Limbocide

I have the privilege of knowing an Australian who goes by the alias Project_Xii. The man is one of the most creative storytellers I've ever met, and he has a solid grasp of English prose. I spend a bit of time on a forum called the KFF – a mostly-dead website where an old group of once (and future) writers who met via the Blizzard battle.net forums nigh on a decade ago hang out, mostly for nostalgia's sake. While checking it today, I came across a new thread of his relating to his masterpiece-in-progress, Limbocide.

A bit of background: This story dates back to about late-2006/early-2007. It was almost halfway finished when he abandoned it, and he has refused, on various grounds, to take it up again since then (despite my own repeated, if futile, efforts to get him to continue it). The story deals with four suicides (in the afterlife, unnaturally) whose lives were intimately intertwined, though they didn't know it at the time. The mystery of the book is precisely how.

Anyway, the new thread alerted my fellow forumers and I to the fact that a film student at the Art Institute of Atlanta, who had apparently once read and been thoroughly impressed with the story some years ago, wanted permission to make a movie based on it.

Project, of course, said yes.

It feels good to know that some people get the recognition they deserve – even if only in a small and occasional way.

Here is the opening scene – a brilliantly crafted, tangible, almost physically painful scene – from Limbocide. I repost it here with all due credit to the author:

I want to die.

The words echo through my head, even as I pull the trigger. The gunshot, metal bar hitting detonator, the soft 'click' of the gun powder igniting, and then the explosion that follows. My ears ring. Something that feels like a mach truck carrying a load of titanium hits my temple. It strikes bone.

It's impossible to describe the sound of a bullet burrowing into your brain, suffice to say that it resembles a gumboot in mud. A sort of... squelching, sucking sound, littered with the tiniest clinks of bones fragments following in its wake. I'm falling towards the floor, pushed over from the force of the blow. Falling.

But this does not affect the path of the bullet. It exits my skull on the other side, a little higher then the temple, and disappears into the opposing wall. A spray of blood, brain, and bone follows it, decorating the wallpaper I swore I'd redo many times during the past year.

I'm still falling, but things are darker now. Getting hard to think, vision getting hazy. The floor finally rushes to meet me, and I greet it like a lover long lost. Though the impact makes a considerable portion of matter spray from the wound, I don't seem to mind. In fact, nothing matters anymore. It's done. I'm free. I'm going to a better place... one without... problems... where I... can be.... ....

Forget visualizing that scene - you can feel it.