Names and conversation specifics are made up, but you should be able to get the general gist of it.

Somewhere in the desert…

The shopkeeper peered closely at the tired looking young man before him.  “Sonny, I feel like I’ve seen you before,” he rasped hoarsely.  “Come around these parts much?”

The young man shook his head impatiently.  “Sorry, you must have me mistaken for someone else.  Look, er, sir, I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

The shopkeeper barely glanced at the strange assortment of items the man had dumped before him.  His beady eyes probed over the young man again.  “Swear I’ve seen you somewhere…” His eyes widened in recognition as he let out a triumphant cackle.  “You’re that actress’ brother, ain’t ya?”

Ben Chapman gave an irritated sigh.  “That I am.  Mind checking me out now?”

The shopkeeper leered at Ben.  “Knew I recognized ya.  Not every day a hot shot like you comes strolling through these parts.  Gonna have to charge extra for these, ya know, since ya might use it in a movie or summat.”

Ben gritted his teeth and forced himself to smile.  “With all due respect, sir, I could get these just as easily at the Wal-Mart down the street, and they’re not going to charge me a premium for being related to a C-list celebrity.”

The shopkeeper grinned widely, showing off the gaps of his missing teeth.  “Oh, I don’t think so.  I think you know exactly how unique these particular items are.  In fact, I’m willing ta bet you drove out all this way just to see little old me.  You must be a real believer.”

Ben sighed again.  “All right.  Fine, you win.  How much?”

This time the shopkeeper didn’t even look at the items.  “Five hundred ought to cover it.”

“Fine,” Ben sighed, digging out his wallet.  “Fine.  Do you take credit?”

“Ben!  Ben, come on man, we gotta move!”

Ben shook his head groggily.  He heard the panicked voice again through the ringing in his ears; it sounded like someone calling to him from the end of a long tunnel.

“Get up, Ben!  Come on!”

Slowly, Ben blinked his eyes open.  Everything around him seemed vague and indistinct.  It took him a moment to realize the effect was due as much to the green-tinted fog rolling in as it was to the knock he had apparently taken to the head.

Strong arms grabbed him roughly around the shoulders and began to shake him.  Fragmented visions began to flash through his head.  A cornfield, shrouded in mist.  Two beautiful women, entwined in a kiss.  A horribly disfigured face looming out of the darkness.  Something strong and ropy whipping through the air.  A scream…

A familiar face blurred into view in front of him.

“J – Jamal?  What’s going on?”

“No time to explain!  Can you stand?”

Ben staggered to his feet and promptly lost his balance.  He felt Jamal slip an arm under his own and steadied himself.

“Easy man, easy.  We’re almost there.”

They staggered on for a subjective eternity.  And then, quite suddenly, illuminated under the beam of a streetlight was…

“That?”  Ben gave a weak laugh.  “We’re leaving on your ridiculous electric bike?”

Jamal gave Ben a strange look before climbing onto the two-seater.  “Get on behind me.  Hang on tight.”

No homo, Ben thought drunkenly as they sped into the fog-filled night.

“The last thing I remember is all of us driving off Friday night to that dinky little farm they referenced on that MST3K episode we watched.  And you’re telling me that was two nights ago?”

Jamal nodded silently in acknowledgement.  Now that they were back in their shabby hotel room on the edge of the farmlands, the fear and confusion Ben had experienced earlier simply gave way to frustration and anger.

“But then… why can’t I remember…”

Jamal shook his head.  He paused for a moment, as if to choose his words carefully.  “What do you remember about that episode?”

Ben grunted.  He had never been a fan of the show, but tolerated them because his best friends got a kick out of it.  “I don’t know, man.  That’s you and Tony’s thing.  Something about a ritual summoning.  Or maybe it was an alien invasion.  Or a body snatcher thing.  I don’t remember, man.”

Jamal nodded.  “Do you remember going out to get the ritual items?”

“Yes,” Ben growled.  “That SOB charged me fifty times what that junk was worth.  You guys owe me $500, by the way.”

Jamal nodded again, distractedly.  “Yeah, sure.”  He fixed Ben with a piercing stare.  “It worked.”

Ben barked out a short laugh.  “What, the ritual?  Seriously.  You need to lay off the shrooms.”

Jamal shuddered and looked down at his shaking hands.  “I’m telling you, it worked.  Gail and Tony…”

Ben frowned.  “Where are they anyway?  I remember them being with us in the SUV…”

Jamal shook his head slowly.  “Ben, they’re gone.”

“Aw man, they left without us?  Is that why we had to come back on your bike?” Ben asked, grinning.

Jamal looked up at Ben with grief filled eyes, and spoke each word slowly and carefully.  “I mean, they’re gone.”

Ben’s grin faltered.  Jamal reached into a rucksack and pulled out an old trash can, a half empty bottle of pink nail polish, and a thin floral scarf.  Ben recognized them as the items he had bought from the loony old man running the curiosity shop.

Jamal placed the items on the table in front of Ben.  “Try to remember.”

Ben looked from the shabby old items to Jamal’s face, searchingly.  He sucked in a breath.  “Sure, whatever.  Just for the record, this is…”

“Stupid, we know, you’ve said that twenty times already,” Gail laughed.  “Humor me, little brother!”

“You’re no fun,” said Tony, on the other side of the ritual circle.  He was bent over his laptop, examining each frame of the MST3K episode they were basing this entire farce on.  “Jamal, move the scarf over to the left a little.”

“I’m just saying,” Ben started again.  “Some farmer’s going to be pissed we stomped all over his corn field in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not like we’re making crop circles or anything,” Jamal said, grinning.

“Relax, little brother.  If you feel so bad about it we can go and apologize in the morning.”

“Okay, let’s make this quick,” Tony said, straightening up.  “Laptop’s almost out of juice.”

“What are we even supposed to do?” Ben asked, scowling.  “Commit more vandalism?”

Tony ignored the comment.  “According to the video, we…”

A loud crack suddenly cut through the air, causing everyone to start.

“What was that?”

“Sounded like a whip…”

“I think it came from over there…”

“Should we go see what that was?” Gail said uncertainly.  “There can’t be anyone else around this time of night, right?”

“Let’s just go,” Ben said for the umpteenth time.  “This was a bad idea from the start.  It’ll be hard enough trying to find our way back to the car…”

“Calm down, wimps,” Tony said, rolling his eyes.  “We’ve all got GPS on our phones.  I’m going to check it out.”  He disappeared into the gently swaying corn stalks in the general direction of the crack.

“Wait for me!” Gail called, scrambling after him.  Ben sighed and followed his sister, Jamal ghosting silently behind him.

Before long, Ben found himself at the edge of a clearing, much larger than the one they had stomped out.  Tony was already crouched down, staring intently at something.

“Quiet,” he hissed as Ben approached him.  Silently he pointed at the center of the clearing.

An old man was on his knees in front of a fire, back towards them.  Some sort of tall plumed machine was quietly pumping the area full of thick green-tinted fog.  The flickering shadows made everything jump around disconcertingly.  Ben couldn’t see the man’s face, but his voice was filled with terror.

“Please… I didn’t tell anyone… I kept your secret…”

“Liar,” hissed a voice near the machine.  Ben could make out the indistinct shape of a large man, silhouette strangely lumpy.  “We saw the video.  Your pathetic attempt at a warning, I assume.”

“No… Please… It was someone else…”

“Someone else?” asked a feminine voice, amused.  “Why, who else could possibly know about us?  You said yourself you kept our secret.”

“I don’t know… It wasn’t me… Please…”

“How very disappointing,” asked a different feminine voice, this one tinged with malice.  “I suppose you didn’t expect us to return before the end of your natural life span.”

“Ssssurprisse,” warbled a fourth voice, strangely modulated.

“I believe we’ve given enough time for the solution to permeate,” croaked the first voice matter-of-factly.  “If you could be so kind…”

Out of the shadows shot a mass of tentacles, grey and slimy.  The first neatly bisected the old man around the middle.  His torso fell to the ground with a heavy thump, conveniently masking the collective gasp of the onlookers.  Whipping through the air, the tentacles proceeded to dice the old man into so many pieces of meat.  Ben noticed sickeningly that not a single drop of blood was spilled; the pieces of what was until very recently a living, breathing human being  appeared to curdle around the edges and begin dissolving into a fine, grey-green powder.

The entire process took a mere handful of seconds.

In the wake of the tentacles, the fog cleared enough to reveal two apparently human women with identical pageboy cuts entwined in a passionate kiss.  A hideously disfigured man, body lumpy and misshapen, looked on amusedly.

“Well, it seems like that takes care of that,” he croaked.  “And now to wait for the replacement…”

As he spoke, the powdered remains of the old man began congealing together, the effect reminiscent of watching a time lapse of a sand sculpture disintegrate in reverse.  Gail let out a stifled shriek.

Immediately, three sets of eyes trained upon Ben and his friends.  “We are not alone,” hissed one of the women.

“Run for it!” Tony yelled.

Ben didn’t need to be told twice.  He sprinted feverishly in what he hoped would take him in a straight line to the gas station they had parked at.  Behind him he could hear the footsteps of his friends following him, and the unsettling whish of tentacles cutting through corn stalks.

The fog, coupled with the near pitch dark made it impossible to see more than a few inches in front of his face.  Ben stumbled blindly forward, hands in front of his face as heavy stalks barraged him from every angle.  He thought he heard a heavy thud and a curse behind him, but didn’t dare stop lest he get turned around in the fog.

And then, quite abruptly Ben cleared the corn field.  Panting and nearly out of breath, he continued sprinting blindly into the night, trying to put as much distance between him and the monstrosities as he could.  All too late he noticed a shape looming ahead of him and ran headfirst into something hard and very solid.

He thought he heard someone scream as he fell into darkness.

Flip to a random page in the papers and you’re bound to see stories of devastation, of loss, of tragedy.  Stories of catastrophic natural disasters, borderline famous people unexpectedly dying, and yet another tragic high school massacre are all par for the course these days.  We mourn, we pity, and then we move on.  We think that the chances of that happening to us are so slim, we might as well burn a few dollars on lottery tickets instead.  Out of the billions of people on the planet, we believe that only the events and lives that hold any significance are the ones that we personally experience.

When I first moved in, I used to lay awake at night listening to the ambulance sirens wail their warbling cry, announcing to anyone who cared to listen that yet another precious human life was on the brink of demise.  On nights when I was feeling particularly despondent, I would sit in a corner of the Lee Barker emergency room and watch the procession of dying people pass me by.  Sometimes loved ones would hurry in after them, faces scrunched in anxiety and fear.  More often than not, they didn’t.  We all die alone in the end.

Blood.  Where was it coming from?  I could almost feel the cloyingly rusty, coppery scent of it filling my nose.

Something wet and sticky beneath me.  Did I knock over a glass of juice when I was startled?  No matter, it’s comfortingly warm.

The scarlet is quite striking in the grayness before dawn.  Startlingly bright, really.  I think I’ll just rest my eyes for a bit and enjoy that image.  Besides, the tile doesn’t seem quite so cold anymore now that I’ve pressed my cheek against it for a while.

QOTE:

Your world is as big as you make it
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner
My wings pressing close to my side

But I sighted the distant horizon
Where the sky-line encircled the sea
And I throbbed with a burning desire
To travel this immensity.

I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!

- Georgia Douglas Johnson, “Your World,” Share My World

I woke up that morning to the wail of sirens, as I had for the last six months.  Lee Barker Memorial, the oldest functioning hospital in the state, spanned three city blocks and serviced tens of thousands of patients annually within its weathered granite walls.  A relic of grandeur in a city that had been dancing on the edge of disrepair for decades, the hospital stood as a testament to human perseverance and ingenuity.  The hospital processed hundreds of cases every day, from an infant’s stubbed toe to a construction worker’s severed arm to the occasional case of lymphangiomatosis or Antley-Bixler Syndrome.

It also happened to be a stone’s throw away from my kitchen window.

I groaned, sat up in bed, and promptly slammed my head on the low ceiling of my “bedroom.”  After six months of living in the cheapest studio apartment I could find, I still couldn’t remember that falling out of bed was actually preferable to suffering a minor concussion every morning.

Twenty years ago, the building was a story taller.  Sometime between now and then, someone thought it would be a good idea to have a romantic, candlelit dinner involving massage oil, incense, and liberal amounts of petroleum jelly.  This had the predictable result of ensuring that the inhabitants were blissfully unaware when a gentle breeze tipped over an ill-placed candle.  Rumor has it that the offenders survived only because they were able to greasily wiggle  through a stuck window onto the fire escape.

At any rate, the landlord decided it would be cheaper to erect a new roof instead of rebuild an entire collapsed floor.  The result was an odd, slanted number that started out even and tapered gradually to become a wall.  Take a cross-section of my apartment, and you wind up with half of an isosceles trapezoid.  My bed is wedged at the point where the ceiling meets the floor, not due to choice, but because it would double as the centerpiece of the apartment anywhere else.

I groaned again for good measure, and shuffled blearily across the cold tile floor in search for nourishment.

I was halfway through a stale croissant when my world shattered.

I couldn’t remember when I had stopped referring to her as “it.”  When had she so completely enthralled me, thwarting my senses and sensibility alike?  I had been so careful.  When had she become more than an object, more than a mere sum of her parts?  When had she become my masterpiece?

Looking back, it was all but inevitable.  I knew full well how abominable my task might become when I first started on her.  Perhaps if I had not kept her hidden for so many years, those closest to me would have had a chance to save me, before she had consumed what remained of my sanity.

It was too late for that, now.  I could not be redeemed.  I did not want to be redeemed.

And yet, looking at her now, lying there with a glow that only my gentle, caressing hands could give her, I felt something missing.  Something gone, or something that never was.  One last shred kept her from true perfection.

Eyes.  She needed eyes.  Eyes full of passion, full of intelligence.  Eyes as deep as the ocean and as clear as the night sky.  I needed eyes to give her life.

I felt a slow smile creep across my face.  Eyes.  I knew exactly where to find them.

Been feeling… tingly… for the past couple of days.  It feels like when my leg falls asleep, except it’s under my skin.  Having a hard time focusing on things, as my eyes also seem to be constantly vibrating.  Seems to be completely internal though; the objects I touch and hold don’t seem to shake at all.  I’m not shivering from cold, either.  I’m just… tingly.

It’s definitely an odd sensation, but it isn’t really unpleasant.  As a matter of fact, I’ve felt more alive in the past few days than I have in years!  I feel like a live wire, ready to snap in an instant.  Guess it’s a good thing I ordered my immune system to be stronger.

Didn’t think.  Had a bacon and ham sandwich for lunch today.  Feel fine for now, but you never know.  They say you can get infected just by being in the same room as one of the little buggers.  And now, there’s a piece of them in me.  It’s probably nothing.  Probably.

All work and

No play makes

Jack a dull boy.

All

work and

no play makes

Jack a dull boy.

All work and no

play makes

Jack a

dull

boy.

All

work

and

no

play

makes

Jack

a

dull

boy.

Boy dull a Jack makes play no and work all.

A all and boy dull Jack makes no play work.

Jack makes all a dull boy and work no play.

Fin.

The voice is faint, barely a whisper over the breeze.  It sounds strangely warbled, as if listening to a phone conversation over a particularly poor connection.  My pulse quickens as I am struck with the distinct sensation of being not alone, of someone else’s presence sharing space with mine.  Imagine sitting in an empty room, completely engrossed in a good novel.  It’s the feeling you get when, for no reason at all, the hairs on your neck begin to prickle, and you realize that someone has been standing in the doorway for quite some time now, watching as you read.  I stiffen, and carefully open one eye.

“It’s not what you think,” the voice repeats.  The voice is tinged with sorrow and resignation.  Out of my peripheral vision, I notice a dark silhouette partially obscured by the shoulder-high hedge, a slightly darker shadow against the deepening gloom.  I focus on the silhouette, and the accompanying voice abruptly sharpens, taking on an almost urgent edge.

“I dreamt of drowning last night, you know.  Just sinking into the depths and never coming back up.  I knew I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t.  A lot of people think that drowning is a pleasant way to die.  That you just float away and never come back.  But it isn’t like that, not at all.  It’s more like… holding your breath while walking past a cemetery, but there’s no end in sight.  You want to take a breath, but you’re afraid of sucking in some poor wandering spirit if you do.  So you just keep holding your breath until your hands start shaking and your face turns blue.  And eventually, despite your best efforts, you gasp for a breath of refreshing, cool air.  Only now someone’s got their hands over your mouth and nose, and a pressure’s building up against your eyes and ears, and you struggle against your captor but there’s nothing to flail against, and all you’re left with is the overwhelming urge to breathe. Now imagine all of this happening while you’re gently floating in the darkness.

“There’s a sense of futility in it all, a sense of your body betraying you, forcing you to take that last killing breath.  I should have been afraid.  I should have been struggling for my life.  I didn’t.  I didn’t because you were there.  Maybe you’ve always been there, and I just never noticed.  It’s like I somehow knew you would be there to save me.”  The speaker’s voice cracks, and I notice a subtle shift in the silhouette.

“But you didn’t, did you,” the voice whispers.  “You let me go.”

The breeze suddenly strengthens, and I can barely make out the rest of the speaker’s tale.

“I guess all I’m trying to say is… Don’t let me float away, not yet.  Please.  Stay here with me, for a little while longer.  I…”

“I…”

“…”

“What’s his type? Wilting flower? Bright and bubbly? Or smoldering temptress?”

- Nicole Kidman, Moulin Rouge!

Some of the more interesting templates for characters that I personally wouldn’t mind being:

1. The mysterious stranger who cryptically leaves messages and clues, giving the impression that he knows much more than he is letting on.

2. The dark shadow in an alleyway, always one step ahead of the protagonist and an ever present yet unknown threat.

3. The tormented anti-hero, tortured by his shadowy past and haunted by decisions he was forced to make in years past.

4. The starving generic creative mind, thrust from her mere struggle for survival into a journey that may decide the very fate of the world.

5. The genius criminal mastermind, able to elude capture and commit heinous acts of criminal activity through sheer intellect.

6. That girl in the last entry.