Tag: chronicaller

Posted on

Enter Ned the Goth

One of the things I love about this daily writing work of mine is that when I write myself into a corner as I did yesterday I’m free to just pretend it didn’t happen.  I’m free to do something new today.  Believe me I want to do something new today.

I’ve got no idea why Jasper is hanging out on the fire escape of my real grade school.  I’ve got no idea what spell he is writing, why it’s his last, or why being fifth matters.  At least why it matters enough to mention.

You may recall we first met Jasper in a field conjuring a flock of geometric shapes to aid him in his flight and escape (or transport or casual flying stroll).  I’d written into a corner on that one too.  Jasper escapes; I’m left holding the bag.

Jasper preferred the rune-script for his spells over the verbose Enchanters’ Latin he’d first learned.  The iconic shorthand of vertical strokes and compact loops in singlets, couplets, triplets, or staggered bunches reminded him of musical notes.  He could feel the pattern of the spell in his fingers as he wrote.  It felt much more like he built magic from a scaffold than he merely described it in a book report.  That concrete sensation steadied his hand and informed his artistry.

The the handwritten spell shuddered on the printed gridlines.  He looked to the five in the corner of the page.  The lines snaked out of place in a swirl and then spacked into a spilled-ink shape.  The loops of his rune-script came unwound too.  The verticals withered like new shoots unprotected from the sun.

Without ever looking up, Jasper swiftly closed and bound his Moleskine.  He slipped it under his hoodie into the waist of his jeans at the small of his back.  The pencil he positioned in his fingers so that as he slammed his hand down hard on the metal railing his middle finger cracked the pencil in half across the backs of his other fingers.

“That had to hurt Jasper.  Did it? Did it? Did it?” Ned taunted musically from the asphalt playground below.  Black clouds of soot belched occasionally from below his Demonia boots.  “So sorry to interrupt.  Were you sketching birds again?”

Day 334
Posted on

Jasper’s Fifth and Final Spell

For the sticklers, I did write yesterday.  And edit.  I just can’t post the content publicly for now.  Settle down.  It’s not salacious, just temporarily private.  Plus, the content is not interesting to most of you anyway.

Jasper pointed his #2 pencil finely but the angle of it annoyed him.  The woman  running the cash register at Tilton’s down the road cooed at his choice of color and said, “It’s a lovely sharpener.”  She obviously thought shavers and sharpeners were the same in the way she thought five-year olds and eleven years olds were the same.   This pink plastic and razor blade jobie compared poorly to the seven sharpeners with dual rotary cutters locked in the eight rooms of the school at his back.  It was not at all like the kind the nuns mounted to the door jams at Sacred Heart Parish School in Topeka.

He gently dulled the needle pointed lead with a few careful circles on the back page of his notebook.  Jasper thumbed back to the front to the first pair of blank pages.  He then numbered the page at the top with an encircled five.  He thought for a moment–maybe he prayed for success–then began constructing the vine-like vertical rune-script of his fifth and final spell.

Day 333
Posted on

Introducing Jasper

http://zulu-eos.deviantart.com/art/Take-to-the-sky-74685129

Grasping a wad of high grasses in his left hand and wrapping it back around his wrist Jasper acted quickly. That would have to do, he knew it probably would not. He scuffed the dry prarie soil with the toe of his sandle enough to draw in with his fingertip. He traced a near-perfect circle, added two sinuous lines that might have been wings, and poked a dot into the center of it all.

Jasper liquified the breeze and draped it around himself. It did not take long.

Air rushed to him from all sides bending the green grass like penitents at prayer. The air then swirled upward into a vortex with Jasper at the hub. Solid circle shapes and other bursts sprung from the markings he’d traced in the dirt and rose with the air. Mostly they were the color of the prarie: green, green-yellow, and green-teal. Some, of course, were starkly white or deeply black.

Jasper hoped the grasses he held were well rooted to the earth, but didn’t look. It wouldn’t matter now. He strengthened his grip for what came next.

The two wings he’d drawn on the circle flowed along the surface of the prarie winding among the grasses growing there as crinkle of his vision. They seemed like eager beasts waiting on chance. They were desperate to fly.

Jasper needed his attachment to the earth to hold. If the roots tore free too soon he’d spin into the initial vortex and bounce in a painful arc along the ground before going up. It happened before; he held no interest in repeating the experience.

The wings popped and snapped along the surface of the prairies battering the gentle plant life and raising more bursts as they came fully to life. Each lively crinkle became a white ribbon expanding into a sheet and then a sail. One split partway out and formed a third anxious beast. The bursts ran freely to the center and rushed upward. The speed at which they formed disallowed them full solidity so nearly all of them were outlines or double outlines.

Jasper waited for the bursts to be incomplete arcs and wilder half-shapes. They signaled his leap.

A neatly drawn plus sign ran up from the leftward wing. Jasper had never seen one of those before. He hoped it good. The point of each wing ripped free of his tracing. They alternated between losing the rest of themselves and trying to encircle Jasper. One twined his leg and popped him off balance. He nearly lost his grip. When he looked up he saw the unsplit wing’s distal end billow up like a sail catching the wind. Then the split one broke free and lept into the air with it’s fellow.

Jasper caught hold of the wing still encircling his leg. He’d been taught he couldn’t force his will on these things; he could only coax them. He watched the billowing ends disentangle from the earth. Their freedom rippled back toward him.

“Please let me time this right.”

Each wing stripped completely free of the earth and rattled into the sky. The wider far ends wafted high and back toward the center. Good. He’d go up first—no arm breaking. A cascade of bursts erupted around him: stars, octagons, circles, hoops, a curious harp shape, more plusses. The wings went up without him. Distracted, he missed his moment.

“No I didn’t!”

He loosed his grip on the grass and grabbed a pair of plusses clawing at the air like it was a ladder. He stuffed his toes into a hoop on one side and stepped on a solid green circle on the other. He kicked and pushed his way up the flock of bursts till he closed in on the nearer tendrils of the wings. They did exactly as he expected—hoped—they twined his body and rooted there.

Jasper launched above the prarie pulled by three wind filled sheets. Bursts orbited him or rested near his shoulders. Sometimes running up the wings; sometimes trickling back down.

Day 295