Cinderella 2.0

And so Charming held out his hand and the horse-drawn carriage with which he was to carry his new bride away screeched to a halt.

"You imbecile, I distinctly remember telling you that you were to stop just before the ratty little cobblestones outside that run-down house!"

Without waiting for his snotty little driver to reply, he flicked his shoulder-length, perfectly-coiffed hair over his tailored shoulder piece and descended daintily onto the filthy streets of the district.

"Lay out your coat for me to walk on, my shoes are new today."

His aforementioned "imbecile driver" (otherwise known as Ivan) sighed mentally.

"Well, aren't they new every day..."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I meant to say, 'Right away, Sire'."

Ivan bent forward and mentally told him to shove off, all while smiling as pleasantly as he could and laying out his best coat on the floor. Charming tossed his hair again and strode across Ivan's coat, making sure to grind it further into the cobblestone dirt with each step. Flinging open the doors of the cottage dramatically, he stood arms akimbo, all the while smiling Charmingly™ at the astounded residents of the house.

And waited.

And waited.

After about three seconds, his patience had worn thin.

"IMBECILE, WHERE'S THE WIND?!"

"Right away, Sire."

The weary Ivan ran forward and fanned Charming furiously, causing his ridiculously unnecessary cape to flutter gorgeously in the "wind".

All natural handsomeness, you see.

And Charming was pleased.

Satisfied, he strode snobbishly along the dusty ground of the house, loudly declaring a desire to meet with the "fair maiden who was able to fit into the glass slippers".

An awkwardly beautiful young lady stepped forward, and Charming's heart fluttered like a teenager's. This was her. He'd know her anywhere.

Her shiny hair resembled spun gold, and her complexion was as fair as fresh cream. Her nose, delicate and adorable, provided a lovely balance to the unabashed fullness of her lightly flushed lips. He sighed appreciatively, eyes trailing down to her tiny waist. The tight bodice she wore accentuated her beautiful shapeliness delightfully, and he delighted at the perkiness of her ample bosom.

His tone softened almost immediately. "Beauty, whatever is your name?"

"Ella," she replied, too shy to meet his eye.

At this moment, Ivan came rushing in, glass slipper in hand.

"Sire..."

However, Ella looked up at the sudden intrusion, and Ivan caught her eye. Their breaths hitched simultaneously, and Ivan nearly dropped the shoe.

"Ivan, pass me the shoe," Charming declared pompously, annoyed at the constant eye contact between the two.

In a flash, Charming had slipped the glass shoe onto Ella's foot, and was making eyes at her. "Oh, my fair lady, your foot is truly a perfect fit. You must come back to my palace and be my lawful wedded wife!"

She blanched. "I'm sorry, Your Highness. I...can't. There is another man."

His heart sank. "Who, pray ask, is this man so unworthy of your honorable love?"

Bashfully, she sidled over to Ivan. This time, it was Charming's turn to go completely pale.

"Him?!"

Ivan shrugged. "Well, you could always fire me, Sire, I'm getting too old to work anyway."

Combined with Ella's torturingly pleading eyes, Charming couldn't help but give in.

"Very well."

Dejected, Charming turned around and left, leaving Ella and Ivan in privacy. Just as Ivan was about to carry Ella off into the romantic sunset, a booming voice spoke for the last time from the doorway.

"Just one kiss, though?"

"No, Sire."

Charming pouted. "Fine, then I want the shoe back."

Strategy #1056

She plops down beside me; I inwardly groan. Once again, she makes the unwise decision of starting a conversation when I am busy.

"Are you busy?"

I look sideways at her, raise an eyebrow, and continue writing, hoping the answer will be evident.

She stares at me expectantly and blinks.

Apparently not evident, then.

She abruptly decides my answer is taking too long to arrive, and continues anyway. "Do you like my hair?"

Not once do I take my eyes off my pencil, but I nod once curtly in a futile attempt to satisfy her vanity.

She frowns and tilts her head to the side. "Why do you never talk?"

My pencil stops moving on the sheet of paper. She is making me very cross.

"Are you shy?" she offers hopefully.

I place my pencil down and turn to face her. "Why do you never shut up?"

She gasps in an offended manner (causing a twisted sort of amusement to slice through me), and it appears to be effective, because she tosses her hair and leaves in a huff.

I mentally file my question away for future use.

03:00

*****************************************

Midnight in the city. He shifted in his seat on the back of the bus. His hands digging into the subtly grime covered pseudo cushions he sat upon, he stared out the window.

They said the city never sleeps, the unearthly orange glow of the streetlights confirmed it, forming a highway in the darkness where the shadows fled. Still, there was a quiet about the night and a strange way where every single sound made by the creaking vehicle which was carrying him onwards echoed out beneath the starless grey sky.

He found his body pressed slightly uncomfortably against the left window as the bus turned, off the highway and onto another long straight road. The lights were dimmer, the blackness closer and endless, broken only by the occasional hanging branch or overgrown leaf hanging out from behind its veil.

On and on the bus travelled, the seats swaying up and down in an almost rhythmic fashion, down that long winding road. Its two headlights forming two ovalish pools of brightness before the slow moving vehicle. A spot of brightness in a world of nothing. The darkness closed in on the bus, and so did time.

He awoke to find himself alone on the bus. He was the only passenger. Rubbing his bleary eyes he checked his watch. 3:00 a.m. He looked beyond the glass and saw the moon in the sky, but nothing else.

The moon. The road. The bus. The constant lights.

The bus no longer bobbed up and down, but he could feel the hum of the engine, and could see the streetlamps passing by. He looked through the windscreen of the bus and saw the road stretching out into forever, disappearing as the gloom swallowed it up, the edge of darkness never closer than it was before though the bus steadily travelled forwards.

It isn't, his mind whispered to him.

Something was definitely wrong, bus services didn't run at this time anyway, and though he had probably missed his stop, he was sure that he would have at least picked something familiar out in the landscape.

The landscape. There was none, none that he could see. Just the moon, the streetlamps and the road; the latter two long blended and blurred into insignificance, till they became as constant as the moon itself. Unchanging.

He rose unsurely from his seat, tottering as he stood more from uncertainty than the fresh tingling sensation of cramped limbs. Pushing past two empty seats and a pole, he paused halfway down the aisle, his footsteps sounding hollowly against the floor, dominating the relative silence of the bus.

"Hello...?" he called out to the bus driver hidden from his view and got no reply. He stood there, straining for any sound beyond the by now all too familiar. The engine kept humming as panic and fear slowly began to grow within him.

Hesitantly he took another step forward, and his foot impacted the floor like an anvil. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and he waited. Silence.

As he crept his way forward very soon he began to make out a figure hunched over the steering wheel. It didn't move, but only kept it's eyes forward, staring straight into the road ahead. He couldn't make anything out in the distance either.

He would've called out, but again his mind screamed at him that something was wrong. Even so, he found himself right behind it and reached out a hand. He stopped short of it's shoulder and paused. He stood there, almost as if in a trance, caught between his fear of what would happen, and struggling against his need to end his predicament. Suddenly it became very clear in his mind that his situation was certainly very out of the ordinary.

Uncertainty and trepidation blossomed into fear and full blown panic as he stumbled away. Away from that thing which he was certain was not human, as far away as he could. Back, back to where he had been, the seat at the back. He shivered as he settled back into the cramped space, sitting upright in his seat he watched the unchanging nothing beyond the window and the moon far and beyond, ever changing but still the same. And as the cold descended on him, he found his eyes tiring, the dread and gloom creeping up on him ever so slowly. He huddled up in his sweater, pulling the folds tighter around him.

Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, it did not matter. His watch had stopped working at 3:01 a.m. and there was no one to tell him how much time had passed. The moon would not. The sun would not. He reached to scratch his back, but then realised that his arm could not move, and so he closed his eyes and went to sleep, surrendering to the dark even as he felt the chilling numbness spread throughout his limbs.

********************************

So I cheated, hah wrote this quite some time back.

Maybe it's because I haven't been writing for too long, but what came so easily to me and looked not very good seems a lot better I suppose.

I wrote this story after being inspired by a half remembered legend of a "twilight zone" where travellers on random highways in australia or malaysia ended up driving on a road that never ended.

My hero doesn't face his monster, partly because he isn't a hero. He's just a poor soul, like you or me. Sadly, most of us aren't hero material. Deal with it. :D

Mundane Horrors

This story is 90% true.

And my goodness did I encounter a lot of strange people on public transport that day.

If only it ended where the story did.

**********************************************

So our precocious hero once again found himself on his way to the bus stop, not knowing what horrors lay ahead of him.

As he would later find out, much.

Too much.

He slid past the slow-moving couple, the kind that you see, walk behind and curse at on every pavement and couldn't help but crack a wry smile when he saw the big bold words in electric blue font on the back of the guy's sports shirt :

Breast stroker

Tanjong Katong Swimming Club

He slid his way onto the bench at the stop, nestling himself tightly on the only available space in between the aunties and their huge bags of vegetables when his danger sense began to tingle.

Frowning, he looked up and saw nothing. The bus stop was crowded, but there was nothing interesting of note, no-one interesting of note. Then he noticed her. Stoned out expression, super thick plastic nerdy kiddy looking red glasses, messy hair and buck teeth. She plonked herself on the far end of the bench for all of two seconds.

Then she got up and stretched, as those super slim, super tanned fitness instructors in skimpy outfits tend to do on "fitness" channels where most of the audience had to be male, staring vapidly to the left, paying no attention whatsoever to the right, which incidentally, happened to be the direction the buses were all coming from.

In any case, she was harmless he thought. A little weird but harmless. That feeling soon changed when she stretched again, upwards this time, lifting her danky looking black top, which he suspected was the only reason why he could not see stains of uncontemplatable nature on it, to reveal her wrinkly pale stomach.

Just then, a bus pulled up; not his. He watched in horror as almost everyone in the stop promptly rose to their feet and queued up to get into the bus, leaving three people in the stop. Him, exercise lady, and an excessively pretty girl on his left, who seemed oblivious to the danger about to befall her.

Most honestly its not like he liked to stare at her and observe the unnatural colour of her belly, however if he was going to catch his bus, he would have to look to his right, and hopefully past her, and not at her.

Empty bus-stops however, rarely stay empty, much to the consternation of our now endangered hero. He could only watch and scream silently in his head as exercise lady, despite her heavy exertions, which now led her to point her head at the ceiling and gape like a fish trying to breathe air every ten seconds or so, seemed to develop a sense of civic consciousness and consideration for others, leading her to move in from the edge of the bench. Towards him.

As he moved closer to the left of the bench, inching ever so slightly away from exercise lady who seemed to take every inch just as he vacated it, he realised for the first time that he had a problem. Towering over the excessively pretty girl was a man who seemed to have sawn off both his arms and grafted two massive trucks in their places. She had a boyfriend.

Caught between the invisible boundaries that boyfriends place around their girlfriends and exercise lady's intimidating flab, our hero now had a life threatening decision to make.

It was at this moment that a bus zoomed into view. Instead of a number, the electronic display on the front obnoxiously proclaimed in block letters "GONG XI FA CAI"

Thinking quick, with lightning quick reflexes our hero leapt to his feet, congratulating himself on his easy escape. Not to be thwarted, exercise lady broke her stretch and strode forward with him.

Panic seized him, what was he to do? For a second his mind conjured up images of an hour long bus ride with the wrinkly expanses of exercise lady's stomach filling half his vision. He shivered and squeezed his eyes to rid himself of the ghastly vision.

Just as the side display of the bus displaying the number came into view, his drama training took over. Feigning disappointment, he paused delicately in his step and reversed his direction, resting lightly on the seat as exercise lady obliviously sauntered over to the entrance of the bus, not noticing the hordes of people scrambling to avoid her.

As he breathed a sigh of relief, he saw the hulking cyborg step onto the bus as well, he was the only one brave enough to stand directly behind exercise lady. Looking down, he realised he was within touching distance of the girl, who was tapping away at her phone in half-excitement, utterly ignoring his presence.

Double-score.

Gothic Story

Clio was told to write a gothic story in class on the spot and this is what she came up with. She doesn’t know if it’s any good, but her teacher did read it to the class… so it should be…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The stranger leaned toward Isobel. He grinned, showing his not- so pearly whites. He reached into his pocket and took out a small knife, slightly smaller than a kitchen knife. Waving it under her nose, the stranger examined her. Already shaking uncontrollably, Isobel now began weeping with terror. He lifted her chin with his finger and placed the blade against her throat. She whimpered, likening to the sound a lost puppy makes. Curling a lock of her golden hair on his finger, he pulled her head backward.

“Please don’t hurt me!” Isobel pleaded with the stranger. “I’ll do anything you want.”

In one swift move, the stranger whipped his knife around and sliced that lock of hair.

“Don’t think you’re off the hook quite yet, love.” Sneering at Isobel, the stranger let go of her lock of hair, which drifted slowly to the grimy, dirty floor.