Ever since Blair had exploded, alone and fondling his nipples in the empty, muffinless grocery store, Jenny further felt the weight of the great fungus as it loomed overhead. Of course, it didn’t help that she’d only had cold showers the past few days. It was so depressing. That time when she had gone showerless for one measly night… this was so much worse. So much. Winter was coming, the water was cold, and she was lucky that Joey had tank-water on the property. Unless it rained though, it wasn’t going to last and town water was no longer flowing.
Everything was gone. The power, the water, and the luxuries and necessities of a normal life. Her mother used to shriek at her every time she’d dared to complain about something. “It’s not the end of the world, Jennifer.” — now, it literally was.
This wasn’t the first time she had thought it, but perhaps Joey was a prophet. Imagine casually talking about the end of the world and then a month later it was actually happening.
Jenny leant over the windowsill and stared into the forest, watching as a group of meerkats bobbed up and down through the undergrowth. They didn’t belong there, but she’d prefer them over bears and wolves and tigers at least. How many other animals had escaped the zoo — all of them? The idea of animals being locked up in their enclosures and not being fed or looked after was horrible, but the thought of predators wandering suburbia and hunting for food, for people, was just as horrifying.
There was movement down below. Narrowing her eyes, she watched as Joey appeared from around the corner of the house and slowly walked over towards the forest, to the little creatures. They didn’t scurry away or try to run and hide from this strange human that encroached upon them, instead they actually approached him as he plonked down on the grass and basked beneath the sun.
These meerkats and those monkeys at Blair’s… these weren’t the first incidences of Joey interacting with wildlife. He was so strange. She smiled. Many years ago, when they were kids in primary school, there had been a massive brown snake slithering around the playground. The teachers panicked and herded the terrified kids into the classrooms, but not Joey, no. He escaped their clutches and strolled over to the snake as though it weren’t a big deal at all. It came up to him, slithered up his leg and up around his shoulders, and it was his best friend for the entire day.
The teachers had been horrified. She had been pretty impressed back then, thought it had been so cool that he had made friends with one of the most dangerous creatures in the world, but now… she’d react just like the teachers did. She was getting old, wasn’t she?
Joey climbed up to his feet and went back towards the house, and the meerkats resumed their little animal lives in their wrong environment. Poor things. All the same, hopefully he had told them to leave their chickens alone. Not that he had managed to catch them yet, of course. For an animal whisperer, he sure had a lot of issues with that flock of chickens roaming the streets.
Hopefully he managed to entice them soon, they needed them now more than ever. They were completely out of bacon. After the power had gone out, it took the freezer a couple of days to completely defrost but they no longer had any cold storage. They had eaten the chicken Joey had caught and then all the bacon. It was almost too much to eat in such a short period of time, but it was better than having it all go to waste.
The front door closed and footsteps headed upstairs. That was odd. Normally he’d come talk with her after checking on his wine and hanging around outside. It had become routine. She needed routine. Without thinking, she whipped away from the window and hurried upstairs, only pausing to briefly knock at Joey’s door.
Joey opened the door and grinned at her.
“Well, hello there.”
It suddenly occurred to her that she had never, not once, been in Joey’s room before. Even as a child she had never been in there; his aunt hated other people and didn’t want children in the house, so they played outside near the forest.
“Welcome to the blue zone.”
At first she thought he was referring to the fact that blue was a boy’s colour, and he was a boy, so therefore his room should have a ludicrous name, but then her eyes adjusted to the otherwise gloomy interior, illuminated only by a small hint of the afternoon sun and a mass of blue lights dangling from black wires across the ceiling.
“It looks better at night.” Joey shrugged, seemingly unfazed by her silence.
The bastard had lights in his room. For a brief moment the room transformed into a haze of angry red, but then she took a quick breath and tried to calm herself. There was no electricity. There had to be a logical explanation.
“Why do you have blue lights?” she asked, unable to stop an accusatory glare. “How is it you have electricity, but the rest of the town, possibly the world, doesn’t?”
“I don’t. I have plenty of batteries though! A good thing I have them too, mushrooms grow better under blue light.”
“For someone who isn’t a drug dealer, you sure know a whole lot about growing shrooms.”
“Aunt Greta taught me a lot of things, Jenny. How do you think we got those things when we were teenagers?” He rolled his eyes. “Come, look at my babies!”
Jenny winced, then crossed the threshold.
After so many years, it seemed strange to set foot in this room for the first time. When he’d said that his room was perfect for growing mushrooms in, she had imagined a dank, musty, gross, mould-infested cave of a bedroom. Thankfully, it wasn’t like that. He had a normal bed, a giant wall-length bookshelf covered with everything but books, a great pile of clothes on the floor, and there was a walk-in-wardrobe flung wide open, displaying his vast supply of novelty items… including what appeared to be trilobite fossils. He really did have everything.
Under the window was a long shelf with a terrarium on it, and in the terrarium were little mushroom sprouts. Joey gazed lovingly upon his baby mushrooms then flung his hands toward them in a ‘ta-da’ fashion.
“Aren’t they adorable?”
“I guess. If you really feel comfortable growing shrooms when the world is besieged by its evil brother.”
“Apples and oranges, Jenny,” he said, not taking his eyes away from his sprouts. “If anything, these babies are a good luck omen. The crepitus won’t dare touch us while we’re looking after its completely unrelated sibling’s offspring.”
“Sure.” Jenny raised her eyes to the ceiling. “That’s not wishful thinking at all.”
“We wished we were dreeeamers,” he sang, then shook his head. “Whatever happened to you, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he huffed, spritzing the sprouts with a mist of water, “Whatever happened to the Jenny who thought this stuff was interesting, who would be outside in a jiffy to help me make cucumber wine, who would happily go on a camping adventure and explore the wonders of the forest? The Jenny who was always by my side, having fun?”
Jenny blinked.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve changed, Jenny. Are you even a Jenny any more, or are you a Jennifer?”
Where the hell had that come from? She was still Jenny — she had always been Jenny!
“I’m still Jenny—“
“No, you’re not. You’re boring. You’ve become a cranky old lady. You need to live a little!” He scrunched his face up and stuck his tongue out. “Ever since you moved in, I’ve been trying to make you see that. But you never do. You’ve become as blind as Mr. Nelson with his big black glasses and trendy walking stick.”
Christ, he was such a child. While she had grown up and become a responsible adult trying to live her life, he had remained stuck in his little rich-boy fantasy world, unaware of the reality that surrounded him. He was blessed and he didn’t even know it.
“That’s because I grew up, Joey. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re adults now. I tried to live my life like a responsible adult.” She blinked back a tear. “Until the crepitus ruined everything.”
“The crepitus has set you free, Jenny. That life wasn’t for you. You only want to live that life because you think you’re supposed to live that life.”
“Like you’d know what I think, what I feel.”
“I doubt you even know what you think, what you feel.”
Jenny balled up her fist, wanting nothing more than to punch his shoulder like she always did, but this time, she restrained herself.
“You know what I want?” she shouted. “A goddamned muffin.”
Spinning around, she left Joey’s blue-lit room and barged into her own.
Helloooo! It's Day Whatever of a sudden onset of Writing Madness -- a NaNoWriMo-inspired challenge that uses the daily #freewrite prompt to help create a full story as quickly as possible.
@mariannewest has issued several prompts since I temporarily stopped writing, and I've kept note of every one of them and will be including them as I go. I'll be trying to do two prompts per chapter.
In today's writing are the prompts: blue zone and fossils.
A lot of inner dialogue today, followed by a whollleeeeeee lot of spoken dialogue that I'll reeeeeeeeeally need to sort through. It feels a bit mish-mashed to me and it's very unfinished, but at least I wrote something!
New header image today! Since it's almost the end of April and I haven't finished yet. I do intend to continue until it is finished though. So this shall thus be known as Writing Madness instead of April Writing Madness! 😅
This is a very rough first draft of an upcoming book and will be tidied up and polished after this Writing Madness is finished. 😊 It might read like fast-paced-rushed-word-garbage at the moment, but it will be refined! (I over-edit like a madwoman.)
Title is a placeholder and will probably not be the final name of the book. 🤣 This story has nothing much to do with whistling but the local pub is called the Whistling Fart, things will go down there, and there will likely be a terrible amount of fart jokes. Because I'm uncultured and farts are funny. 🤷♀
Today's wordcount is 1,522
Total wordcount is 28,615
📝 A Quick Blurb 📚
Genre: immature adult comedy, reverse coming-of-age, apocalyptic silliness
Warning: irreverent, offensive humour
Jenny is a young lady in her mid-20's who finds herself out of work, out of home, and out of luck. An old friend from school has invited her to stay at his house until she gets back on her feet, but she just can't seem to land on them.
Every job opportunity she finds goes spectacularly wrong. The Great Fungus is spreading across the world and consuming all in its path. Then, to top it off, a solar flare renders electricity a thing of the past.
Faced with the end of the world as she knows it, Jenny has a choice. Will she embrace this apocalyptic madness... or will she, too, be consumed by the fungus?
Thank you for reading! 📚😊
See you next time! 📝🤓