Commissions

enolamolloy

Chicago Trip – Short Story Fiction Commission

I was commissioned to write this, but they didn’t want to pay for the copyrights.  Given that fact, I am posting them here both to show off, and to maintain my ownership.

 

As I set my pace to match that of the overwhelming crowds around me, I tried to calm my excitement just a little.  It wouldn’t do anyone any good for me to be shouting out loud how great it felt to finally be in Chicago.  That aside, though, I was getting ahead of myself.  There was still a bus trip that I needed to make to get to the first place on my list.

From the train station, I boarded the Milwaukee bus to a little store called The Boring Store.  The name alone intrigued me, oddly enough, and I wasn’t disappointed.  The crowds were thinner here, and I could see signs on the door saying “Do not bother entering”, and “This place is seriously boring, dreary, characterless, and mundane”.  When I entered the store my eyes were greeted by a random assortment of items that were more than what they seemed.  What at first my eyes perceived to be an umbrella was, in fact, a samurai sword in disguise.  There was an entire section of the store dedicated to voice modifiers, little boxes that changed the sound of your voice as you spoke through them.  The store was filled top to bottom with all types of secret spy equipment, and a sign on the far wall read “Welcome to the Not-A-Secret-Agent-Store”.

I bought nothing there, though it was a lot of fun to look at, and after leaving boarded yet another bus a few blocks down and took that to a park.  Would that I could say that it was possible to see the city if travelling by foot, but it really was too big.  Besides, since I was avoiding some of the city’s main attractions this visit, I wouldn’t exactly be at the center of the businesses.  The park I was in was themed, very cleverly, to the Wizard of Oz.  The playground there, covered with children of many ages, had a sign near it called “Dorothy’s Playlot”.  Throughout the park, though, the best parts were the metal statues of all of the characters from the film and books.

Just a few miles south of the park was my next destination, and I decided to walk this one.  The cool wind off of Lake Michigan felt refreshing, and I had already been outside long enough to be enjoying the chill.  In the Graceland Cemetery, where many folks of renown were buried, stood a statue called Eternal Silence.  Many also called it the Statue of Death.  Covered in a long robe with a cloaked hand covering its mouth, the statue is erected in front of a black marble display.  From the angle I was at and the time of day, I could see the eerie leafless fall trees reflected on the surface behind the ghostly form.  It was eerie to say the least.  A cold breeze picked up as I stared into the statues dark face, and I decided it best to hurry to my next destination.

Turning to find my way to the next stop, I bumped into a man who had been standing just behind me.  “Excuse…” I started, but when I saw his face I hesitated.  “I…I’m sorry, I didn’t notice you there.”  The man’s face was just like the sculpture’s unhidden features, the bottom half hidden beneath a bandana.  I told myself it was to keep his nose warm, but it really wasn’t that cold this time of year.  The man stared up to me, holding out an empty cup in silence.  A chill ran through me again, but I attributed it to my overactive imagination.  I pulled out the few dollars in cash that I had on me and placed them into his cup with an uncomfortable smile.  The man looked down at the offering, then back up to me.  Lifting his free arm, he pointed off in a direction without looking.  I followed his finger with my eyes to another statue, one that I hadn’t noticed before.  When I looked back to thank him, he was gone.

I tried to let the eerie feeling subside as I made my way toward the large statue he had pointed to.  My eyes traversed the rest of the area, looking for the statue of Eternal Silence that I had stood before earlier.  The statue, like the man, seemed to have vanished.  That wasn’t possible.  I stopped, looking harder, before I realized something that secured my feeling that something was amiss.  I was no longer in the same park.  In fact, if memory served correctly, I was several miles up town from where I had been standing only moments ago.  Suddenly a statue disappearing seemed far more likely, since I couldn’t understand how I could have gone from one side of town to another without even realizing it.

When I turned back around, I found myself standing very suddenly in front of the long statue I had been directed toward.  More than a hundred feet long and at least 4 times my height, the statue depicted a hundred different faces.  In front of the statue of hundreds of people stood one figure that could not be mistaken.  Facing the crowd of people frozen in time was a figure much like the statue of Eternal Silence.  The large figure held a long carved scythe, and his appraising gaze seemed to be judging the other carved people.  Each person was unique, and they ranged in age from newborn to old woman.  Some of them were happy, some sad, some healthy, some ill, some rich and some poor.  Each facet of life was covered in this sculpture, and for a moment I had forgotten my strange predicament as I looked upon it.

“It’s Time.”

The voice beside me startled me, and I saw a woman with her child looking at the statue alongside me.  How long had they been standing there?

“Time for what?” I asked, fearing the answer.

The woman smiled and laughed a little.  “No, the statue.  It’s called ‘Time’.  That man,” she pointed to the one that looked like Death.  “That is Father Time.”

“Father Time carries a Scythe?  I thought he was the Grim Reaper or something.”

The woman shook her head.  “So, have you found yourself?”

“Found…myself?”

“In the sculpture.  You are up there, you know.  We all are.”

“How could I be up there?  This thing was made…well the sign says about thirty years ago.”

The woman smiled knowingly.  “How could you not be up there?  We all are.  Tell me, why are you here?”

“That’s a great question, really, I’m not even sure how I got here.”

The woman nodded, and laughed as she picked up her child.  She placed a hand on my shoulder and spoke quietly.  “It doesn’t matter how you got here.  Only that this is where you are, now.”  She nodded toward the statue.  “The next step is to figure out where you go from here.  And you can only do that if you find yourself.”

I looked back to the statue.  On any other day, I would have brushed it off as crazy talk, but I had literally just been teleported across the city.  At this point, I was willing to take any guidance I could get.  “But how do I find myself?” I asked.

“By looking,” she responded, but her voice was a strange echo as she disappeared.  I moved toward the statue again, taking in the faces more than I had before.  None of them looked anything like me, yet I could see a bit of myself in each of them.  The lovers held eachother in a warm embrace, the child played carelessly at the feet of a soldier whose resolve was etched in his features.  Each of them held something familiar to me, but none of them were me.  A hundred faces I scanned, until finally I came across an old woman etched at the back of the group.  Her eyes watched all the others appraisingly, similar to Father Times but with a distinct interest in their lives.  She had a smile across a part of her face as she watched, seeming to be on the outside of it all and looking in at everyone else.  Though she was part of the statue, she seemed the only one who was aware of every other person in it.  She was the only one that seemed to somehow know that she was looking at art.

I moved to touch the woman’s face, not sure why I was even doing this.  As my hand met hers, the statue changed, and her features became my own.  I gasped and stepped back, not sure how that was possible.  As I stared into the stone features that mirrored my own, I began to understand.  I looked around the park to see the other people.  I hadn’t talked to anyone since I’d gotten here, except for the man with the cup and the strange woman.    It was clear now, though, that they weren’t people either.  My eyes went back to the statue as I looked for the evidence for what I suspected.  I hurried around it, looking for every small child and examining the face of whomever held them.   Finally, I came across what I was looking for: a woman, looking exactly like the one I had just spoken with, holding a child in her arms.

She had said that it didn’t matter how I’d gotten here, that I only needed to find out where I was going.  I finally understood, and knew that there was only one person in this city who could tell me where I was going.  With a thought, I had reset my location just like the Eternal Silence man had.  Suddenly I was standing before a fountain with four pillars of water shooting upward in a ring around a large green statue of a man.  A platform in the bushes read at the top “Christopher Columbus”.

“Where am I going?” I asked the statue, but no answer came.  There were crowds of people around him, but none of them seemed to notice me speaking.  I asked the statue again, but still no answer.

I spun around as someone tapped my shoulder.  Behind me stood a man in a suit of armor, draped in a cloak that matched the garb of the statue I had just come to.  His features were exact, though he was a lot shorter than the nine-foot statue I had been talking to.  “Why go anywhere?” he asked, in response to my question.

“You’re Christopher Columbus, the father of exploration.  You of all people should understand why I would want to go somewhere.”

He shrugged, and looked around the city.  “We’re built here, and here we will stay.”

“That doesn’t sound like something you would say,” I chided.

“I’m a statue,” he replied, “Not the real thing.  None of us are.  We’re all just ghosts of replicas, wearing the faces of people who are long-since dead.  I am no more Christopher Columbus than you are an elephant.”

“So, we can’t leave?”

“Do you want to?  Have you ever wanted to?”

I thought about his question.  I didn’t remember much, past the beginning of the day.  I had been more than pleased to be here the whole time.  Did I really want to leave?

“I…I guess I don’t.”

The stern-looking man nodded solemnly.  “Well, good.  If we’re quite done with this conversation, then, I was going to head up to the zoo and see the actual elephants.  Care to join me?”

“Do…do we have to pay for it?”

He laughed and shook his head.  “They won’t even notice we’re there.”

 

 

 

enolamolloy

Tickled at Ren Faire – Short Story Commission

I was commissioned to write this, but they didn’t want to pay for the copyrights.  Given that fact, I am posting here both to show off, and to maintain my ownership.

My trip to the Renaissance Faire had been planned for months, so of course I was excited.  There was little in the world that was better than being out with a group of friends in a place full of festivities and sights.  Though it was still pretty early in the season, the day was hot and admittedly humid.

We had seen many of the sights and enjoyed a lot of different foods, but what I didn’t know was that the memorable moment hadn’t even started yet.  Suddenly, I felt a pressure around my arm.

“Found you, you scoundrel!” yelled a man’s deep voice behind me.  I wheeled around to face the angry-looking bearded creature.  “You thought you could get away with it?  HA!”

He gave a gentle tug at my arm, enough to alert me to the reality that this was part of the show.  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, as helplessly as I could manage.  It wasn’t that hard, considering a man twice my size still held a firm grip on my wrist.

“To the judge,” he commanded, tugging on my wrist again.  I followed along, my friends trotting behind us seeming both nervous and giddy at the same time.  “He’ll know what to do with you,” the man bellowed once it was clear that I was coming willingly.

We stopped in front of a large wooden podium where a man sat cloaked in thick dark fibers and held an over-sized gavel.  “Here she is, the accused,” the man stated vaguely, dropping my wrist finally.

The ‘judge’ leaned over his podium and peered down at me with a scowl.  “How do you plea?”

“Um…not guilty?” I asked, having no idea what I was actually being accused of.

“Is that a question?”

“I really don’t understand what’s going on here.”

The judge scoffed.  “A likely story.  Tell me one thing, criminal, before you are sent to your death.  What was your motivation for the crime?”

By now, my friends were stifling their laughter behind me as I stood bewildered, unsure of how to respond.  “I…was forced to do it.  Yeah, someone made me,” I said, convincing myself more than anyone else.

“Oh?  By whom?” the judge demanded.

“I’ll never tell you,” I replied, getting more into the mood of things.  This was actually kind of fun.

“Oh, we’ll get it out of you.  One way or another.”  He slammed the gavel on the podium, and the man who had brought me there began to drag me away again.  He was a little rougher this time, and it seemed my friends were finally concerned.  Still, they followed without issue, gossiping behind me about what could really be happening.

The large man and all of his bearded glory dragged me to a large wooden seat with straps on it set atop a bale of hay.  By now, we had attracted quite a lot of attention, and people had crowded around to see what was going on.

I laughed a little nervously.  “Okay, guys, fun is over,” I urged, but they all but ignored me.  The large man who had pulled me over set me into the chair and lifted a wooden bar at the foot of it.  He bent down and grabbed my ankles, lifting my feet into the notches at the foot of the chair, and then lowered the wooden bar over them.  As he removed my shoes, someone behind me grabbed my wrists and strapped them with leather belts to the back of the seat.

“Okay, what is going-“

My words were cut off as a sharp gasp escaped me, tingles rushing up my feet and through my legs.  I looked down to the source only to find the large man who had brought me over tying small ropes to my big toes to hold my feet upright.

“Please don’t, I’m very ticklish,” I warned, squirming a little as his hands and the ropes danced over my feet.

“Good, then we should have no problem getting answers from you,” the big guy chuckled.  He stood to one side of me, and another man was on the other side.  Each held in their hands a long feather, and they didn’t wait for my protests to start again before each of them gently set the tips of the feathers against my armpits and started moving them back and forth.

I gasped for air, squealing loudly as I suddenly struggled with every bit of my muscle to remove myself from the chair.  It was pointless, though.  As the tickling grew more intense and my will became stronger, it became clearer how futile my attempts to escape were.

They removed the feathers from my armpits, and it was only as my laughter died down that I’d realized I’d been laughing.  I was about to speak when they set to the same motions on the base of my feet.  Laughing hysterically, I tried to wiggle my feet out of their way, but the ropes around my big toes held them firmly in place.

As the two men waggled the feathers against the soles of my feet, two more came up on either side of me.  One used a single index finger to poke almost sheepishly at my ribcage, while the other used all of the fingertips of one hand to grab at the side of my stomach and ribs.  All of the pinching and grabbing went between my ribs, and I gasped and squirmed and fought pointlessly against the torture.

They seemed, at this point, to have no interest in knowing who the fake person was that had hired me for the fake crime that I had fake committed.  No, all of this was very real, and knowing that there was no information that I could give them to make it stop was the worst kind of torture.  Just as I thought I might not be able to breathe anymore, they stopped.  They were all laughing at my discomfort, and I couldn’t stop laughing either.  Was it finished already?  There was a hint of disappointment, accompanied by gallons of relief as I convinced myself that it was.

Just as I had caught my breath and the laughter had settled down, they started in again.  All four of them in unison, clearly trained in this form of torture as this time they focused on the spots that they had learned, from the last wave, were my most vulnerable.  The two at my ribs quickly moved up to my armpits, digging their fingers in and gently pressing against all the right spots, sending my nerve endings into a frenzy over the whole ordeal.  Meanwhile the men at my feet continued with the feathers, focusing more on the spaces between my toes than the soles of my feet.

My eyes watered as I continued my futile struggle to break free, trying to cry out for them to stop but each word was stifled by my intense laughter.  Every so often they would stop, laugh a little and let me calm down, just to start up again.  Each new touch made my whole body convulse, jolting as I held my breath before bursting into laughter again.

After what felt like hours but was likely only a couple dozen minutes, they stopped again.  As my laughter died down and I sat there trying to find my wits, I could feel the leather come loose on my wrists, the rope come loose on my toes, and the wooden bar lift from off of my ankles.  I couldn’t even move; I was so worn down.  Each attempt to get up was a fight against my nerve-endings and their newfound sensitivity, and I laughed weakly each time I tried to move.

One of the men lifted an arm under my gently to help me up, but I broke out into laughter at the touch.  Everything tickled at this point, and the man retracted his hands and laughed as well.  It took a while, but eventually I was able to stand again, and the rest of the day dwarfed in comparison to the whole experience.

 

enolamolloy

Irish Drinking Songs

I was commissioned to write these few songs for someone, though they didn’t want to pay for the rights to them.  Given that fact, I am posting them here both to show them off, and to maintain my ownership of them.  I am having issues with the formatting (I dislike the double-space after each line, but couldn’t get rid of it for the last two songs), so if anyone knows how I can fix this I would appreciate the tell.  Thank you.

Whiskey my Wife

Oh down by the wat’r where the blinks do grow
I laid me down to rest
In a bed of white in that field of green
With a bottle on my chest
Just me and my whiskey and a biting chill
We talked the night away
She did listen, but I still don’t know
What in hell made me say

‘You’re beautiful and lovely
With your golden skin and eyes;
Your presence keeps me warm,
I am such a lucky guy.
Though you’ll be gone in the morning,
Just stay here for the night.
I love you dear, sweet whiskey.
You make everything alright.

Oh down in the hollow far beneath the hills
I met a woman fair
She could cook and clean and even sing,
And had flowers in her hair
She asked for my heart, but I had to say
That another held it tight
I told her I would be gone in the morning,
But I’d stay there for the night.

‘She’s beautiful and lovely,
With her golden skin and eyes.
Her presence keeps me warm;
I am such a lucky guy.
Though she’ll be gone in the morning,
She’ll stay with us tonight.
I love my dear, sweet whiskey.
Honey, whiskey is my wife.’

 

The Rules

Ev’ry man must know his limits

Though sometimes we forget

So I lay down some rules

For myself and these fools

Who spend too much time wet

 

Don’t you drink no more ‘til you close the door;

Only pour a glass once the last has passed;

If another calls ‘fore the last drop falls,

You’d better pick up your lily pace.

 

But the golden rule

For all men and fools,

And the one no man should break

Is a simple deed

For this listed creed:

Only drink when you’re awake.

 

Ev’ry man must know his limits

Though sometimes we forget

So I lay down some rules

For myself and these fools

Who spend too much time wet.

 

Don’t you never spill  from a glass that’s chilled;

Keep both hands clean as they’ve ever been;

If you break this creed, it’ll be your greed

That gets you so shitfaced.

 

But the golden rule

For all men and fools,

And the one no man should break

Is a simple deed

For this listed creed:

Only drink when you’re awake.

 

Queen of the Floor

Once long ago there was a queen of the floor

A fair maiden to behold

Jaws fell to the ground as she walked through the door

From the young men and the old

Her feet were quicker than a jackrabbit’s dart

As she danced to every song

The woman whose moves caught every man’s heart

In their eyes could do no wrong.

 

Walk away, ye boys, for your heart might pound

But her scornful stare makes a man unsound

For no matter the pace

Any man who will chase

Her will find his hope on the ground.

 

She’d come in the morning and come in the night

Anywhere the music played

She’d dance through a storm and dance through a fight

But she would never stay

As fast as she dances, just as fast will she leave

Never to return

A room feels so empty when it’s missing her weave

The heat of her moves can burn

 

Walk away, ye boys, for your heart might pound

But her scornful stare makes a man unsound

For no matter the pace

Any man who will chase

Her will find his hope on the ground.