Around and around
Passion in childhood leads to passion in adulthood
Remember when as a kid you would spin around in the kitchen in your socks? Maybe you had siblings and would sneak around to scare them as they went to their room. No? Just me? Well that was what I did as a kid and truthfully, I still spin around my kitchen in my socks as I am cooking. For over 17 years I danced. My parents put me in ballet and tap classes when I was around 2 or 3 years old. I always wanted to jump around and spin to all kinds of music. I continued dancing until I was old enough to begin competing. I was around 8 at the time and had expanded my genres into lyrical, hip hop, jazz, and musical theatre. This was where my love for dance grew from something my parents had me doing to being something for me to meet friends and have fun every day. Don't get me wrong there were definitely the bad days and classes that I liked less than others. When I was younger I didn't like ballet, I thought it was boring. My ballet teacher used to be a russian ballerina and was much harder on technique than any 8 year old wants. She was very tough but also the best ballet teacher I have had to date. As I grew older I enjoyed her class more and more, even though my flexibility wasn't the best in the class, I strived to have the best technique. I competed until I was 18 and although competition season was always a stressful time for me, as soon as I was on the stage nothing else mattered. The moment the music started it was just me and how I was feeling that day. There are days that a single dance could have me in tears with how much passion I let out on the stage. There have been several times that I had others that had watched my dances come up to me to let me know how they had felt watching me perform. There is a level of passion that I had with competing that would leave me feeling like all the stress had left my body and wouldn't be coming back for the rest of the day at least. It has been several years now since I last competed, but the passion is still there as I have now experienced other types of dance that I hadn't before. From my dance studio I also received some acting training. I was able to audition and earned a spot with a haunted house that runs during the spooky months of September and October. Although I am no longer competing and training in dance, I still keep myself limber as I have been with this haunt for over 6 years now and don’t plan on leaving anytime soon. I plan a costume several months to a year in advance so that I can make any tweaks or order any custom parts prior to the beginning of meetings for the season. There are so many people who feel the same as I do and keep coming back to make people scream every year. The skills that I learned from dance and still utilize have helped me with my craft of scaring people although not the traditional kind of craft you may have been expecting, it is my own and the thing I look forward to and work on the most every year. You start off with a character, whatever you think might be scary. For the longest time I was afraid of clowns, so one of my main characters is a ringmaster. You can decide from there to be intimidating, creepy, or a jump scare. I tend to switch between all three depending on the group that is passing or which character I am playing that night. Does your character talk? Only make weird noises? It is completely up to the scarer. How do you walk crouched over, straight backed as if floating, crawling on the ground, or maybe you hobble like an old man. These are all the starting points for character creation. I have gone through many different creatures and have several memories to go with each. Just like with dancing, every night when I put on my costume and makeup nothing else matters. Unfortunately that does mean I have twisted my ankle several times as I was chasing groups through a cornfield. I look forward to each season and the screams that follow.
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The last lottery on Earth
They told them it was a lottery. There was only enough space for specific people, the ones that would be able to rebuild the world. They were to tell no one and they boarded ships that were on the seas for several years. Families would be split up and children were left for dead by their parents, if they didn’t get into the lottery. The part they weren’t told was that there had been several different lotteries, and even the children that got left behind would be able to live as the world slowly died around them. Some went ashore sooner, but they all had a different land they were docked in. Each one had different criteria making them a perfect fit for the group they were in. One family was in charge of each group, they were supposed to help and give guidance for the group to survive and create a cohesive civilization. After the first generation of the groups had passed on, some of the others in the groups no longer wanted one family to control the aspects of the group. Although they didn’t want to leave their responsibility the families left the groups in fear that retaliation could break apart everything they had already planned. These groups became the control groups; there were only six of them, but the goal was to rebuild the world with these groups and create a better civilization. The thing that none of those groups expected was that society was continuing on without them. They were nothing more than experiments, thought up by the ruling families in the world and yet they continued to create their own societies bit by bit for hundreds of years. The families that had started the different colonies had simply left when the people started questioning them. They worked together with the governments and hid the experiments from common knowledge. They helped create technologies for the societies to help them create a structure once they forced the families out. The problem with the experiments spanning several generations is that the families that controlled them got bored of watching them create their own structure without intervention. At some point the experiments became less about a possible utopia and more about what a society can handle before it crumbles. The only experiment that continued on its original course was only because the family that had started it tried to leave too late and were mutinied resulting in their imprisonment and ultimately death within the same society. As only one family was assigned to each experiment there was no one able to take over, the society separated females from males and continued on coming together only for certain occasions which resulted in future generations. One of the experiments was now testing a theory on how long radiation in low quantities will result in disease and death. The Family in charge was the Brandt family, Riley being the head of the family since his father’s death five years prior. As a child he was always interested in the experiments and often asked the other families about them as they all stayed in touch with each other. The experiments could only be passed through the sons as they didn’t want any emotions to come in the way of the results and they worried that with daughters who couldn’t carry the name that would be the case. The females within the families didn’t know about the experiments and neither did the rest of the world. One night while Riley was reporting on the radiation levels his wife had come in to ask him a question and found out what he was doing for work even though he had said he worked for the government she never knew in what capacity. She had stopped and waited until Riley was off the call and when he turned around she was in tears. He moved to hold her in his arms.
By Morgan Tucker5 years ago in Fiction
Affection and Healing for Yourself
During the night of the last quarter moon, I gathered my ritual supplies. I carefully handled the chunk of black tourmaline that would protect me from your overall negative and narcissistic energy. I carefully walked the house with my stick of selenite in hand, asking the universe to cleanse our working space.
By Alisha Wilkins ✒️🦋🖋️6 days ago in Fiction
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