Another day, another writing exercise. This one extends on yesterday’s exercise, so I’m extending yesterday’s story.  Not quite the instructions, but close enough.  After all, the point is to write …

Craft a scene based on what you wrote yesterday. Fill in the setting and the narrative action. Remember to put in sounds and smells. What else – other people? Interruptions? If the scene feels dull, add a twist. Make yourself or the toxic person do something completely unexpected half-way through the scene.

*     *     *

“If you’re expecting an apology, you can pound sand,” Phillips eventually said.  A gust of that black smoke drifted past us, and we both choked on the soot added to the acrid, sulfurous fumes.

When my coughing fit ended, I rasped, “All out of sand, Colonel.  Just a bit of crumbly rock.  And pounding it wouldn’t do us much good.”

A bit more of the rock crumbled at my feet.  I leaned harder against him, felt him give way slightly, then press back against me.

“So what do you propose, Donne?  How the h– how do we get out of here?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You’re the expert on all this mumbo-jumbo.”

“What I don’t know could fill a book, Colonel.”

“Useless?  Useless?!” I felt rage bubbling up in me, furiously as the sulfur pit below. “Yeah, goddammed useless me.  I couldn’t lift jeeps, I couldn’t make big magic, I could maybe fire a gun. Oh, yeah, and sometimes I got feelings about stuff.  Yeah, useless, that’s me.”

“This isn’t the time for self-pity, Donne, we’ve got to –”

“Self-pity?  Goddammit –”

“Watch your mouth, soldier!”

I pushed back.  I dug my heels into the crumbling rock and sharply leaned.  Phillips shouted something, then the weight was gone, and I had to shift my weight forward to keep from tumbling in myself.

Phillips’ scream as he hit the sulfur was high-pitched, shrill, and mercifully short.  I only caught the last glimpse of what I’d done as I turned, having made sure I was stable. One hand, outstretched.  His head, his face in a rictus of terror and pain.

And he was gone.

And I was alone in Hell.

What had I done?

That chortling laughter returned, echoing around, just beyond the smoke and heat distortion.  I thought I could almost see something, large and hulking, but it could have been my imagination.

What had I done?

I’d hated Phillips for years, since war, when he was still a captain … when he’d dragged me back into the madness in the early 50s … Each time, when I thought I was rid of him, he’d come back, with some way to demonstrate how little he thought of me, how important he was, how much he could make me dance to his tune —

There were times when I might have shot him. Twice I had actually punched him in the nose.

But not this.  I wouldn’t have done that sort of thing to —

Well, there were some. In the war. But —

We’d just been sitting here, talking, trying to figure out how to get out of here.  If we could retrace —

— figure out —

How had we gotten here in the first place?

For today’s Write Fifteen Minutes a Day exercise … a prompt that I really couldn’t answer.  I don’t have any toxic relatives that come to mind, and the one person who might qualify for the rest, I’d just as soon not write about.

So, instead, Roger Donne, the protagonist of my current novel, finally confronts (after a fashion) his bete noir, Colonel Edward Phillips.

You know that toxic relative or former friend who makes (or used to make) your life miserable? Write out dialog in which you finally tell that person what you think of her and why. Do not hold back. Do not edit yourself. Do not worry that anyone is ever going to see it. Just write!

*     *     *

“Well,” I said, then jumped slightly as a bit of the rocky cluster broke away.  “This is ironic.”

“What are you talking about?” Phillips said.  His back pressed against mine, sweaty through his fatigues and my own.

“You made my life a living hell for so many years,” I said. “Kind of funny we’d both end up in the real one.”

“This isn’t Hell,” Phillips grunted.

Someone through the thick, sooty smoke about us laughed.  It didn’t sound particularly human.

“I dunno, Colonel,” I told him.  “Pool of brimstone. Roaring flames.  Devils.”

“This isn’t Hell,” Phillips repeated.  He started to press me back, getting a little more space for himself, then stopped. “And I didn’t see any devils.”

“Open your eyes, Colonel.” I chuckled, surprising even myself.  “But why would you?  You never did see anything you didn’t want to see.”

“Not the time for a sob story, Corporal.”

“Retired, Phillips. Not under your command any more.”

“Once a soldier, always a soldier.”

“Says the man who hugged a chair at London HQ while sending guys like me out into the darkness.”

“You knew –”

“I knew nothing, Colonel.  I enlisted to fight Krauts.  I didn’t ask to get snatched up onto the Squad. I didn’t ask to get sent behind the lines and deal with werewolves and sorcerers and ghosts and vampires and mummies and all that crap. I didn’t ask to get involved in all that.”

Silence.  Something loud cackled, unseen. I felt a bit more of the rocky island give way, and Phillips pressed harder against my back, even as he mutter, “Neither did I.”

“Yeah, but you got to sleep in a real bed, sir.  And nobody was trying to shoot at you, or eat your face, or steal your soul. And when you managed to get back after a mission — not that you ever went on any missions, sir — you didn’t have your superior look at you like you were a cockroach, mock you, call you and your mates freaks. Sir.”

Sulfur bubbled and smoked.  “I didn’t –”  He trailed off.  “You were freaks,” he finally said, voice heavy.  “And I was the freak commander.  You have no idea what the other –”

“Pardon me for not being properly sympathetic to how your fellow officers and gentlemen didn’t invite you to sit with them at the Officers Club.”

He made a motion with his shoulders that could have been a shrug.  I wished I could have seen his face.  Or maybe not. Easier to let that anger, that hate, out when I couldn’t actually see him.

It passed my mind that maybe where we were was affecting how I felt.  Even if, it didn’t change those feelings. And they had deep roots, from the war, fifteen long years ago.