Unfiltered: The NaNo That Might Have Been

(You'll see plenty of the actual project before it's over, but here's part that you'll only see this much of. The reason? It's literally the majority of what I did the first few days of mu Nanowrimo project. This is the work I abandoned after the first few days, in part because I really wasnt sure where it was going to go. Anyway, enjoy...)

Chapter One

"Riley! Take out the trash, honey!"

Riley Waters grumbled to himself as he heard his mother's voice. He dragged himself form the sanity of his bed covers and wandered himself downstairs to the kitchen. He cursed himself for being angry at his mother the second he saw her strained face over the kitchen sink.

"What in the world could be stuck down there?" she quietly mused as she stared into the drain. "My god, is it some type of animal or something?" Her dark ponytail drifted out of the back of the cloth she had wrapped around her head. Her face, showing much more age than it should for a woman of her years, stressed itself into a series of premature wrinkles.

Riley sighed as he tried to force himself to look towards the trash can. Two firmly packed bags of trash waited for him at the end of his vision's journey, with another bag all but spilling out of the can. Riley grumbled quietly again before being startled by his mother's yell.

"Riley! Ri...!" his mother had started before realizing that he was already in the room. "Oh, dear. Dear? Can you take that out, please?"

"Where's Dudley?" Riley half mumbled the question from his lips. "It's his turn..."

"What?" His mother pursued. "Dudley? Oh, dear, I don't know. I'm sure he's around somewhere."

Riley pointed towards the trash bin with a finger. "It's Dudley's week to take out the trash. What's the point of having a chore wheel if he's not even going to .."

"Oh, Riley..." his mother interrupted him. "I know it's not fair, but I just..." She fought very hard to try and sound like she was being the reasonable person that she knew she wasn't. "I need the trash out of here, and this drain is acting up and... Could you just please do this for me right now?"

Riley wasn't a completely insensitive kid. He knew that life hadn't been entirely kind to his mother over the years. Having to take care of two children, boys no less, on her own wouldn't have been a picnic for anyone. Even though he knew her life was tough, even though he knew that he should be madder at his brother than at her, even though he knew that it wasn't nearly as big of a deal as he was making it out to be to take out the trash... he couldn't help but be aggravated.

Still, he could hear the strain in his mother's voice. He could see the stress in her face and the near defeat in her eyes. And while he wasn't sure exactly what the feeling was inside he got when he heard and saw it, he knew that it was a feeling he had learned he couldn't stand.

"Sure, Mom," Riley offered, trying his best to sound optimistic, "I can do it." Riley wandered over to the trash bin and grimaced. He really hadn't managed to appreciate just how terrible a mess it was. The odor was all but palpable once you managed to reach the can. No wonder she wanted this out, Riley thought. How did my brother manage to avoid this for two days straight? Riley decided to tackle the open bag first, partly because he believed that it might help alleviate part of the odor issue and partly because he figured that by doing that he could stop his mother's almost incessant need to throw items into the bag at the last possible moment.

Sealing the bag, Riley looked up and was surprised to see that his mother was nowhere in sight with a bowl or pot that needed scraping. Her attention remained drawn into the bottom of the drain she was trying with little success to open. He grabbed the first bag, most notably because it appeared it could burst open at any minute, and carefully made his way out the back door.

Riley cautiously carried the bag to the large, green cans in the back of the house, taking an extra moment or two to establish leverage before clomping the bag into the can. He dusted off his hands by brushing them together, even though he realized that there wasn’t much to come from it. His hands weren’t really dirty, but he had picked up the habit from his father, who had always done the same thing after finishing any task of great (or not so great) difficulty.

Riley stopped to look at the small brick house that he called his home. To say it wasn't much would be a bit of an understatement, but they had come to find a way to settle into it. Home. It wasn't really a concept he had even wrapped his head around in the past few years.

The first part of his task complete, Riley returned to the back door and made his way back inside. The two remaining bags sat waiting for him, and his mother was still perched over the kitchen sink drain. She was now taking a plunger to the pesky problem, seemingly oblivious to her son's return. No wonder she hadn't tried to cram anything else in, he thought. Riley glanced into the den, where the television was still on. The news program showed the local weather caster pulling one of his infamous gags. The middle-aged man was currently wearing a bathrobe and shower cap while standing in front of a green screen. The man was ducking and dodging as someone, presumably offscreen, threw what looked like balls of aluminum foil at him.

"And this is a reminder to all of our viewers out there..." The forecaster spoke through his bobbing and weaving. "A reminder that tonight is the last night of the meteor shower we've been having the past two nights... so make sure..." It was at this point that it became apparent that there were at least a few people throwing objects, as the number of foil balls had increased. "So make sure that you check it out if you get a chance..."

There were now a good many other objects being tossed around in the man's direction. Some balled up wads of paper, some tennis balls, and even a stapler passed narrowly by his head. Just at the moment when the poor man's distress seemed to reach its peak, the screen quickly flipped to an image of the news anchor trying his best to act like everything was normal. The hearty older man simply smiled and offered in his favorably relaxed tone, "Thanks, Stu. Good old Stu."

From somewhere offscreen, Stu could be heard screaming, "Ow! That's my spleen!"

(So that's it. There was some funky stuff at the beginning as a prologue, but it was truly babbling. Eventually, it was supposed to turn into a story about two brothers trapped on a strange planet and I think it might have gotten Lord of the Flies at one point... I never really have read that book, come to think of it. Anywho, I think there are a few all right moments in here, and I might at least re-use the weatherman scene in some future project. No part of the animal goes to waste...)