Excerpt 4
A passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling true crime story that happened within my own immediate family:
Kissing the boy on his smooth forehead, she exhaled very slowly and released a tiny sigh, the sudden chill of her warm breath on his cool skin causing her flesh to prickle with goosebumps. She closed her eyes in the briefest of respites, before opening them again and releasing her precious son from her arms so he could sleep. He let out a faint and restful coo as he relaxed onto his back in blissful abandonment of the cruel world.
She crept out of the room then, more cautiously and soundlessly than she even knew herself capable to move. Every step down onto the dirty plush carpet seemed to reverberate deafeningly, promising to wake the neighbors and trigger her inescapable downfall. So with every step down, she slowed her pace, and attempted to calm her pulsing heart.
In the murky blackness of the room, she failed to account for the door frame, smacking a hip against the solid wood with a low thud. Jennifer froze. She strained her ears for any sign that he had been alerted by the noise and remembered she existed, and was standing up from his sunken hole to give chase. For the moment, he was not. He let out a congested chortle in response to something Ed Sullivan said. So she continued forward.
Three eternities later, Jennifer reached for the tattered quilt that lay rumpled at the foot of the bed. She move still ever slowly, eventually lying flat on her back, with the cover pulled up to her neck. She was always cold, laughably so. Growing up, her mother, from whom she inherited frozen blood and who suffered the affliction herself, used to pile two or three blankets on her daughter every night while she slept. Jennifer always awoke under a heap of warmth, usually thus starting her day in thankfulness for her mother’s thoughtfulness. In this house however, in her eternally damp prison, the stuff of nightmares, she was permitted only the one holey blanket, frayed and threadbare as it was. The problem was thoroughly exacerbated by her teeny petite frame. Without any body fat to speak of, Jennifer spent the greater portion of every night shivering recklessly from scalp to sole.
Outside her window, the inky night played host to a wild wind that growled low and hostile. It grumbled deeply, ever constant, bemoaning that its dark terror was only permitted to reign over the night, and never the bright day. Jennifer lost her thoughts in the blow of the wind, like one who gradually stops noticing the tick of the clock, or the trickle of faucet water. She wondered dazedly if there were such beings as evil spirits, swarming in circular patterns around this house. If there were, perhaps that’s why the hero spirits of joy and light continued to fail to reach her. For surely, if Satan’s spirits exist, then too must God’s angels. Lucifer, the brightest of them all, she recalled dimly from Sunday school.
The moon, glowing brightly in its turn, peeked out from behind her hiding place to see whether the terrors had gone and let her be. Seeing that the maleficent wind still ferried the whispers in circles around the homes of unsuspecting saints, she dimmed her shine and backed away out of sight, leaving Jennifer St. Joy to her own devices.
A stiff bare branch pecked at the pane of her tiny window. She started at the sudden sound. It scratched out a message three times, then fell away with a new gust of wind.
Reassuring herself that odd weather was nothing to fash about, she settled again, her heart slowing down once more.
But lo, a footfall, faint and terrifying.
Liquid fear bubbled up beneath her frozen skin, warming her everywhere. Her blood pulsed in her ears.
A sharp clap of harsh thunder. A shriek as it pierced the silent night. Another hellish bellow as the veil was torn and the full dominance of the night unleashed itself.
Another footfall. Distinctly closer. A creak of a cracked floorboard rang out. As loud as the demon inhabitants of the wind outside.
Silence.
Then a booming crash as her bedroom door was flung open with such violent force she thought the house would crumble down and crush her. The sharp sound of puncture to the wall by the doorknob had been overpowered by the boom, but she surmised what had happened from David’s sudden jerk on the door from the other side. He yanked at it, and tugged hard, groaning as he did until it finally came loose and the door could swing freely again.
She felt, rather than saw in the blackness, him stare at her. Demon eyes searching and scanning for her figure in the bed.
“Now.”
Excerpt 8, Part 3
Passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling crime that happened in my own immediate family:
She was immovably sure that the monster had returned, fangs wet and shiny and dripping with the blood of the last teenage woman he’d kidnapped, played house with, and killed. She could sense his approach, and their imminent need to decide whether to fight or flee. Inside this moment though, she shoved her son mercilessly behind an actual toilet, squishing him down amid his cries of surprise and confusion, ignoring his protests. She crouched as well, but beside him, holding him down in his crumpled shape, depending on the porcelain toilet to stand between him and his attacker when that time came.
When a set of fingers gripped the rusted metal door handle, she could feel the prickle of deathly suspense in her every bone. This was it. Her final fighting moment had thus arrived.
The massively heavy door swung open, and footsteps marked that someone’d entered in. A young black girl in fact, maybe eighteen or nineteen years of age. Jennifer nearly melted under the release of such a mix of emotion and pent up tension. The girl was fairly trim, wearing ill fitting jeans below a tight red and yellow t-shirt that revealed much of her slightly flabby midsection.
“Um, Mrs. Lancey?” the girl began by way of introduction. “Are you Mrs. Lancey? Ma’am your husband is waiting outside for you and he said to come in and tell you to come out. He said that you’re pregnant and it’s not good for you to be in here so long where he can’t take care of you.”
“Girl! Girl!” Jennifer very nearly shouted back to her in joy and relief, and stood up, releasing her bear grip on Jacob. As she rose, she revealed to the girl a perfectly plump baby belly of eight months’ making. “My girl,” she attempted, before realizing that more words were going to be necessary to quite explain. She took a deep breath, fighting off a choke sensation from all the different sentences competing to be let out first. “Young girl. My name is not Mrs. Lancey. That man is not my husband. His name is David, he is my kidnapper. He took me and my son a long time ago and I have been missing from my family and living in his house as his prisoner, we both have.” She gestured to the terrified little boy, still hiding behind the rusted toilet and timidly peering out, physically quivering.
Within two moments, the girl had dashed out of the bathroom and muffled screams could be heard by Jennifer from inside. She was terribly unsure how to interpret what was currently going on. She imagined the girl, unfit to handle such a revelation, acting rashly and attempting to take on David by herself. She pictured the skinny frame climbing him, claws out and teeth bared. And losing. She pictured her losing that battle with one easy swipe of his paw. Or she imagined the girl, and this scenario was tremendously worse, running scared as far away from this mess as she could. Which wouldn’t necessarily be cause to blame her, but it would be an open invitation to the monster to thrash his way in and reclaim his escaped prize.
Jennifer was jolted out of any imagining though, by the smash of the door against the white plaster wall as it forcefully swung open, revealing in the door frame a burly black man with a modestly small, curly afro. The door was so defiantly heavy, yet he tossed it easily from closed to open like he was batting at a falling feather.
“Mrs. Lancey, have you been kidnapped?” he roughly bellowed in her direction. Then he spied the folded, cowering boy. “Little boy, have you been kidnapped? Mrs. Lancey, have you been kidnapped?” He repeated his questions with an increasing measure of concern and deepening note of agitation. He was her rescuer, fierce and strong. It was clear his intentions were to physically insert himself between the girl, the boy, and the sorry looking bastard outside who stood accused of the crime.
After gentling down into a more approachable form of hero, the bulky weightlifter lowered down as far as he could on his tree trunk legs, and reached out a thick hand to coax the little boy out from behind the toilet, all the while cooing to him that everything was going to be ok. The man paused for a minute before opening the door again to rearrange their order, positioning himself in front of the two victims, so that he would open the door and be the first to encounter whatever was on the other side.
And a massive uproar on the other side it was. In the time that the interaction inside the women’s restroom had taken place, at least a dozen more men had gathered outside, not counting the female students. All appeared to be of college age, or perhaps slightly older. All except two were African American in color, which Jennifer had expected to be the case after her first escape attempt showed her that she was located deep in the heart of a racially homogenous hub. She stood out like a white light bulb, even in the middle of the sun soaked daylight, all white skin and light blonde hair and shamrock eyes. And small frame. The men that had gathered were all particularly footballish in size, excessively beefy and extremely formidable. And she never felt safer, or more protected, or more at home, or more deeply, lovingly protected than here inside this minute.
A light touch came to perch tentatively on her shoulder. “Ma’am?” said the voice of Rose. When Jennifer looked up, Rose’s delicate fingers let go instantly as she pulled her hand back and silently seemed to reprimand it for being so bold. “Ma’am I’m so sorry ma’am.”
Rose was unnaturally timid, and most unusually at a loss for words. “I can’t believe I…” she trailed off, clearly physically unable to further describe the horror she had inflicted on the kidnap victim. Jennifer came into herself, and rose above the clamour of the swelling crowd to step atop her pain and forgive the young girl. Who, she noted with surprise, wasn’t nearly as young as she’d thought after all. She was a college student, obviously in attendance here at whatever campus she now stood beside, at the adjoining bus depot.
“You are totally forgiven,” she said with every gentleness in the world. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t know. You did everything you could to help me and that’s quite alright dear.” Though she was a fair few years younger than the Rose of the family floral shop, she spoke with an elder tone, showing every love to the girl who would have jumped to help in far a different way, had she known that that’s what was required of her. She wrapped her lankily thin arms around her friend then, and quietly returned to the circled crowd of students whence she came.
Everybody seemed to be talking at once, which to her surprise, didn’t overwhelm Jennifer or even Jacob in the least. He could sense too that he was in the presence of protectors. And fierce ones at that. One such protector did step away from the hubbub of activity and pull her aside. He was interested to know a few more specifics and find out what exact kind of situation he and his friends had all just interfered with. Jennifer worded her story as accessibly as possible, choosing to leave out the more gruesome details out of respect for her listeners, while still conveying that the man they now physically held by the arms in their terrific grip was of the devil himself. As she talked, more and more ears perked to the sound of her voice, and a growing hush fell over the continuously gathering crowd, more and more students noticing the commotion and coming over to involve themselves.
“My name is Jennifer St. Joy. I am sixteen years old." She wiped an escaped tear with forceful ferocity, and pointed to the man trapped in place by many black hands. "I was kidnapped a year ago by that man.”
Excerpt 8, Part 2
Passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling crime that happened in my own immediate family:
He saw her immediately, with the two of them naught but walking down the street, no trees or alley ways to weave around and hide themselves. The monster sped up, obviously submitting himself to blind rage and entering into vicious predatorial pursuit.
He veered his car recklessly into oncoming traffic, other motorists honking angrily and swerving out of his way. His car was near to aiming up at the sidewalk now, where Jacob and Jennifer pregnantly sprinted. A loud pop sound as David careened up the curb narrowly avoided some terrible obstacle Jennifer didn’t have time to turn around and check out. A slender alleyway materialized on her right, and fierce protective instinct had her hurling her son up and into it, clearing him out of the sidewalk path, and thus, out of David’s murderous way. She followed him in, noting with relief that the alley was too narrow for any car to fit. This bought her an amount of time, as David would have to exit his vehicle first before resuming chase. And that was only if he discovered them there.
They paused for some seconds as Jennifer scanned and registered every gamepiece at play here. While calculating her next move, she spied with utter joy the passing of David’s blue car in front of them, the driver not noticing his victims peeking out from behind a dumpster. He continued to drive on, Jennifer letting out a huge panting breath as he accelerated out of sight. After additional minutes, Jeana and Jacob exited out from their hiding place and back onto the busy street, which showed no signs of the terrorizing road rager that had just passed through, hellbent on murdering a young woman and her young son.
Still hurrying with unstoppable rush toward the bus depot she could barely make out in the distance, Jennifer held tight to Jacob’s arm and waddled forward. She had just enough room in her brain beyond her singular purpose to notice some sort of school campus beginning to appear all around them. She seemed to walking deeper into it the further down the blocks they went. The dilapidated houses were fading out behind them, and being replaced by vast grassy fields, and metal link fences, and tall brick buildings with every manner of label and lettering.
Finally, the bus depot, and a large cork board with schedules and notices and fliers all pinned up everywhere around it. She and Jacob pulled up in front of it and stopped at last, both catching their breath and stabilizing the dizzy spin in their heads from the lifesaving run. But not thirty seconds had passed when hypersensitivity set in, and knee jerk instinct had Jeana grabbing hold of her son and dragging him through into a heavy set wooden door marked Women.
Excerpt 8, Part 1
Passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling crime that happened in my own immediate family:
With false labor occurring every few days in the time following her most recent escape attempt, the increasingly alarming pain of which paralyzing Jenny and terrifying Jacob, the former resolved that no better opportunity would come along, and that she would simply have to go it again, come what may.
Early the next morning, sleepy eyed and still drooping from the night’s fitful sleep, David found Jeannie serving mashed banana bites to her son on his high chair box, and she was wrapped in a blanket. The blanket was far oversized for her small frame, soft and fluffy in texture, and patterned in black and white. It also appeared to be stifling her. She didn’t appear cold by any definition, at least, not cold enough to warrant going about the daily routine wrapped in thick bedding.
“Why are you…” David began to inquire with genuine curiosity, but stopped, shrugging it off, evidently deciding that finding out the answer was not worth the effort it took to ask.
With the click of the bolt behind David’s departure, Jennifer had dropped the thick blanket, releasing a superabundance of pent up heat that had been choking her inside its wrap, making her sweat. She took Jacob’s hand in hers and scooted him forward off the box, down onto the floor. With her left hand, she scooped up the uneaten banana, all squishy yellow mass of it making a regrettable sticky mess on her cupped palm. And this was all she now grabbed, nothing but herself and her children, and her son’s leftover mush breakfast.
Outside, the dawn was only breaking, a hazy gray midnight sky giving way to a peach and pink sunrise. The air smelled crisp and new, the cool air chilling the sweat from Jennifer’s skin. The mother and son stomped down the broken wooden steps once again, and made the familiar right turn. They veritably ran. Jenny waddled with her baby as she marched down that run down street, Jacob tripping at her heels to keep up, utterly confused as to what strange adventure was happening around him this time.
Passing by the front door stoop of 729 Trinity Street, Jenny yielded to another false contraction. Though familiar with it now, that didn’t make them any less painful, or any less shattering. Each time, her baby girl’s life flashed before her eyes; each time, she conjured an image of the ultimate consequence, with no access to medical care to save her life if something really had gone wrong this time. But this contraction didn’t stop her. She merely slowed her pace, bent down forward, hands on her knees, accidentally jerking Jacob down, whose wrist she always grasped, and let it pass, standing back up and hurrying forward to make up for lost time.
When the baby was done pretending she was being born, the worst imaginable sight came into focus in front of Jennifer. A long, blue, convertible Buick Skylark was just turning the corner, with none other than David Lancey at the wheel. Somewhere, a miscalculation had been committed, or she’d just plum screwed up. She had no way of knowing his route to work, or knowing any semblance of schedule, or knowing whether he’d forgotten something and what it was. She’d just gotten very very unlucky.
Page 2 Dear Journal
I am hiding behind the blue sofa. I can’t come out right now because mom and dad are fighting. So it’s good if I just stay here and wait for them to finish. We’re all in the living room together, but they can’t see me because I am hiding behind the blue sofa. Since my teacher Miss Padilla said it’s good to write in a journal every day, that’s why I’m doing this. I don’t really want to though. Miss Padilla says that’s how you become a good writer who can articulate his thoughts with clarity and presizion. I don’t know what an articulate is, but I guess if she wants us to be one, then we should try. I always try to get good grades in Miss Padilla’s class. She is very nice and very pretty.
I like school. My friend Brett and I are in the same class together. We usually sit together at lunch too, but not very much lately because Brett is in band and he has alot of band friends that all sit together at lunch. Today at lunch Brett sat with me though. He told me that his parents are on vacation in Idaho to visit his mom’s sister. His nanny is taking care of him and his sisters at home. I don’t think Brett likes his parents very much, he always talks about them like theyre not very nice people. He likes his nanny though. Her name is Clare and I’ve seen her and me and Brett both think she is very pretty and very nice.
At lunch today Brett said that because his nanny is staying with him at their house while his parents are on a trip, that he could come over after school to do homework. His mom would defiantely never let him do that if she was at home. So I said I would ask my mom and he could come over. We didn’t get a lot of homework done though. We played dawn of Dragons on the TV in my room for a while, and then we got hungry and went downstairs to find some microwave macaroni and cheese. We were sitting on the blue couch eating the macaroni, but then it sounded like my dad was home at the front door. My dad is very strickt and he gets real mad if I eat on the couch because I spill a lot. So as soon as me and brett heard the door jingle, we jumped off the couch and hid behind it so he wouldn’t see us.
But then Brett’s mom came in. It was her and my dad AND my mom. all 3 of them came in and they were all yelling real loud and talking alot of stuff all on top of each other. Me and Brett were real confused and kind of scared because we didn’t understand what was going on.
Me and Brett just looked at each other and he picked up my blue school journal and wrote a message inside it. We didn’t want to talk out loud because then they might hear us and that would mess up everything. He wrote on the first page “what are they yelling about???” but I didn’t write back because I didn’t know the answer. I just looked at him at shrugged my shoulders and we went back to listening. So that’s why I started this journal entry on the second page because Brett wrote on the first page.
Then all of a sudden Brett’s mom appeared behind the blue sofa where we were sitting and drugged him up by the arm. She must have jerked him real hard because he screamed or maybe he was just surprised because we didn’t hear her coming. She shouted at my dad about if he wants to just sit and wait for the monsters to come then he can but she’s not going to let her family die.
I thought she was in Idaho to see her sister with Brett’s dad but I guess not. Brett didn’t even get a chance to look at me because his mom pulled him up so fast and then he was gone and his mom took him out the front door and it slammed shut. I don’t know if my mom and dad know that I’m still back here, but I’m not gonna come out after how mad Brett’s mom is. They’re still yelling and she is saying what are we going to do Jim (that’s my dad’s real name) and he is saying about the van doesn’t have any gas in it and the roads out of town are blocked anyway by the city offishals. Anyway so that’s why I’m writing in my journal like Miss Padilla says. I’m just going to wait back here until either my parents say it’s ok to come out and I won’t get in trouble about the macaroni on the sofa or until Brett comes back or until the monsters come. I don’t know which.
Hidden Battles
Written for a writing prompt that said...
The hidden battles
The poor girl plunged her hand into her pocket, wrapping her shaky fingers around the $20 bill. She fingered its grimy flat surfaces, petting inside each fold and crease. She desperately dug through her trove of regular excuses, panicked, grasping for one she hadn't already used. "I left my wallet at home," she toyed with, and, "I don't get my allowance til Thursday." But neither would work believably, not again.
The poor girl stared into the eyes of her friends, praying for a distraction that would pull focus from the impending purchase. A cell phone ring. Or the sound of a mannequin toppling over. Or a fire. But nothing happened. Instead, the poor girl remained awkwardly stuck inside the moment, heartbroken and torn apart over what to do.
"I can't afford it." Would they still like her if she said it? Now she'll never be forced to find out.
The poor girl slid her mother's birthday across the counter, and into the hands of the cashier.