Thanks, this is the first 30 pages of a 300 page novel. There are shifts from Pete’s coma to his backstory, as represented by the typed out greek letters: alpha, omega, delta. The idea is to view Destiny in contemporary terms, we think of the greek gods stuck in antiquity, where if they had any power or wherewithall, they would change with the times. Don’t feel bad, many agents have echoed your sentiments that it is well written, but they just don’t know what to do with it, and so it goes unsold.
Novel Treatments / KOMA (Analysis)
The First Night
Alpha
Strings
Since long before Zeus topped his father, Cronus, to become lord of all and CEO of the largest company in the universe, three goddess sisters began to determine the Destiny of both gods and mortals alike. All lovers of Greek mythology know them as the Fates; goddesses with fiery sides. Clotho, the Spinner, wove the strings, Lachesis, the Apportioner, measured the strings, and Atropos, the Inevitable, cut the strings. The process was and is, with some adjustments, still repeated seconds before each person on Earth is born.
They plodded along through history in their cave. In the beginning, they viewed infants three days after birth to make sure the assigned Destiny fit that particular mortal. A practice gone by the wayside, barring the viewing of exceptional mortals.
Tunes, lute numbers long forgotten by mortals, were hummed as they shaped Destiny. The drip from a tiny waterfall in the background added a constant percussion beat, and like a marching band drum, kept the sisters in time. After a war, they discussed cutting all the strings to the same length -- give every mortal the same fair shot -- but they quickly decided the only way for Destiny to prevail, was for it to possess a sort of unpredictable lunacy. A string could easily be cut short or be stretched out and have tens of years tacked onto it – the point was to keep the mortals on their toes and make life seem less and less like a production line. The beauty of the operation was that not even the sisters knew, until Lachesis measured the string, exactly how long it would be.
The sisters took the same pride in their work as classical sculptors. Each string being, in their view, a masterpiece: unduplicatable, and a totally organic expression of Destiny. For the longest time neither gods nor mortals questioned Destiny, they died when they were slated to. For many centuries, the job had seemed more like fun rather than work for the sisters.
As the population grew, the demands of the job did as well, but the quality of work remained consistently excellent. To meet the growing demand, the sisters worked longer into the day and with fewer smoke breaks. Eventually they labored at a fevered pace, 24 hours a day, to stay ahead of the work. As they were fond themselves of saying, they were busier than Zeus at a virgin convention. Through all of this, they still had to make sure the mortals only lived as long as their Destiny string measured out to the second; no more, no less. The deaths they were most proud of were the strings that nixed the ambitions of people who thought they deserved immortality: Alexander the Great, Caesar, and later on the Kennedys, among others.
Everything intensified steadily until the Industrial Revolution, when the population seemingly quadrupled overnight. People simply had to spend less energy on work, and thus had more energy for pleasure; the carnal kind of pleasure that led to population explosions, not unlike rabbits on Earth.
That’s when the sisters had to start their own industrial revolution. Atropos had drawn up the plans for such a machine on her lunch breaks during the Inquisition, but she never thought she’d need to employ machines for another thousand years.
The Dest-O-Matic started small and grew to mythic proportions. A mural that depicted mortals in the process of various forms of death, such as a massive heart attack or being eaten by sharks, was painted on the side of each machine.
At its inception, the guts of the machine were relatively simple. At one end a Titanesque hopper was filled with scales from the Scylla, which were shredded and spun into thread in the machine. Two metallic arms then braided the thread to make a fine golden string, and the string was then measured and cut by a sister. They had tripled their productivity with a simple machine. Their jobs were no longer stimulating; they worked by themselves and at least Clotho and Lachesis felt their jobs could be done by chimps.
But still they fell behind, and they gave the machines a more active role in forging Destiny. Installed were random number generators and gyroscopes to ensure Chance, which they felt had been their trademark, was maintained by the machine.
The whole contraption was then computerized and run using Παράθυρα: έκδοση θανάτου (Windows: Death Edition) operating system, later given to the god of the Nerds -- son of Zeus and a librarian -- Gaetilus. A diamond-tipped automated blade completed the Dest-O-Matic, and with that, the sisters took a backseat in designating Destiny to a mish-mash of non-sentient steel and microchips.
Now that they were no longer involved in the day-to-day process, the sisters realized that the actual cutting had eaten up all of their time, and they had never paid attention to enforcing Destiny on all the crazy mortals. With the population expanding out of control, they had to consult with other gods to bring about suicide bombings, plane crashes, cults, and botched surgeries.
They built more machines and trained more apprentices, pushing the sisters farther away from the strings themselves. Today, the number of employees is at one hundred -- mostly made up from ex-child actors and retirees whose Social Security checks don’t cut it -- all the immortal children of philandering gods. They are split into three shifts, each working tirelessly, and they have gone 75 years without a Workplace Accident. Their timecards are marked with an , Alpha, for the start of their shift, a δ, Delta, for their lunch break, and an , Omega, for the end of their shift.
Much of the sisters’ time is now spent keeping their small operation free of the godly conglomerate, Olympus, run by Zeus himself. Instead of togas and feathers, the gods dress in smart looking pin-striped suits and have titles such as V.P. of War or V.P. of Love. They plan marketing blitzes and give presentations to the Board; they sign contracts and make back-room deals. All in an attempt to make the mortals believe in one more abstract god whose duties and power had been bought by Olympus.
The sisters know that they need the mortals to believe in Destiny, but refuse to let mortal whims dictate their work. So on a banner nailed against a wall in the factory are the words: Destiny is out of the mortal’s hands. Secretly, each sister has wondered aloud to their mother, Night, if it’s not out of theirs as well?
Red lights swirled and sirens sounded at the earthly proclamation of, My Fate is my own! Atropos, oldest of the three sisters, looked up to see which stupid mortal thought he could do a better job than she. Strands of gray hair mixed with her blonde mane, a sign of the level of stress associated with her job. She knew it had never occurred to any of these mortals that they would know when enough was enough. Instead, they either wanted things to go on for forever, or end it all right then and there; the whole world swarmed with people perpetually stuck with the mental capacity of a moody teenager.
At the turn of a switch a monitor flashed on with the image of a man hanging from a rope tied to a tree branch. Atropos Tivoed the image and zoomed in to the man’s left ear. Written in a freckle was the number 4903-059.5-0000000. Atropos spoke into an intercom, “Send me the string for this number.” She then pressed another button on the monitor. Everyone in the world upon his or her birth is tattooed with a minuscule number on the left ear; making it easier for everyone involved, and keeping the dealings impersonal.
It was like a Celestial Security number. An individualized code that told Atropos immediately when he’d been born, 4903 meant that he’d been born in the 4,903rd year, 145 corresponded to the day of the year he was born, which in this case was May 25th for the mortals, and 0000000 was the exact second of his life in which he’d die. This doesn’t make sense, she told herself, he shouldn’t be alive or maybe he’ll never die. Atropos wasn’t really sure what this meant; trouble for her, most likely.
Seconds later a limp, duct-taped string flew through an opening next to the door. Atropos’ heart fell—here it was: the one mistake made by her precious machines since their birth in 1784 by the Christian calendar. She wouldn’t allow this to get out and have doubts shroud her beautiful machines; she absolutely would not go back to cutting all those strings by hand and working twenty-four hours a day. The memory flooded back and blood drained from her face.
On the morning of May 25th, 1977, the tag displayed the number 4903-145-0000000. All the other information regarding the length of the line had been concocted by the machine. No checks and balances system existed for the operators, whatever the machine spit out is what was cut. The operators simply attached the tag to the string and the string to a fancy clothes pin on the fly line above, and whoosh, off it went to the warehouse.
The Alpha end of the string came out first, and was stamped with a small sign. To the operator biting her cuticles, it looked like an average sized string that followed; nothing spectacular about it. She paid more attention to the hangnail on her pinky finger. Although all the string was the same in quality, what the people assigned to the strings did with their life was their business. The cutter on the machine plunged down to create the Omega end and as the blade was three quarters through, it stopped, was pulled up, and more line shot out. The operator hit the only button she had been given: a dusty red panic button.
Atropos came down out of the loft overseeing the floor. A drill or a prank pulled on her by the other two, she thought, but when Atropos got to the machine in question the operator’s face flooded her hands with tears. The operator had positioned herself to hide a limp piece of nearly severed string hanging from the machine.
“I think I screwed up this guy’s destiny,” the operator muttered.
Atropos scoffed. She severely doubted this. She said, “Unless it was his Destiny for you to screw it up, what exactly could you have done?”
The operator moved out of the way to reveal the string to Atropos.
“What…?” Her lavender eyes flared. Temporarily thrown, she had trouble catching her balance in the new heels she’d been breaking in all day.
The operator was a blubbering mess. It was common knowledge how close friends the Furies and the Fates were and she was afraid of being punished. She cried out, “I don’t know, it was all the machine! Please don’t have me struck down.”
“Struck down? Are you kidding me, the union would be all over my ass. Did you touch anything while the machine was cutting the string?” Atropos wondered.
The operator shook her head.
Atropos searched the dusty manual that had been propping up one corner of the operator’s stool. She looked under: Prematurely Cut Strings, Error Messages, and on a whim, Oops. The manual had been written mostly in Spanish, and the only thing she knew how to say was No tome agua (don’t drink the water) from her one vacation on Earth, which had corresponded with Cortez’s landing in Mexico.
In all her years of cutting the strings of Destiny for people, Atropos had never come across a problem like this. Her hand had been steady, and always in rhythm with the actions of her sisters. She gingerly picked up the string, hoping that it wouldn’t simply break at the cut point, as it was holding on by one, thin, woven strand.
Atropos felt confident she could correct the problem herself. She asked the operator, “Do you have any scissors on hand?”
The operator looked up briefly to see Atropos rifling through the small drawer at the bottom of the machine. “We have a small pair for cleaning up any frayed ends,” she replied. “But Clotho doesn’t like us using them anymore since you all caught hell from Zeus after we trimmed two or three years off of George Burns’ string.”
“I think I can wield the shears properly. I’ll cut it and then tie it, the guy will lose two, three years at most. He won’t miss them.” Atropos pulled the scissors from under an old copy of Goddess’s Day.
The operator put her hands on top of Atropos’, and Atropos put her other hand on top of the operator. It was an age-old playground ritual to determine first at-bats, but never had years of a person’s life been at stake. The operator topped off Atropos’s second hand, thus giving the operator the victory.
“Well smarty pants, what do you suggest we do with this guy now?” Atropos was flabbergasted that she had been challenged.
“Couldn’t we just duct tape it?”
Atropos didn’t like hitches in Destiny—the Black Death, for instance, had been a contributing cause to her other sister, Lachesis, turning into a lush. The fewer mistakes made by the three, the less the higher gods interfered, and the less the mortals got it into their heads to attempt to shape their own Destiny.
The two conspirators then pulled off long strips of the silvery tape that had been stolen from the janitor, who had been passing by, and wrapped them carefully around the flimsy middle, Delta () section, of the string.
“We can just hide it in the back of the warehouse, behind a pipe or something,” Atropos was sure the problem would work itself out. Maybe the computers will be in charge of everyone’s Destiny by then,” she added.
“Or maybe he’ll just try to kill himself,” suggested the operator.
In her office Atropos said, “Don’t let anyone in here,” into her intercom.
A voice came back, “And why not?” The voice was deep, throaty, and instantly recognizable to Atropos as her sister Lachesis.
As Atropos guffawed into the intercom the door opened and Lachesis boomed out, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that two-toned string that just flew by, would it?”
Lachesis despised the machines for taking her job away from her and forcing her into an office position. Left with more free time than she’d ever had, Lachesis developed slight chipmunk cheeks and her once smooth thighs had become pocked with cellulite.
Despite her protest of the machines, part of Lachesis had never felt comfortable determining Destiny; who was she to deal out Destiny when she couldn’t get a handle on her own existence? If she were a mortal, she’d be leery of all this Destiny business, too, but she’d never trust her toaster with setting the timeline of her life.
“I think I deserve a bit of privacy every four hundred years,” Atropos said while attempting to hide the string that had just arrived. “I’m not the one going to Switzerland for spa days all the time.” Atropos knew that Lachesis had her little secrets, too.
“While I never-” and instead of finishing her thought, Lachesis leapt at Atropos and snatched the string away from her.
Lachesis managed to pin down Atropos with her legs and hold her there until the duct tape was unwrapped to reveal the gash in the string.
“Wow this is big,” gawked Lachesis. Lachesis hoped that this would be the final straw for the machines.
Atropos rolled her eyes. “Have you been working out?”
Lachesis looked at her once statuesque figure, hell, even that silly sculptor had thought she was Venus, but now she mourned for the good workout of measuring strings. The comment created enough of a distraction that Atropos threw her sister off of her chest and took back the string.
“The worst part of this is that the guy is trying to set his own Destiny and doubting our authority,” explained Atropos.
“Do you blame him?” Lachesis said while eyeing the string.
Atropos recoiled into her chair in thought. How could everyone else on the little rock blindly accept their lot in life, even if they did prefer the Christian explanation, while this guy feels the need to challenge our power? Blame him? Yes. Do anything about it? No.
They were powerless in that regard. Their real hope was that he would keep this to himself. The Fates had already lost many believers to the idea of Free Will, but for any mortal to believe in Destiny and want to control it, created an empty feeling in Atropos’ gut.
“Let’s open a big hole in the ground beneath him,” chirped Lachesis.
“Wait and see how far he goes with this whole thing,” Atropos continued.
Atropos resumed playing the video of the man hanging from rope. She snapped her fingers and the tree branch started to crack. The man fell from the tree.
Omega
Awash in fluorescent light a man lies in a hospital bed. His head is wrapped in white cotton gauze and skirts the top of his closed eyes. Behind him, scrawled in capital letters is the name Pete Seneca. He is covered by a sterile white blanket that rises and falls in time with each of his even breaths.
A woman sits in a chair close to the head of the bed. She has just inserted a slip of paper into a book and then closed the book. Placing the book into a canvas bag, she scoots the wooden-frame chair noiselessly away from the bed and stands up. Theresa Epstein, Hospital Volunteer Corps is written on a plastic-covered badge hanging from her neck.
As she walks toward the doorway she stops and smiles at two people who have just entered the room. Theresa grabs the hand of the woman that is walking toward her and leans to whisper something in her ear. After Theresa leaves, the two people take up a spot on either side of the bed.
“Do you think…?” the woman begins to ask and catches herself.
Her strawberry blonde hair is short, and she is wearing flowered medical scrubs. The whites of her eyes are streaked with red, and her cheeks and ears are flushed. Her hands are fidgety; first she picks at her cuticles and then she arranges the blanket at the foot of Pete’s bed.
Standing on the other side of the bed, a man with a blue work shirt chews apart sunflower seeds and spits the mangled shells into a bottle. The name Dave is embroidered above the left breast pocket on his shirt.
“What, tried to kill himself again?” Dave finishes the question left hanging in the air.
He pauses and the only sounds are the whir of the air conditioner and the beeping monitors.
Then he answers the question himself, “I don’t think so, Moira. He was supposed to be coming to my house.”
“But what if he was,” Moira suggests. “I just don’t think I could stand it. He’s changed so much in the six months I’ve known him. He’s only just turned twenty-nine.” Her eyes are welling with tears as she finally concedes, “I guess we won’t know until he comes out of it,” she takes a deep breath and exhales. “If he comes out of it.”
She is interrupted by the entrance of a doctor.
“Hi, Moira,” he says. His voice is deep, yet strained. “We’re still waiting on the police to find the driver, that should at least clear some things up for you.”
The doctor stands, both his hands resting on the bottom edge of Pete’s bed, and his eyes shift from Moira’s face to Dave’s and finally rest on Pete’s.
“The important thing is to keep his fever down, and keep him comfortable. I wish I could tell you how long he’ll stay in the coma, but this isn’t exactly rocket science. We have volunteers that come in to read to Pete to keep his mind occupied, and it will help if he hears a familiar voice,” the doctor says.
Moira nods her head, “She’s been in here; she seems very nice.”
Silence again.
Dave forces a wad of shells into the opening of the soda bottle and then asks, “What exactly is going on in his head, doc?”
The doctor scratches the back of his head and frowns. “Unfortunately, we don’t know too much about what actually goes on. Some patients have said that everything is completely black. For all I know he might think he is an armchair, or a spider, or possibly he’s going through the motions of his everyday life, but completely alone. He’ll hear your voice, but maybe it’ll be backwards and he’ll think it sounds like a foreign language and he won’t understand it. But somewhere deep down, he’ll know it’s your voice.”
There is a hitch in Pete’s breathing and he sniffles. Three sets of eyes focus on Pete before his breathing resumes its normal rhythm. More silence, save for the beeps and air conditioner.
“I’m not saying he was,” Dave says, “but would it make a difference if he was trying to kill himself?”
The doctor sighs, “I don’t know, but it seems that if somehow he did this to himself, then he’ll have to figure a way out of it subconsciously. All the patients that I have seen come out of these have said they felt like they had to fight like the dickens.”
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Emerging from the stygian rear of the warehouse, Pete Seneca waves at the humid air while he glances at the empty driveway, swearing that he heard someone’s voice call to him. He rubs the back of his head and feels a lump; he then realizes that his whole body feels as though it’s shrouded in an agonizing ache.
Pete pokes his head out of the loading dock. He looks over the list of employees that have etched their names into the paint and touches his father’s chicken scratch handwriting. There it is—Marty Seneca. This is the last place his father worked and Pete wonders if this will be his own last job; if he’ll follow exactly in his father’s footsteps and lose his mind to Alzheimer’s as well.
He leaves out a mild string of expletives at the failure of the UPS driver to show for the pick-up. Usually the guy is here by five-thirty, but it must be close to six now. The only thing Pete can do is leave a note for his boss, Mr. Kirchner, under his door.
Five more hours or so until his shift ends and he thinks that he’ll maybe sneak out at some point to see his father. Pete has an unseasonably strong desire to physically see the old man, stronger than any time Pete can remember. He fights the urge because he calculates that it would be his luck that Kirchner would come in the moment Pete walks out.
From time to time Pete thinks he hears noises, beeps that sound exactly like a heart monitor. It’s all in his head, he reassures himself. It’s probably a cold he’s picked up and can’t shake; it’s manageable, but makes everything fuzzy. Or maybe it’s something more serious, like vertigo, or the beginnings of Alzheimer’s.
He misses the talk of baseball with the UPS driver. If he had any free time he’d like to go and watch a kids’ game, maybe sign his father out of the nursing home for a day to take him to a game, promise to keep a tight leash on him.
It seems no time has passed and Pete is watching the digital colon separating the hours from the minutes blinking on the warehouse clock. A loud buzzer sounds, startling Pete; no matter how often he hears it, it still scares him. It comes at a different time every day. Always close to six o’clock, but never on the dot. The days that it doesn’t sound until after six o’clock and Pete’s forgotten it are when he really jumps. The buzzer means that all the office folks have gone home for the day, and he can lock up the warehouse.
As he stares at the fuse box to turn off the warehouse lights he goes over the checklist in his head of doors he’s supposed to lock. Two big bay doors: check; ground level garage door: check; man door: no.
Pete walks through the rows of interlocked metal shelves that hold wooden palates of blank aluminum sheets and farther down, the punched-out bottle caps. He quickens his pace as he looks at all the possible hiding places for murderers and he realizes that the most important reason for him to lock the doors is to keep his imagination at bay.
The L-shaped hexagonal key slides into the hole in the door’s push-bar. Pete turns it until the bar pops out and the metal latch is secure against the catch. He gives the door a strong shove to ensure the mechanism is set, then hustles through the dark warehouse to the custodial closet.
A cheap, clear plastic bag lines the five-wheeled trash can Pete pushes through the door to the cubicles. He looks around for any stragglers that he’ll be forced to talk to; he wonders if they keep up their carefully cultivated fake personalities and water cooler dialogue around their families. He lumbers through their cubicles searching for any garbage cans filled with used gum and smelly fruit peels to empty; except every can is empty. Through it all he smiles from ear to ear. Usually unbridled happiness manages to overtake Pete when he’s collecting trash, because he works by himself. Not having to be subjected to the chipper way they answer the phone or their shrill, forced laughs makes up for the loneliness, and saves him from declaring his dislike of these people based on their insipid personas. Instead he hates them for the contents of their garbage cans.
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Pete ducks down behind one of the cubicle walls. He raises his head slowly to peek over the green fabric-covered walls to see who spoke. After a full minute of not hearing another sound he asks, “Is anyone here?” He hopes that there will be no response, that someone just left their radio on. As he rises, confident that he is alone, he hears something else.
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He holds his breath. In the faintest way it sounds like a person talking, but merely speaking gibberish. It almost sounds like voices speaking a foreign language that Pete can’t comprehend. Crouching, he makes his way through the maze of cubicles. Could this be someone’s idea of a joke? If it is, then it isn’t funny.
Pete can’t even speculate what language it is, it’s all Greek to him he thinks. He doesn’t even know anyone that can speak another language; although Dave always claimed he could speak pig-Latin.
He checks behind filing cabinets and under desks without finding anything. Quite suddenly he jumps up onto a desk to get a view from above. Nothing. Only after he makes a sweep of all the bathroom stalls is he confident that he’s alone. He guarantees himself that he has just been hearing things. It may have even been the wind.
Delta
In his yard, a twenty-eight-year-old Pete balanced on a step ladder while he flung a rope around a tree branch. His brown hair insulated his brains from the numbing Canadian air that kissed his face. He was briefly consumed by the flashing orange light from the city snow plow going down his street. He wondered: Is this what hypnosis feels like? I bet they can’t cure smokers with this nonsense. Can I be hypnotized so deeply that my heart will stop? So preoccupied in his own mind was Pete that he didn’t feel the stinging in his ears produced by the wind. Pete knew that the light would stop right before his heart completely gave out, and that it would force itself to beat on just to see if the light ever returned; thus keeping him alive. Pete had shitty luck this way; I can’t even kill myself right, he thought.
It had always been the easy things in life that he’d screwed up. In first grade when all the other little boys and girls had been expertly cutting snowflakes out of construction paper, Pete looked down to see a splotchy red snowflake, as if from hell, and his bloody fingers. After that incident they only allowed him to paste things.
On the ladder Pete swayed under the constant presence of the wind as he tried to tie the rope to the branch. His ears were as red as the mittens he wore; his mom had knitted and give them to him only weeks before that Christmas that never came. Now, they barely covered the meaty heel of his hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to wear anything else. As if the simple act of putting on a grown-man sized glove would betray his mother. The mittens were one of the few tangible things he had left from his mom; he had even fewer memories of her.
From the time he was a baby his mom had pre-empted normal kid stories, Humpty and a couple of blind mice, for tales of Greek heroes and the mischief of the gods. He remembered her using different voices for the gods, who always seemed to get off on messing with mortals.
“Mom, why do the gods have to be so mean?” he’d asked once.
She rubbed his head. “Because they know what’s best and they make the rules. No matter how unfair they seem.”
The most unfair, in his opinion, were the Fates. Pete still dreaded thinking of a story about the three women just watching as their favorite city burned to the ground and all the people died. Since then Destiny, and those three sisters played constantly on his mind.
He decided that he couldn’t accept that his Destiny was constructed by such cruel women; not that he disliked women, but they had always disappointed him. His mom had died, Erika had left, how much more could one man take?
The notion that bothered him most was that he didn’t want a preordained Destiny from the same monsters that had set up his mother to kill herself, and his father to forget his own name. What exactly did they have in store for him? Where was Zeus and why didn’t he swoop in and deliver Pete from the clutches of the wicked women, as he had done for Hercules? Then it struck Pete that he wasn’t the son of a god; he was the son of a combined machinist/dock worker from the middle of nowhere who suffered from Alzheimer’s. He had to prove the stories wrong; he as a mortal could shape his own life and death.
Pete screamed into the night, “My Fate is my own!” His voice died into a whisper in the wind. He didn’t want to feel empty as he imagined his mother had, and he didn’t want to drift forever in the depths of his twisted mind, as he knew his father was doing. Whatever lay after this, Pete never thought about, but this decision was his own; he held all the power now. On a ladder, the night after Christmas, he put the crude noose around his neck and tightened it. The rough fibers splintered and broke off into his neck; his skin scratched off into the rope. There isn’t much room in these things, he thought to himself, and slightly loosened the noose. It dropped from against his jaw to down over his Adam’s apple. He closed his eyes and counted down from ten. At eight he gulped hard and his hyoid slammed against the rope. His knees slackened at five, and at three he took what he thought would be his last Earthly breath. The air burned his lungs even though it was colder than he could ever remember. He shuddered and his foot slipped off the snowy piece of metal and he regained his balance when he said two. By no means did he want to go before his time. The whole idea of this was to go exactly when he wished, not a second early or late. He said “one” out loud, opened his eyes and stepped off his perch.
Half a lifetime seemed to pass in the time between his step and when he finally found the rope in midair. His legs flailed as if he were doing a spastic swimming stroke. Tiny blood vessels began to strain in his eyes and the rope dug into the soft flesh around his neck. Involuntarily his hands struggled to free himself from the noose.
As the falling snowflakes, perfectly cut by the nimble-fingered immortal inhabitants of the sky, piled up on his head; Pete’s mind wandered. He remembered art class and going home that day to his cold house with only half of the Christmas decorations up, his present that year a new suit to wear to his mother’s funeral. He’d wanted He-man or even a lesser known Masters of the Universe action figure. The entire next year, at Dave’s house, whenever they played together Pete had to use Skeletor. When he tried to explain to his father how unfair this was, his father could only mumble something about how the Jets were due to win it all that year. They had collapsed in the first round of the playoffs.
Any time Pete really needed to talk to his father and ask why his mother had killed herself, his dad had always been conveniently too busy, too tired, or too drunk to talk man to man with Pete. Claims had been made around town that his father had been hitting the sauce and finally the sauce hit back, a not unlikely suggestion in a small town, but it didn’t explain his father’s propensity for forgetting his keys or even where he lived in the middle of the day. Up until that point his father had been a functional drinker, but he’d never forgotten the name of the starting quarterback of the Jets; now his father thought that Testaverde was the name of a new car. His father never even looked as though he might want to answer Pete’s questions, and so he never did provide any explanations; his dad just got angry. Pete was never sure if his father got angry over the memory, or if maybe it was that he had no memory of her left.
“Dad, do you feel lonely?” Pete would ask.
“Why should I?” said his father.
“Because you don’t have a memory left,” Pete explained.
“Hey Biff-o, another round!” his Dad would shout, rendering any further conversation moot, as it became apparent to Pete that his father had slipped back in time.
The doctor had told Pete that his father would always go to a place in his memory where he felt comfortable, even if that was the bar; and that as he aged his memory would work as though it were a clock being wound backwards. Pete hoped that the clock would one day just stop; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, he told himself. If he didn’t do this tonight, he wondered, when would the springs in his own clock work loose? He’d been told once that it was every boy’s fantasy and Destiny to turn into his father. Pete couldn’t remember ever wishing, “When I grow up I want to have my brain scrambled like an egg.”
Now as Pete savored every mouthful of available oxygen, he cursed himself for not doing something so he had less time to think. If he was going to die, he wanted to get it over with; it was like the one American Idol results show he’d seen, always kept in anticipation. He tried to laugh and he wondered, how many people die laughing?
Crack. It sounded like far off thunder to Pete at first and it quickly got closer cutting his attempt at laughter short. The second to last crack of sound sent Pete crashing to the ground, where his ankle landed at a funny angle and the last crack he could remember hearing was his shin bone breaking.
In the minutes after Pete landed, the snow around him turned redder and redder and then began to melt. Before he realized that the broken tree limb had used his leg to cushion its blow and for his trouble all he had received was a six inch gash in his calf and a broken leg, he had made it to his own back door, dragging his bum leg up the three stairs, from the sun porch that served to sun only trashcans, to the kitchen, and miraculously dialed a nine, a one and a one before crumpling into a pile of delirious pain. The phone swung like a pendulum on its worn-out cord, marking the time until the paramedics found Pete whining like a kicked bitch.
“Pete,” Dave barked. Dave wasn’t a touchy feely kind of guy, and there was nowhere to touch Pete that Dave would have felt comfortable with while Pete was wearing a hospital gown. “Pete,” he repeated.
Pete looked out tiny slits in his eyes. Dave was wearing a black knit hat that sat on his head like an unsteady crown; not pulled down, just there. He wore his faded flannel jacket like a trophy, each stain a badge of honor: the dirt from the time he changed his wife’s flat tire on the highway and a passing car splashed him was all over his back, and right above his left breast pocket was a story he refused to tell even Pete. The rest of Dave’s outfit consisted of the blue uniform it would have been strange to see Dave without.
Looking down at himself Pete realized he was not quite so conservatively dressed. When he’d arrived in the emergency room, the doctors had cut his pants off of him, and later covered him in a flimsy blue smock that hadn’t been tied in the back. Now Pete had a white knit blanket and bed sheet covering his torso and his one good leg.
Out of the blue, Dave grabbed the bed by the rails and shook like a crazy man trying to escape from prison. Pete’s head flopped back and forth, while he tried to keep his eyes closed to see how far Dave would go with the act.
“What are you doing to this man?” a nurse asked. Pete had no recollection of ever seeing her before.
Dave looked her up and down and winked at her to show his obvious approval. The nurse then reached up and pulled the curtain around Pete to separate the two of them from Dave.
Pete noticed Moira Plath, R.N. printed in recessed plastic on the nametag of the nurse that was gently rubbing his arm with her right hand.
“Mr. Seneca,” she said while continuing to rub.
Pete stirred slightly, “Five more minutes.”
Moira then pressed the elevation button on Pete’s bed and slowly, as his head began to rise, he opened his eyes. She stopped when his eyes opened completely.
“Mr. Seneca,” she said.
Pete interrupted her, “Call me Pete.”
“Pete, we’ve checked and you’re allergic to morphine.”
“That sucks,” came from Dave on the other side of the curtain.
“We’re going to give you something else,” said Moira before she injected a needle into the IV bag that hung on the side of Pete’s bed.
When the syringe emptied Moira pulled Pete’s curtain back to reveal Dave sitting on the floor, holding a tray while he scooped Jell-O into his mouth. As Moira walked past him and out the door he stared at her ass. Pete knew that Dave, married to the same woman for eight years, could find at least one attractive quality on any woman put in front of him. She’s probably dynamite in bed he’s gotta be thinking to himself smirked Pete.
Dave jumped up and followed her out the door.
“Wait, nurse,” Dave handed her a piece of paper. “Could you call that number and tell the person that Pete asked for them?”
Pete watched the nurse walk away, the paper in her hand. Pete knew Dave had a small harem of women that he called on when his wife, Gloria, played the frigid-headache card, but this girl seemed different than the usual “Dave Girl.” She seemed almost too similar to Gloria to excite Dave.
“She’s all right,” proclaimed Dave as he came back in the room and shoveled more red Jell-O into his mouth; the only thing that seemed to shut him up.
Pete didn’t know why he’d become friends with Dave; he was big, loud, and seemed to have an appetite for anything that could kill him. Once at a party in high school Dave ate three double cheeseburgers, smoked a pack of cigarettes, drank a six pack, and started two fights. He still did many of these same things, but in the comfort of his own house.
“Why are you here?” Pete hadn’t told anyone he was in the hospital. He wanted everyone to think he was far away, on vacation on some Bahamian island. He had requested vacation from work for two weeks. He hated the holidays; every year it was the same thing:
Dave would say, “Pete, if you aren’t doing anything come on over. You know we’ll have more turkey than we can eat.”
Pete would invent some elaborate story. “I’m going to a private island off the coast of Colombia with some old friends from school.” Then Pete would sit in the house playing a pocket poker game and visit his Dad in the nursing home.
Dave knew that Pete hadn’t gone anywhere exotic, so he wasn’t surprised when he saw the write up in the police blotter; not much isn’t news in a small town.
Dave rose and put the tray on Pete’s little bedside table, but refused to surrender the jello. “We heard about your nasty spill. Gloria said it’s my fault. I knew you were at home. I should of gone to the bar with you, and that’s why you fell. The good news is Gloria thought I shoulda been at the bar, for once.”
Pete looked at him blandly. “I tried to kill myself.”
“No you didn’t, you were probably just loaded.”
The drugs started to kick in and Pete’s eyes became dry and he blinked a lot. “I stood on a ladder and put a rope around my neck. I don’t know what went wrong; all I wanted to do was die.”
Dave started to hum, seemingly so he could disavow knowledge of Pete’s admission. “Gloria made me get this and bring it.” He bent over and pulled up the grocery bag with clean underwear and some t-shirts and threw it at Pete.
Pete took the bag and set it next to his propped up leg. His eyelids drooped under their own weight.
“I had to break a window to get into the house. I hope you don’t mind. Are you going to eat this?” Dave seemed to float out of the room with the spoon from Pete’s tray and another batch of strawberry flavored horse hoof delight.
“Someone is fucking with me,” said Pete before he drifted off.
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andycam9718 reviewed Version 1 -
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Reilly616 reviewed Version 1 -
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andersda reviewed Version 1 -
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Overall this is very good. I liked the characters, the entire thing on the three aspects was really well done. The final bit seemed to drag on just a bit. I don’t know if it was just me, but you might want to look at the pacing. Here are some of the little stuff; Use what you can disregard the rest.
“they were fond themselves of saying” vs. as they were fond of saying.
“Windows: Death Edition” this is coming in the spring of 2010
“one hundred all” vs. one hundred; all
“small the operator” ?
“like the one American Idol results show he’d seen, always kept in anticipation” this, and passages like it may limit the life of this piece.
“injected a needle into the IV bag” They never do it like this. The drug is either contained in its own IV bag, or they inject using a needle, through a “Y” fitting in the tubing.
“some t-shirts and threw it at Pete.” This is good people feel that suicide is contagious.
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Lunsford reviewed Version 1 -
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CEO of the largest company in the unive … fewer smoke breaks … busier than Zeus at a virgin convention … lunch breaks …
This is the most odd piece of writing I have ever read! As I was reading, I kept seeing those things, which seemed so out of place in a story of Greek gods, but the more I read the better it got and the more comfortable I was with it.
The writing is superb and it’s obvious you’re an intelligent person so I knew there had to be some kind of method to this maddnes, but it just continued on. I still don’t quite understand.
But I’ll say this; I was glued to it to the end! The women, the strings, the duct tape, the scuffle with the goddess and her chubby sister, the machines, the mistake. It was very captivating. And VERY different.
I liked the way you incorporated the words into his messed up coma mind. That was very well done. I don’t know when he came out of his coma and I know I didn’t miss it, but I seem to have missed something.
It never dragged for me and even though I didn’t realy understand it all, I really enjoyed it. Good job.
campb26593 reviewed Version 1 -
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You definitely have a story. The circumstances are outstanding. This is your work of art, but here are my humble recommendations:
The long expositions throughout this story should be delivered with more dialog and less narrative. In the television series, “Dead Like Me,” a team of grim reapers’ indoctrination of a young apprentice serves as the vehicle for explaining the “business.” That’s the sort of thing that would work well for this story.
The narrative explains that the industrial revolution resulted in a population boom because people had more free time. Really, the population boom is caused by agricultural values that drive a couple to have 10 children. The industrial regions actually experience stagnation in birth rates. You get immigration from rural areas to centers of industry to fill the demand of an expanding work force. Anyway, the cause of population boom could be a nice little debate if you have two characters engaged in dialog. And, they can say things that the narrator can’t get away with.
Last year I discussed a manuscript for a novel I had written with three agents at writers’ conferences. The novel alternated between past and present tense. They each told me that present-tense novels were once in vogue but could not be sold to publishers today. I changed my prose to all past tense. I recommend you do the same.
My final recommendation is on the subject of suicide. The mother commits and Pete attempts “literal” suicide. I recommend that their behavior be changed to “virtual” suicide, which is an act that is likely to place a person in extreme danger but might not be viewed by others as suicidal. For example, the mother could sign up for three tours in Iraq where she is finally killed. Why did she do that? Pete could skydive 100 times in a week or sign up for a fishing boat job in Alaska.
Please leave a comment if you want me to expand on my comments. I hope they helped.
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