Story #54 Is A One-shot Written At The X-Files Writer's Workshop In 15 Minutes.

Story #22 which is a CPE essay "Music"

For anyone who is not familiar with the Cambridge Proficiency (C2) type of essay, this is a discursive essay where you are supposed to read two short texts, summarize and evaluate them, and introduce a new idea.

“When words fail, music speaks” are the famous words by Hans Christian Andersen. It is claimed that music encourages creativity, develops one’s potential, and communicates our emotions best. How do we know, though, what shapes and forms music should take to bring about the best rather than the worst?

There are very few people who remain unresponsive to tunes whatsoever. From the majority of us melodic patterns elicit heightened emotional response, usually of positive nature, as they often trigger ingenious chords of our potential and impulses of compassion. What might be argued though is that, apart from being capable of producing inspiring flows of consciousness, music may also instigate aggressive behavior, especially if the tendencies pre-exist. There are criminal cases of appalling atrocities being committed while listening to Bach, Vivaldi, or Marylin Manson. It is, of course, highly debatable if the exposure to some particular musical listening patterns can push one over the edge, but the question still stands.

What is not debatable is the influence of music on the younger generation and its value when used as a tool of education. At the same time, it is widely disputed what kinds of music institutions should teach in their classrooms, and if we adhere to some particular style, how do we define what tracks exactly belong to it? First and foremost, we have to decide not on the content of the music we expose juveniles to but the form. However valid in rousing a person’s prowess the listening to music might be, the ability to play the instrument can be of more value, more impact, more worth. In this case we can reap benefits of both listening and playing music.

Whatever form and content are chosen though, it is beyond question that music is our outlet at times of trouble and we can always count on it to make us feel better.

Story #69, which is a positive travel experience.

“Look, we gotta go there,” said my travel buddy Katya showing me the first photo that came out as she googled Austria. The photo showed the tiny alpine village of Hallstatt, nestled between a mountain and a lake with a mouthful of a name. 

The vista rendered me speechless and was enough of a reason to say yes to a holiday, yes to Austria, yes to Hallstatt.

Between us, Katya and I have five kids and the power to move mountains when it comes to traveling without them. Ironically enough, our choice fell on that postcard-perfect Instagram-worthy place at the heart of the Alps. 

Three train journeys, two soaked-through backpacks, and one ferry cruise across the lake later, we finally arrived in Hallstatt. The place, included in the top ten places to visit while in Austria, miraculously wasn’t swamped with tourists. We took a leisurely funicular ride to the skywalk observation deck, enjoyed a cup of Viennese coffee with a piece of the Sachertorte, walked up the path for another hour, and then set off on a hike back, all the way snapping away left, right and center.  

Snap and we were 900 meters above sea level. 

Snap and we were inside an old salt mine. 

Snap and we stood in front of the stained glass windows of the old Protestant Church on the main square.

Snap and we were back home, locking away new precious moments in a memory box along with a few hundreds of photos capturing those unforgettable instants. 

We only heal together

Author: @642stories

For: @msrisallaround​

While investigating a seemingly simple and harmless case, Mulder and Scully find themselves in a situation when their reality is anything but real. 

Link Here

#XFDarkfic2022 11/17

Story #1 “A Local Hero”.

This one was originally written as a part of my CPE training. It’s based on a true story, and I do love the way it turned out; however, it’s fair for most of my pieces.

___

Daniel Watzlav never planned to be a hero. He didn’t expect his life to change overnight, taking twists and turns like in an action-packed movie. It was more of a downward spiral reversing steadily until the point of no return was reached. In the summer of 2000, he took his daughter Liz to explore the Kungur’s cave in the suburbs of his home city Perm. They spent a night at the campsite, a fire cracking at their feet and a canopy of stars above their heads.

Anything can change your life forever. It can be something big like falling in love. Or something so teeny-tiny that it doesn’t even leave a mark. Like a bite of a rabid bat. Upon returning home from their holiday in the embrace of nature, Liz started exhibiting symptoms of a virus-like infection. Doctors failed to identify the root cause of her condition until it was too late. The girl died of rabies. 

It might sound awfully cliché, but as a loving parent, her father wanted to commemorate his daughter’s memory. While Liz was undergoing treatment in a hospital, Daniil became a first-hand witness of the sorry state of affairs of medical facilities. Little patients were surrounded by nothing but faceless white walls and stiff plastic chairs for parents in hallways. Daniil poured all his grief and sorrow into the project of building a state-of-the-art children’s hospital where parents would be welcomed into the healing process, and children would have buoyant space to recover that felt like home. It took another two years for the Elizaveta Watzlav Children’s Hospital to open.

Daniil played a pioneering role in addressing the problem of restricting parents’ access to their children once they were admitted to the clinic. Not only did the Elizaveta hospital become a template for all the following world-class children’s medical facilities built, but it also set the health system on track towards designing special parents’ houses on the grounds of the existing hospitals not to separate the minors with their next of kin. So, is Daniil a hero? Indeed.  But then again, do you need to be a hero to help others with all your heart?  

Story #65 is something to be said about bones.

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”

Said Henry David Thoreau probably talking about finding your vocation and yada-yada-yada. Sitting in a wooden gazebo of my mother’s country house and looking at our twelve-year-old orange ball of a Pomeranian gnawing at a raw steak bone makes that quote a bit of a joke.

What does it take to know your own bone? How do you even know if that fucking thing is your true bone? Damn right. This is where you had to start, dear Mr. Thoreau.

I wanted to be a forensic pathologist. No, seriously. I thought I was going to cut skin and muscles and all. Literally. I would slice and dice and get to the very essence of a bone.

A human’s body is a temple, so often vandalized and violated by a few who believe they’re omnipotent - criminal offenders, abusers, perpetrators - doesn't really matter what you call them. By unraveling the mysteries of the body's destruction and gathering all the clues it left behind, I’d solve the puzzle and bring the body its dignity back. Restore it. Make it whole again. Make it more than just a set of bones.

I never became a queen of an autopsy bay. Somewhere along the way, I took another turn to explore my other obsessions. The writing was one of them, and this time it’s all down my bones.

The thing is, I didn’t recognize my bone when I first saw it. Sometimes it takes years to find it. It may take a few more to understand that it, indeed, is your true bone. However, one thing Mr. Thoreau was right about is, whatever your bone turns out to be, once you find it – gnaw at it. Gnaw at it with all your might. 

That's the story behind the fiction article about the local hero.

Story #11 "Ignorance is no longer bliss."

I was nineteen when my father died. He was only fifty. An industrial accident that changed all our lives in the blink of an eye. It was a late summer Sunday afternoon when the doorbell rang. Two men were standing on the threshold holding a small black plastic bag. They were the bearers of the tragic news. I couldn’t believe what I heard until I opened that bag. There was my dad’s lunchbox, untouched. I remember looking at that plastic box, not being able to open it, thinking how it was even possible. He was supposed to eat that food.

Everything was fine! He left for work in the morning, packed his lunch, and a couple of hours later those people were standing at the doors of our flat saying that my father would never get back home again. The sight of that container in the plain black plastic bag broke me. I kept saying that that was not happening. That was not happening. That was not real. Only it was.

His death was of the utmost importance because he was my father. Someone I knew and cherished. Someone I’m going to remember and love till the end of my days. But there are so many other deaths around we hardly notice. Every. Single. Day.

How many wars can you recall in the last seventy years? I remember the American-Vietnam war, probably because it was widely popularized and countlessly screen-adapted. I’ve definitely heard about several armed conflicts in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Maybe some other places as well. I’ve no idea what was behind these conflicts, or what other parties were involved, or whether it escalated or not, or how many people died. Because these people are just blank faces in the crowd of other blank faces which have nothing to do with me. They’re faceless of the faceless. They don’t even seem real. They all live somewhere there. NOT here. Not close enough to be a problem for anyone apart from those who live and die there. They are out of sight and, therefore, out of mind.

It will not happen again. Donbas showed us that any war is real and cannot be considered trivial. There’s no small war. There is no war people can ignore. We all see now what happens when we act like it’s someone else’s problem. Once small and seemingly insignificant conflict, it escalated into the large-scale war. History repeats itself and once again gives us a lesson. Will we learn it now? I don’t know, but there is hope.

Everybody has to care. Everyone should think of consequences. We are not allowed to be blissfully ignorant anymore. Regardless of nationality, skin color, beliefs, etc., human life is priceless. Period.

Story #29

The X-files fanfiction "We only heal together" 3/3

Read it on AO3

3.

When Mulder opens his eyes, the darkness instantly evolves into a hazy grayness. No snow or harsh blinding light. No screeching metal cabinets behind his back, no blinking fluorescent ceiling lamps, no whirl of snowflakes around. It’s not their office. 

His head feels heavy and Mulder draws a deep breath and takes a look around. He’s lying on the tiled floor in what looks like a spacious conference room. He can hear Scully’s ragged breathing somewhere close but not quite there. The pounding in his head is the pounding on the door. Slowly, he comes to the conclusion that what they have just experienced was no more than a hallucination. A dream of sorts. It’s sickening cruelty chilling him to the bone.

“Scully?” he croaks. There’s no answer.

Dizzy and confused from their ordeal, Mulder manages to roll on his back and spots Scully lying a few feet away from him in the fetal position. From where he is, it looks like she’s still imprisoned in their mutual delusion, her eyes darting beneath her tightly shut lids. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge his presence at all, and on unsteady legs Mulder rushes to her, almost crashing down onto the floor in his haste to get to Scully. Not sure whether it’s safe to wake her up, Mulder nonetheless cannot resist reaching out and brushing her shoulder tenderly. At his touch Scully jerks sharply and a weak moan falls from her lips. 

“Don’t,” she says in a small voice. Mesmerized and terrified at once, Mulder watches how the lashes of her closed eyes get wet, and when a single tear escapes and runs down her temple, he is overwhelmed with horror. A shocking, stomach-churning realization sinks in.

The pounding on the door becomes almost unbearable in its discordance and in a matter of seconds the noise turns into a thunderous racket. The door gives up under the assault of whoever stands behind, and a bunch of police officers along with paramedics burst unceremoniously into the room.  

What happens next happens so quickly that even hours later Mulder struggles to reconstruct the whole evening in detail. It comes in increments, and he knows next to nothing as to which are real and which are just figments of his imagination. 

Scully is put on a gurney and whisked away outside to the ambulance, he himself has to endure a disgustingly long and meticulous examination by a young paramedic. When it’s finally confirmed that he sustained no physical injuries and is free to go, he’s held by another officer to explain his involvement. Around him, the place is swiped for evidence. Mulder does his best to deliver his version of events, which feels pretty much like an after-sleep groggy recollection. The police disclose that there was an anonymous call about people being subjected to torture at the location. They have yet to determine the source of the call, but the Portaverros were arrested on the spot upon trying to flee their office. They are being taken to the station at the moment and the agents are welcome to pay a visit and interrogate the couple as soon as they want. Mulder advises the cops that it might be reasonable to separate the couple, and confirms they’ll drop by the police station first thing tomorrow morning.

At last, he ventures out of the building to look for his partner only to find Scully already waiting for him in a car. Not a word is said as Mulder starts the engine and heads off to Georgetown, anticipating how tedious their journey back home is going to be. The silence is uncomfortable and seems to scream even louder than the noise he heard at the crime scene, and it makes him shift anxiously in his seat. His partner’s head rests against the side window, her eyes closed. He can’t stand the thought that she might be pretending just to steer clear of him, so he chooses to believe Scully is dozing off, exhausted.

When Mulder pull the car up to the front of her apartment building, she wakes up only to notice that the car is double-parked and the engine is running, the key still in the ignition. Obviously, Mulder has no intention of inviting himself in. Carefully, as if not to touch him, Scully extends a hand under the steering wheel to turn and pull the key out. The engine dies and the silence stretches like a taut skin of a drum. Taking a moment to gather her thoughts and then measuring each word carefully, she says:

“Come inside, Mulder.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” his voice is a bone-tired whisper. 

“We’ll just talk.”

“Scully,” he stops her with an exasperated sigh.

“Mulder, please. We can’t just sweep it under the rug and hope it will sort itself out.”

In an attempt to catch his eyes, Scully cups his chin and turns it to meet her steady gaze. Mulder surrenders to her willingly, secretly elated that she has no trouble touching him. Not like in the Portaverro’s residence. It’s only a moment before he drags his eyes away again, his face contorted in pain. 

“Did I really do that?”she knows he’s talking about their shared nightmare, and logically she understands it wasn’t real but it hurts all the same. They will bring it to the surface and acknowledge the damage done. They will deal with that. There’s no way she's going to put her head in the sand and circumnavigate his question. Withdrawing her hand, she says calmly. 

“Not for real, no.”

“It felt real.”

“It did.”

The knuckles of his hands turn white from the power of his grip on the steering wheel. All of a sudden he’s a wild animal trapped in a cage, the quiet and limited space of a vehicle suffocating him. He wants to launch himself off the seat, pace around, circle the table, topple a chair, shove his hands in his pockets, put some distance between them, punch someone. He doesn’t do any of these things. Deep down in his heart of hearts, he knows that Scully is right, they have to talk it through. Stealing a quick glance at his partner, Mulder is relieved to see that her expression and posture are open. 

“What was your fear?” he finally asks.

“Betrayal,” that makes him jerk his head up and search for her eyes. 

“Remember that case we were working on in Braddock Heights? With the vhs tapes?” Scully continues. “At the time, I thought you were in cahoots with the cigarette-smoking bastard. I was terrified of being betrayed, most of all by you. I guess this time that fear manifested itself in the cruelest way possible.”

Her hands are slightly shaking and she hides them between her thighs, so Mulder wouldn't notice and poses the question back. 

“What was yours?” 

“Hurting you,” Mulder replies without preamble, raw emotion in this voice. His eyes burn, pain filling him up to the brim, threatening to spill over the edge. “I was afraid…” he drops his head, no longer able to endure her sea blue penetrating gaze. “I am afraid to end up doing something that will hurt you, Scully. I fucking hurt you all the time.”

“Mulder…”

“I do, Scully. You can’t assuage my guilt by saying it was your choice. I know what you're gonna say, it's always been your choice, and you stay by my side of your own volition. I know that! It doesn’t make me any less responsible for all the bad things that keep happening to you.” He’s looking at his upturned hands, fingers splayed wide until Scully’s small strong hand comes into his view and cradles his tanned and big one. The contrast is mesmerizingly beautiful. When she tugs on his arm and brings their intertwined fingers to her mouth, kissing each of his knuckles lovingly, his eyes cloud with tears. 

From the moment they were partnered, Mulder had the unshakable belief that Scully needed his protection. If he could… if she let him, he would put her into an inner pocket of his jacket to hide her from the perils of the outside world. As far as she was concerned, he was simply scared out of his wits. Mulder is well-aware that despite being a diminutive woman, seemingly fragile and vulnerable, Scully is stronger than anyone he knows. Stronger than himself. Her petite frame is no more than a facade. On more than one occasion, he bore witness to her easily overpowering her male counterparts. Hell, for the seven years they’ve been together she probably incapacitated more offenders than he had done in all his years in the FBI. Scully is his strong little partner, best friend, and staunchest ally. She’s the love of his life. 

“Mulder, listen to me. You are intransigent. Adamant. Moderately aggressive, dominant and assertive. Maybe even the most grandiose narcissist in the flesh I know. But aside from being all those things, you’re also kind, compassionate, empathetic, loving. And you are not a rapist. I trust you with my life, Mulder.”

Her soft breaths dance across the skin of his hand still pressed to her warm cheek, lips grazing lightly on his calloused fingers. 

“You’re my guiding light, Scully. My touchstone. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if not for you.” 

It feels like a moment of distilled creation. He might have chosen other words but their meaning echoes her own: they are not going to let it drive a wedge between them, leaving their lives in disarray and their souls emotionally crippled. As Scully’s hand reaches the door handle ready to get out of the vehicle, Mulder doesn’t hesitate to follow. 

Story #8 "The 5-Second Rule"

It's a CPE-based book review of "The 5-second rule" by Mel Robbins.

Prompt:

A literary magazine has invited readers to submit reviews of non-fiction books. You decide to submit a review of a book that has influenced you greatly. Your review should briefly describe the book, explain what aspects of your life have changed after reading it, and assess the importance of non-fiction literature.

What if somebody told you that you are just 5 seconds away from a totally different life? From having a better job? From being a better parent? From succeeding in business? The answers to all the questions above are explored by Mel Robbins, an Ivy League-educated criminal defense attorney, in her book “The 5-second rule”. Given that the only thing standing in your way is yourself, Robbins, with her quick wit and fiery opinion, hands over to the readers a simple way to break the habit of hesitation and set a scheme for a better life.

The essence of the five-second rule is in the so-called metacognition tool that enables one to trick the brain into things it wouldn’t normally do. Once you receive the impulse to work towards something, start counting backward, and then physically act on it. The moment you miss that five-second window, your mind shuts down, as it is designed to stop you from doing anything uncomfortable, uncontrollable, uncertain.

I wish I could say that to me, the book was nothing short of an epiphany. That I could trace back every single problem and complaint to hesitation and silence. That applying Robbin’s concept to my day-to-day life presented me with a prospect to push through excuses to procrastinate far enough to see how much more life had in store for me. Nothing supernatural happened though. Nonetheless, following the scheme given in her book, I managed to set my perfect routine to have just the right amount of time to go over my morning procedures, make breakfast, take the kids to school, and embark on a working day with a smile on the face.

Robbin’s 270-page debut is like a shiny new thing that attracts lots of attention. That notwithstanding, it is a prime example of why non-fiction books should probably slim down. They all have pages and pages of testimonials turned into riveting, albeit juvenile, and overly repetitive stories. Aside from that, they are heavily seasoned with pretentious advertisements, giving readers a feeling of being marketed to, on each page. That’s precisely why services like Blinkist can summarize such books succinctly into fifteen-minute reads. You may be tricked into thinking that you are handed over a tool to enrich your life; however, for jaded readers, it might be no more than an old pseudo-psychological trick wrapped in a new package.

Story #55 is a one-shot #2 written at the X-Files writer's workshop in 15 minutes.

They were standing by the sea. Coffee cups in hands. She caught herself thinking she was drinking so much coffee these days it could start oozing out of her ears. 

“You know, there was a time when I thought I would love to retire in a place like that. Opening my tiny cozy coffee spot, talking to people, reading books, brewing fresh coffee and tea.”

“You’d be bored to death in a span of a few weeks. A. coffeeshop and you, Mulder, is a parallel universe, no less.”

“I could write something.”

She ignored him, lost in a reverie of her own.

“People don’t even sit at coffee shops anymore, Mulder, it’s all grab and go. Life is too hectic, they won’t talk to you.”

“No, no, Scully, it would be different here. I just know. You could bake some gingerbread, and we would have books everywhere, and they would sit and read, you know, and then ask for a refill.”

The urge to interrupt him before he had finished was overwhelming. 

“What on earth are you talking about? Coffee? Books?”

This is how she knew. It was anything but their reality. It was anyone but her Mulder.

“Your life is aliens. You are not married to coffee, Mulder. You are married to your work. Files and all.” He turned to her, a confused look on his face.

“See you in the basement.”

The portal opened behind and she stepped in, still feeling a strong tang of the sea in the air.