An excerpt from my current work in progress: Dizzy had fallen in love with Wenzel Universitys Robinson School of Engineering the first time she had first laid eyes on it, at age fifteen. The sooty-gray smokestacks-cum-clock-towers that topped the Grecian-columned buildings enchanted her—the Robinson School’s campus was that of an early automobile plant that had been renovated multiple times over the past century—promising untold stories of chugging machinery and shadowy Morlocks drudging along in the basements. There on her first day, Dizzy had stood transfixed, gazing in wonder, her books in her hand, a thousand wheels spinning in her head. She remembered she had loved the anachronism of old-fashioned wooden doors being right next to ultra-modern, revolving glass mazes, and she’d heard it on good authority that old, gray ghosts walked the halls of the biology lab, and that late at night in the library, strange rituals were conducted, rituals designed to conjure forth Lovecraftian gods. Rumors had abounded about grave-robbing by med-students and of unholy experiments conducted late at night beneath fluttering candle-flames and beside the sparking arc-lights of eldritch machinery. She had even—that first day here—fallen in love with the specter of old Wenzel Sanatorium, up there on the hill: A cracked, crumbling, collegiate monstrosity whose tallest, shadowy tower loomed out over a canopy of eerie, dead trees whose branches wrapped their thick, shadowy clutches around a decrepit, concrete road that wound through the hillside’s ancient forest, until it dead-ended at the old, gargoyled citadel. A corporate-like wall of smoked, black glass had lent the Physical Sciences and Engineering building an enigmatic air of mystery, and not so long ago, you couldve caught her there, wearing the same beat-up, black leather jacket and frilly, white pirate shirt, and with her punk-rock mop of blueberry hair fluttering beneath her neon-strawberry, cockeyed bowler, and her red, vinyl go-go-styled exoskeletons boots clicking and clacking their way down the hallways, her vivacious vamp—enhanced by the exoskeletons servo-motors—a little theatrical but nonetheless march-like and purposeful. And no matter where had gone in those early days, she had hidden herself away behind those old, black, bug-eyed welding goggles that had belonged to her father, with her Ichabod-Crane-like robotically-augmented arms forever clutching scowling, old Schrödinger to her chest as tight as they could as she flitter-bugged here and there, prowling from lunch to lounge to laboratory and back again. Ah, good times, good times. To think, how innocent she had been then . . . how much simpler life had been. Before the invasion. Before the con. Before everything. She longed for a return to that base naïvety shed enjoyed then, for some force greater than herself to reach down into her heart and wipe away the tumor of cynicism that had grown there. Alas, no force was forthcoming. And so, she did the best she could, trying as best she knew how to keep the flame of optimism burning within her soul. It wasnt easy, with all this death and destruction surrounding her. Yet, she still held out hope, hope that all this could somehow be set to rights, that the human world—with all its flaws and foibles and hangups—could be restored to its former glory, for it had been glorious, even with all its problems. Even with all the stupid Mundanes in it, it had been a wonderful, beautiful little world. Maybe it could be again. Dizzy clung to this thought as might a terrified child to a security blanket. And if loving without irony made her naïve, then so be it. She would rather be that than dead inside.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:27:32 +0000
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