I’ve been meaning to start putting up the little bits and bobs of writing from my current Creative Writing class, as the way this professor handles the actual writing portion of the course has really worked for me this semester. Here’s the first one, a bit of ofic based on a vague report from our campus police blotter, in which someone broke into the concessions stand at the baseball stadium, stole about $80 in coins from the vending machines, & then apparently made themself a batch of popcorn, and then left without touching the cash registers or any of the more valuable sports equipment.
Eighty bucks in change weighed a hell of a lot more than she’d thought it would. It was mostly quarters, swiped from the university vending machines she’d knocked over the last few nights. She’d googled how to do it first, of course, but those wiki-how-for-criminals pages made it look a lot easier than she’d found the task to actually be. Just getting the machines tipped without crushing herself to death had been a neat trick, and then figuring out how to get enough torque on the crowbar to pry the protected change compartment open had taken over an hour of sweaty, backbreaking labor the first time she’d tried it. And all that in the middle of the night, trying to keep absolutely silent, so that no one would notice and call the cops on her.
She didn’t have any time to waste sitting in a jail cell, or in the university therapist’s office while they tried to call home about her behavior and drew up her disciplinary paperwork. The thing in her basement wouldn’t wait that long.
The concessions stand barrier finally slid open with an irritable rattle, and she froze, trusty crowbar at the ready as her eyes darted around the dark baseball field, waiting for someone to call out to her, to stop her. Nobody did, of course; baseball season was long over, which was why she’d figured on this spot. Still, she tried to keep from jingling too badly as she once more shouldered the backpack full of coins and slipped inside the concessions booth. The oil she needed was in a thick-glassed bottle in the pocket of her sweatshirt, sealed with an ancient cork and dense drips of wax. She tore open the seal with the bottle opener she’d brought from home and dumped its contents out into the popcorn machine without allowing herself to dwell on the bottle’s label. She didn’t care to think about what was supposedly in the bottle, much less what sort of creature it had supposedly come from. She got the machine started – another process she’d had to google, right after researching how to deal with the creature slowly stretching its tendrils up her basement steps – and then bent to unzip the backpack as the machine began to heat up.
The coins went in a handful at a time, and it was at this point that she rather vividly remembered all of her high school chemistry classes, and cursed herself for not thinking to bring work gloves or safety goggles. The process wasn’t as violent as she’d feared it might be, at least, the coins beginning to sizzle the moment they encountered the warm basilisk oil, and then to inflate, and finally drop over the side of the corn kernel basket to the floor of the popcorn machine with soft, barely metallic clinks. The misshapen, oil-infused pellets would need to cool for a bit, and then she could scoop them back into her backpack and the extra duffel she’d brought alone, ready to be sprinkled down the wooden basement steps into the hungry maw of the creature below. She couldn’t pronounce any of the names listed for the thing growing down there, but this, this strange, impossible process, had appeared to be the tried and true method to eradicate it, listed out in simple step-by-step instructions on the forums and message boards of crazy internet people who seemed to view this sort of creature as just another nuisance of home ownership – or renting from a little old lady, in her case – akin to termites or their pet turning up with fleas.
It was by far the scariest termite she’d ever seen.
