| General Fiction posted May 13, 2024 |
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Someone, or something?
My Stalker
by Wayne Fowler
The Stalker Contest Winner
I reached a rough spot. Couldn’t quite figure how to get another antagonist into the story now that I’d effectively dealt with the villain. With life aplenty left in my protagonist, it would be a long, predictable, and totally boring spell until the happily ever after. If I wanted to keep an audience, I needed some tension.
As I’ve learned over the years, I needed to walk. In the house, I would pace, but given the opportunity, walking served better. I could nearly predict the point in my walk when my main character would find something: meeting someone, or being confronted by something. Generally, it was when I left the lane and entered the woods. I don’t recall a time that I couldn’t sit back down to the laptop and hammer out a thousand words or so. And I do mean hammer. I’ve pounded off the letters on more than half the keys.
With few deviations, my protagonist is Ohmie, a nickname earned by his adventures with electricity: amps, volts, and ohms – Ohmie.
The very first Ohmie story involved Jimmy Buffett. Not literally, but literarily. Ohmie was seven years old and after getting an unrequested taste of lightning’s electricity, he learned that all Earth's electrical field would be harvested by the Eullalas, aliens who’d ionized planet Earth millennia past. Earth owed its polarity and electrical currents to the Eullalas, and they were coming to harvest their crop.
I learned all this on a walk. Reaching a derelict fence, one that I’d stepped over a hundred times, I was gently sparked, making contact with an ancient electric fence wire. It had never before been active, and I couldn’t see now, in its dilapidated condition, how it worked at all.
Well, I saw my character excitedly stopping the Eullalas. Rightful ownership aside. Ohmie knew that we here on Earth would not favor losing our juice. Something had to be done. Only seven, Ohmie knew he would need help. Unable to get the President’s or any of his generals' attention, he turned his efforts to private enterprise. And that meant money – Warren Buffett kind of money.
But making one of the only mistakes of his life, Ohmie called Jimmy Buffett instead of Warren. No matter. Jimmy was on board and together they built a device capable of repelling the Eullalas and saving the Earth and all her inhabitants, all humanity.
Thanks to the shock of an electric wire that should not have held a charge.
Ohmie story after Ohmie story came to me during my walks. It was as if Ohmie himself was walking along, leading me, watching me, following me. Sometimes I would abruptly stop and do a 360. All I ever detected was another idea for a new Ohmie tale: a kite hung up in a tree, a stick made into a spear, a rock chiseled to the shape of a wheel, the sound of a wobbling boxcar wheel.
But Ohmie stories weren’t the only thing I wrote. And Ohmie wasn’t always a youth. He grew and developed. Not linearly, he time-hopped from caveman days to the present and back and forth, hitting historical highlights coming and going. Some other stories were novel-length, several as a matter of fact. But while the characters might not have been Ohmie, most were close enough to be cousins.
Walks lately, I find myself talking to Ohmie, asking him what he thinks about such and such: would he consider a rival, would he be interested in a romance, how about being the villain? To the last, I sensed a firm no.
Even though I felt Ohmie’s presence, as I said, leading me, trailing me, observing from the flanks, I never saw him. That, I’m sure, would reach into the psychotic. Ohmie certainly never replied to my discourse. But if it wasn’t him stalking me, then who was it? I was beginning to shorten my walks, sometimes afraid to begin them. My walking would appear to an observer to be that of one struck by a paranoia bug. Maybe there was a stalker, and Ohmie merely lived in my brain.
Once again I was at a rough spot in my writing, a situation particularly difficult plot-wise trying to figure how to plausibly arrange a shootout. The spot turned out to be days long, soon reaching into weeks. My route became a well-worn path. Adding to my frustration, my stalker was gaining on me. I could feel him. It was time to do something different.
I drove my car up the lane, pulling off into the weeds at the point that my path entered the woods. When I exited the car, I was reversed. The outside temperature was sufficiently cool that my discomfort was minimal. With a toboggan pulled completely over my face, and my cap on backwards, as was my pillowy winter coat, I exited the car backward and walked backward with my attire arranged as if I was going forward, as normal as I could manage.
I saw him. For the first time I saw my stalker. He was gaining on me. About my own age and very nearly my own size, he wore neither coat nor hat. His walk was a soundless glide. Though he walked, his feet didn’t seem to touch ground. As my poorly-controlled mind was wont to do, I pictured the Michael Jackson moonwalk. (Progressing backward along the trail, stopping my reverse movement and leaping forward, which appeared backward based on my cap and coat, I bound onto him, wrapping him with my arms and legs.) Onto his back, and then mine, we rolled and scuffled, tussling our way down the gentle slope of a hillside. Finally, I had him pinned to the trunk of an old sweet gum, its root structure protruding from the ground like an old man’s knuckles and bony fingers.
“Ah-hah! Caught you! Who are you, and what do you want?” Intending to scare him into believing that I could hurt him, I sank my strangling fingers into his throat. Blinking back disbelief, my clutching fingers met their counterparts, left caressing right. Scissor-locking his torso, my legs pinched him in two. Still, though, he smiled a smile of brotherly friendliness.
Without moving his lips or mouth, the man clearly said, “Don’t kill your muse!”
The Stalker Contest Winner |
"Kill your darlings" - coined by either William Faulkner or Allen Ginsberg and popularized by Stephen King - "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."
Thanks to Fan Art for lynnkah's 'Bump in the Road'
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and 2 member cents. Thanks to Fan Art for lynnkah's 'Bump in the Road'
Artwork by lynnkah at FanArtReview.com
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© Copyright 2024. Wayne Fowler All rights reserved.
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