Walking Through The Spiderwebs - I

[xthread]

A Doctor came to talk to me today. He says he wants to make me well, but he's not very good at listening. I will talk to him anyway.

"I had a pet Spider."

The Doctor has a Nurse with him. I like Nurses better than the Doctors. They have pretty gowns, with little name tags on them. I would like a name tag.

"That's very good, Rachel. Tell me about the spider."

The doctors and nurses have white gowns, like the walls. Some of the other girls have green gowns. I wonder if their walls are green. I wonder if red would wash out of a green gown.

"I named it Spid."

The Nurse is sitting very still. Doctors always move around, but Nurses will sit still for hours. I wonder why Nurses know how to sit still. I wish I could sit still like that.

"Tell me more about the spider, Rachel."

This gown is white, and scratchy, and it has a name tag. I don't think it's my name. I didn't think it would be scratchy when I put it on.

"Spid didn't love me."

They want me to go home. That's why they come and talk to me.

"How could you tell that your pet spider didn't love you?"

I wish they would let me keep a pretty gown, but they always take them away.

"Spid ran away."

I don't want to go home. I never meet any new friends at home.

"Then what happened?"

I would like a red gown best of all. But the Doctors always take my red gowns away.

"Spid died."

The Nurse isn't sitting still any more. Now she's yelling and it hurts my ears. I wish she would stop. But the Doctor is talking to me.

"Where is Nurse Meyers, Rachel?"

Tomorrow I will try to make my gown red again.

"See what happens when you don't love me?"

Comments

[malabar.livejournal.com]

Tee hee. You know the address for the royalties checks, right? ;)

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are more variations coming. I'm running an experiment in reframing the scene with different chrome to see how it resonates differently in each case.

FYI, I made a slight edit, I'd gotten two sentences in reverse order earlier.

[malabar.livejournal.com]

Reminds me a bit of the Matheson story "Dress of White Silk"...

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Horror isn't normally my genre, I'll have to go look it up.
(btw, not all of the treatments will be horror per se. This one just wanted to get out of my head this morning, and I was inclined to let it)

[awhyzip.livejournal.com]

"chrome"?

[xthread.livejournal.com]

"chrome" in the gaming sense - in this (fiction) case, I've got a single scene in mind, that can be presented from a variety of different styles, and based on the style of the presentation, it should be able to have some very different emotional content and context. As an experiment in writing, I'm trying to determine both how to use each of those styles, and to consider the different emotional messages that can be wrapped up in the same basic scene. This idea came up a few weeks back, when I tried to present a very visually-dependent scene to someone over IM, and then started thinking about how to relate the scene in text, since the internal pacing is meaningful, and once I'd gotten that far, it became clear that variations in style could communicate some fairly different sub- and super-texts, at which point I just had to play with it..

Although waking up at 6:45am and needing to write down a very short horror story is still a fairly strange thing, at least for me.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

... And waking up before 6:30am and needing to write down the short horror story is even more appalling!

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I once woke up at 5 AM, after going to sleep after midnight, sat bolt upright in bed, and sang the entirety of Pippin's song in the "Return of the King" movie aloud.

I didn't even know I knew that song!

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I remember you saying something like that at Lee's party. Did you make up the original joke?

[xthread.livejournal.com]

That honor resides with malabar
I've just lifted her excellent schtick and am now misapplying it for my own porpoises.
You should see our stately lions.

[finagler.livejournal.com]

Not bad! Appologies for the unrequested constructive(?) criticism, but I think I like the start better than the ending though -- by the end there's too much action going on outside of her head and the impact of "see what happens when you don't love me" line is kinda lost.

I'm curious to see the next versions...

[xthread.livejournal.com]

oh, thank you.
I agree with your criticism, the beginning is much tighter than the end. It's not a style I'm used to, that's part of the point of the experiment.
I think that I can evoke some very different perceptions of the scene, the circumstance of the character, etc, just by varying the style a bit. So, this piece is very much a straight psychological horror piece, by the end of it I want the reader to be realizing that the girls gown is drenched in the blood of the missing nurse, and I want to evoke that realization and the attendant image in as few words as possible.
In another of the renditions, I'll be treating it as straight tragedy, trying to convey the impression that the girl is delusional and lonely, but not that anything bad is happening, just that she's lost in her own world.
Two other styles I plan to try are a very descriptive style, with very detailed descriptions of what the viewer is seeing, and a dialog style where you're really only hearing the conversation (stolen fair and square from the hard-boiled crime novels I've been reading). This version probably gives you the most detailed view into her internal dialog.