A couple of lines in the prose of this story may appear to be a little clunky and awkward, standing out from the story; these lines were quoting the original newspaper headlines that we were provided to give some inspiration for stories, and I wanted to keep them in as a reminder of The Cost of Living's origin.
These lines were:
"There was no one who didn't fear a man who came to the door at 6am."
"I'm a bad person. I'm going straight to hell. I've a one way ticket."
The overall premise came from an article reporting that scientists believed an infusion of young blood in mice improved the brains of elderly mice, and subsequently their performance in tests.
Other works
If you enjoyed The Cost of Living, please download or sample my novelette, 'Trapping Honey', available from most eBook stores. A sample of ‘Trapping Honey’ is available at the end of this book.
Please also check out ‘The Parcel’, a collaborative work that I contributed to, edited by Morgen Bailey.
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TRAPPING HONEY
(Sample)
By Karen Pomerantz
CHAPTER ONE
I haven't always been this strong and confident, as a teenager I was a quiet, shy, paranoid girl, withdrawn and scared of my own shadow. But even now, as the strong me, at twenty, new and improved, version 2.0, I am feeling overwhelmingly terrified at my current predicament.
I know who was responsible for the pathetic years of my teenage life, and it wasn't just me. Months ago I stopped blaming all those kids for the way that they'd singled me out – I now realise that they just didn't get it, and I'm cool with that, I didn't want to be understood by the likes of them either, but I can never forgive the way that they consciously chose to react to my appearance and treat me like I was worthless – just because you don't understand something – fear it even, is no reason for the unprovoked attacks that I fell victim to.
As a teenager, you're deeply affected by everything socially, even when you don't really want to be, and I was no exception. Outsiders like myself liked to claim that we didn't want to follow the crowd, and like most of them, I didn't, but what I did want, sometimes even need, was acceptance and a bit of peer respect. Instead I got the complete opposite, being the target of severe bullying for most of my later years at senior school.
Back then as I was discovering my identity, I wore a lot of black, and before you think that this tale is going to progress to me ‘seeing the light’ and becoming ‘normal’, whatever that is, don't worry, I have no desire to be normal. My hair was dyed black, and I was seldom seen without my signature heavy black eyeliner. Heavy metal was my music of choice, my parents' generation would call me a goth, the younger generation would call me an emo, but I didn't really want to be called anything, I was just me.
Walking around school in my dark get-up with Dr. Martens boots and my black (of course) ex-army bag containing my school books, I opted for large, ill-fitting clothes to hide what was actually a pretty decent figure, in at the waist, out at the hips and up top. It's not that I thought there was anything wrong with it, quite the opposite, I just didn't want to draw any more attention to myself than I'd somehow already managed to do. Gym class was a whole other beast, baggy tracksuit bottoms I could get away with, but although those white polo shirts could hide any size waist, however big they were the material still fell softly over large breasts, perfectly framing what I usually preferred to keep hidden. Seeing my obvious discomfort, a small but rather influential group of girls saw this as a potential avenue for making me the butt of their jokes.
"Nice tits you got there Sarah, bet they don't get used much!" shouted one of the girls on the opposing netball team. Her friends all giggled, I just ignored her, netball was torture enough for me without things like that thrown in to the mix.
"I bet your Daddy loves them" called the girl's air-headed sidekick. Our sports teacher was on another court at the time, coaching another game, so she didn't hear the slander. As luck would have it, she of course turned around just as I managed to take possession of the ball and hurled it straight at the head of the sidekick, imagining it popping that balloon-like skull of hers on impact.
"Ouch!" she squealed as the ball hit her square in the nose and blood began to flow freely from one nostril, the constant stream creating a crimson trail down her bright white top.
"Sarah Honey!" shouted the teacher "go to my office immediately and don't move until I get there" she ordered sternly. Mumbling under my breath, I did as instructed and before too long, the coach joined me, the gym session finished.
"Now young lady, you'd better give me a damn good reason for that assault back there." She demanded. I explained about the insults, feeling like a chastised toddler and trying my best to not use the phrase "she started it". My teacher looked thoughtful, "yes, those girls can be rather... abrasive, but you still can't take to physically assaulting them in return for their stupid, albeit highly inappropriate, words. Give it five minutes so that the changing rooms are empty before you go in, I don't want you bumping into those girls again until you've calmed down."
"Yes, Miss," was all I could bring myself to say. Five minutes later, as instructed, I went to get changed. On arrival in the empty changing rooms, I saw my sports bag on the bench, but my clothes were not on the peg above it where I had left them. It became apparent that the girls had decided that as my punishment, it would be funny to throw my clothes into the showers. I guessed this was an attempt to force me to wear the offending white polo shirt for classes the rest of the day. Not wanting to let them win, I wrung my clothes out as best I could, and put on the soaking wet articles and a brave face instead, all the time feeling like at any second I would just collapse and fall apart at the humility I felt. Of course, the wet clothes clung to my figure even more than the sports top would have done, but at least the dark colours made me feel modest to a certain degree, and the girls hadn't fully won on this occasion.
Following that stunt, the next time that I found my clothes in the showers after gym, they had also been doused in bleach. It was at this point that I broke. It was never going to stop, and I hadn't even done anything to attract the attention of these antagonists other than share some hallways with them.
Over time, I became more and more withdrawn as the abuse at school continued. My parents didn't know what to do with me, I hardly ate, and then it got worse.
For a while, the bullying eased up. I was suspicious at first, then after a few weeks, one of the boys that was friends with my main group of tormenters, Jon, began talking to me, coming to my aid to pick up my things after someone knocked them out of my hands in the hallway, and generally being nice. That was something I hadn't really experienced before, as I had no real friends to speak of, besides Damien, whom I didn't really consider a friend, so much as someone to be tolerated. Damien wasn't directly horrible to me, but he would often just watch and laugh rather than step in to help me on the frequent occasions that I found myself the butt of someone else's joke. It was this lack of intervention that meant I never felt any real loya
lty to Damien, but he continued to come and sit next to me at lunchtimes and generally act like my shadow whenever he spotted me, so I accepted his frequent presence, but he was certainly no confidante.
I did assume for a time that he wanted more from me than just a friendship, and this theory seemed even more accurate one year when his mother bought him a camera for his birthday. He had snapped away at me relentlessly for about a month before branching out with his choice of subject matter, and when he finally did begin to move on to landscapes and still life, I believed that I'd mis-read the signs.
The bullying I experienced had made me withdraw and not want to get close to anyone who might cause me hurt. Only Damien had been persistent enough to continue plaguing me until I began to speak back to him, until Jon, that is, whom I began to trust due to his defiant acts in public, against his friends, when he came to my aid. Eventually, Jon asked me to go out with him. Over the weeks of brief conversations between us, I'd begun to fall for him, so I was thrilled, and too blinded by excitement to wonder if there may be an alternate motive behind his request, other than a genuine desire to spend time with me. How stupid I was back then.
CHAPTER TWO
Now, for the first time since the night I went out with Jon more than three years ago, I feel equally as vulnerable and helpless as that pathetic girl I used to be. I awaken slowly, my head groggy and thick with the smog of a deep sleep. My eyelids are heavy, I keep trying to force them open, but they are so resistive, why does my body not want to rouse itself? I cease the fight a little and focus my remaining senses on my surroundings. This does not feel like my bed, the mattress is squidgy and lumpy, likely old, and the material I feel beneath my fingers is not the soft jersey cotton of my own bedlinen, but something more starchy. It itches, and I move to pull my sleeves a little further down my arm to shield me from the sheet's scratchy fingers. That's odd, my sleeves are extremely baggy, I usually wear my shirts quite snug these days. Something is not right. I struggle through the smog that clouds my head to think back, to remember how I came to be... wherever this is, but I am too drowsy. I try once more to open my eyes, and at the same time manage to push myself up, almost to a seated position, before the spinning sensation it results in causes me to give in once more, allowing myself to drift back into unconsciousness, I lie back down on the soft pillow.
The next time I awaken, I don't know how much later, I don't feel so obstructed. I lift my face out of the soft feather pillow beneath me, I hate soft pillows, I always feel suffocated as my heavy head pushes down and the surrounding material and filling rises up in front of my mouth. My jumbled thoughts, although much improved from earlier, still do not feel one hundred per cent clear as I attempt to muddle through my sparse memories. Finally opening my eyes as I sit up, slowly this time, it takes me a minute to be able to properly focus on my environment. There isn't much to see, the room is sparse, and unfamiliar, I hear only silence, and the smell I breathe in, supposedly the best sense to aid memory, was telling me nothing. I do not know this place, nor remember how I got here, and the sense of foreboding that accompanies this realisation wraps itself around my very soul, digging its fingers in tightly.
What is clear is that I have woken on a bed in a sparse room that I do not know. The door is the first thing I check when the unfamiliarity of my surroundings has fully sunk in, and I find that it is locked. My heart begins to race, my breathing turns ragged as I become aware that I am someone's prisoner here. Trying to remain calm and lucid, I think back, "how did I get here, what happened?"
I have no memory beyond stepping out of my front door that morning to go to the shops and get some milk for my breakfast cereal, and so no idea of how I have come to be someone's captive in this place, nor, in fact, where this place actually is or who has brought me here. That in itself was shocking enough, but my situation was made to feel exponentially worse for two reasons; One, the entire wall facing the bed is covered in photographs of me. They are from all ages, although mainly in my darker days of black hair and clothing, through to the more recent shots of me playing Roller Derby at my last two bouts with Stormy City Rollergirls. My skin crawls as I reach out to touch my image in one of them and I can't help but release a sudden shudder at the realisation that someone has been following me, studying me, for years.
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The Cost of Living Page 3
