Writer's Journal

Continuing with my conceit that Cicatriz is laid out on the television series, here are the first two seasons, collected together.

Season 1:

Cicatriz 1×01

Cicatriz 1×02

Cicatriz 1×03

Cicatriz 1×04

Cicatriz 1×05

Cicatriz 1×06

Season 2

Cicatriz 2×01

Cicatriz 2×02

Cicatriz 2×03

Cicatriz 2×04

Cicatriz 2×05

Cicatriz 2×06

There is a dilapidated hospital in the north-east corner of Mozambique, built during the period of Portuguese colonization, and maintained off-and-on for the entirety of its life.

While one can drive to it in the dry season, in the wet season, the roads wash out, and the only way to make it to the hospital is to row there. Sitting by the door is a tin rowboat that has, in spite of all logic, begun to rust.

It has only one patient, kept sedated constantly, with an IV drip. One of the three nurses smokes when she makes her rounds, tossing the butts into the dead potted plants. The other two sit by the patient, and reads aloud in turns. One does the classics, the other reads magazines.

The doctor only shows up once a week to check on the patient. As his father did, and his father, and his father back to the time of colonisation, when they took over from the shaman who had handled the patient beforehand.

The patient was an effeminate young man—though the doctor had read in his great-grandfather’s notes that, at one point the patient had appeared as an old woman—and was never allowed to wake up.

Once, in mid 1914, they had run out of sedative. The Doctor’s grandfather had seen the whites of the patient’s eyes, and struck him over the head with a stone the size of a fist.

They did their best to make sure to have sedative on-hand, but they ran out in 1933, and again on the 6^th and 9^th of August in 1945.

They switched to a different sedative after that.

The smoking nurse stands in the door as the doctor checks the patient’s vitals.

“He’s been stirring lately,” the nurse rasps.

“That’s not good,” the doctor noted, “we might have to switch again.”

“Why not just euthanise him?”

The doctor shook his head, and looked at her. Two days later, she had been replaced by another nurse, who said that he was simply happy to be there.

The Doctor smiled, and left for the week, to go back to his practice in town and to his pregnant wife.

(Recently, I quit smoking.  I was thinking about writing on that, but today’s only the fourth day out, and a friend of mine wrote a much better account of her own adventure with quitting smoking.  It isn’t available, but I can’t help but feel that I’d end up stealing from her if I wrote on it.  So here’s a dose of absurdity for you.)

The man lay bleeding in the moonlight, a hole going through his upper-right abdominal. His lung was pierced, but he could still speak, were he to take the time to plug up the hole with the flat of his hand.

The woman sat on the tree stump next to him, and smoked a cigarette. They couldn’t hear the ambulance, yet. He applied pressure to the wound.

“The stars are beautiful, you know. I can see Orion.”

“It’s the only constellation you ever knew.”

Wheeze.

“And the big dipper.”

She smiled, slightly.

“Oh, alright. Yes. The stars are beautiful.”

“Can I have a drag?” he asked.

“You aren’t going to get blood all over it, are you?”

“It’s you’re fault if I do.”

“My fault for letting you take a drag, or my fault for shooting you?”

There was a wheezing laugh that ended in coughing.

“I’d let you have one if the situations were reversed.”

“But they’d never be reversed.”

“Oh, just you wait.”

Another wheezing laugh, the coughing came quicker.

“You should probably save your strength.”

“Eh. Can I have a drag?”

“These things kill you, you…” her straight face dissolved, and she began laughing.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics found the two laying in the grass. He was still alive, but barely—he’d uncovered the bullet wound, and his companion was blowing smoke into it.

Not much to say, today.  I quit smoking last night, and I’ve got work to get done, today.

Expect a change in tone for the 3×0X sections.

Work, work, work.

Sorry, folks.

(There was a modernist building that was going to be put in Manhattan called the “Church of Solitude”  designed by Gaetano Pesce, an Italian architect.  This scene here was essentially me thinking about how things might be if the design had been built, and other cities had constructed buildings of a similar purpose.  So…essentially, this is an architectural alternate history.)

The Temple of Solitude was understandably quiet. After being closed all winter, after the gardeners had finished in the open-air cells, the janitor set to work cleaning up their mess and that of the long winter.

In the back room, the three interns opened up the refrigerator marked “not food” and each pulled a pair of tortoises out, after moving out of the cold refrigerator and into the warm grip of the interns, the hibernating reptiles began to slowly come awake.

Each was placed in a different cell, to combat the growth of the snail population and add atmosphere.

Each cell was carpeted in grass. Most had a stream coming through them, and one larger plant, either a berry bush or a large shade tree. All were open to the sky, but the walls were tall and thick, preventing sound from penetrating. In the middle was a bench.

After the janitor had finished and stepped outside for his smoke break, the front desk attendant unlocked the front door, and began to work on a crossword puzzle.

The first customer was a child skipping school. She had a book under her arm, and walked right by the desk. Going to the fourth door on the outer ring of the hallway. The girl reached into her pocket, pulled out a roll of quarters, and put six in the slot by the door. The door unlocked, and the sign cycled over from “Vacant” to “occupied.”

The next people to come in were a trio of college students, who dropped in a handful of quarters, stepped inside. They took off their shoes and dangled their toes in the stream, as they discussed a presentation.

Around noon, there was a rush of office people coming in, either singly or in small groups, and for almost half an hour, every cell was full, as the white collar workers sat in the cells—boxes much like their cubicles, but filled with green instead of beige—and ate lunch in privacy.

At the end of the day, the shutters at the top of each cell were closed, and the desk attendant walked the circle, opening each cell with a master key.

“We’re closing.”

“You have to go home.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Hurry up now, it’s time.”

“See you next week.”

And after all the customers were gone, the evening shift gardeners came out, and lit each cell with bright lights, the four of them going in each cell and checking for any major damage to the plants, and harmlessly excising injured sections.

When they finished, they left food in the tortoises’ dishes and shut down the lights, locking up the Temple of Solitude behind them.

A special treat to thank you all.  Granted, we’re actually around 1,497 hits, but I think we’ll hit it today.

Now, here it is, a short story of mine that was originally written last year in one quick 24-hour burn, then put in a drawer until now.

The Necronaut

EDIT:  1,500 GET!

In which terrible things occur.

Cicatriz Episode 2×06

This brings the second season to an end.  About halfway through.

[This was supposed to be posted last week, sorry about that.]

Let me tell you something. Very rarely, if ever, will you have time to just write, or just do whatever creative thing you’re focusing on. You can’t just live on the mountaintop. Maybe, if you slave away and toil, you can build a cabin up there.

Most of the time, though, you visit the mountaintop, and live down in the muck with the rest of us mortals. You can’t let that stop you: hell, last week when I was putting together 2×05, I had to come up with a course plan, work out a writing assignment, and get a new draft finished of an unrelated short story.

In short, you can’t let your responsibilities stand in the way of writing. Nor can you let writing get in the way of your responsibilities.

Replace “Writing” with whatever creative endeavor you wish to pursue.

It’s something that you try, honestly. You’re going to go away from your writing desk when you feel hungry, or realize you need to get the laundry done, or whatever. And you’re going to leave the dishes in the sink when you’re on a roll.

Don’t worry about it. It’s a mistake to do either of the above, but all mistakes can eventually be forgiven, especially those with only yourself as the victim.

The only reason that Cicatriz 2×05 got done at all is the deadline. If I hadn’t set for myself that it must get put up Friday, April second, you can bet I would’ve spend that Thursday evening drinking with friends and Friday morning sleeping until noon.

Which might still have been a productive use of my time.

So, when you’re setting out on a creative endeavor, do your best to make wise use of your time, but forgive yourself if you don’t. If you’re stressing out about what you should’ve done, you won’t get around to what you actually want to do.

So make a schedule for your creative work—NaNoWriMo in November is a good start for this—and stick to it as best you can.

And if you fail, don’t sweat it. Unless you just lost someone else a huge amount of money, it shouldn’t really matter all that much.

About Cicatriz:

I didn’t make up the graffiti that’s been showing up in previous chapters. It’s from somewhere particular.

I understand that it isn’t terribly common, but you have to believe me.

I got struck by a lightning bolt not six weeks ago, but wasn’t really burned. The doctors were confused as all hell, because only my hair was singed.

They did a CT scan, and found that my pineal gland had swollen up to three times the size it had been previously.

“What does that mean?” I asked the endocrinologist.

He shrugged, and made an indistinct noise, before they sent me on my way.

The city looked strange, as I headed home. Like something was layered over it: a strange, indistinct image. Ghostly figures walked through the crowds, and stumbled through the streets.

One of the ghostly things leaped out in front of my car, and flashed into being for a second.

It was a man with too-long limbs, and a face made out of zippers set into his flesh.

My car slammed into him, and he collapsed, seemingly dead, and was gone.

When I got home, I locked my door, and barricaded myself in.

There are others out there, things that look like they might’ve been normal once, but seem to have forgotten all the intuitive knowledge they had of anatomy.

I knew this would only be temporary, I would have to eat. I’d have to go to work.

But I lasted for three days, nonetheless.

Things scratched at my walls, and I retreated toward the middle of my house, to the bathroom, with no outside windows.

I slept in the bathtub.

Soon, though, I heard more scratching, from inside the bathroom closet. Opening the closet door, I found myself in a hallway that I had never seen before, with a single doorway at the end.

A faint light came from underneath it.

I think I’m going through. If I’m just crazy, please check the bathroom closet.

Dr. Heinz’s case file said nothing about his engineering credentials, the infiltrator noted. He was supposed to be a mathematician.

The cabin had been easy enough to approach. The infiltrator was more used to having to deal with henchman after henchman, probably getting captured somewhere along the way, to have a master plan explained to him and then a dashing final battle after his escape. Possibly over a vat of boiling acid, or something.

In comparison, the sedate walk in the woods was rather pleasant. The closest thing he saw to a henchman was a opossum that hissed and slunk off into the dark.

He’d been briefed on the security system, and it would be simple enough to bypass. He pulled a black sheet from his bag, and unfurled it. He held it out in front of him, hanging down vertically before him.

The infiltrator slowly approached the cabin. When he stood beneath the motion detector, he dropped the sheet, drew his wire cutters, and disabled the machine.

A light came through the window. A chalkboard covered one wall of the cabin, from end-to-end, at least from the vantagepoint of the window.

Dr. Heinz was a ruin of a man: once a tall, chubby man with bright eyes and a shock of white hair, now he was stooped and underweight, with dark circles beneath his eyes. His hair was falling out, and the infiltrator thought he could see a tooth sitting on the table.

The doctor was using a soldering iron inside some kind of casing. A small metal sphere with blue lights sat next to it. The infiltrator assumed it was something hot, due to the waves of heat distortion pouring off of it.

Stepping back, the infiltrator drew his handgun, raised it and drew a bead on the doctor. He exhaled slowly, and squeezed the trigger. The first bullet shattered the window. The second would have hit the doctor in the head, if the blue sphere hadn’t flashed, sending the bullet back along its trajectory, lodging it in the infiltrator’s shoulder.

When he came to, he was sitting at the doctor’s kitchen table, a mug of stew sitting on the table in front of him. The Doctor was rewiring the contents of the metal case—it had probably once belonged to the tower of a home computer, but its innards had been ripped out and replaced.

The blue sphere flashed menacingly.

“Oh, good, your up,” the doctor said.

“What happened?” the infiltrator asked.

“You tried to shoot me, but my device here deflected the bullets back at you.”

“How?”

The doctor shrugged.

“Ever since I started working on this theorem…” the doctor made a vague gesture by his left ear.

“What is it?”

The doctor looked at him sharply.

“I found something. It’s…hard…I can’t explain.”

The doctor stepped back from the machine, and stepped over to the blackboard.

“let’s start over here…”

The doctor’s voice faded into dull white noise, and the meaning behind the symbols on the board gradually became clear to the infiltrator.

The first thing that became clear to him was the nature of infinity. His eyelids went slack, and his nose began to bleed.

The second thing that became clear was the fact that the world he knew was simply the representation of certain mathematical structures that existed in a sort of platonic space. His mouth went dry, and his eyes stopped producing tears.

The third and final thing that entered his mind was the knowledge that there were things living in that platonic space, and the knowledge that a particular one of them was represented there, beyond the board. A tremor shot through his limbs.

“You see?”

“I need a ring-spanner wrench and a voltimeter,” the infiltrator said, his voice hoarse.

“I knew you were going to say that,” Dr. Heinz said, “help yourself. You know where they are, right?”

“Yes. I think I do.”