Post by Chris on Dec 3, 2007 19:56:09 GMT -5
I have been away for a while, but fear not! I come bearing the beginning of my new story! I feel particularly good about this one; it's just my type of thing. Enjoy!
Once upon a time, the Belmopan Comprehensive School was just an institution of secondary education. In fact, it once boasted being Belize’s largest high school, where hoards of teenagers of all shapes, sizes, stations and smells were stuffed into depressing, vandalized classrooms filled with splintering desks, wobbly chairs, faulty wiring, leaky ceilings and cockroaches big enough to make your dog run away with its tail between its legs. You know, just a regular old public school.
And then, rumor has it, one Thursday evening the Agriculture teacher Mr. Quiroz was too lazy to go all the way from the Technical Arts building to the staff room to take a whiz, and he daren’t go into a student bathroom without a hazmat suit and/or a gun, so he went out the back door of his classroom and ‘fertilized’ a crop of his students’ tomatoes. Because Mr. Quiroz had a humongous bladder, and because he had taken lunch with a six pack, he naturally had to pee like a racehorse in both quantity and potency, and took his time in relieving himself. By the time he had gotten through, the poor tomato plant had become so drenched in the teacher’s overpowering body fluids that it could no longer keep its fragile self upright, and keeled over. As Mr. Quiroz smiled to himself and made a mental note that he would have no choice but to give Derek Guzman, his least favorite student, an F, as it was his plant that had just kicked the bucket, he noticed a purplish, glassy something or other glowing and glimmering in the dirt where the tomato plant had once stood. Although he supposed he could explain away the glimmer due to the fact that ‘wet’ glass in direct sunlight would emit some sort of glare, he had no rationale for the purple light it seemed to radiate sinisterly from within. Mr. Quiroz was understandably skittish about picking up something lying in the dirt where he had just ‘unleashed the beast’, so he instead tried to prod it loose from the earth with his boot.
There was a strange noise. A gigantic flash of purple light. A blood-curdling scream. And Mr. Quiroz was never seen again.
Ever since then, the Belmopan Comprehensive School has been plagued by a series of phenomena so mind-squelching unfathomable that even I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I intend to talk about it a lot more. Now, instead of just splintering desks, wobbly chairs, faulty wiring, leaky ceilings and more students than you can shake a yardstick at, the classes at Belmopan Comprehensive are also chock full of things from the great beyond.
And for some reason, even bigger cockroaches.
Twice upon a time, there was a lunch lady at the Belmopan Comprehensive School by the name of McKinley that nobody liked. She was an edgy sort of lady for her elderly age. She was short, thin, sheet white and riddled with large blue veins. Her teeny strands of dead-looking white hair fell out like dandruff, and she had quite the bald spot. She had livid green eyes that shifted like angry gnats, except for when she was angry; they bulged and then got perfectly still when she was in a tizzy. She was known for loudly gargling the never-ending stream of phlegm her mouth produced, and then swallowing it. She also occasionally used it as a projectile on people who annoyed her. Former principal Mr. Anthony can attest to her accuracy and range after she perfectly lobbed a particularly oozy phlegm-ball into his coat pocket from across the room as he had tried to explain to her that she just wasn’t allowed to keep pigeons in the kitchen. She never made a meal that didn’t include a strange substance of a leathery consistency that seemed to turn to sand once it reacted with your stomach acids, and she always insisted that it was meat even though it was incontrovertibly proven that no meat distributor had ever stepped upon the school compound while the cafeteria was under her ownership. Even when the foods she did cook were discernible for what they were in appearance (which wasn’t very often), they never once tasted like anything familiar. In fact, the flavors of her food were so decidedly alien to the human tongue that those who were brave enough to taste anything she cooked or had no alternative but to nourish themselves with her culinary nightmares were known to spontaneously shriek in terror at the very unwelcome surprises her food had wrought. People were careful to never look into her eyes if it could be avoided, and some, believing that it could ward her off, even took to wearing cloves of garlic when venturing to or nearby the cafeteria.
But as hated as she was, everyone had to admit that Ms. McKinley was heaps better than the last lunch lady. Hired when the school lured crazy old McKinley into retirement by promising to give her a monthly stipend if she gave up the food service industry forever, the new lunch lady had been a magnificent cook, a friendly, cheerful person, full of love and kindness and laughter.
Right up until she had tried to kill them all and accidentally made a sticky, explosive mess of herself.
Yeah. It was a really sad story. Mostly because it ended up involving doubling Ms. McKinley’s stipend to get her back to work.
And thusly it was not once but twice upon a time that the Belmopan Comprehensive School had a lunch lady by the name of McKinley that nobody liked. But at least Ms. McKinley had never tried to kill an entire school.
At least that’s what a jury of her peers concluded.
Once upon a time, Brice Garnett sat in Literature class, drumming his bony fingers on his desk as he absently stared into space. Although he wouldn’t allow himself to be worried, he certainly wasn’t not concerned about the pickle he had gotten himself into. The term had only begun just a little over a week ago, and he had actually fooled himself into thinking he had gotten into the groove of things, and then he had gotten himself into this stupid situation. As capable as he was, this was one of the few things he had to admit that he wasn’t sure he could handle.
Up at the front of the class, the blob that was Ms. Rivero stopped mid-lecture. In a Jedi-esque manner, the portly Integrated Science teacher could sense disturbances in her classroom (and fittingly enough, in the faculty lounge refrigerator, where she kept her lunches). She jerked her bulbous head out of the textbook she had been dictating from and narrowed her flinty eyes as she did a quick sweep of the classroom, and swiftly locked in on Brice in his reverie. Normally she’d threaten to eat whosoever dared to even let their minds wander for a second in her class (no one who had ever seen her girth would disbelieve that this was a legitimate threat), but she got a bad feeling about this boy. She found it mighty suspicious that a wispy, lanky, nerdish first year like him had gotten through almost two weeks of Belmopan Comprehensive without any life-threatening injuries or complete psychological breakdowns. That was very irregular. She, and everyone else in the classroom for that matter, could still smell the ‘mishap’ Giancarlo, the grotesquely muscular 17-year-old ape of a student in the front row, had made in his pants when he unwittingly wandered into the guidance counselor’s office after he’d heard a strange noise. He was as pale as death, still trembling uncontrollably as he fought a losing battle against sobbing. If someone like Giancarlo could barely maintain his mental well-being, how was it that Brice was able to do so without so much as batting an eyelash? Even now, it was easy to tell that he was the only person in the classroom who wasn’t bathing in their own anxious perspiration. In fact, he seemed even … pensive. Someone was actually thinking? In class? Even for a place like B.C.S., that was pretty strange.
Ms. Rivero’s sudden silence brought Brice back down to earth. As he turned his attention back to her to find out what was going on, Brice accidentally locked his dark brown eyes with Ms. Rivero’s own. In that moment, Ms. Rivero inexplicably felt her breath catch in her very large throat, and had she been standing at that moment (which would have been a rare occurrence indeed) she would have felt her strained knees quavering under her, and not from the usual pressure of holding her enormousness. Ms. Rivero proceeded to react in the same way anyone would had found themselves in Brice’s seemingly dark gaze would have.
She gulped, and hastily averted her eyes.
As Ms. Rivero steadfastly pinned her eyes down to the page of the text and resumed her lecture, she decided that threatening to have this one as a snack would be a big no-no. Having worked in a place like the Belmopan Comprehensive School, Ms. Rivero was no scaredy-cat, but she couldn’t repress the powerful shudder that Brice’s eyes had inspired in her. Her fear, however, was quickly replaced with annoyance when Candice, the prerequisite suck-up in the front row, held out a candy bar for her, having thought that her shiver was actually a hunger spasm, something Ms. Rivero was quite known for.
Unsurprisingly, she still ate the candy bar.
Brice sighed. He recognized all too well the look-and-look-away technique he had just seen in Ms. Rivero; he had been seeing it his entire life. Brice had once believed that it was his grim, blithe personality and snarky, deadpan voice that gave people the heebie-jeebies, but apparently people had sensed an inner darkness inside him that kept them at arms length even when he was a child. His mother explained that her friends would lie through their teeth and say what a beautiful baby he was, but then hurriedly made excuses to leave whenever she suggested that it would be all right to hold him. She knew for a fact that their official nickname for her son was ‘The black Wednesday Addams. With a penis.’
It didn’t quite roll off the tongue, but it sure got big laughs.
Although he normally hated that people feared him for absolutely no reason, this was one time Brice wished that he could use his innate ability to his advantage. However, he knew all too well that there were some things even intimidation couldn’t save him from. Especially when you go to school at a place like Belmopan Comprehensive.
Then the bell rung. And he sighed again. This was it.
Lunchtime.
More to come.
Kooks and Spooks
Issue No. 1
Tragically Delicious
Issue No. 1
Tragically Delicious
Once upon a time, the Belmopan Comprehensive School was just an institution of secondary education. In fact, it once boasted being Belize’s largest high school, where hoards of teenagers of all shapes, sizes, stations and smells were stuffed into depressing, vandalized classrooms filled with splintering desks, wobbly chairs, faulty wiring, leaky ceilings and cockroaches big enough to make your dog run away with its tail between its legs. You know, just a regular old public school.
And then, rumor has it, one Thursday evening the Agriculture teacher Mr. Quiroz was too lazy to go all the way from the Technical Arts building to the staff room to take a whiz, and he daren’t go into a student bathroom without a hazmat suit and/or a gun, so he went out the back door of his classroom and ‘fertilized’ a crop of his students’ tomatoes. Because Mr. Quiroz had a humongous bladder, and because he had taken lunch with a six pack, he naturally had to pee like a racehorse in both quantity and potency, and took his time in relieving himself. By the time he had gotten through, the poor tomato plant had become so drenched in the teacher’s overpowering body fluids that it could no longer keep its fragile self upright, and keeled over. As Mr. Quiroz smiled to himself and made a mental note that he would have no choice but to give Derek Guzman, his least favorite student, an F, as it was his plant that had just kicked the bucket, he noticed a purplish, glassy something or other glowing and glimmering in the dirt where the tomato plant had once stood. Although he supposed he could explain away the glimmer due to the fact that ‘wet’ glass in direct sunlight would emit some sort of glare, he had no rationale for the purple light it seemed to radiate sinisterly from within. Mr. Quiroz was understandably skittish about picking up something lying in the dirt where he had just ‘unleashed the beast’, so he instead tried to prod it loose from the earth with his boot.
There was a strange noise. A gigantic flash of purple light. A blood-curdling scream. And Mr. Quiroz was never seen again.
Ever since then, the Belmopan Comprehensive School has been plagued by a series of phenomena so mind-squelching unfathomable that even I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I intend to talk about it a lot more. Now, instead of just splintering desks, wobbly chairs, faulty wiring, leaky ceilings and more students than you can shake a yardstick at, the classes at Belmopan Comprehensive are also chock full of things from the great beyond.
And for some reason, even bigger cockroaches.
* * * * *
Twice upon a time, there was a lunch lady at the Belmopan Comprehensive School by the name of McKinley that nobody liked. She was an edgy sort of lady for her elderly age. She was short, thin, sheet white and riddled with large blue veins. Her teeny strands of dead-looking white hair fell out like dandruff, and she had quite the bald spot. She had livid green eyes that shifted like angry gnats, except for when she was angry; they bulged and then got perfectly still when she was in a tizzy. She was known for loudly gargling the never-ending stream of phlegm her mouth produced, and then swallowing it. She also occasionally used it as a projectile on people who annoyed her. Former principal Mr. Anthony can attest to her accuracy and range after she perfectly lobbed a particularly oozy phlegm-ball into his coat pocket from across the room as he had tried to explain to her that she just wasn’t allowed to keep pigeons in the kitchen. She never made a meal that didn’t include a strange substance of a leathery consistency that seemed to turn to sand once it reacted with your stomach acids, and she always insisted that it was meat even though it was incontrovertibly proven that no meat distributor had ever stepped upon the school compound while the cafeteria was under her ownership. Even when the foods she did cook were discernible for what they were in appearance (which wasn’t very often), they never once tasted like anything familiar. In fact, the flavors of her food were so decidedly alien to the human tongue that those who were brave enough to taste anything she cooked or had no alternative but to nourish themselves with her culinary nightmares were known to spontaneously shriek in terror at the very unwelcome surprises her food had wrought. People were careful to never look into her eyes if it could be avoided, and some, believing that it could ward her off, even took to wearing cloves of garlic when venturing to or nearby the cafeteria.
But as hated as she was, everyone had to admit that Ms. McKinley was heaps better than the last lunch lady. Hired when the school lured crazy old McKinley into retirement by promising to give her a monthly stipend if she gave up the food service industry forever, the new lunch lady had been a magnificent cook, a friendly, cheerful person, full of love and kindness and laughter.
Right up until she had tried to kill them all and accidentally made a sticky, explosive mess of herself.
Yeah. It was a really sad story. Mostly because it ended up involving doubling Ms. McKinley’s stipend to get her back to work.
And thusly it was not once but twice upon a time that the Belmopan Comprehensive School had a lunch lady by the name of McKinley that nobody liked. But at least Ms. McKinley had never tried to kill an entire school.
At least that’s what a jury of her peers concluded.
* * * * *
Once upon a time, Brice Garnett sat in Literature class, drumming his bony fingers on his desk as he absently stared into space. Although he wouldn’t allow himself to be worried, he certainly wasn’t not concerned about the pickle he had gotten himself into. The term had only begun just a little over a week ago, and he had actually fooled himself into thinking he had gotten into the groove of things, and then he had gotten himself into this stupid situation. As capable as he was, this was one of the few things he had to admit that he wasn’t sure he could handle.
Up at the front of the class, the blob that was Ms. Rivero stopped mid-lecture. In a Jedi-esque manner, the portly Integrated Science teacher could sense disturbances in her classroom (and fittingly enough, in the faculty lounge refrigerator, where she kept her lunches). She jerked her bulbous head out of the textbook she had been dictating from and narrowed her flinty eyes as she did a quick sweep of the classroom, and swiftly locked in on Brice in his reverie. Normally she’d threaten to eat whosoever dared to even let their minds wander for a second in her class (no one who had ever seen her girth would disbelieve that this was a legitimate threat), but she got a bad feeling about this boy. She found it mighty suspicious that a wispy, lanky, nerdish first year like him had gotten through almost two weeks of Belmopan Comprehensive without any life-threatening injuries or complete psychological breakdowns. That was very irregular. She, and everyone else in the classroom for that matter, could still smell the ‘mishap’ Giancarlo, the grotesquely muscular 17-year-old ape of a student in the front row, had made in his pants when he unwittingly wandered into the guidance counselor’s office after he’d heard a strange noise. He was as pale as death, still trembling uncontrollably as he fought a losing battle against sobbing. If someone like Giancarlo could barely maintain his mental well-being, how was it that Brice was able to do so without so much as batting an eyelash? Even now, it was easy to tell that he was the only person in the classroom who wasn’t bathing in their own anxious perspiration. In fact, he seemed even … pensive. Someone was actually thinking? In class? Even for a place like B.C.S., that was pretty strange.
Ms. Rivero’s sudden silence brought Brice back down to earth. As he turned his attention back to her to find out what was going on, Brice accidentally locked his dark brown eyes with Ms. Rivero’s own. In that moment, Ms. Rivero inexplicably felt her breath catch in her very large throat, and had she been standing at that moment (which would have been a rare occurrence indeed) she would have felt her strained knees quavering under her, and not from the usual pressure of holding her enormousness. Ms. Rivero proceeded to react in the same way anyone would had found themselves in Brice’s seemingly dark gaze would have.
She gulped, and hastily averted her eyes.
As Ms. Rivero steadfastly pinned her eyes down to the page of the text and resumed her lecture, she decided that threatening to have this one as a snack would be a big no-no. Having worked in a place like the Belmopan Comprehensive School, Ms. Rivero was no scaredy-cat, but she couldn’t repress the powerful shudder that Brice’s eyes had inspired in her. Her fear, however, was quickly replaced with annoyance when Candice, the prerequisite suck-up in the front row, held out a candy bar for her, having thought that her shiver was actually a hunger spasm, something Ms. Rivero was quite known for.
Unsurprisingly, she still ate the candy bar.
Brice sighed. He recognized all too well the look-and-look-away technique he had just seen in Ms. Rivero; he had been seeing it his entire life. Brice had once believed that it was his grim, blithe personality and snarky, deadpan voice that gave people the heebie-jeebies, but apparently people had sensed an inner darkness inside him that kept them at arms length even when he was a child. His mother explained that her friends would lie through their teeth and say what a beautiful baby he was, but then hurriedly made excuses to leave whenever she suggested that it would be all right to hold him. She knew for a fact that their official nickname for her son was ‘The black Wednesday Addams. With a penis.’
It didn’t quite roll off the tongue, but it sure got big laughs.
Although he normally hated that people feared him for absolutely no reason, this was one time Brice wished that he could use his innate ability to his advantage. However, he knew all too well that there were some things even intimidation couldn’t save him from. Especially when you go to school at a place like Belmopan Comprehensive.
Then the bell rung. And he sighed again. This was it.
Lunchtime.
* * * * *
More to come.
