American Psycho

Ch. 1

Mirai sat in front of a blank laptop screen, the typing slit that marked where you were in a sentence blinked on and off as if it were a SOS signal, awaiting for the muse to strike the only person who would soon be starting a new project. A half empty bag of plain chips laid beside the laptop, which sat upon a table of light colored oak; the sound of Green Day played in the background, Billy Joe singing about 'paradise', if that's what you wanted to call it. Mirai basically grew up listening to this music; she remembered when they first started out, they actually sounded a bit unique, though some say that Nirvana could easily have beaten them with Smells Like Teen Spirit.  Anyone who had enough sense around her would know to stay away from this subject at any point. She never favored Nirvana in the slightest, and thought there was enough room for error for them to improve upon.

Mirai crossed her arms as she leaned in the back of her leather chair. The cursor kept blinking. She stared at it for a long minute before leaning back forward, typing Billy's Little Box of Horror's. That title didn't suit her. She pressed the backspace button, then typed The Forgotten House. Horror was popular, right? With all the Michael Myer and Freddy Krueger movies, it had to be popular.

The thought of horror gave people thrills and chills, it taped into that primal emotion of fly or fight, and the reasonable thought for her was fly; it was better to run out of the house and jump into a car than trying to find a weapon to fight the killer, then immediately becoming dinner to some Hannibal Lecter wannabe. She quite liked the idea of some douche getting eaten for the right reasons, but the thought of someone like her getting the knife to the heart was a little hard to take in.

The background to this new story Mirai was starting needed to have some facts. Maybe it could be based on a real life forgotten house? The story could be set in many places... Possibly in the backcountry of the Appalachians? It seemed the logically decision; from her general knowledge, the people of this place were spaced apart, having to go miles to the store that had plywood floors and was basically in ram-shackles; the hills curving the road, the rocks spurting out here and there; puddles of water forming from raised roads and lowered soil; the smell, from what she has read, smells a lot like leaves and dirt, with a hint of what seemed to be despair...

Mirai didn't know much about this area -she moved from Dallas to Houston at eighteen, both of which were in Texas- and while the people were going to sleep in the Eastern Standard time frame, the evening was still coming to a close.

Good Riddance came over the speakers of the laptop. Mirai let out a stifled laugh. She didn't even know when to leave. It would be better to leave when she actually had a well drawn plot to follow, and that would be best, because she would need to get a hotel room, if that was possible, and pack everything that she needed into bags and carry them to the airport when she finds the appropriate  flight out.

Heck, even the thought of the people from this place made it seem like she was a stranger, an alien; her Texan accent would show through wherever she went. She wouldn't even know the common phrases that seemed so simple to other people. "Y'all" was something that everyone used from the time they were small, and Mirai guessed that Appalachians used it in the same matter of speech.

Not knowing anyone would be a bigger danger; it would be weird for a Texan to come to a rural place where she knows nobody except God the Father and maybe the occasional folklore legend she heard over the years. If Mirai decided she wanted to go here, it would be like taking an alien and making him try and live as a normal human being; in a strange land, being around strange people. It would be the same for those people as well, seeing someone from a better state enter in theirs, poking around places like a surgeon looking down at a patient with curiosity, prodding certain organs to see what happens.

She leaned her arms against the desk, her fingers laying on the top of the keyboard at the required places. If she was going to start writing, she still had to write a general plot to this. House hidden in the depths of the woods and a couple finds it? No, too cliché. A house in the wide open and teens go to plunder? Again, too cliché. Maybe it could be what she will soon have to do; a person who has to find residence but gets trapped by a serial killer? Possibly. If she wrote it well enough, Mirai knew that she could set it apart, somehow, make it as if Stanley Kubrick and Jonathan Demme produced the most amazing thing ever. Maybe not so much Kubrick. Steven Spielberg was the better choice, however he did direct Jurassic Park and Hook, two films that were more imagination and more "if" than "aw".  The part with Nedry getting eaten always stayed with her, though, so she guessed that made up for that.