riverrun's New Writeups

Free to a God Home (idea)

2009-06-30T00:35:36Z

Intruso

Chapter Fourteen

First stop of the day was the feed store. Bethany paid religious attention to her animals' diet. A year ago she'd lost her first Arab to colic. It was a dreadful time, seeing that her personal life, too, was collapsing all around her. Kalila had been eating too much grain all along they figured. She was prone to intestinal ailments anyway, always had difficult menstruations, and had taken advantage of an open gate to stuff herself with sweet feed. She died in the night, before they could even get her to the vet.

Bethany wished her horses could subsist on forage, that she had the space to just turn them loose for fifteen hours a day, but that was not the case. The dream of a real ranch, a dream that she thought she shared with Benvolio, would now probably never come to be. The animals were as trapped in her imperfect…

Lemonade and Consequences (idea)

2009-06-26T23:44:12Z

Intruso

Chapter Fifteen

The day Kalila died was perfect, right up 'til they found her dead in her stall.

--I like you! Bethany said to him that hot August morning after he'd been working with the horse for about an hour. This was convenient, because Gabilan liked Bethany too. A lot. She had brought a glass of lemonade down to the paddock.

--Hey! she said, smiling. Such beautiful teeth. Gotta take a break for a minute. Here.

And he drank deep.

It was the way the sun fell across her broad strong forehead, and the way the freckles waltzed across her nose. It was the way she had her impossibly thick curly chestnut hair pulled back tight at her neck, which was damp with perspiration, and the way she stepped right up to him and took his head in her hands and kissed him long and hard, and her breasts pressed against him, and her pelvis was insistent and inviting. And her breath was sweet, her tongue agile,…

In the Beginning was Rock n Roll (idea)

2009-02-03T23:51:45Z

Intruso

Chapter Six

--You have the most bizarre ideas about marriage, said Bethany. Really.

--Well, said Silvia, putting down the happy sunset from hell book, since I AM not, have never BEEN, and the way things are going will never ever BE—

--Yes—

--MARRIED—

--Yes—

--I like to think of myself as—

--Lucky?

--If you like. Really, I just think, after waiting all this time, and reading—

--If you can call it that—

Silvia shot Bethany a genuinely hurt look.

--Sorry said Bethany. I am evil.

--Well, I think I can definitely say I know what I want.

--Right, you see, we all start out thinking like that. Then everything gets...messed up.

Bethany was waiting for the little rainbow ball on her Mac to stop turning. It didn't feel like it was ever going to. She collected her core PhD…

Probiotics and the Muse (idea)

2009-02-02T23:22:37Z

Intruso

Chapter Ten

Will Stover was fighting the impulse to call enpointe. He didn't want to appear too anxious, or any more pathetic than he already obviously was (trolling the internet for dates for godssake), but he had to admit: enpointe—who now had a real name, not to mention a beautiful voice—made him feel things. Specifically big sexy horny things leavened with laughs and philosophical musings and even more laughs, and then more sexy horny things.

Hard to believe that just over a year ago he'd sworn off women forever. Hard to believe that he couldn't accept the divorce until his therapist got it through his head: he was ADDICTED to Laura. Hadn't they broken up and gotten back together three times in the course of the thirty-year marriage? Hadn't she CHANGED HER MIND the day…

Her voice was shiny (idea)

2009-01-28T01:07:32Z

Intruso

Chapter Three

OK. She looked beautiful, if lo-res screen shots with everybody else cropped out counted. An enormous tangle of untamed mahogany-colored hair. A wondrous bosom. Mysterious eyes. A lovely smile. Will wasn't working from a check list exactly, but Bethany Byrne had gorgeous legs, and that was important to him in complicated ways. If these photos had tumbled out of an envelope from a Casting Director, Will Stover the producer would definitely be setting up a meeting.

Now: these three horses. What about these horses?

Stover had a bad time once with a girl and a horse. A bad time indeed. When you got right down to it, she'd preferred her stallion to him and—you know—how do you compete with a horse in the first place, right?

The difference, he reckoned, was that that was then—when he and the girl were nineteen or twenty—and this was now, when both…

contentment (idea)

2009-01-24T00:03:10Z

Intruso

Chapter Two

From the sky, if you're a pilot, or an astronaut, or a high-flying bird or—especially--a god, the Los Angeles basin, even on the clearest day, looks like it needs a good scrub. It's as if somebody left this one piece of Thanksgiving earthenware unwashed on the kitchen sideboard for too long, and the leftover gravy, the cranberry juice, the string beans and the mashed potatoes grown cold have all been coated with a patina of dirt and dust and the occasional corpses of freeloading insects too stuffed to fly. It's smog, of course, basically. Carcinogenic particulate matter that clogs air filters and alveoli from Santa Barbara to San Diego and redefines the word ubiquitous.

Like Joni Mitchell in the song, Bethany had come to the desert to lose the smog. And the thing was, after ten years, on a bad day even the desert had smog. You could still see the Milky Way up above you,…