Ok…This is TOTALLY not what I want to showcase on this blog, but someone asked me for an example of another style of my writing.  So, I decided to post a bit of a blurb from one of the other books that I’m writing.  This excerpt is from one called Entries.  It’s an introduction to one of the main characters. It’s decidedly darker than what I usually share with anybody, but it does show another side to how I write.

I’m REALLY interested to know what you think, so please leave a comment…good, bad or indifferent.  So, without any more delay…….I introduce :

LISA

42 – The number of days since the 9 year old girl disappeared on her walk from school.

41  –  The number of days since the rapist had gotten what he wanted from her.

38 – The number of days since he bashed her head in with a hammer so she wouldn’t tell….

37 –   The number of days since he put her in a hole underneath a bridge and threw shovels of cold dirt in her face.

12 – The number of days since they found her there.

 3 – The number of hours since they had placed the girl back in the ground, and the woman had gotten the strength to move on.

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    Lisa Grinesford stared up from the bottom of the stairs as if she was waiting for some sign that it was okay to change her mind to come bounding down towards her.  Nothing came.  In her mind, she had been preparing for this since the fifth night that Michelle didn’t come home; trying to mentally perform  a delicate balance of having the parent’s hope that their  child would come home with the  hopelessness of preparing if she didn’t.  In the end, it was all for nothing.  Her strength waned and eventually, inevitably,  she  tumbled headlong into the hopelessness of what had become her reality; a reality that was delivered to her as a late night present; adorned with flashing red lights,  wrapped in a blue uniform,  and that mechanically recited,  “I’m sorry, but…” on cue just to tie it all together.  She didn’t even have to pull a string.

    Michelle would never come down those stairs again, she thought…still staring up at what seemed to her to be an endless staircase.  With that thought, the bloody, oozy wound in her soul that had begun to scab over was ripped back open; exposing the nerves underneath to the cold, biting harshness of what she  had to do…

“…clean the room.  Just clean the freaking room and get on with my life.”

She placed one foot on the bottom step…then the other foot on the next one and slowly, methodically forced her muscles to work….making her way up the stairs.

    Lisa felt her head start to spin, and grabbed at the banister to steady herself; closing her eyes against the world that was suddenly spinning out of control around her.  It had seemed to her like only yesterday that she was teaching a wobbly Michelle how to use the handrail to help her come down the stairs…now she herself was using it to help her make it up them.

   Slowly,  she made her way up the stairs;  turned the knob to Michelle’s room and stepped inside.   She left the door open behind her; a semblance of an  escape route in case the spinning decided to return.  As she shuffled her way  across the room, she noticed the dark space under the bed and thought, “Huh….I guess the REAL monsters weren’t under the bed….”  She cringed at the callous truth of it.

    Lisa sat on the edge of what used to be her daughter’s bed in what used to be her daughter’s room and looked out the window that her daughter used to look out of and stared  blankly into the cold, wintry day outside.  She had barely found the strength to come into the room until now, much less actually make changes, so the room around her had sat largely undisturbed since Michelle disappeared.  Everything was just as she had left it, for the most part, untouched.

    Lisa  wasn’t sure if it was simply a trick of her weary mind, but it seemed as if she moved just right on the bed, she could catch whiffs of the overly sweet smelling scented lotions that Michelle would slather all over herself after her baths.  Lisa allowed her head to hang slightly and closed her eyes; drinking the smells in; trying hard not to scare them away.   Her dark curly hair draped her face in an unruly shroud of dark frills allowing only the tips of her ears to peek out.

     She didn’t  sit there alone…there were demons there with her.

     The demons sat there on the bed next to her.  They had come to her in the days right after they found Michelle’s body; gently dripping their jaded opinions into her ears like warm, thick honey.   Over time, their voices had become more desperate and louder; gaining strength with each passing day.   Now, they screamed at her almost constantly; their honey laced words replaced with a venomous concoction of gall and vinegar; of hate and regret; constantly buzzing in her ear like a cacophony of blow flies around a rotting corpse.

     Their buzzing filled her head.

      So,  there sat Lisa; the pale faced, dark headed, frail, specter of a woman that she had become over the last month, surrounded by stuffed pink bunnies, giant teddy bears, Barbies and unicorns.  There was nothing that could have looked more out of place in that room than she did.  Well, except…maybe the gun that she had rested on the bed next to her.

“Pick it up.” the choir in her mind  sang.

She picked the gun up…and placed it in her mouth.