Checking In, Still Alive and Still Working
To all of you wonderful people who have asked, yes, I am alive. And yes, I really should be blogging more often. It’s just…you know, nothing happens around here. I sleep, I drink coffee, I write and I paint. I know it’s taking me a long time to get the new FNAF fanfiction book up and ready to go, but I swear I’m working on it. The problem is, I don’t start writing at the beginning and go on until the end. I write whatever scene is clearest in my mind, and I rarely bother myself to think about how it even fits into the plot. This has led to some interesting twists and turns in all my books, but more importantly, it meant that with this one, I have finished the latter half of the book before really putting much work into the first half.
I have three hundred pages of New Faces, Old Bones good to go, but the beginning bits of the book are still pretty patchy, and as I work on them, I create ripples in the story that sometimes need to be smoothed out or at least noted so I can work them into the timeline. All of which I tell you so that I can tell you once again that just because I’m not posting progress doesn’t mean I’m not making progress. It’s just slow. And backwards.
This was supposed to be the year I got my shit together, remember? Yeah, I had a hearty laugh at that, too.
But I am working and to prove it, here is another sneak peek, in which Ana is asleep and dreaming of herself as a child. Her mother has brought her to a great glass castle and now she is lost deep in the maze of its halls, but now she hears something and has followed the sound to an open door, and on the other side is a man she will not meet again for twenty years…
***
The man was crying and although he did it in a dark room away from other people, he was not really trying to hide it. He sobbed with his whole body, shivering, coughing, rocking. One hand wiped at his eyes. The other he kept clutched at his chest, as a small child will cup a scraped knee or pinched finger, holding what hurt the most.
For a long time, Ana only watched, fascinated in spite of her unease, the crying man as captivating in his own way as a dead lizard teeming with ants. She had the feeling he was not a stranger, although she did not know him. Her recognition came from a deeper place than just as someone she might have seen in town. It was as if she had dreamed him to life. ‘He sang to me once,’ she thought, but could not imagine where or how such a thing could have truly happened.
Then, deep in the house, she heard the slamming of a door and her mother’s shout, and fear gripped her. Ana had run, which was a bad thing, and there was nothing worse except to be found, as she must be found, but of all places, she could not be found here. The forbiddeness of the room was stamped into every surface. She was not sure what could be worse than to be hit and put back in the closet, but if little Ana had learned nothing else in her short life, it was that there was always something worse. She did not want her mother to find her here, so she had to make the crying man be quiet before her mother heard him.
Slipping further into the room, Ana closed the door. The man did not seem to hear the soft sound it made or her footsteps on the dark floorboards, but the next time his hand moved away from his eyes, he did notice the light that had come in from the hall was gone. He looked at the bookcases where it had been, then turned his head and saw her.
He wasn’t just a man, but an old man. He was not very wrinkled, but the wrinkles he had were deep. They made crooked channels for his tears to travel in, like the miniature canyons that formed out in the desert after a hard rain. And although he had mostly stopped crying when he saw Ana, at least so loudly, the tears kept coming. He did not appear to notice at first (was that how it was with boys? Did it break something inside them to never cry when they were younger, so that when they got old, the tears came out through their cracks, whether they meant to or not?), but after one of the tears made over his chin and dripped onto his neck, he fumbled out a small sort of napkin from his jacket pocket and wiped his eyes. He couldn’t do it very well. His hands were shaking.
Ana went to him as Aunt Easter had come to her so many times in the past and took the napkin from him. It was cloth, not paper, and felt very fine in her hands, but it had been his idea, so she guessed it was okay to keep using it.
She reached up, cupping the back of his neck just above his stiff white collar, and he let her pull him down where she could better reach. She did not shush him or sing the Cheer-Up song—that seemed inappropriate to do to a grown-up to her small-child sensibilities—but she wiped his cheek, blowing on his tears as Aunt Easter blew on hers when she cried.
He did not speak either, only watched her. Up close, she could see his eyes were pink from crying, but also very blue—a pale, painted-on shade of blue, brighter and bluer than David’s eyes. His skin beneath the tears and wrinkles was also pale, possibly the palest she’d ever seen in Mammon, where families gardened and children played outside and sunburns were a part of life, no matter how much banana oil your aunt rubbed on you. His hair was boy-short and unbrushed, blond where it was not white, with pale specks of stubble on his jaw that made a raspy sound under her napkin. That, and the smaller sounds of breath, his and hers, were all she could hear. He smelled of good smells—laundry smells and perfume smells, different from the ones her aunt used, but still good. She had only ever been this close to one other man, a man with whom she had always felt safe, and so she felt safe with this one, too, even if he was a stranger.
When she was done wiping and he was done crying, Ana gave him back his napkin. As he folded it into a triangle and put it away, she looked around, then took down a stuffed Freddy from the only shelf she could sort of reach (she had to climb onto the wide arm of a chair) and gave it to him.
“Oh,” he said, accepting it. His voice was deep and rumbly in his chest, almost like the real Freddy, or as real as he was to Ana on the tapes Aunt Easter made for her. That sense of dream-like recognition grew stronger. He touched the tiny hat sewn to the soft toy’s head and looked at her gravely. “Thank you.”
Ana nodded, once more uncomfortably aware that she was not where she should be now that the man’s crying had been attended to and the immediate threat had passed. She turned to go, and at once, he reached out for her, not to catch and shake, but merely to touch the tips of his fingers to the back of her hand and swiftly take them away again.
“Did your aunt bring you?”
He pronounced it oddly, not like the bug, but to rhyme with ‘haunt’. Nevertheless, Ana knew what he meant and shook her head ‘no’. It did not occur to her to wonder how he knew Aunt Easter. Children are, by their nature, egocentric creatures. As prodigious as she might be in other areas of her development, Ana was yet of an age when she believed everyone she met knew everyone she knew. And so she did not doubt he would also know what it meant when she whispered, “Mama.”
He did not look afraid—grown-ups did not get afraid—but he looked at her like he knew why she was. Again, he reached, this time shifting the curtain beside him at the same time so that the snow-bright day struck her in the face, blinding her. He looked at her as if she were pictures in one of the storybooks Aunt Easter read to her—Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, Rumplestiltskin—and when he touched her cheek, his thin, oddly rough fingers unerringly brushed across the place that hurt the most.
“Does she hit you?” he asked and somehow that was scarier than any other question he could have asked, just because he knew to ask. No matter how urgently Ana shook her head, the old man’s frown only deepened. He knew already. He knew the secret and he knew the lie.
Ana pulled away from him and fled to the door, but when she opened it, she could hear her mother, not close but not far, shouting and swearing. She hesitated, afraid to stay and feel her lies pulled out, afraid to go and meet her mother.
“Don’t run,” the man said, still seated, making no effort to chase her if she did. “You mustn’t run from monsters. If you have hope, then hide. If you have none, then fight, but you must never run.”
Ana looked back at him, standing tensely on her bare toes, ready to bolt. “You’re not a monster,” she said, whispering so her mother could not hear.
“I’m not? Well.” The old man looked down into the Freddy-bear’s plastic eyes. When he looked up again, the lines on his face seemed deeper. “That’s good to know.”
