Thursday, February 7, 2008

Mr. Pickles - Prelude

Mr. Pickles is the working title of a short story that I am currently working on and hope to some day get published, if not sent off to a writing contest to win some grant money for college.

It's based on a sketch, that I unfortunately can't link to at present, that a friend of mine, and fellow co-worker, Amory Abbott, did within his sketchbook. He had asked me an opinion on it and we had started talking about it the rest of his work shift from there. Weeks later a story begin to form in my mind and I asked him if he was going to do anything with it and if he wasn't if I could use it for the basis of a short story. He had no plans to use it beyond a sketch and thought it was a cool idea for me to write a short story based around it.

The sketch itself showed nothing more than a girl between the ages of eight and twelve and had her looking down at a cat that was blocking her path and was also staring up at her. She says "Mr. Pickles?" and there is also a caption below which reads "Two years after the house fire destroyed everything".

Below is your first taste:
Acrid smoke filled her lungs, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't cough, she couldn't even think, all she could do was gather what strength that she had and crawl out of bed, trying to expel the poison that was slowly filler her lungs. With each inch of struggle she succumbed more to the flaming nightmare, she tried to whimper, to call for help, but not so much as a squeak left her lips. This had to be a dream she thought, a very horrible dream, one that she was a prisoner of, that was claiming her slowly as she finally made it to the floor in one exhausted heap, letting the demon of fire and ash consume her. Without warning she saw something, a miracle, a shadow of a giant engulfing her bedroom window. The glass and frame exploded into what she thought was a million pieces, and the shadow entered her room, bent down, and extended its hand...
More teases to come soon.

2 comments:

Amory Abbott said...

WAAAA! I like it!!!!!

Nathan Guest said...

I'm really glad. Now if I can just get more time to work on it.