E4 Chapter 4 Baseball season was over and cool wisps of fall had carried Mark home. His steel practice bat was tucked tightly between the passenger seat and door of his Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and his minor league jersey was tossed haphazardly in the back.Mark hadn’t been back to Tempest, New Jersey in the three years since he started playing ball after college. The first place he headed after leaving Mekong’s Bar was Mill Road. It was a country drag on the outside of town; desolate, winding and covered by trees that were shedding. There was little off the cracked blacktop besides overgrown driveways and the wrecks of abandoned homes set back into the woods. Mark eased his foot on the car’s gas pedal, his bug-like, orange Ghia dropping down to a crawl. Mark felt the dry electricity of the place rush warm blood down the back of his neck. The spikes of his dark hair bristled. Mark brought the car to a slow halt and let the headlights illuminate the eerie woods around him. He didn’t know exactly where it had happened but it was along this road. A flick of a knife. The quickening, then release of a feminine pulse. Mark’s world was deader without her. Mark closed his eyes and the same vision that had been stalking his dreams over recent months formed on the back of his eyelids. Samantha, her soft features lost in a blaze of sun, leaned on his car door and her fingers ruffled his hair like the wind. Mark squinted, in his mind, and flashed to her face. Drained skin, mouth wired to stay shut, sunken eyes. Mark reflexively turned away. Samantha pleaded with him not to think of that. Her death was not a curse to taint the memory of her life. Mark relaxed and finally saw her eyes, bright as neon. It was all he could make out of her besides her outline in the sunny haze. Mark asked, through thought rather than spoken words, why she had been visiting him. He didn’t mind; he wished he could stay with her there in the perfect sunny field she brought with her. Was it just because of Jeff’s troubles that she was there, though? He felt her touch, an invisible ghost on his cheek. Her hand cast soft tendrils through his memories. Remember me, she said, everything. How she never let her skin veer far from a tan. How she gave him rides to work every single of the many times his car broke down. The years remained in him, scrolling past like the grainy footage of an old video reel. The recollections were jumbled and assembled into a past that had become fragile and distant. Wet bathing suits and infectious laughter and closet desperation. Mark knew at that moment that talking with him was but a bonus to her ghostly mission. Remember me, she whispered, but don’t forget the vow. Mark blinked, her words jarring him into both into the further past and present. A vow the three of them had made when they were in the fourth grade. To always look out for one another.
Mark remembered it and Samantha said that’s good, he needs to. Because Jeff is in trouble. She said she couldn’t help Jeff, in fact she was the reason he was shattered, grinding down in the big machine. Shattered, Mark told her, described them all. He felt her touch again, comforting and pleading. You know I got it, he told her, and saw the thanks, the sorrow, in her eyes. Her words, wherever they came from to enter his mind at night, had talked to him repetitively, growing louder every time. When Jeff’s mother had called and repeated Samantha’s plea, Mark had stopped writing off the dreams as passionate delusions. Home, though. It forced him to revisit those thoughts of Samantha and what had happened to her. Mark’s temples tightened and he was stabbed by the memory. It passed by him as much as it could; it never really went away. She then sunk into his memory and Mark opened his eyes, returning to the darkened woods around him. Mark had a friend, a living one that needed his help. He sunk the accelerator pedal down and focused on how to enter back into people’s lives after a three-year hiatus. He didn’t have long to consider it. Mark felt a large rush of static electricity, prevalent in the air, and heard a faint hum along the wind. It was somehow calming. Then, around a bend in the wooded road, another car came barreling at him. Mark was stunned, unable to immediately react. The car that had just roared out of the ether was a purple Duesenberg, a classic from the early half of the twentieth century. He had once seen one in a Las Vegas museum. When it hit him how large the steel auto was and how badly it would plow into him at its current speed, Mark spun the steering wheel hard. His car swerved out of the Duesenberg’s path, its rear bumper close to being torn off as it narrowly escaped. The woods were a pinwheel of dying colors in his car’s headlights. Mark slammed the brake pedal but the car twisted out of his control. He held tighter to the wheel as the Ghia shunned his efforts and twirled off of the road into the woods.
2 comments:
Hmmm, you were right this is a terribly short chapter, not without merit mind you, it just ends as soon as it begins. It has me thinking though, and see how you like this, Chapter 4 is your chapter 1 with the addition of the dream throw into it. This has a two prong effect it starts the story inmedious res (or however that is spelled) and it sets a good scene to hook a reader. You then can go into chapter 2 as it should stay chapter 2; this holds true for chapter 3 as well, as that explains why the events in chapter 1 happen with help from the introduction of lenara in chapter 2 and her discussion with mark in chapter 3. It makes everything tidy all the while forcing the reader to read on the true test of any piece of written word. This also gives you ample time to tell of Marks back story or at least who he is: a baseball player and his relationship with jeff and sam. If he is already driving around NJ there can be persoanl landmarks that cause mark to have memories that fill in the reader with the important character details that reader will need.
The appearance of the purple car as more of a threat and its unknown driver makes it more compelling than the straight linear approach that Lenara is driving this car and she is causing mark's accident. We should, even in third person narrative, have a base character perception for being the vehicle of the story. Mark is the most likely canidate so we should be surprised and horrorfied with mark about the crash than just idly waiting for it to happen. The suspense is removed when you know that the crash will occur because the end of chapter 3 tells you the explicitly so there is no real surprise or danger in it. We also know that Mark is susposed to survive this accident because his death would ruin Squid-boys plans; if we don't find out about squidy until after there is that remote sense that something could befall mark, a sense of danger, especially after we come to know jeff is in danger and Sam is dead and died around there. You mention the term curse, well play along with that term and give a sense that maybethere is something cursing them even if there is not because with all the bad luck it sure seems as if danger lurks behind them to bring them into ill existence.
Overall, short but I can sense that your writing is becoming more solitified. your more willing to be destriptive, though there is room to improve always on your surroundings descriptions, but overall the characters are having a place were they live, or once lived, or will live, it is just a more tangible existence.
I agree with you totally that Chapter 4 should be the opening chapter, and I don't how I didn't see it before. Beef it up, and add the other bg info from the other chapters, work in the elements of his dreams. And then I can get into Lenara's perspective, both as a thief and of meeting Mark. Yeah, definitely the threat of the car and Mark's fate works better when you don't know what it is.
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