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Calling by Shelley J Alongi Aviation story 16. Romance, roses, and a cool summer morning all give us a glimpse into how Anne and A... [1,580 words]
A Not So Ordinary Day by Shelley J Alongi Aviation story 15. A glimpse into the sometimes frazzled existance of a general aviation... [2,064 words]
For Love Of Lessons by Shelley J Alongi Aviation Story 13. Anne and Andrew Crance have lived in this house for about fifteen years ... [2,295 words]
Little Things by Shelley J Alongi Aviation Story 7A. Anne and Andrew's first year of marriage is a good one. Humor, ritual, and lo... [1,672 words]
Confidence by Shelley J Alongi Aviation Story 12. Andrew helps a passenger become more comfortable with flight. We get to see him ... [1,712 words]
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Success by Skyler Drevan Another part of my 'Fable' anthology. [275 words]
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Hoi, Hoi, Hoi, by Buxton A pitiful attempt at re-creating something that resembles The Clockwork Orange. Oh well here it... [286 words]
Heartburn by CalbayR Love Allergy anyone? Here's a comic take on a love phobic. [1,430 words]
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Saturday Night
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TITLE (EDIT)
Saturday Night |
DESCRIPTION
A woman living in a post-apocalyptic future in an empty city. I wrote this several months ago, but as "28 Days Later" just came out, I feel the timing for submitting this is appropriate.
[1,484 words] |
TITLE KEYWORD
Science Fiction |
AUTHOR
Wolfa |
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Yes, I am "frollygumpaloo".
[April 2004] |
AUTHOR'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
tasertag@email.com |
AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (17)
A Really Very Gothic Poem (Poetry) This is so very depressingly gothic that you will scream with fury and tear your hair out in despair. Or maybe not. (As you may have guessed I am not over-fond of gothic poetry.) [107 words] [Humor]
Dogfish (Short Stories) An owner tells the story of a neurotic, once-abused dog. [1,352 words] [Animal]
Drive (Poetry) A poem. Yes. Yes it is. [88 words]
Hunting The Ghost Lion (Short Stories) An African poacher stalks a trophy lion through the savannah and encounters a strange and ancient creature. [2,146 words] [Fantasy]
I Thought We Were Perfect (Poetry) A poem. Wrote it awhile ago about someone I loved. Who died. [93 words]
Labrador Waltz (Poetry) Dark dreams. [158 words]
She Had Her Dog With Her (Short Stories) Fiction/vaguely fantasy short story about someone obsessed with a woman. [2,617 words] [Fantasy]
Solef (Short Stories) Genetically modified monster escapes onto the surface of a harsh alien planet. More sci-fi. Wee. Considering expansion on this. Feels to me more like a treatment than any sort of masterpiece.:) [1,684 words] [Science Fiction]
Straying From The Path (Poetry) A Poem, once more. Ahh, my memories of a certain delightful time in high school... and the birth of my disillusionment with this whole diseased capitalist society and its ideals. [471 words] [Mind]
Terrarium Life (Short Stories) Surrealistic dystopia. More sci-fi. Needs improvement, of course, but I decided to post so you'll know I'm not dead. Yay. [1,684 words] [Science Fiction]
The Perfect Snow Angel (Short Stories) - [1,754 words] [Mind]
Where Chaos Reigns (Page Uno) (Short Stories) Page one of a sci fi/fantasy/urban fantasy story (formerly called "e") I am working on for submission to a magazine. I absolutely refuse to say which magazine. [386 words] [Science Fiction]
Winston (Part 1) (Short Stories) A brutal, viciously intelligent pit bull -- a champ pitfighter -- makes his way from the dogfighting world to a vast puppy mill. **Adapted from a screenplay** [3,013 words] [Horror]
Winston (Part 2) (Short Stories) The pitbull, Ripper, plots his escape, and a strange young woman is introduced. [3,397 words] [Horror]
Winston (Part 3) (Short Stories) The escaped pitbull forges a partnership with a bum. Meanwhile, the woman Dana believes she has finally found happiness, and the young dog Spot begins his training. [2,671 words] [Horror]
Winston (Part 4) (Short Stories) Continuing story about a pitbull and a crazy woman... I don't really see the need to describe what happens in this installment...probably no-one's going to read it anyways. Oh well. [3,116 words] [Horror]
Wolf In Janie's Shadow (Short Stories) Of a girl who fell through the cracks in the world. [2,103 words]
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Saturday Night
Wolfa
On Wednesday afternoon at around 5.00 PM, it was finally quiet, and Maria, shopping in the nearest supermarket, relaxed.
***
On Thursday night, Maria coughed. It was a bulky sick-cough, not a dry dust-cough. She rubbed her throat lazily and returned to the TV. Reruns were on, of course, but Maria didn’t mind; the episodes were new to her. She usually never watched TV, being too tired-out from work.
On Tuesday Maria had gone to Blockbuster with a stolen shopping cart and thrown all the movies she had ever wanted to see into it. She half-heartedly watched a couple of them and then threw the rest off the balcony. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t bring herself to care. Now she watched only these dull sitcoms, characters flitting like ghosts across the screen, frail plots wavering in and out of focus.
She picked up a thirty-dollar lipstick lying on the coffee table and scrawled MEDICINE in long, careless letters on the TV screen. Shopping list.
***
On Friday morning Maria poured an entire bottle of Chanel No.5 onto a napkin and held it tight to her nose as she stepped cautiously into Dan’s apartment. She thought she remembered him leaving, but better safe than sorry. She was careful not to look around too much as she trotted to the battered motorcycle that held court in the tiny living room. Maria gave it a quick check-up before wheeling it out. Plenty of fuel.
She left her dented Mercedes-Benz at the curb and dashed off on the lean bike, weaving expertly through the mess of empty cars cluttering the street.
Maria roared past the echoing supermarket without a pause. Her refrigerator was still humming, keeping her hoard of food quite safe. She also had the keys to a meat locker in a nearby diner, now stuffed with vegetables, fruit, and TV dinners in addition to carved cow.
The glass front on the first pet store broke easily enough. The Chanel-soaked napkin served her well as she stumbled past the grisly cages of the small mammals. A quick search revealed that only the snakes and one or two dogs had survived. She hauled the dogs out into the street before returning to knock over the snakes’ tanks with a long mop-handle.
Nothing still lived in the second pet shop, and, discouraged, Maria abandoned her search for life in the city and roared on to the Aquarium.
She left the motorcycle at the curb and leapt the turnstiles. The huge glass aquarium containing tropical fish and sharks had no link to the sea; Maria left its denizens alone. There was nothing she could do.
Her next stop was the area called the “Tropical Lagoon”. It was a small island of sand surrounded by a slow-flowing river of seawater, connected to the sea at one end by a tall, stout wire gate. Alligators and flamingoes dozed on the banks as huge sea turtles and fish went round and round. She found the keys to the padlock on the gate connecting the Tropical Lagoon to the sea and bravely scaled down the observation platform to reach it. The alligators lay like logs. She climbed hastily back up and used a net to shove one side of the gate open.
The pair of killer whales circled their massive tank restlessly. She remembered that a small pod of dolphins had shared the tank with the whales before. Now there were no dolphins, and a rather unpleasant stain on the bridge across the tank where the trainers once stood. Maria tore open the still-cool refrigerator and threw buckets of fish into the tank before daring to swim over to the gate to unlock it. Once she was out of the water, she threw another bucket of water into the sea just outside the enclosure. The largest whale charged through the gate and his mate followed him to sea.
The dolphins were in a sad state, but they had managed to survive the week on the few fish that slipped through their gate. They gratefully accepted her buckets of food and left her alone to work on the fence. She finally had to use bolt-cutters to get the chain off this gate. Either she had the wrong key or the padlock had rusted shut.
The dolphins circled the opening nervously for a few moments before rushing out.
***
On Saturday morning Maria unlocked all the cages in the zoo, leaving the animals to figure out how to escape on their own. She did not want to attempt to lure a pride of starving lions out of their habitat.
That afternoon she took a sailboat out into the bay. It was her first time sailing in years, but she remembered how well enough. After cruising for about an hour she saw a pair of sleek fins breaking the surface of the water in the distance; her whales. She smiled, guessing that they would hang around the bay for a couple more days and then begin the long trek North to their freezing ancestral waters.
It wasn’t until the sun began to set that she saw the dolphins and dived cleanly into the sea. The dolphins, missing their human friends, swam up to her. Maria had never before touched a dolphin and felt strangely elated as she stroked their sleek rubbery sides. There was something powerful in the wise, eloquent eyes. If only she could speak their language, maybe she could understand. She was awed by their massive strength, awed that they were so gentle towards her.
She almost thought she was drowning, in a whirl of pink and gray and sea-green shot with golden sunlight. She would have liked to drown that way.
***
By the time she got back to her apartment Maria felt totally drained. She took a hot shower, thankful for whatever miracle had left her water running.
When she was dressed and ready for a good night’s TV, she picked up the unopened package of Alka-Seltzer from the table. She took four, washed down with Dimetap and Aspirin. She wanted desperately for something to silence that tickle in the back of her throat, the one that had been growing for days. She wanted desperately for it to be a cold.
She turned on the TV, and there were fewer channels than there had been the night before. She watched a now-familiar episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as she drank cocoa. She wondered idly if the whales had left already, if the tigers now roamed the streets. Freeing the animals had seemed like the only thing she could do to preserve some life in this dead city.
***
On the Saturday night of last week, Maria had cut a Yellow Pages from a telephone booth and spent the next couple days driving breakneck to all the orphanages and children’s shelters she could find. She had to dodge fires and the little scrabbling mobs of sickly looters. Two bullets hit her rear windshield, leaving glittery spiderwebs. But she made it to every shelter. When the children were alive, she dragged them out and let them loose in the towns. To her horror, in two of the shelters the caretakers had actually poisoned the children. Wanting, perhaps, to spare them the final agony of the sickness.
On Tuesday afternoon, Maria had finished and driven back to the towns to see how the children were doing. She saw none alive, though she reasoned some must be.
And then on Wednesday afternoon at around 5.00 PM, it was finally quiet, and Maria, shopping in the nearest supermarket, relaxed.
***
This Saturday night she watched the old episode of Buffy with great concentration. It was almost shocking when the station wavered and finally went off the air at the end. She flipped through the other channels and watched as, one by one, they too flickered away.
Maria pulled open the east window, ripped out the screen, and heaved the useless TV out of it, watching with some interest as it smashed to the street ten stories below.
The TV was soon joined by her bottles of expensive perfume and tubes of thirty-dollar colored lip-grease.
She rubbed her throat thoughtfully. The tickle of a cold had vanished. A strange thoughtfulness replaced it. There were green lands still, far from here. There were places where free-roaming domesticated animals had survived. There were manuals to teach her things, there was… a long lonely life. A survival rate of perhaps one in one hundred thousand, probably less. She might never meet another human being again.
She weighed the two options carefully before she realized, with some wonder, that she had already made a decision.
Maria scooted her armchair up to the open East window, yawning temptingly over the solid concrete ten stories below, and sat in it for perhaps the last time, determined to wait out the night and see the sunrise.
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"Good work. Reknowned and respected author JN St. George said you were someone to watch for." -- iconoclast, Detroit, michigan.
"Thank you!" -- Wolfa.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2003 Wolfa |
STORYMANIA PUBLICATION DATE
July 2003 |
NUMBER OF TIMES TITLE VIEWED
3035
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