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vampiredungeon · 2 years ago

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Goodreads is really fun because you’ll find a list called “the greatest books of the 21st century” or something and the first book on the list is twilight and you’re like goddamn I hate twilight how’s it winning? So you go into the comments to find someone else complaining about twilight but to your horror everyone else is raving about the series and just as you’re about to comment your hatred of the book you see a guy named Tom. Tom keeps writing long winded comments about how he thinks twilight is a insult to literature and that there’s so many better books to be on the list instead etc etc and he keeps getting ripped to shreds by everyone else in the comments so you think huh maybe I should help him out here but just before you click reply you notice Tom’s profile picture is an old white guy and old white guys on goodreads usually have weird opinions so you decide to check his profile real quick and at first nothing looks wrong he lives in the us and his bio says something like “married, 3 kids, civil engineer” pretty standard for old white guys on goodreads so then you go and check out his favorites shelf but it’s all full of history and philosophy books you’ve never heard of before so you decide to compare your books and again at first nothing seems too weird most of the books you two have in common are just some classics you both left unrated and you’re about to close out of his profile when you see that he gave the really cool book you read couple months ago only one star unlike your five and he also left a review for it. So you click on the review and you’re a little nervous because one star is pretty harsh and that cool book had a lot of diversity and old white guys on goodreads love to bitch about diversity but you give him the benefit of the doubt and assume Tom just didn’t like the slower plot or the sometimes dull dialogue and then you start reading the review and are immediately blasted by sentence after sentence of: “Horrible woke pandering” “A disgrace to the genre” “Unnecessary social commentary” “Disrespectful to my IQ level” The review is paragraphs long and feels never ending and you desperately scroll through the rant hoping to find someone replying to Tom calling him out but instead you find the review has 62 likes and anyone who commented on it was applauding Tom for his bravely at speaking up against the woke mob you bite your fingers to stop yourself from replying to Tom and everyone in his comments calling them all ignorant cunts because while that would be satisfying you know none of them are going to give a fuck and you’ll probably just get your comment reported for harassment or something so instead you just close out of his profile and then you close goodreads and then you turn off your computer and drive it an hour to the nearest lake and you stand on the shore for a bit debating whether or not you throw it in but you eventually decide not to because it was kinda expensive and what are you going to do without a computer so you drive an hour back home but it actually takes longer then an hour because its dark now and it started raining so you take it extra slow and by the time you get back home it’s even darker and it’s gotten a lot colder too especially because you took off your sweatshirt to wrap around your computer because you don’t want it to get wet and your fingers are shaking pretty bad so you drop your keys twice trying to unlock your front door but by the time you do make it in you decide to take a nice long hot shower and about a half a second before the water hits your face you remember your hot water heater broke yesterday.

#I’m exaggerating #but barely #goodreads #books #writing #j.writes #that’s right this is getting the writng tags I’m counting this as a free writing exercise #anyways I’m not a huge fan of of the ending and I think the part about his review should go on a longer but I don’t feel like changing it #this is based on a true story btw

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ghoulodont · 1 month ago

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First Gear

Phantom seeks Dewdrop's expertise to learn a new skill.

Relationship: none Characters: Phantom, Dewdrop Words: 2.2k

Driving Lessons, phantom is very brave, no cars are harmed

Read below or on AO3

Dewdrop turns the car into the empty parking lot and eases it to a halt. Adjacent to it lies the remains of what was once a shopping mall. Now it’s just a building, blocky and expansive, dominating the asphalt landscape.

Phantom glances out the passenger side window The grimy shadow of a department store’s name and logo oozes down the dingy brick wall that looms outside.

Something in the car beeps a pleasant chime as Dew pushes the driver’s side door open. Phantom doesn’t know much about cars, nor much about this one in particular. Not that he’s done the math, but he’s probably spent far more time in buses and vans than in cars. This one is new-ish, probably, much more similar to the cars in commercials on TV than the ones in movies from previous decades. It seems nice, maybe even high-end — leather upholstery instead of fabric, a sleek display built into the center console. It belongs to Dew. Did he buy it new or used? It wasn’t particularly long ago, relative to the history of automobiles, that Dew was summoned, so—

A tap on the passenger side window makes Phantom jump.

Dew pulls the door open and looks down at him. “Getting cold feet?”

“No! No, I’m ready.” He has to be. It was his idea — well, sort of. He was the one who mused aloud in front of Dew that he might want to learn to drive, and Dew was the one who immediately offered to teach him.

“Cool.” Dew gives Phantom an encouraging pat on the back as he passes by. He sits down in the passenger seat and closes the door.

On the other side of the car, Phantom settles into the driver’s seat. When he pulls the door closed, the chime stops. The car is silent apart from the quiet hum of the idle engine.

Dew points toward Phantom’s feet. “Left is the brake, right is the accelerator.”

Phantom peers into the footwell. The pedals are starkly mechanical, black metal and rubber.

“Can you reach them okay? Comfortable? You can move the seat if you want.”

Phantom nods.

“Great. Hold down the brake and put it in drive.” Dew taps a finger on the gearshift.

This part he’s seen before. He grasps the gearshift and presses down on the little button at the front, then pulls it back until it lines up with the letter “D”. He can feel the gentle resistance of the entire mechanism beneath his fingers, a satisfying clunk as it passes through each setting.

“Now slowly take your foot off the brake, and the car will start to roll forward.”

Phantom glances over at Dew. He’s not sure what he’s looking for — maybe permission, or some sign of acceptance that this could now all go terribly wrong by his hand.

Dew nods at the windshield. “Eyes on the road.”

Phantom snaps his gaze forward. The gray pavement is hatched by the worn white lines of parking spaces and marbled with cracks. There are a few dark patches where potholes have been filled. He grips the steering wheel a little bit tighter.

“And if you ever want to stop, you can just hit the brake, alright? Nothing bad is going to happen.”

Phantom nods. He doesn’t look away from the parking lot surface in front of the car. Dew is almost certainly watching him with that particular intensity he’s so inclined to exhibit, and if Phantom were to make eye contact, he would be melted into a pile of goo in the driver’s seat.

“So, whenever you’re ready, ease off the brake until the car starts to move.”

Slowly, Phantom lifts his foot, feeling the pedal gradually rise against it as the pressure is released. The car inches forward. The immediate sensation is like sliding on ice — a startling moment that he instinctively wants to resist, scrambling the signals in his inner ear — but the speed soon plateaus at a comfortable crawl.

“Okay, now you can move your foot to the accelerator and start speeding up. You don’t need to press it all the way down, start with just a little bit.”

Moving his foot off the brake feels like taking a step into thin air. Across what seems to be a huge void is the accelerator, tucked out of the way in the corner of the footwell. He moves his foot back to the brake to make sure it’s still there, and then back again to the accelerator. He pushes down, just slightly, the smallest possible motion he can make with muscles that have never been put to this task before.

The car jumps to life under him, the vibration of the revving engine bleeding into the frame and the body and the interior, into his legs and back where they contact the seat. It’s only when he removes his foot from the pedal reflexively that he realizes the speed has barely increased at all, and that, in fact, it’s decreasing now in the absence of his input.

He pushes down again, ready for the jolt this time. He lets the car speed up, then slowly lifts his foot away. When the car starts to slow back down, he reapplies pressure, then removes it again.

Now the end of the parking lot, and the beginning of the building adjacent to it, is starting to approach — not quickly, but it feels urgent. He resists the instinct to move his foot and stomp on the brake, and instead turns the steering wheel. The car enters a gentle arc to the right. Once it’s perpendicular to the building, he carefully returns the steering wheel to the upright position. It’s easier than he expected, like the car wants to go straight.

“Good,” Dew says.

Now that he’s not barreling directly towards it, the wall seems far away. He could have waited longer — several seconds, probably — before making that turn, and everything would have been fine. He lets out a breath and tries to let go of the tension in his shoulders. He applies a little pressure to the accelerator, then releases it again.

“Now what?” Phantom hadn’t really thought beyond this part.

“You can drive around wherever you want. Do some turns, speed up and slow down, just get a feel for it.”

Phantom exhales again. He adjusts his hands on the steering wheel, flexing fingers that have become stiff from his tight grip. He gives the accelerator another gentle tap, a little more speed, then lets it ebb away. The next edge of the parking lot is coming up, a curb-enclosed strip of patchy grass that separates it from the access road. He turns the steering wheel again.

After one more turn, making his direction of travel parallel to the nearby road, he shifts his attention to the challenge of of maintaining a constant speed. If he keeps up his initial strategy of tapping the pedal, the car rushes forward and slinks back, overzealous and overcorrected, like a clumsy lion cub still learning how to hunt. However, he soon discovers, if he applies constant pressure, just the slightest amount of it, he eventually reaches a steady state — the natural tendency of the car to slow down counteracts the engine’s power to the wheels just enough for the forces to cancel out.

“Starting to feel easier?” Dew asks.

Phantom nods. “What next?”

“That’s basically all there is to it. The rest is learning traffic rules and how to deal with other people.”

Phantom feels his hands grasp tighter at the steering wheel, seemingly against his will. “I don’t think I know any traffic rules.”

“That’s not true. But don’t worry about it, we can just do this for now.”

He relaxes his grip. After one more circuit around the perimeter of the parking lot, he makes a careful half-circle turn to reverse his course so that he can try a few laps in the other direction. He dares to move away from the edge of the lot, carving a wide and rolling serpentine down the middle of it, crisscrossing the faded paint of parking spaces.

“Stop for a second,” Dew says.

Phantom presses his foot down on the brake and the car jerks to a halt.

Dew points straight ahead through the windshield. “See that road?”

Phantom nods. In the background, cars are making their way down the road at a moderate pace. It’s the road Dew turned off of ten minutes ago or so, into this parking lot — four lanes, traffic lights at the intersections.

“What’s the speed limit?”

“Um.” Phantom watches a silver sedan pass from the right side of his vision to the left, leisurely, over the course of several seconds.

“It’s forty.”

“Forty,” Phantom repeats. He looks down at the speedometer, which currently reads zero.

“Right. Just for context.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know how fast you were going just now?”

Truthfully, he has no idea. He certainly wasn’t looking at the dashboard — it wasn’t anywhere near the top of his list of priorities. “No…”

“The fastest you went was seven miles an hour. Again, just for context.”

Phantom shifts his weight awkwardly in the driver’s seat. He’s still pushing down on the brake pedal hard enough that he may as well be standing on it.

“So, you can keep doing what you were doing, but don’t be afraid to go a little faster. There’s plenty of room here.”

Phantom nods again. This time, as he keeps doing laps around the perimeter of the parking lot, he glances down at the speedometer as it rises to twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

“See, you’ve got this,” Dew encourages.

They complete a few more laps in the low teens. Phantom has lost count of how many times they’ve been around in total, his mind inundated with numbers from the speedometer as he splits his attention between the dashboard and the world outside the car.

“Listen,” Dew says, “you’re doing pretty good with the handling, but I think you need to get more comfortable with speed. Remember what I was saying about the road?”

“Forty?” Phantom glances at the speedometer again — only eleven now.

“I think going around the outside of the parking lot you could easily do twenty-five or thirty.”

“Really?”

“Sure, just keep the turns nice and wide.”

Phantom takes a deep breath. He puts slightly more pressure on the accelerator, trying to apply it smoothly, but the car jerks forward anyway like it’s excited to be let loose. The speedometer climbs to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. He goes into the next turn earlier than before, and by the time he comes out of it he needs to turn again almost immediately, having reduced the shorter edge of the rectangular parking lot to the rounded end of an oval.

“Good,” Dew says. “See if you can get it to thirty on the straightaway.”

Incrementally, lap after lap, he goes faster and faster. He settles into a rhythm of increasing the speed on the long side of the racetrack-shaped loop, easing off in the turn, adding pressure again, repeat.

“Almost there,” Dew encourages, the speedometer reaching twenty-seven, twenty-eight.

He feels almost out of control, like the car is running away from him and all he can do is hold on. Nevertheless, he presses his foot down — twenty-nine, thirty.

“Yes!” Dew cheers, genuinely exhilarated as they reach a speed that might be found on a school zone sign.

Immediately, like he’s been released from a spell, Phantom lets go of the accelerator. Slowly, he brings the car to a stop, easing his foot onto the brake until the wheels stop turning. In the absence of the vibration of the tires moving over the asphalt, he can feel his heart pounding.

“Nice,” Dew says, with a congratulatory clap on his shoulder. “That was great.”

Phantom takes a shaky breath. He stares at the speedometer, which has returned once again to zero. “I think I’m done for today,” he finally says.

“You sure you don’t want to go out on the road now?”

“What?”

“I’m kidding, I wouldn’t let you do that. Next time we can find some side streets or something.”

Phantom watches cars go by on the road again. His foot on the brake starts to feel heavier. “Really?”

“I think it would be fine. But we can always come back here if you want.”

With Dew’s guidance, Phantom puts the car in park, and then they swap seats again, returning to their original arrangement from when they first arrived. His legs feel wobbly on the solid ground as he walks around the hood of the car. He resists the sudden urge to give it a grateful pat on the nose, like it’s his noble steed he just rode into battle, a comrade in arms and a beast of burden.

Back in the passenger seat, the movement of the car takes on a new meaning. It’s scary, the lack of control — he no longer has access to his lifeline that is the brake pedal. Then again, seeing Dew pulling out of the parking lot, driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other elbow resting by the window, practiced and confident, he’s okay with being a passenger for now.

#fic i wrote #based on a true story. sort of. a little #btw i try to not be too american but everything is so american in this one i couldnt help myself

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