Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25987771-20160325002848

I've been tinkering with various story ideas for a long time now, and this one's the most coherent I've got so far. If you wouldn't mind taking a look-see, I'd really appreciate it.

At a young age, we have a bad habit of getting ourselves into trouble. To quote a beaten-into-the-dirt phrase, “curiosity killed the cat,” and that’s extremely relevant with kids and teenagers. What I’m trying to say is, sometimes we stumble on things that are far out of our league or realm of understanding, and the prime time to pull stunts like this is when we’re at our most naïve and adventurous.

I thought those days were over when I entered my junior year in high school. This was the time when I would get a taste of the adult world, having to take the SAT’s and starting to search for affordable colleges. I was officially an upperclassman, and the thrilling yet limited adventures of discovery as a child were now just memories, right?

In between my AP courses, I took up a photography class for fun. I needed something relaxing in between the synthesis papers and SAT’s, and I figured to myself, “how hard can it be to take pictures?”

I praised my foresight, because the class was a cakewalk. Our teacher usually let us just sit around and talk if there wasn’t anything planned for that day, and the work was almost entirely out of school. We had to make photo albums that included “collages of our daily lives” or “simple things that brought us joy.” It took about fifteen minutes to do each album, and basically, if you presented something that vaguely related to the topic with enough confidence, you walked away with a perfect score.

There was one day, however, in about March, that our teacher brought up something a little bit more complex.

“You know,” she said, when we all settled into our seats. “Spring is a time that’s always associated with nature’s beauty. Flowers bloom, leaves reappear on the trees, the snow melts away revealing the new green grass…”

She paused, looking at her feet for a moment, as if choosing her words as carefully as possible.

“But you know what? Nature can be pretty damn hideous sometimes!” she exclaimed, a few of the students laughing quietly. “Really, think about it, animals kill other animals, insects chew up decayed plants and corpses, water gets polluted with mud and algae, it’s disgusting!”

She then stopped, smiling.

“In fact, I think that should be your next album, everyone.” We all blinked, glancing at one another.

“You heard me. Let’s make things interesting! Instead of looking at all of the beauty in nature, I want you guys to look at the dark side. Document everything that makes the natural world ugly.”

I was actually pretty excited for this project. It was the type of thing that really made you think, without being too difficult. I could already think of a few good places to start, but one in particular tickled my fancy. There was a small marsh on my high-school’s property, a short walk from the fences of the baseball field, right on the edge of the intersection at Cummings and Briarmoor roads. I’d never actually been in there, I had only seen the cattails poking out on the bus ride to and from school. That seemed like an interesting place to have a look around in. The water was probably full of generations of algae and bacteria, just the kind of thing I was looking for.

The only problem was actually getting back there. The woods were a bit notorious for being a sort of safe haven for kids to go and smoke pot or have sex, so occasionally campus security went snooping around back there for anyone. Hopefully I wouldn’t look too suspicious if I had my camera out.

I waited until after school was out before I put my backpack into my locker and headed out behind the field, one of the class’s digital cameras around my neck, and my phone in my back pocket. It had a pretty good camera on it too, but it was a much bigger pain to get them printed out if they came from the phone.

I hopped the fence and started to make my way through the woods. It was a really nice day, not too much pollen and with a pleasant breeze in the air. The pine needles above me rustled as a soft wind came through the branches. I kept my eyes peeled for any ugly or off-kilter photo opportunities as I continued towards the marsh.

The only atypical thing I spotted on my walk to the marsh was a gigantic collection of mushrooms growing under a tree. They weren’t even the typical capped kind I saw around my yard, they were the big puffball kind. They looked like a giant, out of control zit growing on the ground, all fat and ready pop. I snapped a picture.

I started to smell the marsh-water as I got closer. Swamps have a particular reek to them, kind of a mix between skunk-spray and refuse. Even though most marshes only start to smell bad when they’re big, this one couldn’t have been bigger than a few meters, but it was potent enough to jostle the contents of my stomach. If there was a way to capture that stink onto a picture, that would definitely qualify for my album.

I finally reached the edge of the marsh, yellow-tan cattails poking out of the ground. They were thick, thick enough that I couldn’t see any water. I thought about taking a few more steps forward, but that was probably a bad idea. The water might have gone deeper than I thought, and the last thing I wanted was to ruin my clothes and the camera by taking a header into filthy bog water.

I wanted a clear shot of the water, so I made my way into the underbrush to my left. Sticks snapped under my feet as I peered through the reeds for an opening, and I found a small section where the foliage had rotted away. I took a picture of the dark brown, rotting cattails floating lifelessly in a few inches of water, then I looked into the water itself.

It was about as filthy as I imagined, a very pale green in color with a glistening, oily film of God-knows-what on the surface. This was perfect.

I snapped a picture, carefully holding my camera at the right angle to catch the sunlight on the water’s greasy surface. I took a step back to get the shot perfect, but I cringed when I felt something squish under my right shoe.

Fantastic, I had just wandered into a big pile of shit. I looked down in dread, praying it might have been a mud puddle, but it was neither.

The body of a small animal was buried beneath a thin layer of leaves and pine straw. I prodded it with my foot, rolling it over so I could get a better look.

It was a small dog, no bigger than a possum. The poor thing’s chest was pulled apart like a dissected frog, revealing the empty cavity where its insides once were. It must have escaped from its backyard one night, and probably ran into some coyotes.

I hesitated for a good half a minute before I snapped a picture. My teacher was right, nature could be really ugly sometimes. I doubted that I would even include it in my presentation, it was way too ghoulish to just up and show at school. I would probably just end up deleting the picture later.

I spotted a small collar around the dog’s neck, and felt a lump form in my throat. Oh man, now I had to deliver the bad news to the owners. I swallowed heavily and reached down for the name tag, wiping the grime off of it.

I had to stop when I heard a noise from behind me, a low, soupy bubbling sound. I turned to look at the water behind me, and I saw a swelling gurgle in the corner of the marsh. I readied my camera, zooming in on it, turning over in my mind what it could have been. A gas pocket? Maybe a big turtle? From the size of it, that would have to be a big goddamn turtle.

I snapped a picture, but it didn’t look all that great, the gurgle was already mostly faded away when the camera actually captured it. I looked from the camera back to the water, and saw that there was definitely something under there, as a thin pucker glided across the oily surface of the water, leaving small eddies twirling in its wake. What didn’t make sense was that it was swimming towards me. Instinctively, I took a few steps back. I don’t really know what I was expecting, it didn’t look big enough to be something dangerous like an alligator (were there even alligators in Virginia?) Hell, maybe it actually was some big turtle.

Turtles wouldn’t swim right at you, though.

The movement in the water stopped a few feet from the rotten cattails. It took a second to notice that something crawled out onto the dead plants. It blended in almost perfectly, being the same chocolatey brown color as the cattails.

My first guess of what it might have been was a snake. It had no limbs that I could see. But as I squinted down at it, I couldn’t see a head, or even any eyes. The image of an animal I saw in Biology class flitted across my mind, a lungfish. It was a tube-like thing that crawled out of the water for long periods of time. But those things lived in places full of huge swamps, not in tiny bogs like this one.

The thing in the swamp squirmed out of the water, but I couldn’t see an end to it. Not only was it longer than I thought, it wasn’t moving right. It didn’t move of its own volition, almost like someone was reeling it out of the water with a fishing rod.

I fumbled for the camera around my neck, hoping that one of the teachers back on campus could identify what this thing was. Before I even had the chance to open the lens, the creature whipped forward with alarming speed. It grasped for the dead dog, smacking against the ground with a heavy thud and slithering over the body’s eviscerated torso. With just as much speed, it retreated back into the marsh, dragging the dog backwards until it disappeared under the filthy water. I felt my nerves jolt when I saw an identical creature to the first one squirming out onto the shore.

Without a second thought, I turned tail and began to bound away. The foliage beneath me was extremely thick, and my foot caught on a snarl of weeds, and I fell into the ivy face first. I felt a lukewarm moistness as one of the brown creatures coiled around my ankle. I immediately grasped for it, trying to pull it off of me, but my leg slid out of reach as the slippery creature tugged it towards the water.

I was being dragged towards the water while the other creature slithered its way up my pant leg, soaking my jeans as I furiously slapped at it. My shoes slipped into the water, leaking through the worn soles and drenching my socks. I whipped back to the creature wrapped about my ankle and pulled it towards me, trying to pull it out of the marsh. It wouldn’t budge. It was anchored to something beneath the surface, but what?!

I yelled for help, bellowing that I was being attacked as my legs disappeared into the sickly green water, the creature that had been crawling up my leg reaching my chest. I could see its outline bulging beneath my shirt as I tried to grab at it.

I screamed again, but it wasn’t for help. I felt my ankle, the one that wasn’t trapped, crunch. A set of jaws bore down on it, effortlessly biting into the end of my femur with dagger-like teeth. I immediately grasped for whatever had bitten me to pull it off, but the creature up my shirt sprung to life and coiled around my left arm, like it was protecting whatever had bit me.

These weren’t animals. They were feelers. They were part of whatever had bit me, like a set of tentacles.

I wrestled with the feeler around my arm, thrashing about and making as much noise as I could as my entire bottom half was submerged in the marsh water. It thrashed back, squirming away from my touch and tightening its grip around my fingers, threatening to snap them. The mouth underwater let go of my ankle and sank its teeth into my thigh. I used my unrestrained arm to grab at it, touching a heavy, slimy mass. I raked my nails up it, hoping to do some kind of damage. My index finger hit a particularly soft patch, plunging into and popping a round protrusion of jelly. An eye.

That's all I got right now. Feedback's appreciated. 