QWC #4: Getting Dirty

[Redlass]

Describe the smell of dirt.

I'll post mine soon (I hope). I'm trying to write it up for my current writing project and got stuck on trying to describe a room filled with dirt, fungi, and plants. So I figured I'd pass along the challenge.

DIRTY HABITS DIE HARD

Ten pounds of fresh, rich dirt. That's usually what it takes to make the boards of my coffin soft enough for me to rest through the daylight. Some of my kind, well, they use Martha Stewart pillows and Pottery Barn mini-mattresses or they've decked out their daily resting places with the best that a funeral home can provide, but for me I'll take dirt over them all.

Not just potting soil or that crap you buy in the store. We're talking farm topsoil, worked for fifty years and still rich in the heartland. Not over-worked or poisoned with chemicals, mind you. True, untainted rich earth.

Ever take a moment to close your eyes... run your hands through it... take a big breath of it? Every smell, every taste there ever was is wrapped up in it like a whole orchestra of sounds, building and building until you get just one tone out of it all...

That's the smell of dirt.

I know you're heard all the legends. A big black cape and white fangs, changing into a bat at will while running from garlic, crosses, and wooden stakes. There's movies, books, and all sorts of garbage out there to fill your head with all sorts of fantastic dreams of blood-sucking adventures.

It's not the case. Trust me, I know, and from the look in your eyes I think I must be some sort of disappointment.

I know all about disappointment, believe me.

But first, a little background about what it is to be this thing called a vampire. Vamprism isn't some curse passed from master to victim, nor is it some bacterial infection or spiritual symbiosis. It's really just an affliction that, over the centuries, has been misunderstood into a legend. Add up enough recessive traits in the genetic lottery and you add up to a pretty lethal combination of missing genes, broken proteins, crossed-over hormones, and a slew of unusual traits.

Usually, the so-called vampire will die at birth, or as near to it as the first few feedings that end up puked out or refused. This led to the assumption that all albinistic babies were weak and helpless, which is not true at all. Just the vampiric ones.

For those unfortunate enough to be born with the condition but barely fortunate enough to be born into wealth, it was found that the consumption of the blood of the living was rich enough in the missing minerals and nutrients and yet in a form that the child could manage to digest without rejecting it or becoming mortally ill. Why the rich had it so much easier than the poor in this regard can only be explained by the number of servants and affordable victims available for the blood necessary to sustain a child, sometimes the sole desperately-sought heir far too early or far too late in a noble parent's life.

Perhaps a captured soldier one day, or the residents of the local jail or vagabond's home the next day. Some of the "well known" vampires of history used their bloodthirsty military campaigns to cover up their thirst for actual, life-giving blood.

Just as immortality and invulnerability are myths when it comes to members of my afflicted few, so are many of the supposed weaknesses. Sure, with overly sensitive eyes and skin, travel by moonlight was the only means possible to walk out in the open. But to walk in the sunlight meant pain and painful burns, not a fiery or explosive death. Unlike the vampires of legend, a heavy cloak and a protective reflective mask could ward away the dangerous rays of daylight, but most who suffered from the collection of vampiric maladies found that to travel only by night raised less suspicion that being constantly under a wrapping.

Some legends are best left as is, in the dark. Familiarity breeds suspicion, more so than full knowledge. It's best that we are feared for what we may do instead of what we truly are.

With modern times, modern conveniences and technology have aided us in improving out lives and helping our survival. Blood transfusions, blood-replacement compounds, and myoelectric exoskeletal devices give us the nourishment and support or brittle bodies once lacked on their own. Tightly-sealed coffins combined with the workings of hyperbaric oxygen chambers can force our damaged blood cells to take up and distribute oxygen in our walking corpses, long enough to nearly last out an entire day of basic chores or properly managing those who would do them for us.

But flying? Clouding the minds of men? Summoning wolves and turning to vapor or a bat or some other beast?

Rubbish.

So, with all my weaknesses and all these many advances and wonders of science available to my accursed kind, why I do still sleep in a dirt-lined coffin and drink the blood of unwitting victims? Why do I lure them in by guile and trickery instead of merely purchasing the elixir and contraptions that would make such a hideous and brutal transaction unnecessary?

Well, why not? Now sit still, this won't hurt a bit.

[Redlass]

You amaze me, file. While I'm over here struggling to come up with three measly lines to describe the smell of dirt, you manage a whole short story that is creepy and amusing. I lingered over the symphony metaphor--very, very nice.

I'd been working on the vampire thing, but needed the excuse to start it. Thought that the vampire luring in a delivery-boy bringing fresh dirt would do it.

I do not have a good sense of smell, so I had to pad with another oddball collection of observations. It's not really a story, though. But it can be the basis for one if I snowball it.

[Redlass]

I really think you can identify creativity in a person by what they're able to do with the most mundane and common items. I also think it's a great way to develop creativity--try to make a strange twist on a mundane item. It's why I applaud what you've done--I think it shows a lot of creativity and an ability to leap for the unusual.

I'm still struggling with the few lines. I've deleted everything I've come up with so far. The sad thing is, it's really a very small portion of what I'm doing, it isn't even slightly important, but I want to get it right. I'm writing up a dungeons and dragons module for possible publication (got to get that query letter in the mail!). I'm trying to write the box text for a room that is a neglected herbarium where the plants have all died and been reduced to soil. The room is dark, so the odor is what will greet the players first--so I want a good description of it. At this point, it's almost become a point of pride. I will get it and it will be good. It also may be next year.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

That's a tough challenge. I had never really thought before about how to describe odors, and thinking about it now, I can't come up with any words for particular smells. All I can think of is saying things like "it smelled like a redwood forest an hour after it rained," but that's not really a description, is it? It's more like answering the question "What does dirt smell like?" by saying "It smells like dirt."

Maybe that's all that can be done??? Do we even have words for smells? I'm drawing a blank ...

[satan]

Very nice, file13 . . . i'm imagining a Papa John's delivery-person bringing in a box of dirt . . .

An idea that seems like something you'd play with would be a description from someone who has sensory circuits wired up awry . . . so, for ex. dirt smells loud or purple or sour or whatever . . .

Anyway.


She brought her hands together and scythed down, shoveling into the ground, scooped up a handful of dirt and almost shoved her cupped palms into her face. She inhaled deeply. A great weariness settled on her shoulders and reached up to drag her eyelids down.

“I smell the mountain that was. I smell its ice-capped peaks and babbling brooks that broke free in the springtime and tumbled down. I smell the fear of the mountain as erosion does its work. I smell the animals that roamed the hills the mountain became; I smell their bones. I smell the men that came later, much later. I smell fire. I smell flesh crying out against flesh, steel clashing against steel, blood soaking into the mud. I smell the oil and exhaust of the great machines that leveled the hills. I smell the tar and asphalt; I smell rows and rows of cookie-cutter houses with two cars in the garages. It isn’t pretty.”

She exhaled for a long time, sighed even longer, and seemed to brighten.

“I smell roots taking hold, sap pulsing up slowly in the rhythm of the sky, leaves budding, leaves spreading, fruit falling. I smell the sunlight falling softly on trees pushing aside the roads Man laid down a few decades ago. I smell the animals, small and furry, coming back once again. I smell worms tunneling, leaves carpeting the forest floor, wind whistling through the maze of trunks.” She turned, “Can you smell it?”

The child turned toward the house and hollered, “Mooooom! Gramma’s been drinking again!” He sniffed once more, and once more the reedy voice piped up, “And she needs her diaper changed.”

[phoenixx]

He surveyed the land of his family, thinking harshly of his inheritance. He had vowed never to till the soil like his father, or his father's father, or his father's father before him. He toed the soil in his moment of desperation, releasing the too familiar scent of the earth.

This soon after the funeral, standing in the family plot at the top of the hill behind the house, the only scent he smelled was the earth smell of death and the wet, moldy smell of decay and loss. He tried not to breath, fretting that inhaling the horrible earth would cement his unwanted destiny as his father's dream keeper.

He didn't realize he had tears leaving dirt tracks of pain on his cheeks until his small son tugged on his hand. He looked down, and for the slimmest of moments looked into his younger self. He shook his head, clearing his vision, and tried to smile for his son. It was then he noticed his son was trying to hand him something.

He bent down, gagging from his proximity to the dread smell of his legacy, and looked to see what his son held out to him. When he saw the clod of earth in his son's small hand he took a step back in revulsion. The grandson of his father in so many ways, his son looked at him earnestly and told him that the smell of earth made him so happy, he thought sharing his happy smell with his dad would make him feel better about grandpa. After all, his son reasoned, how could grandpa be hurting anymore if he was in dirt?

Sighing in resignation, he asked his son what he smelled when he smelled dirt, what made it his happy smell. Peering up at him from his floppy bangs, his son answered that dirt smells like things that grow, like life things, happy flowers and tall trees. Then he said that dirt also smelled like safe places - caves and hollows, hills and mountains, and dirt was the holder of water, something everything needed.

Face widened with surprise, he took his son's hand, then leaned over and grabbed a new handful of earth. This time he expelled air from his lungs to make room for a deeper breath, and an understanding that earth held the smell of death, yes, but also of life renewed, musty with age and knowledge. Shrugging his new worries off his shoulders, he and his son turned back to the farmhouse.

Leslie

[phoenixx]

who's next?