The Usual Place: an Unusual Begining

A summative piece from my writerscraft class.

It was another normal day at The Usual Place, well as normal as it ever gets. We’ve seen everything here, from locals to foreigners to men from mars. No, seriously, one day a Martian walked into our coffee shop holding people at gunpoint. I quickly put on my tinfoil hat and hid in the freezer. After twenty painfully cold minutes I came out to find everyone gone. Abducted. That was the day I became the owner of this shop. Since then we have had so many unusual things happen to us that I lost count.

My family has just moved into the apartment above the coffee shop and all the chatter about the mass abduction had died down. I am working away on the window opposite the computer café when I hear it, a deep rumbling that sounded as if it was coming from beneath the store. I kneel down to get a better listen, my ear freezing against the cold tiles. This is definitely where the sound is coming from. I decide that it must be the boiler and so I returned to the streaking glass window. The rumble is then replaced by a sound like ice that just entered hot drink. I turn around looking for the cause, but everything seems to be in order.

“Hey dad, is the ice machine on the fritz again?” My daughter asks as she walks across the checkerboard floor. It only takes a moment for me to notice the huge crack that’s crawling towards her.

“Stay back Renn!” I yell over the growing groans of the floor.

“Hey calm down, I wont wreck your precious store.” She says, “I just wanted to use a computer.” But the computers are gone; they have fled from the roar of the earth below.

“ Hey dad? What’s going on?” my daughter asks, a little less sure of herself.

Suddenly steam explodes out of the fragile spider web of cracks. I jump, causing more steam to spray up. Both of us decide it is better to be somewhere else so we book it to the stairs, each step revealing new geysers of steam. As I reach the bottom step I turn around only to see the floor completely cave in. Where it once stood there was now a pool of water steaming like a locomotive engine. From its depths rose a serpent like head, covered in glittering green scales. This is not what I had in mind when I said I wanted to attract new customers.

“I found this in the attic, you might want to use it.”

I jump; I hadn’t even realized my daughter was there. In her hand was an object that could only have come out of the covers of Moby Dick, a harpoon. I quickly place the jagged hook inside the launcher; the clunk of the catch telling me it was ready. I aim at the beasts swinging head trying to get a lock on it. When I think I have it I close my eyes and pull the trigger. I am knocked over by the kickback, which changes the trajectory of the shot. It sinks into the ceiling above the creature instead of the head where I initially aimed. The serpent whips its hideous face in our direction and rears back its head to strike, but it doesn’t get the chance. The place where I hit the ceiling has cracked, letting our kitchen come crashing down on the beast’s head. As the dust settles we are able to make out the outline of the head lying as dead as the stone it has been crushed by.

“Nice shot. Now we don’t have a store or a kitchen.” My daughter says jokingly.

“I’m going to bed.” I say “Wake me when the mad scientists who created that thing come.”

Sure enough I am roughly shaken awake a half hour later.

“They are here.”

That wasn’t the only strange thing that has happened either. Since the serpent attack, we have had zombies invade, meatballs fall from the sky, and once my daughter and her friend disappeared for a month in a strange cloud of darkness that happened to roll through. I was sick with worry, but she and Tobias came back all right, so life went on. Even now as I have to hold back a swarm of giant killer bees I’m ok, because no matter what happens I always get through it saying, hey, its just another usually day at The Usual Place.

Reviews

[Wolfwind Words]

That was a fun scene you made there. Gotta love it when crazy things happen in normal places. There's just something novel about it all.
You had a good rythem to the events as they played out and a well balanced level between description and conversation. Nice Ink!

Aaron

[Eryn ♪]

Thank you for reading. I'm glad I could entertain you for a moment of your time.

[Lucy Morningstar &heart..]

I never got to read this when we had that class! It's quite amusing and reallllllly well written :) I like the Moby Dick reference lol and dat sarcasm though with Renn...sooooo accurate for a teenage girl xD Well done, love ♥

[Eryn ♪]

Ugg reading it now is like torture. Im gonna revise it tomorrow.

[Lucy Morningstar ♥]

Ok? My review stands no matter what...i mean the part about how good it is lol