Predator

It has more sharp teeth than any carnivore has a right to. Its haunches and shoulders are humped and packed with muscle. Large paws show large black claws that scratch the earth with each deliberate flex of those gray-black paws. The breath is putrid, pouring from between those great yellowed teeth in miasmic huffs.

It’s not going to be any of those that get you. It’s the fear. You’re frozen by it, because you’re prey and instinctually you know it. You heart is beating in your throat, in your ears, nigh coming out of your chest. It’s trying to get the most out of the time it has left. Conversely, your breath is stuck in your lungs; your swollen heart is blocking it. You can’t scream, you can’t cry, you can barely breathe. That’s probably best. This is the ultimate the predator, best to move as little as possible.

It doesn’t matter that you are its evolutionary superior. It doesn’t matter that you can read and write, build tools, that yours is a brain that has the ability to build weapons that can wipe out thousands in a bright flash. Right here, right now the fact you have cognitive abilities that this creature can’t dream of is irrelevant. Here, the meaning of life is simple, survival of the fittest. You are a bald, naked, pink creature, with no claws and blunt teeth. Your muscles are weak and the way you walk exposes all your vital organs, neck, belly, throat.

You are Food.

Then it springs. You are dead in a simple crunch of teeth on fragile bone and cartilage.

But you were dead when it first caught you in its dull hungry gaze.

–G.A. Buba

Stripped Asiatic Hyena

Its been a busy week, will try to post more regularly

My Novel- Book One: Practice Pitches

So for anyone interested here’s the quick pitch for my novel, And They Called Her Stormbringer.

The temple was quick to call it a “gift of prophesy”, while such a gift was useful. Llani discovers that her ability is much less of a blessing when she’s spouting omens of death and destruction on the head of the high priest, Isak Tornin. But even charged with blasphemy and named a false prophet, fallen from grace, the Goddess Jordaine, High Lady of the Heavens, is not done blessing Llani yet. After all, with the Empire of Braeth facing a war with the western hill tribes come summer, many people are looking for favor in the eyes of the Goddess of War.

Does this seem interesting? Would you like to know more? I have issues talking about my novel, I’ve been writing practice pitches. Feedback is appreciated. I much prefer shoving my writing under someone’s nose and going:

Me: “Read.”

Hapless Friend: “But what am I reading?”

Me: “Doesn’t matter, just read.”

—G.A. Buba

Check the new pen I got, its Japanese and has a warning label on it in itsy bitsy print. “Retract after use.” I love nice pens, particularly pens concerned you might harm yourself with themselves enough to post neat little warnings

Home

The last thirty minutes of a six hour drive is always the longest. Every pothole looks familiar. You know how to drive these roads at night, in the rain, with headlights shining in your face, half asleep or half drunk. This is so close to home you can taste it. Your mind is already leaps and bounds ahead, and it’s like no time has passed at all.

You’ll pull in the drive and tumble out into the cold, and tell everyone all about school and the friends and the guy you just met, but he seems so nice…

And that’s when it hurts. It’s sudden, like a fist to the gut, like all the air’s been sucked out of the car and replaced with bleach. You can’t miss people constantly that would be crippling. So you don’t.  You forget. You pretend that home is exactly like it was when you lived there every day… except it’s not.

The house that looks so familiar will be cold and empty and full of stale air, most of the innards that made it home, pictures, dirty clothes, things that indicate the presence of people are gone, packed into neat little boxes stacked in unused rooms, or brought with them halfway around the world.  Most of the pets have been given away to friends and neighbors, who can care for them better while the family is abroad.

It’s so…so stupid that for a minute you let yourself think you were going HOME. Because you’re not, it’s not home anymore. Home is family. Home is the smell of Dad’s cooking, the cat petting himself on your shins, and everyone’s shoes spread out in a blast pattern from the back door. All those things have picked up and moved across the Atlantic. You’re really just driving to a particularly familiar storage closet that holds your winter clothing. You shouldn’t have let yourself get excited for that.

–G.A. Buba

Driving home

It’s hard to go home when you know nothing will be the same

Caffeine

This is the graveyard shift, the long hours after Dad’s finally too exhausted to drive in the wee hours of the morning until they stop for breakfast at ten. Everyone is asleep. My sister barely lasted thirty minutes awake before she knocked out, feet leaving foggy imprints on the windshield, tucked under a blanket stolen from the parents in the back. The Bobcat, or the Coyote or some other tiny country station is buzzing static as I drive further from Amarillo. The roads a grey swath under yellow headlights, and the only thing I’ve seen in miles is eighteen wheelers blinding me with their headlights as they go barreling north the other way on this tiny two lane highway.

Seven exits after the red light on the dash pings a strident warning, the yellow glow of a Love’s sign pops up beside the next overpass. I exit pulling in under those too bright white lights, and my sister makes a muted protest. The door comes open with a rush of cold. It’s a matter of minutes ever more tedious minutes to get the tank filling. It’s one of those that have to be depressed by hand, and 16 gallons seems ever so long, and the smell of gasoline is doing odd things in the cold that is burning her fingers.

Thankfully a run quick run indoors offers climate control. Finally the real reason for insanely large gas station cups is revealed. Coffee. Large, and more a vector by which to imbibe cream and sugar. It runs hot through her veins and the remainder of the night is spent in a pleasant buzz of caffeine and jittery fingers on the wheel tapping out to old country classics she hasn’t heard in years but hey—Thank God and Greyhound She’s Gone!

G.A. Buba

Coffee and country make for the best company on late night drives

Unquiet Soul

She has what they call in the old South an unquiet soul.

“I don’t know who’s winning anymore.”

She says to herself, and on the inside its blood lying like rust in her veins, burbling through her great heart at war with her brain—she says,

“I don’t know who’s fighting anymore.”

“My boys,” she says, “I love them, but god knows its only peace when one of them’s dead or dying. A stroke or a heart attack, that’s how I’ll go. My papa he went like that, died of too much heart. He got it in him that he had to help people and so he signed himself up with the army you see. He went missing far from home swarmed with smoke and the screams of genocide—but you know that’s the only way the devil coulda come for my papa. Too much heart he had. My mama she died of a brain too loud- whirring, screeching, voices whispering—SHOUTING, crazy things… and then one day I guess she got tired of telling ‘em no. They found her at the bottom of a waterfall. I guess she was trying to drown all them voices out.”

“I don’t know why I’m fighting anymore.”

“And then you got me,” she says, “With a brain too loud and a heart too big. I’m all of them at once, baby girl. God only knows where it got me. But I think the two halves of me were so busy trying to kill each other they forgot all about killing me. My dark haired boy, all blood and iron, that one. That’s who lives up here,” she taps her temple, “And my golden summer lad, he’d love you while you put a dagger in his chest. Smile while you pushed it in and twisted it,” She taps her breast, with one last great big breath she smiled and tapped her forehead,

“Ahh, I shoulda guessed it’d be the head that did me in.”

###

And they called her manic depressive.

G.A. Buba

Hello

This is my personal writing blog. Follow for travel write-ups, poetry, and short stories, which proliferate like rabbits since I’m trying to finish the last 10 chapters of my second novel. I’m looking for a place to put all the little side projects. I’m rather hoping having to upkeep a blog will mean I’m informing someone of my progress, and thus progressing.

Will be reposting some old work from my previous writing blog found here:

http://andtheycalledherstormbringer.tumblr.com/