Soft And Fleshy: November 2008

So here are a few pages from the 24 hour comic challenge. I didnt finish it in time, and these are the only pages I really like. And looking over it, not only do I realize that none of it makes sense, but I also see that the comic is not really about nuns at all, more like about doubt surrounding something obvious and not obvious at all....like most of what i make.

That being said, it did get the urge to draw nuns out of my system for awhile.
Random pages not in order!

Also I enjoy assigning myself a number of paragraphs and writing a story. So here are two four paragraph stories.

Sometimes girls can predict their own future. Only girls can do this as they have an acute awareness of themselves that most men are incapable of. These girls witness their future in fogged windows and puddles on dirty cement. Sometimes they see their future by surprise, like when they look up in a rearview mirror or static on a television.

Cassandra Patterson realized her future at the tender age of fifteen. She had just had her first sexual experience with a boy in a closet at her friend Patty’s birthday when she went to the bathroom to clean up. She was examining the flushed markings on her cheeks and the rough hickeys on her neck when up in the corner of the bathroom mirror she saw her future hovering.

When Cassandra examined it closer she saw that she’d have sex with a number of boys before she reached an age of desperation and married a man she was only slightly satisfied with. He was in the army and would often be gone from the house, where she would knit blankets for children with cancer to pass the time. He would sleep around and she would swallow her sick feeling and would refuse to think about it. When he became forty-five he suffered a heart attack and Cassandra nursed him back to health, and from then on he became devote and loved her with all his might, but Cassandra was never really into it and died at eighty.

After viewing her future Cassandra took a moment to collect herself. She reapplied her strawberry lip gloss, tidied up her hair, and accepted that she was to lead a mediocre existence in the shadow of others. Cassandra then went back downstairs to the party and ate enough Doritos to get sick.

*****
Sometimes she would look down at the ground and realize that that feeling under her ribs and above her stomach wasn’t her imagination at all. Pink converse stepping into puddles and on sticks and rocks and over chewed up mint bubble gum. Avoiding the cracks because that’s always a good rule. Just in case.

At night when she’d be trying to sleep and her parents arguing in the living room, the lump would grow. She didn’t remember the first time she noticed it, probably it had always been there, like that mole above her right breast. Boys in her junior high would make it worse as well. Tom Page would pass her down the hall and she’d hold her breath hoping that he glanced her way even for a second, and when he didn’t and he turned into the science room, she’d let out her breath and the lump would be bigger. Holding history textbooks closer to her heart did nothing to relive the sensation.

She looked into curing the feeling. She searched textbooks, magic books, wikipedia, her grandmother’s diary in the attic. Not one mentioned the peach-pit lump of uneasiness. She would look at her stomach in the mirror and began to think that she could see it poking out of the thin skin of her belly. She worried. It grew.

She told her mother about it. What if it was cancer? Or something worse. But her mother just laughed a little with red-rimmed eyes and thin lips and smiled at her daughter. Her mother explained that there was no cure, and one day it would surly grow large enough to kill her. Her mother went back to chopping onions and she placed her pale, cold hand on her belly.