/lit/ - Literature

>>1630241
seems reasonable. I know I always get "it's" wrong, but what else is there?

I'm mostly worried that people will become offended.

>>1630208
Taken under advisement. I was actually retooling "waste" right now, since the story I'm trying to tell can be written with rivers alone.

Alright, I was thinking of submitting "the Wolf" to a story competition. Is it good enough?

>>1630186
That one's a nonfiction piece, but thank you for your input. I hope to see some of your writing soon!

>>1630173
That's true, it is a lie. I would have screaming fits about the greenhouse gasses, lie down on the ground and refuse to get into the car. But that's even less believable.

Alright, so it seems that 4chan just doesn't like pastebin.

http:// |||||tinyurl(DOT)com/||||||4juctlp

This links to a pastebin with pastebin links to the stories.

It's a pretty broad selection, from dark reality to madcap fantasy. Each one's like four or five pages. I hope you enjoy.

I'd love to hear some feedback on these stories as well. Hopefully this will go a ways for making a new /lit/.

Since /lit/ has descended into stupid trolling, I thought I'd post my new story, and repost some of my old ones. For those of you annoyed by tripfags, I'm only going to use it when I'm posting stories, which I will do on a regular basis.

I can't seem to use pastebin on the first post, so I shall try in the first response.

>>1185764

Hell yeah

Yeah, it's just a rewrite of something I wrote for intro to short fiction

I guess i'm not /lit/ enough for you lot, i've got work, i'll check later on if this thread is still alive.

>>1114332
sorry what? wrong thread perhaps?

and that's it. Looking over it, I think I might stretch out the rambling madness part a bit, make that more meaty.

Any thoughts? pointers? I've only posted a drabble on here before.

I heard the slam of a door. The Things and the Cat had left. I pulled myself out of the grate, and dusted myself off. My mind felt uncommonly clear. I walked out of the warehouse which was certainly not a cave, and stepped back into the real world. I breathed normality in and closed my eyes.

As soon as I did so, I opened them again, terrified. I hid my terror and walked down the street. Time was moving at it’s normal pace again, and the advertisements were no longer hidden by my unwillingness to view them. I was trapped in the real world.

Unless I closed my eyes.

So now i sit here in my apartment, every light on, TV blaring. The clacking of the typewriter is the only thing keeping me going, aside from the five cups of coffee. With every blink, I know I’m still deep in the dark cave. And there is Elen moving there in the dark.

I found my way to a McDonald's. Normally, I’m not the kind of person who eats at Micky-dees, but it was... well, grounding. I could walk into any McDonald's in the city and it was the same as every other building of it’s kind. I ordered the same thing I had ordered since I was a teenager (double cheeseburger with bacon, hold the pickles) and felt... normal again.

Was that all it took to cure madness? A simple burger? I slurped my Coke, pleased with myself.

Pleased a bit too soon, apparently. I stood and turned, seeing the five bedraggled members of my crew. Dark tendrils licked their lips, squirmed in their ears. Their pupils were not their own, but belonged to the darkness that clearly lived within them. “No! don’t let them take me away! They’ll turn me into one of them!” Unfortunately, I was bedraggled enough to be still be unnoticed. The five dragged me down the street. A flock of birds flew overhead. The cat was still in the basement of the cave waiting for me. I struggled against the five who had once been my friends, my worldview warped and changed, struggling like I was to be free. I was a spider caught in his own web. I was a comet held in orbit by a planet, crashing on my inevitable course. I was a sailor being pulled underwater by a great Kracken.

The five of them threw me unceremoniously into the grate and left. I was puzzled. Where were the tentacles? Of course they were only within my mind, but surely I was still mad enough to see the terrible things? It was pitch black, wet, cold and quite lonely down there, but I was still definitely sane.

The cat led us to what looked like a large, deep cave, though in reality it was simply an abandoned warehouse. Down a rickidy staircase we went. Our laughter had stopped a while ago; we all understood that this was very important. The cat stepped lightly towards a grate in the floor. I saw that there was something inside of it, moving and squirming. One of our crew stepped towards the grate and lifted it. The something revealed itself as a swirling mass of darkness, reaching and grabbing at the edges of the pit. There was nothing else that I could see within, just black silence. The brave one who lifted the grate, a former stockbroker who had lost big recently, looked at us. He shrugged, and lowered himself into the grate. I saw with my own, mad eyes that the darkness wrapped around him and... subsumed him. I gasped, blinked and rubbed my eyes. It was so hard to remove myself from my madness, but I could still extricate myself from the miasma and see the “truth.” The truth was that he was lying at the bottom of the small pit, grinning like an idiot. I stepped away from the pit. The cat meowed at me and I saw it’s eyes blazing with fire. There was a tiny sun behind the cats head, and some of it’s brilliance was leaking through the cat’s eyes.

I don’t know why, but I ran.

Without friends to corroborate the false reality which I had set up, it started falling apart. I saw Iron Man looking down on me from a vastly outdated movie poster. Smiling people advertised toothpaste, and I could swear they winked at me. I smelled my breath and was disgusted. I needed to brush my teeth. No, I needed to eat some real food and then brush my teeth.

So I showed her how to be mad. How to see what is not there. The two of us wandered around the city, laughing at trees that twisted this way and that, watching squirrels watch us. For a solid thirty minutes we were convinced the squirrels were coordinating their movements, and tried hiding from them. This was harder than it seemed.

We showed more people our “talent,” people who were spilling the black muck of utter despair onto the pavement. Some people ran away, but by nightfall there was a small band of us laughing at nothing in particular. We slept in the park. The homeless people came up to us and asked for change, and we handed it out. Money was an object, anyway.

I personally regretted that decision the next morning. I was hungry and so were most of the others. Some seemed to snap out of it. They would write their night of madness off as some strange acid trip, rather than the happiness that lay hidden in their own minds. When four of them left, the remaining six of us wept great ponds of sadness onto the ground.

Later, when the great sun hung directly overhead on the Day of Madness, we saw the cat. We were walking around the downtown, having found some dumpster food earlier, when the pure white feline walked directly in front of our little band and looked at us. We all froze. We had been pretending to be invisibile at the time, our slight smell and bedraggled clothes rendered us practically invisible in a city which hated the homeless. The cat shocked us all out of our private, imagined world and pulled us back into the smelly alleyways darkened by the towering buildings on either side. The imagined babble of a brook disolved into the sounds of traffic and distant sirens. The cat meowed at us once, and we fell back into our private revels. The cat turned, and the six of us followed without question.

In the dark days that followed, I often turned my mind back to that one long walk to the psychiatrist. Upon arriving, I discovered that the quack charged $100 an hour, and I didn’t have insurance. I stormed out, laughing at the secretary and indeed the whole establishment. The secretary watched me with concerned eyes as I kicked a can and I watched the long trail it left through the air, giggling on my way back to my apartment.

On that long walk through a slow, peaceful world where the glass and steel buildings looked more like great and beautiful mountains rather than looming, blinding symbols of corporate power; that this life might actually be better than the one I’d had before landing myself in this mess. I decided to share it with the people who needed it. I saw someone who needed it, a girl with streaked eyeliner sitting alone on the sidewalk.

“What if there was a way to blind yourself to the media blitzkrieg that our nation is being forced to endure, and instead live in a world of powerful symbols of your own devising?”

She blinked, confused and looked up at me. She wiped her tears and told me all her problems. They just spilled out of her like she’d dammed up the fact that she’d lost her job, that her boyfriend was a cheat, and that her cat had died. I didn’t really want to hear it. Her sadness was a polluted pond spilling out onto the sidewalk, mutated frogs of memory leaping from its murky depths. I saw the same flock of birds fly overhead and I briefly wondered if they were in my head. Then I decided that it didn’t matter.

The next day, I tried to get back into the metal forest. I took out all the silverware that I owned and put them on the table, and look deep into them. I am unsure what I expected to find there, but nothing happened. That was when I decided that I had probably lost it. When I first slipped into a slower time, I was sure that whatever I was experiencing was real and meant something. I had been raised reading Narnia and had waited all my life for the closet to open into the snowy forest. I thought this might have been the ticket into a larger world, but with my entrance into the Metal Forest I was certain that this was no boon but madness. I googled “psychiatrists” and found the nearest one, which was three miles away. I didn’t trust myself to drive anymore; who knows where my mind would take me?

So I began the long walk. I allowed whatever was happening within my mind to roam freely. As I walked over a small suspension bridge, the beautiful lines seemed to reach into the heavens. A flock of pigeons flew overhead, and I saw through the seeming chaos of their movements and into the underlying pattern behind their flight. After the birds flew out of sight, I held their pattern and image in my mind, letting them fly forever. The sun was like a great and beautiful being which hung in the sky to give me warmth.

Eventually, I dragged myself to work. It was a slow, long night. The seconds dragged by, and I started to get worried. What if my new found gift turned on me? What if I was to be trapped in this smelly, dirty kitchen for an eternity of subjective time? I drifted over to the silverware like a zeppelin, intending to sort the chrome utensils. As I focused on the various spoons and forks, a strange transformation occurred within my vision.
Instead of looking down upon a tray of silverware, I found myself in a metallic forest. I brushed my hands across the silver leaves and sticks, and was shocked. It felt completely real, thought I knew I was almost certainly having a hallucination. I let my hands do the work, sorting the “sticks and leaves” into their appropriate bins, while I wandered through this strange new world and saw many incredible things. Great metal pines which rose from the ground and seemed to scrape the sky. Quicksilver streams which i had to step gingerly over. As night began to fall in this metal forest, I sensed that I was not alone here. There was something moving in the trees.
I jumped slightly. My boss had approached me with a soup order. He was speaking so slowly that I rolled my eyes. His expression turned to a canyon of a scowl, and I realized my mistake. I gave a murmured apology and began making the burger, careful to keep my mind on what was in front of me.

When I was done vomiting, I lay in bed and tried to sleep, but it didn’t come. The minutes ticked by, and I felt that peculiar sense of timelessness that one gets when sleep eludes them. I Sat still, lay there with a blank mind. Emptiness filled me, with only the eternity between the minutes for a comfort. When the first rays of sunshine crept tentatively into my room, I sat up. I jumped out of bed and made myself some cereal and eggs. I decided to walk around, since I had nothing to do that day.

I was walking out of tiny apartment when I saw the cars around me slowing to turtle speed. The people around me moved like their legs were stuck in the mud. At first it was terrifying, but eventually I grew comfortable with these conditions. That day I would spend what seemed like hours thinking, mostly about the nature of time and the irregularity of my circumstances. It wasn’t something I could share with anyone. We westerners live by the ticks on the second hand, and finding myself floating between these ticks was strangely liberating.
This isn’t to say I was some sort of superhero. I was moving just as slowly as everyone else. It was eerie and disorientating, and at first I thought I could break free from this impediment and become The Flash, zipping past cars and crossing continents in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, that ability was beyond my grasp and I contented myself with my internal meditations. I’d forgotten all about what had distressed me so profoundly the night before.
After I had become comfortable with this bizarre new world view, I spent most of my menial hours in it. I could read much faster than I thought possible; I was reading a two books an evening. It was wonderful. I must have crammed months of subjective time into that first day.

A red nissan. That’d been what had hit her while she rode to school on her moped. Her blood had splattered over the front of the car and dripped off like the car itself were melting. I didn’t see it happen, but I walked by thinking I’d catch the subway and surprise her at her school.

I’d walked right past.

The front of the diner where people ate was sparklingly clean. The back was rank and I’d seen rats there more than once. I’d suggested a cat, but my boss had claimed it wasn’t “up to code.” I usually spent my shift cleaning up the breakfast crew’s mess. Mopping, sweeping, scrubbing, washing dishes. Apparently, this diner made a killing during the morning shift. I’ll usually see the same old crazy man who ordered a cup of coffee every night around eleven.

The shift dragged by. I played drums with the pots and pans until my squat, red face boss came in and glared at me. I almost threw the pot at him. I just needed to get away from that place.

When I finally did get away from it, I realized why I’d had such a “relaxing” time at work. Because it wasn’t my home. I left the lights off and tried drinking more. I ran to the toilet when I realized that the only thing I’d eaten that day had been a package of potato chips.

But my mind filled in the details. The smiling lady selling toothpaste across the street always looked like her little sister. I had kissed her for the first time on the bench while we waited for her bus. I kept my eyes down, but even the sidewalk pockmarked with gum reminded me of the day I’d skipped work and she’d skipped school and just drew silly pictures everywhere, laughing. She had left me, and set traps in my memory.

It started with a bending and stretching of time itself. Her funeral lasted for what seemed like months. I sat there in the front row with my head in my hands. I was more than a little drunk, and I was afraid that I stank of cheap liquor. I watched as my girlfriend’s parents and uncles and aunts got up in an infinite parade of black suits and dresses. It looked to me like one of those documentaries about penguins, where the awkward birds shuffled in slow, pointless lines. I could feel their gazes on the back of my neck. They wanted me to say something. I couldn’t. I had serious deja vu at the time, and I knew that it ended when I walked out in the middle of the funeral to go to work.

No, my boss didn’t give me the night off for Elen’s funeral. I stepped into the bright night of the city. I’d been raised in small town America, where night was real and tangible. Here it seemed like night was just mood lighting, the sign that it was time to fuck. As I started walking I lit up a cigarette and sucked on it. Menthol’s would remind me of her. I’d met her by bumming a cigarette from her when she’d been in college while I was working at the diner. We moved in together a year later.

I left the lights off as I moved around the apartment. Better to stumble blindly than see the I used my phone to find my work shirt and shoes and changed into them. I drank another glass of scotch, and relished the warmth in my throat. I left my glasses on my bedside table. Better to see nothing at all than to see the things that reminded me of her.

>>1076341
You don't think there's truth in literature? Truth beyond science? Seriously?

>>1076336
>>iphone

>>road trip up to school

>>passing the phone off between the three of us