Copper's Writing Thread

[☆ marriage maze ☆]

Welcome to my writing thread! This is where I will share some of my work. Feel free to comment or critique!

Short Story- Isn't it Ironic?

Sara had a long list of things she hated about Los Angeles. The La Brea tar pits were probably at the top of it.

She and her father had moved from Maine two months ago for a job opportunity, and Sara still hadn’t adapted. For one, here were probably more people in the apartment building she lived in than there had been in the whole town she had lived in. It was blisteringly hot every day, even in the middle of January. there were people everywhere, which made her feel claustrophobic even when she was outside. And then, of course, there were the tar pits.

The tar pits were the only real reason Sara was even in L.A. Her father had gotten a job at the museum there, so almost every day she had to look at those things. To her, the whole thing was like a an enormous graveyard. True, it was a graveyard for all the stupid prehistoric things that had fallen in there, but it was a graveyard none the less. And the very thought of a grave site as a tourist attraction made Sara feel sick.

When Sara was at school, she felt alienated from everyone else in her class. Her body hadn’t adapted to L.A either, leaving her dark-haired and pale while her classmates looked like they spent every day at the beach. She spent most of her free time at school reading alone in a corner. She didn’t pay mind to the other students, and they paid her no mind in return. Which is why it surprised her when three girls approached her one day at lunch.

“Hi Sara!” One of them said in a sugary voice. She didn’t know their names, but they looked slightly familiar to Sara. “Hello.” She replied in a deadpan tone. This didn’t faze the girl, and she continued talking. “So, we were wondering...do you want to go visit the Tar Pits with us after school?” Sara thought about this. Normally, she would have said no instantly. But, just for a moment, these girls had looked...nice. They really seemed sincere about asking her on this outing of theirs. Her dad had been asking her if she had made any friends in L.A… She decided that, maybe, this one time, she could stand going to the tar pits.

The sun was already down by the time they had gotten there. No matter how eerie Sara found the tar pits in the day, it was nothing compared to this. They looked like dark holes in the ground, a suffocating void you could fall into at any moment. That thought made her shudder. The girls led Sara up a hill. They told her to close her eyes, and she obliged as they led her forward.

“Okay, open your eyes!” One of the girls said. Sara had a hard time telling their voices apart. Sara opened her eyes to see that she had made it to the top of the hill. She could see the city lit up in the night, buzzing with activity even late in the day. Just below her, she could see the tar pits, almost invisible in the darkness. “It’s so beautiful…” She finally managed to say. “It’s almost like-” She was cut off by the sound of the girls laughing.

She turned around, confirming that the girls were indeed laughing, one of them nearly doubling over. Before she could ask why, one of the girls shoved her with surprising strength. Sara fell back, sliding over the edge of the hill and plummeting down towards the void below. She closed her eyes, bracing herself for the inevitable landing, when instead of hitting solid ground she fell into a sticky substance. Her eyes flew open in panic. She had landed straight in a pit of tar she hadn’t seen from the hill. As she struggled to get free she only managed to sink even further into the oozing blackness. She looked up to see that the girls had left. She didn’t know when they had, or where they might have gone. Most likely back home.

Why? Why was she so stupid? She had trusted them, and for a fleeting moment she had felt that someone here had cared about her. And where had that gotten her? Some day in the future, the scientists like her dad would find her stained bones and put her in a glass box so all could see her final and greatest mistake. Homo Gullibulus. Most likely died while hunting.

The tar seeped over her mouth before she could laugh.

[☆ marriage maze ☆]

Poetry Corner

Three Kits

The first kit was born mad,
Screaming and clawing at
The world he was dragged into.
So they named him Rage,
Left him with his mother,
And pretended he would be okay.

The second kit was born weak,
coughing and whining at
Her unfair world.
So they named her Herb,
Kept her hidden away,
And pretended she would live.

The third kit was born still,
Unable even to open her eyes upon
The world that had rejected her.
So they named her nothing at all,
Buried her out of sight,
And pretended there had been only two.

In Your Footsteps

The ghost of you is following me
Through the rickety gates
where we once walked together.

My memories of your warm hands
Run their fingers through my hair,
Braiding it with the blossoms
That grow where you are.

You guide my tottering steps
adjusting my nervous walk
To the pace of your own oh-so-confident one,
The one I looked forward to seeing every day.

A whisper of a voice I knew better than my own
“You’re gonna do great things, kid.”
You said you were never coming back
But you never even left.

[☆ marriage maze ☆]

Short Story- Death is Just a Girl

The sound of the flat line burned through the otherwise silent room, alerting us of the end of Rosie’s coma. I looked over at the other girls, once part of our three-man vigil, now a part of our three-man funeral. In Bridget’s corner, the waterworks had begun, The tears welling up in her eyes and falling to the ground, pooling in her glasses and staining her sweater. Evelyn was just sitting in one of the uncomfortable, plastic chairs they gave us, staring at the flat red line. There was a look in her eyes almost as if a light that had shined on her her whole life had suddenly been switched off, leaving her confused and lonely in the dark. I understood how she felt- It shocked me too. Rosie was our light, like a sun that shone in our own private sky. We couldn’t imagine what it would be like if for any reason, she wasn’t here anymore. In our minds, she was other-worldly, a higher being than us pitiful mortals. In our minds, she couldn’t die. She just couldn’t.

But no one thought to tell her about the train.

We were foolish, honestly. We heard what the doctors had said. words like “internal bleeding” and “massive head trauma” don’t mean everything is going to be okay. Words like that mean trying to remember what flowers she told you she wanted in her casket, that one day you were talking about funerals. But we didn’t think about it like that. We didn’t want to.
The nurse left the room to, and I quote, “Give us a moment of peace.” Almost as soon as she left, another girl entered the room. She didn’t say anything when she came in. She was pale and thin, and when she looked at Rosie, we could tell she had seen a lot of people who were in Rosie’s place. There appeared to be circles under her eyes, like she hadn’t slept in a while, but she appeared wide awake as she strolled through the room, still without a word. Finally, I spoke up. “I think you have the wrong room.” She turned to look at me, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw her eyes were a solid black.
“I don’t have the wrong room, Amber.” She said, in a cold, echoing voice. I shivered. How could she have known my name? Bridget and Evelyn looked scared as well. “I am Death.” The girl stated, quite simply. This shocked all of us. We had always pictured Death as some tall, hooded figure, perhaps with a scythe, or in Bridget’s animes, some attractive guy with colorful hair. I took a closer look at her. She was thin, but muscular, her brown hair up in a messy bun. Death must be a dancer, I thought to myself, stifling a giggle. Rosie had been a dancer too; She and this “Death” might have been friends. That thought made me sad again. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I was forced to watch as Death put her hand on Rosie’s forehead, and her eyes opened for just a second, making the three of us jump in surprise. Slowly, her green eyes faded to white, than closed once more.

“It is done.” Death said, as if we couldn’t tell. The three of us closed our eyes and bowed our heads. I’m not sure why, it just felt like the respectful thing to do. We kept our eyes shut until we could hear Death’s voice again.
“You know, I could take you with her.” This caused our eyes to flutter open in confusion. “I know she meant a lot to you...I could take you too. Then you wouldn’t have to live without her.” Death sounded like she was about to cry. Me, Bridget, and Evelyn all looked at each other for a long time. We didn’t know what to do. Than suddenly, Evelyn’s Ipod, which we had been playing for Rosie, turned on. It had run out of power, but I guess now that we had charged it, it had enough power to work again. We had been playing Welcome To Night Vale, a podcast Rosie loved. We listened carefully:

"...That’s the essence of life, isn’t it? Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. And while they’re happening, they feel like the only thing that matters, and you can hardly imagine that there’s a world out there that has anything else going on.
And then the glow cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or not at all, in my case. And you are left with a powerful sense of the fleeting nature of even the most important things in life.

And the faint, but pretty, smell of vanilla."


We politely declined Death’s offer. With a wave goodbye, she slowly faded from our sight. We walked out of the room together, thinking still about what we had heard. There would never be anyone like Rosie, ever again. We knew that. But we also knew that somewhere, there was someone who felt the way we did about Rosie, only about us. Maybe it was each other, maybe it was someone we hadn’t met yet. Sure the end of Rosie was the end of an era, devastating us to the core. We would never forget jow much good she brought our lives.

But, the glow cloud moves on.

And we move on, one way or another.