My Turn

Ok, so I am in the mood to keep posting, so here is the beginning of a story that I started writing a couple of months ago. In the same vein as Josh Muselix's story, it is a goal of mine to actually finish one of these stories at some point. Unfortunately, full-time employment keeps me from sitting around and writing all day.

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Sunday morning. It was raining. Karl wanted nothing more than to pull the covers back over his head and go back to sleep. The steady drumming of the rain on the bedroom window was hypnotic. Karl’s half-asleep brain imagined the sound was actually caused by wave after wave of miniature soldiers marching across the window in their tiny little army boots. For some reason Karl was comforted by the thought of a blanket of inch high Rambos covering his window.

Just as Karl was becoming fully committed to the troop deployment, a bloodcurdling scream from the next room disrupted his jack-boot revelry. Karl was startled and got out of bed to determine the source of the scream. He paused at the pile of clothes on the floor to pick up and put on a t-shirt and pair of shorts. What he found in the next room was his younger brother in frantic activity centered around a video game console.

“What’s going on out here?” Karl asked lethargically.

Karl’s younger brother Todd, who was the classic hyper-active spazz of a 13 year old brother, never looked up.

“My Xbox360 froze! It froze!” Todd was nearly screaming in hysterics, “I was just about to go in the room where the guy is to get the bomb so I could go find the guy with the thing and blow it up and…”

“It’s not your Xbox…” Karl started, but he didn’t really have the energy to argue semantics.

“Yeah, yeah,” Todd said, “has it ever done this to you before? I mean it was just fine last night and it worked all morning…”

“Isn’t it a bit early for all this?” Karl interrupted, knowing that it would be minutes before Todd quit talking of his own accord.

Todd looked at Karl for the first time.

“It’s already 8:30, Ice.”

When Karl was fourteen he had decided that he hated his name. Carl Weathers was the only cool person he could think of that shared his name. And Carl Weathers hadn’t been cool for a long time. So, using the poor decision-making skills that are typical in the average fourteen year old, Karl declared that he wanted everyone to call him ‘Ice’. What could be cooler than Ice, after all? It didn’t take Karl long to realize his mistake, but the damage was done. Three years later, everyone still called him Ice, and always with the gleam in their eye that he saw in Todd’s eye that particular Sunday morning. Some days the name would be enough to make Karl seek retribution physically against his brother, but his mind had not quite wholly returned from the land of the rain soldiers and the moment passed.

Karl and Todd lived with their parents in the suburbs in a small ranch-style house that looked exactly like every other house in their neighborhood. It was the sort of neighborhood where almost everyone took pride in the maintenance of their house and yard because that was the only way to differentiate between them. The day their father installed a small fountain in the front yard, below the picture window in the living room, was a controversial day in the neighborhood. Their father was so proud, but many in the neighborhood thought it was ostentatious. Their father knew that they were all just jealous.

There were a few houses in the neighborhood, however, that didn’t take care of their house or lawn at all. These were the houses that were discussed the most by the neighborhood gossips. Rumors would spread through the neighborhood about criminal activity that would go on at these houses and occasionally law enforcement would show up to prove a rumor or two to be true.

Karl and Todd’s house backed up to one of the run-down houses. Their father complained bitterly and almost non-stop about the house and its perpetual state of disrepair. Several months before that Sunday morning there had been a small fire at the house. When the fire department arrived, they found that a multitude of criminal activity had been going on in the house and the occupants had been led away by the police shortly thereafter. The house had been vacant from then until a moving van had shown up on Saturday.

Karl’s father was convinced that a new passel of rogues would be moving in and he was already in full complaint mode.