kc01.html

Creatures (temporary title)-Chapter 1

Filename: kc01.html
© 1999 Kim Celli
Length: 2300 words

Genre: Fiction
Description: Introduces the main character, a successful writer, and gives a background on the characters he writes about and how he began writing about them. Foreshadows conflicts to come.

WARNING: The following literature deals with mature subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.

Creatures
Chapter 1: The Beginning

The house was exactly what we wanted. Looking at my wife's face as she gazed out the French doors towards the crisp, blue lake, I knew I had to get it for her. She belonged here and, God knows, she deserved it. After all the years of living with a struggling, moody writer, my wife Karen was still the lovely saint I'd met in college. In fact, before the first book got published, Karen worked two jobs to allow me to write the novel that was going to our "big break."

What she saw in me, I'll never know. She was blonde, beautiful, and poised. I was sallow, introverted, and scrawny. She said she loved my writer's mind, whatever that meant. She loved the way I saw beauty in ugliness, and the way I saw ugliness in beauty. What she didn't know was that because beauty often ignored me, I grew to see it as ugly, and because ugliness accepted me, I grew to see it as tolerable. After all our time together, I don't think she ever suspected my less-than-aesthetic reasoning. And I didn't have the heart to tell her. I didn't want to lose her.

Karen had given me many things. One of them being our daughter, Rachel. Rachel was everything that was Karen, but in miniature. She was a beautiful little girl with a vivid imagination and saw possibility in everything. I had never been a part in the creation of anything so perfect. When strangers on the street stopped to comment how beautiful Rachel was, I responded as if they were complimenting me.

So I wanted my family to have this house with its high, vaulted ceilings and balcony overlooking a long stretch of woods. I wanted Rachel to wake up each morning in a pink-and-white bedroom and be able to look out at the oak trees through her picture window. I wanted Karen to make us breakfast in a large modern kitchen so glaringly white that it hurt the eye. And after too many nights of staying up till dawn, and the long moody silences I would keep for days while I was writing my books, my family would get this house that I would pay for.

Well, not really, if you thought about it.

I wouldn’t pay for this house. The creatures would.

In fact, the creatures were responsible for everything we owned: the cars we drove, the clothes we wore. Everything down to the toilet paper. Karen even came up with the saying that the things we had were our "creature comforts." She thought it was funny and although I laughed, it made me uncomfortable. It seemed they controlled everything, including my moods. If they weren't happy, I wasn't either.

I came up with the idea of writing about the creatures during the painfully pimply years of adolescence. I didn't have a lot of friends then (that hadn’t changed with age, although I’ve had quite a few prospective agents and publicists take the liberty of calling me "buddy" and "old pal"). So I dreamed up the creatures to act as surrogates for the friends that I didn’t know how to make.

I’ve always felt apart from people in a way. Kind of like I was of a different species. I’ve never understood them and the complexities and demands of their emotions. I’ve also never felt comfortable with their unpredictable natures. But, you see, the great thing about creating your friends is that you always know what they are going to do, and you have the ability to control how they treat you.

It was perfect for me and for them. We fed off of each other, really, the creatures and I. I have often said, ironically, in interviews that the creatures saved me from sure insanity. They were fun to be with, they were always getting into interesting types of adventures and trouble, and most importantly, their whole existence revolved around being friends with strange, lonely kids like me.
Each creature is about the size of a dwarf, reaching no more than about two-and-a-half feet in height. They have gray, lumpy, potato-like bodies, and their hands and feet are small reptilian appendages. Their bellies are distended and plump, making them look like miniaturized replicas of Buddha. Their faces are flat, and their noses are smashed and very wide, with flared, mucus-filled nostrils that make them look as if they constantly have a cold. They talk to each other in hushed, inhuman whispers that I have never been able to understand. Nevertheless, I understand them and they understand me and the other characters in my books. They have a faint musty odor to them, as they were spawned from a gully located just down the hill from my childhood home. Since I spent most of my time there as a child, playing and dreaming, it seemed only right that the gully be their birthplace.

When I decided to write fiction for a living, I began writing about the creatures on the premise that they might fascinate others like they fascinated me. And to my luck they did. So far, I’d written eight books about the creatures, and they all did exceptionally well.

So, I had the creatures to thank for this house that I was going to buy for my family. The one thing that was exclusively mine.

* * *

After we moved into the house, I immersed myself totally in writing about the creatures. Not so much out of interest or that possessed streak that some writers get from writing on certain subjects, but just for the fact that my agent said that the public couldn't get enough. The books were making me a killing. There was even talk of adapting some of my books for a screen play.

If the truth be known, the more that I wrote about the creatures and the more money I made, the more I began to resent them. I felt no happiness from my success, because it wasn't me that the public loved(it was the creatures. As my resentment grew, I made the creatures more grotesque and more inhumanly disgusting. With each book, I made them dumber and clumsier. It was like getting back at them in a way. But it didn't matter how dumb, disgusting, or clumsy I made them, the readers just loved them more.

In time, I decided to make them ferocious, even violent. I thought that by making the creatures frightening that it would make them less lovable. But it didn't. The hideous monsters could get away with anything(it just wasn't fair.

And with each best-seller, I felt the creatures laughing at me, mocking me for doubting their appeal. It was as if they didn't belong to me anymore. Maybe they never had. I longed to come up with a new set of characters. Characters that I enjoyed writing about and could make me money. But every time I brought a new idea to my agent, Martin Riley, he would get this faraway look in his eye as if he weren't listening and say, "Interesting. . .interesting. But do you have anymore developments on the creatures?" He didn't even call them my creatures anymore. They were THE creatures now, as if they could stand on their own without me.

I longed to tell him, "Yes, yes! I do have new developments for the creatures. I'm having their race violently destroyed. They’ll be decapitated and their body parts strewn and buried all over the world so they will never be able to come back and cohabit my brain or the brains of others. They will be overthrown by a new breed of which I will be the master and controller of their success."

But I never said this. I'd just smiled at Martin and tell him about the new adventures the creature would be having.

So, the once lovable, trouble-making creatures were now violent, flesh-craving killers. With each book, my goal was to have my readers feel the level of disgust that I felt toward the creatures. I made the creatures without conscience, morals, or any sense of right or wrong. In a time of political correctness, I had them murdering old ladies and pregnant mothers. In one scene, my creatures killed a homeless person so they could eat his internal organs.

But nobody ever came after me. Not the Feminists, the Pro-Lifers, or people for the homeless' rights. The only people who were beating my door down were the movie producers. They were offering me millions of dollars for book rights.

At one point I tried to write about the creatures hurting children, thinking that surely someone would complain about that. Oddly enough though, the creatures wouldn't let me. As soon as the words and pictures flashed into my head, their hushed, raspy voices raised in objection. In the rational part of my brain, I knew that the creatures actually adored children. In one of my earlier books, they sought revenge against the abusive father of a small child they had found in an abandoned tree house. They took the child in as their own, cared for his cuts and bruises, nurtured and loved him.

At times, I would get pangs of sentimental tenderness for what the creatures had been to me, how they had gotten me through uncertain and lonely times, but it was pushed away by my jealousy. I think the creatures, for the most part, let me get away with the violence I made them commit because they didn’t fully understand it. (Some did not take it as well as others, however; Guppy, one of my more sensitive creatures, couldn't eat for a week after biting the head off a mouse in my last book.) But they would not allow me, under any circumstances, to let them hurt children.

These feelings I had for knowing what the creatures wanted and didn't want written about them came to me often. There was the feeling I had about children, of course, but there was more. As I started to make the creatures more violent in nature, other parts of their character emerged. Things I had never considered.

At random moments during my writing sessions, I felt compelled to write about their sexuality. It was not even that I felt compelled(the idea actually repulsed me(but nevertheless, it was there. I could feel them becoming less and less inhibited. I could hear them grow silent when a female character entered a scene. I could see their nostrils stretching across their faces to catch her scent. And my God! The things they were thinking of doing to this poor, unsuspecting female were embarrassing! I could feel the hardening of their organs as they watched her walk, and talk, or play with a strand of her hair. I hadn't even known that they had organs!

With each writing session, the feelings became stronger and stronger. Images and thoughts that I'm sure were theirs and not mine pushed their way onto the paper. Once I was in the middle of working on a scene in which the creatures were about to rob a woman in an alley way. I began to describe the woman as matronly, in her late 40's, with a tired expression on her face. Suddenly I realized that I had written that the woman was in her early thirties with long, blond hair and a sensual, inviting smile. Suddenly she’s wearing a black leather miniskirt without underwear. She sees the creatures and her heavy, round breasts begin to heave. The creatures can see the darkness of her nipples beneath her flimsy, white shirt. The woman, who I had intended to make very frightened by the creatures, is now talking dirty to them. She's lifting up her skirt very slowly and seductively leaning back against a garbage can with her legs spread. The creatures’ organs are pulsing now, and they are arguing amongst themselves about who will be the first to take her. A fight breaks out because one of the creatures becomes possessive and tells the rest of them that none of them will have her because this is the woman he's going to marry in the next book.

He approaches the woman and she turns her head. In horror, I see that it’s my wife! Outraged, I overpower their fantasies. The woman pulls down her skirt indignantly. She looks at them in disgust and tells them that she'd rather be robbed than have sex with any of them. Besides, she says, she's happily married to a man that satisfies her every need. The creatures are devastated. Rejected and dejected, they scurry from the alley and disappear into the walls. And I know without a doubt that they are going somewhere to jack-off.

The same scene is played over and over. Different circumstances, different women. Sometimes my wife, sometimes my wife's friends(any woman that I came in contact with who was even remotely attractive. If they weren't attractive, then the creatures compensated with their vivid imaginations. Breasts were enlarged, legs were elongated, tummies were tucked. They were sexual visionaries, these creatures of mine. They saw a sexual odyssey in every female(even my 60-something-year-old mother. When that happened, I told them point-blank just to forget it. Bottom line was that these were horny little beasts with only one thing on their minds.