils of chunky cud moving toward the kitchen doorway. To him, it seamed as if it were falling downward, even though he knew the kitchen was across from him. He would later find this sensation very hard to shake. No matter which way he was facing, it felt like it was downward. Always downward; always the feeling of being on the brink of teetering into nothingness.

As he was flailing in this sudden upheaval, his head bumped into the ceiling, and that's when he started to scream.

• • •

3

• • •

The windows that only a minute ago were letting in the light of the sun, were now dark. The only light that illuminated anything was coming from the glow of his screensaver on his computer in the den to the right of the front door. Then, suddenly, even that went dark. He was essentially blind.

Amos became panicked. He grasped for anything his hand could clutch. He found the curtain to the front window, and with surprising ease, was able to pull himself toward the glass, although not before he popped the curtain rod from its bracket. The curtains came free and in the zero gravity, got him tangled up even further, so he started to drift aimlessly again. If anyone could see in this pitch black, they would find the curtains moving like fluid around his convulsing body. Amos cried out in fear.

Eventually, he settled. You couldn't say he was calm, because his mind was a minefield of hysterics. His brain blew a huge fucking reality-fuse and his body simply went limp. These moments would be hard for him to collect later, to sort in any chronological order, but finally after some time his brain did some kind of a reboot. It was as if he woke up and realized he had somehow made it back to the window and was just staring out into the deep. Out into the blackness, the never-ending nothingness.

*Where was his neighbor, what's his name? Barrett? Garrett? He was just there a second ago, watering his lawn. What was happening?* He sobbed like a toddler who lost his mother.

• • •

4

• • •

There is nothing so primal, and so terrifying as being surrounded by utter and complete darkness -- especially in your own home. This is different from blindness. Amos knew his eyes were still working fine, so his brain was scrambling to find something to behold. The more it searched, and the deeper it scaned, the more heavy the raw sensation of terror was when his eyes kept coming up empty-handed. He could *feel* his irises dilate. His pupils became the size of dimes, trying futilely to let in more light. Combine this with the unprecedented situation he was now in, and it's understood how it took him over two and a half hours to even begin to rise back to the surface of sanity. If, in fact, he *was* sane.

Perhaps what began to tug him back toward the surface of coherence was that his eyes did, eventually, begin to resolve something. Something was out there, so faint, so thin, as to be almost colorless.
*Maybe pink? Gray?* He couldn't really tell.

It took him a good while to discern that it wasn't his imagination. It wasn't just something, either. It was a lot of some*things.*
Floating near the front window in absolute blackness, a thin double-pane of glass between him and the ostensible abyss, he started to gather himself.

• • •

5

Hrmm. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this without asking the Mods first? There’s quite some bit of the story to go, and now I’m starting to feel funny about making so many consecutive posts (and they’ll get larger as it goes on).

Maybe I’ll keep posting bits later today, unless the Mods have a problem with it?

6

Just so’s you don’t feel all weird like about consecutive posts and all.

7

Ha! (thanks) :wink:

8

Wellll… in that case…

• • •

*First things first.*
He needed to be able to see and get around. He was a project manager for PetersonHicks; a large corporation that focused on building exhibits and displays for major trade show events across the country. He wasn't just any project manager either; he was a *fucking kick ass* project manager. And he was going to get through this using his tried and true *Amos Finerty's 5-Step Method of Getting Shit Done.*

Step one: Gather all possible information, resources and assets.
Step two: Assess risk and feasibility.
Step three: Devise a plan and commit to it.
Step four: Schedule the plan into workable milestones.
Step five: Execute.
Wash, rinse, repeat.

He wasn't used to weightlessness, and remembered some long ago, and far away, NASA documentary, which he must have seen late one night on the Discovery Channel, that zero gravity took some getting used to. He began to experiment with his body. It was barely enough to merely swing his arms and paddle his feet. This wasn't like swimming. The air just simply wasn't dense enough to provide much traction.

After a couple minutes of testing out different flips and cartwheels, he realized that he could get his body to move into any position he wanted quite easily, it was accelerating that was troublesome. Not only that, but he kept flapping or banging into countless items that he couldn't see floating in his vicinity. One item was sharp and cut his forearm, right below the left elbow. Something wet had got him in the face. He needed light as well. But he couldn't remember where he kept his flashlight. *Was it in the utility closet down the hallway, the junk drawer in the kitchen, or perhaps he left it in the garage? Did he even still have a garage?*

Once he got on the move, he figured he could be fumbling around in the dark for hours looking for something that was battery powered and emitted light. That primal embryo of panic began to throb again. The darkness, even more than the weightlessness, was an aspect that started to present itself as a formidable entity he had to constantly keep in check, lest he fall back into mind-numbing fear. 

*His cell phone.*

Using the brightly lit LCD display would have been perfect, if he hadn't left it charging in his car. He parked his car in the drive because he was going back out later for a movie with Thad, and from what he could tell, he didn't have a driveway anymore, let alone his car. Too bad he quit smoking eight years ago too, he used to always carry a lighter.

Something just hit him in the head again -- the curtain rod.
*It would be perfect.* All the curtains were still attached to the rod, but he yanked it off the wall mounts when he was grasping for something in those first few seconds. It had to be a massive blob floating around his 18 by 24 foot living room, with a vaulted ceiling no less.

Now that he saw the faint pinkish blobs outside during his mental reboot (which was still damn near invisible and really took effort to see), he used that to find his bearings. By feel, he could tell his head was now pointing toward the hardwood floor. The windowsill was *above* his head.

He gingerly used a finger against the glass to turn himself around, right-side-up. He had heard it a million times, "For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction." This was now so true and fundamental to his every movement, that he kept repeating it to himself, over and over again as he worked to orient himself. He even made a little melody and sang it sheepishly to himself, under his breath, like a soothing lullaby. At least, it broke the eerie not-so-silence. Every few seconds, he heard a household item bounce of a wall, the floor, or each other. It was a freakish ballet of furniture and household sundries dancing all around him.

Amos pushed off the glass with his feet as if he were rising from the ground in slow motion. He had to be careful. If he pushed off too hard, he'd go crashing into the opposite wall. The last thing he needed to do was hurt himself by rushing and moving too fast. Besides, Lord only knew what was in between him and that wall. He knew there was a rather sharp-edged glass coffee table that might be floating around in here somewhere.

Almost immediately he found the curtains. They had coalesced closer to the ceiling, a good ten feet from the floor. He pulled in the fabric until his hands met the main shaft of the curtain rod. He had to remove the curtains. It wasn't as hard as he thought it might be, as he started to get into a little rhythm of removing all the loops. Nearing the end his hand slid across something cold and slimy on the curtain. Instinctively in the dark, he smelled it. *General Tso's Chicken.

Vomit.

The screensaver.*

He remembered now. Recalling the puke as it streamed away from him, before it all went black. The reason he saw it, was because the computer in the den was still on, casting a bluish glow all over the area. This was possible only because he had his computer on emergency battery backup. After sixty seconds, the backup will put the computer to sleep, conserving energy, thrusting his house into complete darkness.

He now knew what he needed to do.

• • •

9

• • •

Once he finally got all the loops unstrung from the rod, he had a great staff to vault himself around the room with. But he still had to do it very carefully, as he couldn't see jack-shit. It was an adjustable rod, so he extended it just enough so that one end could touch the ceiling, while the other reached the floor. He tested it out, and sure enough, it worked. Wedging it between these two surfaces made a sort of stripper-pole of solidarity. Or, he could use it to touch off against a wall to move him in the direction he needed.

It was still pitch black, but he closed his eyes out of force of habit, more than anything else. It did, however, help his brain to visualize his surroundings and relative distances and such. He opened them again, and using his new best friend, pushed off the wall opposite the den. He immediately moved the rod a few feet in front of him, like a jouster, so as to catch the wall the den's doorway was on. His face rammed into an ottoman. *Why always in the face?* Regardless of his defensive efforts, this interaction knocked him off course, he hoped not too far.

He eventually hit the opposite wall and used the rod to jimmy himself in place. His eyes were open as big as dinner plates, and his mouth was a stretched grimace of that of a person who doesn’t know what's coming at him, yet knows there's not a damn thing he can do about it.

At this point he forced himself to relax. He could tell now, by concentrating his vision to where the front window should be, that he was, indeed, close to the door of the den. He reached out to where he thought the doorway was, while his other hand gripped the vertical stripper-pole he had now wedged in place. Sure enough, his hand found the jamb. Dislodging the pole, he maneuvered around into the doorway and entered the den. Without hesitation, he made straightaway for were his computer usually was and plowed right into the floating mouse. At once the entire room was awash in a brilliant blue blast as the monitor flipped over from dead black to his desktop pattern (littered with umpteen icons). It was so bright it hurt his eyes.

He kept his battery backup in the closet, with his router and cable modem. If he wasn't so anal about concealing such things, the little amber blinking light on the backup would've been enough light to avoid most of the grief it took to get this far.

It's surprising to most how far the faintest light can spread out and illuminate just enough so that you can get around, once your eyes had grown accustomed. But having his monitor lit, after a few hours spent in pure darkness, was like shining a searchlight in a room full of mirrors. He had to wait for his pupils to dilate again, before he could move on.

In fact, it was so bright, it caused his eyes to tear up. Just from his computer screen alone. He wiped his eyes, and got to work, readjusting and jamming the pole, of whom he now thought of as "jimmy", between the floor and ceiling of the den so he could use it to hang on -- with his legs.

Luckily, the way the universe works, the more massive an object, the more energy it takes to get it moving around from a steady position. Things like his sofas, and his computer desk where, relatively, still where he left them -- clinging near the floor. But his LCD monitor hung slightly in the air, tethered by a few cables.

He brought the mouse back down to the desk and clicked on his browser icon. It was dumb, he knew, but he had to try. He nearly wet himself when his homepage came right up. Then he put his fluttering heart back in its place when he realized his browser was just loading the homepage from the computer's cache memory. There would be no Internet. No telephone. No power. It was only a matter of time before he ran out of air. Which was another curious thing. He knew his house was about as airtight as a cheese grater, how had he not succumbed to the ostensible vacuum outside? Make that milestone three. Milestone one was done: Moving. Milestone two was only half complete, however: Light. He needed something mobile.

He needed a flashlight.

• • •

10

• • •

Before he headed for the rest of the house, Amos checked his desk drawer really quick for anything useful. Unsure of what might come in handy, he loaded his pockets full of anything he thought might make a good implement: Fingernail clippers; paperclips; two pens and a pencil; some stickies; a six-foot USB cable – and that's when he found it: A small, gimmicky, keychain LED flashlight. He had barely remembered that he had it. It said *"PetersonHicks, LLC - Bring Your Event to Light!"* on the side where you were supposed to squeeze to make the light turn on. Squeezing it, it threw out a sharp blueish beam. Simply releasing would make the light turn off. It was paltry, and ran off a watch battery, but right now he wouldn't trade it for a million dollars.

After a couple more hours of searching around the house, he was able to gather some more items. He was especially relieved to find a bunch of long, decorative candles his ex-girlfriend must have left in the top of the utility closet when she was living with him a couple years ago. They were scented of lemon grass, which he thought smelled more like lemon ass. Collectively, they would last for days. He lit one to be sure, and found that even in this unknowable, terrifying situation, he could still be awed by nature. The flame didn't burn like everyone knows a candle to burn. No warm, yellow, flickering paisley of fire. In zero G, the flame took on a mesmerizing spherical shape, which wobbled like a soap bubble. And it wasn't warm-yellow either – it was blue. He snuffed it out after a few minutes not sure how much oxygen those things would burn through. He kept some matches and the candle in a fanny-pack he found. Again, his ex-girlfriend’s. *A fanny pack? No wonder I dumped her.*

The task of going through his plan, his *Method of Getting Shit Done,* helped take his mind off of the big white elephant in the house. *What the fuck was happening?* He didn't even know how to approach that question. In the end, he realized it didn't much matter, only that he was probably going to die.

A few possibilities, did however, run through his mind. The first, and quickly refuted out of silliness, was aliens. If this was an abduction of some sort, this was surely an odd way of going about it. The second was that it was all in his head. He had probably gotten in a car accident on his way home, and this is what his mind decided to play out for him in his coma. But that just didn’t feel right. The third, and equally as silly, is that this is some sort of alternate dimension. He wasn’t even sure what that meant, only that his 16 year old nephew liked to dress up like Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation for biannual conventions, and spout phrases like sub-space, parallel universes and alternate timelines. Dumb.

The fourth thing, and probably the most horrifying, is that he would never know. He would just die here, alone in the dark.

He felt that was the most likely, too.

• • •

11

With baited breath, I eagerly anticipate the next installment…

12

Bare with me, I’m kinda polishing this up a bit before I post each chapter. It’s kinda dusty!

A couple more before I shove off for a coupe hours…
• • •

Milestone three was upon him. He checked his watch and five and a half hours had passed since the incident. He decided milestone four would be food, water and other "bodily needs". *Good god, I need to take a dump.* But for now, he thought that might be a moot point if his house was slowly venting air into space, or whatever was out there. Besides, he already had to close the bathroom door, after witnessing the toilet water floating over the sink like a bad CG effect. He just wasn't ready to deal with those things yet.

He used "jimmy" to fly himself back into the kitchen. The attached garage was still there, as he could see through the windowed door that led into it. He decided this was as close to an airlock as he could come to for a suburban house built in the '90s. Besides, he had a feeling his heavy-duty flashlight was in there after all. He had newer windows and doors on the whole house, so he thought the seal around those would be decent enough to keep air in, but he knew the garage would be empty already, if there really was a vacuum out there. After shining his little LED light into the dark corners, besides some floating cans, tools and some scraps of garbage, everything seemed normal.

At first, he lit one of his candles, and put the round flame next to the seal of the door. The candle just did it's graceful wobble, no sign of leakage.

He decided to open the door a crack. If there *were* a vacuum on the other side, he'd feel the pressure drop and the current of air rush past. His only fear was making sure he could get the door closed again, so he figured if he opened then close it in one fell swoop, all the while keeping his momentum going, he'd mitigate any possible pressure blowout.

He tied the six foot USB cable tightly through a couple of his belt loops then tied the other end off at the half-bath door knob right next to the garage door. He took a deep breath. No time like the present, he thought.

*Open, slam!*

Besides the draft of the swinging door, it was pretty uneventful. He did it again, a little slower this time to be sure.

*Open, close -- Nada.*

This, he thought, was good news. If the garage had air, that meant the air in the house wasn't going anywhere. He was no scientist, but he imagined he had about 3 or 4 days of breathable air in the house (although, he wouldn't be surprised if it only lasted 24 hours). He'd know when he started to get sleepy. Not a natural sleepy, but an irresistible, *heavy* sleepy. But for now, he purged those thoughts out of his head.

Still hanging onto hope, he opened the kitchen door into the garage.

• • •

13

• • •

No rush of air, no eyes popping out of his head, no boiling blood. The air pressure was definitely the same as inside the house. He pointed his *"PetersonHicks, LLC - Bring Your Event to Light!"* light at the small holes and cracks where the garage door meets the concrete. He slapped the garage door opener button that was mounted on the wall next to the kitchen door.

Of course, the garage door didn't open. He thought it funny that he really did expect the garage door to start grinding and humming as the overhead light popped on and the garage door to rise on its screw-drive. *Habitual ritual.*

He then un-tethered himself from the USB cable, and brought "jimmy" with him into the garage, he was done pussyfooting.

After a few minutes in the garage, he was really starting to get the hang of weightlessness. He did find his heavy-duty flashlight, and he even had an extra 12-volt battery, still wrapped in cellophane beside it on some metal shelving. If circumstances were different, he’d prefer this method for household wandering. This really was the only way to fly.

He unceremoniously floated over to the garage-door-release pull-string, bracing himself against “jimmy”, he tugged downward on the string and popped the door of it's track. He repositioned "jimmy" into place right up close to the garage door, and pulled himself to the dirty, oil-stained concrete floor, aligned to the center of the door. He got a good grip on one of the door's horizontal struts.

*Am I really going to do this?* Yes, of course he was.

The door flew upward, rattling on it's curved tracks, after a strenuous push, exposing him to what lay beyond his little house.

He became paralyzed as if floating before the gaping maw of an indifferent god; silhouetted against the abyss.

• • •

14

Typing naked, huh? And it’s just you and me? I got something you could be “polishing!”

15

I’ll be back later…

16

Dude, I always write in the nude.

And, uh, no… I’m not “polishing” anything that isn’t either attached to myself, or my wife!

17

Wife?!

**quietly, sheepishly exits **

18

WAIT! Come back, you’re my only listener!

Did I say wife? I meant, umm… aw shit. Yeh. I’m married.

19

** Cracks door, sticks head in **

And a dude, dude.

** closes door, heads to bathroom for three hour shower **

20

Oh good god, you thought i was a… GASP!

runs to take a three-hour shower