Posts tagged: fiction
the piano plays some Gershwin as I sit stoned at the bar, with a poorly made Long Island chilling my still slightly shaking hand. this isn’t what I want. I wanted to be in Nashville by now. my worries should have been left somewhere out over the Plains. but I’m still here and I still have a job to do.
she sits silent, her mind floating among the lights as the devils circle. her arm is numb and beautiful, as is her soul. her sins lean heavy against the outside of the door, waiting for smallest crack to bust the whole thing up. she knows what her mother would say but that hasn’t mattered to her in years. her only care is the stillness of life at this moment and the muted violence that awaits her.
he wanted this to go on forever. the warmth that she had given him would soon fade into the chilly loneliness that weighed on his soul for so long. she was a ghost. she had died long at the hands of an awful rake. she was a ghost and living in this world, a world which requires emotions to be hidden beneath the skin, wasn’t possible for such a fragile soul.
“my world doesn’t seem to hold the same charm it once did,” she whispered. “there is no love among us. no one can find hope anymore. it is a vast white desert with the bones of forgotten dreams littering the landscape. everyday I wish for a second death, a death that would finally allow my escape.”
he stood there, staring at the love that once burned and raged in his arms, watching the sun slowly fall into the ocean.
she said her name was Julie and it being late august I was inclined to believe her. what drew me to her was how straight she stood. I’ve always had a thing for posture, probably because of my mother’s obsession with yoga. Julie and I began a long and rather intense affair beginning that august night.
I met her outside of a bar, it doesn’t matter which one, really. I was standing there with a freshly lit camel red, when a creature wearing blue sundress with tiny, yellow flowers dropped her purse at my feet while searching for a lighter. bending down to help this flame-haired damsel, I made a joke about her being drunk in the middle of the day, which was ill-received. I would late come to find out that she is chronically clumsy.
how do you act when your world melts away? smile and pretend it’s a dream? some night terror from which you’ll awake? do you stop, evaluate the misery and plan your escape from this sea of blood in which you’re drowning? do you say “fuck it” and “fuck everything else” while you’re at it? or do you sit quietly in the chair in your dark bedroom and blame everyone else for all of your sins, never realizing that it’s your own damn fault?
the smell of a foreign cigarette and her melodious French accent are the only things I remember from our first encounter. it wasn’t until a week later that I realized her full resemblance to Mary - sitting at the counter at the seedy cafe, unpretentiously sipping her espresso. I’m not sure whether it was the way that she held on to the tiny cup (with both hands), or the way that she puckered her lips after each drink. but the poetry in her eyes was the same. and the sway of her hair induced a similar trance.
he decided to stand up to the monster. nothing that he had done in all of his twenty-three years could have ever prepared him for such a task. the boy’s favorite time to murder was in the middle of the day, when society is at its sonic peak. his father came home every day from work at a quarter after noon; to eat a sandwich (usually bologna with mustard) and to defecate (usually caused by the bologna sandwich). Sam could easily walk into the bathroom, catch his father with his pants down, both literally and figuratively, and execute him with whatever method he would so choose. in his mind, Sam was compiling a list of atrocities his father had committed against he and his younger sister. and as the list grew larger and larger, it became clear that the only penance for these sins would be decapitation.
it’s as if she had walked into a lake of fire. through her persecution, she kept the cool that she was known for. the cool that made me believe that she was the brightest star among an unending galaxy. when she stood up there. the get the final verdict - the one from which the only appeal is to the angry god himself - her face was a confused edifice; a wicked contradiction. her tears - falling not for loss of life but the loss of innocence in the heart - cut a perpendicular route to her smiling smirk, which glowed glad amongst the clouds and circles, both dark and damning. she fixed her eyes upon the cross, the nude snake-oil salesman making his final plea. and as she closed them for the final time, a commencement prayer slipped from her lips, setting the truth before the eyes of the lord.
I’m alarmingly fragile in my dreams. The slightest friction, whether physical or emotion, makes me crumble into a thousand little bits. For instance, during one session, I found myself at the foot of a castle, seemingly somewhere in England (the English countryside as I imagine it). A faint moan could be heard from even the outside and it grew me closer. The sound was familiar, that of a woman, and somewhere in my heart I knew that she and I had met once, either yesterday or a thousand years ago. Each new corridor seemed longer than the last. A musty, stuffiness choked every thought. Upon each door was a large, wooden cross. The closer I seemed to be getting to the source of the sound, the more I began to wonder about this mysterious siren. Was it someone who I loved? Was it someone I had used to love? What did these moans signify? I felt that each step was in the wrong direction. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to find this woman.
A soft, blue glow seems to drift into my window; passing the dust and abandoned garbage, settling somewhere near memory. I can hear the dreams as they are being written. They scream loudly, with a foreign accent from some Eastern European hell. I wish that they had the voice of a girl, a small girl. While it would be more frightening, there would also be a comfort in such a tiny, lost heart.
I can’t say if anything I’ve ever seen has been real, but I do know that late at night they come again - all of them - and they sit at the foot of my bed waiting for me to slip away. If there were some sort of prayer or chant that could drive them away, I’d gladly prescribe.
But I am alone. I am sitting up now. Someone in the house is listening to a radio. I’d like to hear Miles Davis one last time. I know that I could put my soul at ease. And then maybe I could get some sleep.
A week ago, I would’ve been tickled three shades of pink at the very thought of selling my books and my records and jumping into my modest sedan and setting off for somewhere, never having a definite plan of return. It’s easiest to “cut and run” when you don’t really have anything to cut. A couple of hurt feelings that will heal much quicker than you’d ever expect. Who’s you’re mom? Who’s your dad? What do they really even mad to you? You could spend the rest of their lives trying to make it all up to them (Which in the end will prove fruitless!). But that’s a world that had never crossed my mind. I’m independent; whether that is a good or bad thing is to be decided in the future by a judge I can’t even imagine.
