Prologue? How about No-logue.
A peek at a prologue for Timothy's Monsters that will only see the light of day right here.
Today is my very first Fiction Friday! So exciting. This is a space that I haven’t exactly put my finger on yet, but I think it will be fun 😀 I’ll start with some snippets, deleted scenes, character sketches, that kind of thing, and we’ll see how it evolves from there. Eventually, Fiction Friday will likely become available to paid subscribers only. For right now, though, I’d like to share it with everyone.
The story I have been working on the most lately is called Timothy’s Monsters. The characters in this one are some of my favorites that I’ve ever written. In a nutshell, it’s about a young boy, Timothy, who is raised by monsters (Sasquatch and a werewolf, specifically) and a quest to find belonging in either of the worlds he belongs to, human and monster. The scene I’m sharing today is one that will never make it into the book. It’s one of the first complete scenes I managed to write for this story. It is how Timothy first meets Q, the sasquatch that will raise him. It involves Timothy’s parents, and they are awful. It won’t make it into the book because I have drastically changed my approach to Timothy’s parents. I realized that while horrible parents are indeed an effective crucible, my favorite books (to name a few, The Wingfeather Saga, the Green Ember Series, and the Wilderking Trilogy) actually depict families that are full of decent people trying their best to do good and support each other. I’d rather show a loving family that is met with unexpected upheaval from outside sources–or even internal ones!--than one that is just rotten from the get go. I think a lot of us come from families like that; families where the trials we face don’t come from hating each other, but from loving each other and navigating that in an unpredictable, imperfect world. How do you deal with someone you hate when they are hurtful? You walk away. Maybe throw a pie in their face first or something, but you walk away. How do you work through that with someone you love? It’s a little more complicated. The stakes are much higher. The emotions are much deeper. Anyway, all that to say, this original prologue to Timothy’s Monsters will only see the light of day right here. It made it through a round or two of editing, but it isn’t exactly polished since I shifted gears before I got around to that, so, fair warning, it has flaws. As part of the paid subscription, there will also be an audio recording of this excerpt. My sweet husband thinks I could record audiobooks one day. I think he’s just trying to find a way out of his day job.
The Once But No More Prologue to Timothy’s Monsters
Twilight in the forest always arrived much earlier than in other places. The towering redwood trees reached higher in the sky to block the sun than many of the tall, unsightly buildings of the cities nearby. The animals of the day were settling in for the night, while the nocturnal creatures began waking, stretching their limbs or their wings. The routine of the forest was steady and consistent, rarely interrupted.
The stillness between evening and night was disturbed by the sound of the engine of an unhealthy car. It approached loudly and tumultuously, like the vehicle was ready to combust or come apart. Then, without so much as slowing down the ugly sedan, with duct tape covering the hole where one of the headlights should have been, and a scrap of blue tarp covering one of the back windows, also held in place with duct tape, came crashing off the road and through the underbrush. It shredded decomposing logs, flattened ferns, and jolted over exposed roots. Shaped like a box and colored like moldy bread, it came to a rest about twenty yards from the roadway. The engine killed, the lights turned off, and a wisp of smoke snaked its way out from under the rusted hood. For a few moments, all was still again. Then, the passenger side door burst open and someone stumbled out in the darkness.
“Lars, you moron, getcher backside over here and help me!”
A woman’s shrill voice, thick with a hillbilly accent, cut through the night air and silenced every creature within a hundred yards that had dared think the intrusion was over and had again started up their nighttime pursuits.
“Shut yer trap, woman, you ain’t pregnant no more, I don’t have to do nothin’ for you!” came the hoarse reply. “Nine months...Lars, do this! Lars, do that! Laziest woman on the whole earth. Nine months bein’ your slave!”
The tragic, frightened cry of a newborn baby, so contrasted in its purity to the wretched howling of its parents, filled the air.
The woman shrieked.
“You idiot! That thing has cried all day long, and ten minutes after it finally falls asleep and shuts up, you go and wake it! Lars, I hate you!”
Moving silently through the trees, never breaking a branch or misplacing a stone, was an enormous figure. Lured by the noisy intruders, intending to dispose of them one way or another in order to restore the peace of his forest, the creature watched from the shadows, hidden in a great hole in the side of one of the giant trees. His hairy brow was furrowed as he watched the two humans unloading things from the back of the beater car. He saw the trail of destruction behind it--the broken saplings, the smashed mushrooms and torn ferns, who knows how many squashed insects and small creatures, and his irritation swelled, cresting into anger.
He inhaled sharply and exhaled slowly, then turned his attention back to the offenders. They were attempting to pitch a hideous brown-green tent by the light of a tiny flashlight and hollering back and forth at each other.
“Go into labor in the middle of a heist, what kind of professional are you?”
“You call that a heist? Robbing a rich little ol’ lady?”
“Yeah, I call it a heist! An’ a brilliant one, too, if you hadn’t a’ ruined it.”
“Oh, excuse me, next time I start birthing a baby, I’ll try to pick a more convenient time!”
“You better! Only you won’t be birthing no more babies, not so long as yer with me!”
“We still got the money, Lars. Why are you so upset?”
“Cause she probably had more--lots more! We only got the obvious stuff. She’s probably got jewels and gold and stuff stashed all over that old house of hers. Did you see that ring on her ugly ol’ hand? A new car, right there, that would’ve been!”
Lars opened the car door again and trash tumbled out. Cans, greasy papers that had once held hamburgers and fries and other such foods, huge plastic cups, and all sorts of other junk littered the once pristine forest floor. The baby’s cries, coming from inside the car, grew louder, the desperation in the little human swelling. Lars pulled out a tattered black backpack and shut the door, stifling the cries of the infant. He took the pack over to the fire that the woman had managed to light using lighter fluid and a few matches. In the violently flickering light, the creature could see from his hiding place that the bag was full of cash and other valuables.
“Coulda had twice this much, three times, even!”
“Shut up, Lars.”
The fire, poorly built, was already dying down. The woman squirted more lighter fluid on it and it flared up again.
The creature hiding in the hollow of the tree felt his temper rising. He considered himself the protector of the forest, and if watching those two horrible people deface and destroy his precious home wasn’t enough, the neglected baby, so clearly in distress and so blatantly ignored, was pushing him closer and closer to doing something he had sworn he would never do again.
“Darn it, Claudine, could you do something about that noise!” Lars bellowed at his wife.
“I gave birth three days ago, I ain’t exactly feeling myself yet. Can’t you be a gentleman and do something about it yourself?”
The man looked indignant.
“Nine months of pampering, and you still want more? Make that thing shut up, woman! Besides, I gotta count the money.”
Claudine, who had set up a lime green beach chair next to the already-dimming fire, rolled her eyes, hoisted herself to her feet, and trudged over to the car. She wrenched the car seat out of the backseat and set it purposely down right next to Lars, who glowered at her, then at the car seat.
“Can you believe they wouldn’t let us leave the hospital without that stupid chair? Cost us a good chunk of our loot! And the seatbelts work just fine, mostly.”
“Uh huh,” replied Claudine, obviously not listening.
Lars was a thin, pale man, repugnant in every way. His nose was large and his eyes were small and close together. His black hair was thin and slicked to one side with unnecessary amounts of pomade, and his face was covered in red splotches. He wore a green and red plaid button up shirt, which he had either torn or roughly cut the sleeves off of, and jeans that were probably blue at one time, but now were so filthy that they were an uncomely, muddy brown. His shoes, however, were shiny, black leather loafers. While Claudine had so inconveniently been in labor, he had left the hospital to enjoy a little splurging with their new loot.
Claudine, on the other hand, wore a hot pink blouse bedazzled with plastic diamonds, and black, skin-tight, faux-leather leggings. Her belly, which had so recently been home to an unborn baby, mushroomed out of them, still swollen. At the hospital, she had been furious when the baby had finally come out and her stomach was barely any smaller. She had screamed at the nurses that they had done something wrong, left something in her that wasn’t supposed to be there. Their explanation that it would take time for her body to get back to normal was simply unacceptable. Livid but undeterred, she had wriggled and squeezed her way into this outfit, which she had bought months before in anticipation of being free of her pregnancy. Her dirty blond hair was poofed up high on top, then hung down straight until the last few inches, where it once again poofed. She looked like a poodle. Makeup was caked onto her face, so it was impossible to tell what her natural look was. She might have been beautiful, in another life, but she looked clownish and frightening, especially in the firelight, which had sprung to life again thanks to another dose of lighter fluid. Her six-inch leopard print high heels sank deep into the soft earth when she walked, forcing her to stumble around on her tiptoes wherever she went.
Inside the car seat, which had its cover pulled all the way forward so its tiny contents were concealed, the wailing increased in volume and despondency.
“Shut up!” Lars and Claudine both yelled simultaneously at the infant.
That was it. That was the line. The lurking creature finally had enough. Without hesitating one more second, he emerged from the tree. Still in the shadows, he stalked slowly forward towards the makeshift campground, no longer attempting to conceal himself. Though they might have spotted him now, since he was only a few yards away, Lars and Claudine were too caught up in their own irritation and arguments to notice him. A few more steps forward, and he stood at the edge of the fire’s glow. Still, they did not see him. He watched for a few more moments, stunned by their blindness. The creature looked down and noticed a beer can, tossed away by one or the other of them, lying just a few inches from his left foot. He raised the mammoth appendage, covered in thick, sleek, reddish brown hair, and let it fall on the can.
The crunch made Claudine nonchalantly glance up from her unsatisfied inspection of her recently manicured fingernails. At first the towering figure made no impression on her self-absorbed mind, but she quickly did a double take and her jaw dropped.
Standing at least nine feet tall, thick fur failing to conceal the muscular body beneath, wearing a ferocious expression on a terrifying, ape-like face, and breathing heavily in its rage, the creature loomed over them.
“I mean, really, if we have to buy anything else for that little weasel, we might as well go back to that old lady and get the rest of our money.”
“Lars!” Claudine breathed, her eyes wide and her entire body stiff as a board.
“Robbery, that’s what it is. Wish we could have just left it there. That would have been real choice, just leavin’ it there, then we wouldn’t be stuck with it no more.”
“Lars!” Claudine cried with a little more desperation in her voice. It was just enough to get him to look up at her.
“What?” he hollered, irate at being interrupted during his rant. He saw her face, rolled his eyes, and turned around. Immediately, upon seeing the creature, he yelped and fell off his own neon beach chair, almost landing in the fire.
“Big Foot!” he screeched, stumbling backwards.
“Sasquatch!” squealed Claudine.
The creature took a step forward, and the light of the fire caught his eyes, making them blaze with the fury he was feeling.
“Get out,” he growled in a deep, quiet, menacing voice.
“It talks!” Lars wailed.
“Get out!”
Like the savage roar of a lion, the bellowed command echoed through the forest. Claudine and Lars both screamed at the top of their lungs, at a similar pitch, and half ran, half crawled to the car. Claudine hesitated only for a moment, glancing towards the car seat. The creature took one massive step towards her, putting himself between her and the baby, and let out another deafening roar. Claudine looked like she might faint, but instead she clambered into the car and shrieked at Lars to drive, which he did, hardly waiting for her to close the door behind her.
The creature glared furiously as the car flew in reverse, scraping bark off his beloved trees and flattening more new growth. When the headlight, flailing around the forest as the car crashed over logs and swerved around trees until it finally found the road, at last faded away, the creature turned to the now-silent bundle behind him. He stared at it, suddenly unsure, until he heard a tiny squeak come out of it. He knelt down and gingerly pushed back the canopy. Inside, wearing nothing but a plain white onesie and a little cap, was a tiny baby.
The creature studied the infant, rubbing his chin.
“Er, hello,” he finally said, his voice much kinder than the one he had used with the child’s parents. The little one squinted up at him, new eyes still foggy. “You needn’t be frightened. I’m not Big Foot. Heavens, that’s just insulting. I’m not Sasquatch, either. That was my great, great grandfather. Tiresome how everyone calls me by his name. No, indeed I have my own name. Quinten. Everyone just calls me Q, though. You may call me Q.”
The baby’s lips trembled under a perfect button nose.
“Oh, bother, you aren’t frightened, are you? Sorry for that show. Couldn’t let those monsters keep treating you like that, I’m afraid. Wasn’t right. I’m not exactly a fan of humans, but you aren’t really a human yet, are you? I mean, you are, of course, but you haven’t really done any of the things most humans do that makes them so wretched. Sorry, no offense meant. Er…”
Q trailed off, unsure what else to say. Then, the baby’s tear-streaked face relaxed and for a moment Q was certain he saw a smile.
“Right, well then. I suppose you’ll have to come with me. Hungry, I wager? Eleanor will know what to do about that. Come now.”
Awkwardly but gently, the giant lifted the car seat with two fingers and, humming a gentle tune, disappeared back into the forest
.