I've been working on something different and need some feedback from people who aren't predisposed to like whatever I write.
This is the beginning, around 750 words. A bit creepy? maybe.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fantasy Pill
A black and gray sky
Cigarette ashes swirling
Low-lit room unstirred
Things changed on a bright winter wasted day. I was going back in time in the house I use to own. It was a small and forgotten house with window eyes and vinyl siding. It had a weak foundation and dust, and it was at war with rats and bugs, and it was always too cold. My life was stagnating, the present was decaying and the future was stillborn. I'd hunt forgotten memories that I'd consume like an orange, sucking the colour and tones out of them until they were bitter white skin.
Most of that bright winter day was spent just like that in this house. Doing nothing to improve it, just playing with ideas on a typewriter and looking through the worried eyes that gazed out onto the street. Bright winter wasted days, and this was the last of them.
In the afternoon the postman came bearing gifts. I wondered about his life and how he decided to take such a symbolic job.
Happy, purpose?
I waited for him to stride across my lawn and stop thinking about my house before I went to see what he brought. Little patches of damp grass among wet snow, they looked like they woke up too early. The grass around the wooden pole of the ribbed metal mailbox with my address on it woke up too early.
Reaching my hand into the dark, I hoped, as usual, that something good came my way. This time something did. A decorative envelope and an intriguing caption:
CHASE YOUR THRILLS WITH THE FANTASY PILL
The letter was inviting, but not an invitation. It was folded carefully and speckled with peaceful, womanly colours. The message was a lot of affectionate compliments arranged like any good piece of artistic expression should be; beginning with its purpose, and consistent to the end that comes just a little too soon. This is how you can feel beautiful, just by being you. It was a temping offering of bait, and it was all I really had to consume.
A couple of days, the letter is the centerpiece at my dinner table. Time to go! Never look back!
Dark gray winter day on the other side of the coach window. There was no driver and no passengers, there were only pleasant thoughts and dangerous expectations. An array of lonely landscapes were framed by transparent ice and snow; fields of tense plants and reaching trees, frozen and hard and dead. Above them the sky was cold and full of brushed white clouds that wisped like cobwebs.
Behind the cold, behind the cobwebs, something was there and it was breathing and staring with hungry, darkened eyes. I fell asleep to its company.
Someone needs your soul
An empty space for your art
Hidden in her room
Reality struck and rippled my placid mind and I found myself in the fast and anxious last minutes before arriving on a long trip. The sky had warmed, trees were replaced with frosted red brick, and the icy border of the window was now just a ghostly apparition of milky orange sun. The driver appeared, and then the passengers, one by one, as they became aware of the end of the trip and shared my thoughts. We all departed together and then they disappeared again, except for the driver who hated his job and protested by dragging small explosions of smoke into his lungs with a grimace. He took a long look at me. I was a mess, a lawn gone to shit, untrimmed with patches of flaws, staring at a return address on a torn and wrinkled envelope.
I'd never been to this town before, but it felt, ineffably, like I had. I was jaggedly walking through a memory on the other side of the sidewalk. I kept my view to the memory side, remembering, as if I had spent some time in my life here, all the passing buildings. A small hardware store with towers of batteries and dark corners of power drills, a convenience store run by an old Asian couple. I've bought batteries and bug repellent, Twix bars and rented movies, all in dreams that I don't remember having. Crossing a four way with a hanging red light, I saw memories in the passing Passat and utility van with a carpet cleaning decal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'll save you the rest for now, and, if I find the time, critique stuff.
