It is Sunday night, two nights after Sean met Athena, and the encounter has stuck in his playing, playing over and over again like a skipping record. He has never experienced such a tangible memory. It's a drug. He is addicted to the memory of her. He is addicted to the vision of her in the smoke filled room, bathed in the effervescent green and red and purple light of the concert hall. Every detail is stitched into his brain. The way her shirt hung off of her porcelain shoulders and dipped, low-cut and perfect, in the front. He remembers the brown thread stitched delicately around the collar and the wide bell cuffs. He remembers the natural frowning shape of her mouth, the glossless pink of her lips, the smattering of light machine gun freckles near her nose, the gorgeous length and blackness of the lashes surrounding her shock green eyes. He remembers the complex highlights and shadows in her hair, the way it hung over her ears and parted over her forehead and how a rogue wisp of it fell across her eye. He remembers her shape, her almost criminally curvaceous figure, her lack of height, and the defensive stance she had when he introduced himself. He remembers the inadvertent flinch she gave, the surprise of being approached and the wariness that crept into her initial smile. He remembers her so vividly. He remembers the sharpness of her chin, the breadth of her face, the slight rose in her cheeks and the almost unearthliness paleness of her white skin. He remembers her voice, especially, how it was the perfect complement to her, how she was the form he'd envision if he'd only heard her speak on the phone or the radio. He remembers the slight crookedness of her teeth, the dissatisfied calmness of her demeanor, and the cool economy of her language. She wasn't wordy. She answered his small handful of questions in a way that was efficient without being terse.
Athena lived nearby and she was a year younger than Sean. She worked as a receptionist at a high school, which is she loathed, but she was putting herself back through college after having dropped out a semester prior to getting a degree in graphic design. She was single and hadn't had a boyfriend in a while. And, yes, she would be interested in having dinner with Sean some night.
She didn't have any paper with her because she never took her purse to concerts. Sean had accidentally left his phone at home. He did have a silver Sharpie, however, and Athena scrawled out her number on the palm of Sean's hand. The silver was barely legible on against his own white skin, so she wrote the number, again, on his forearm. Sean was embarrassed by the way the sensation of her hand on his arm shocked him, and how the force of it fanned out like downed wire electricity through every nerve in his body. It was at that moment he sadly took note of how long it had been since any girl had touched him.
She was very explicit in her instructions. He was to call her on Monday, because to do so earlier would make both of them feel very desperate. And then she left. She didn't stay at the concert. She didn't hang out with Sean after their brief, wonderful little meeting. She just disappeared. It was probably for the best, because it allowed time for Sean to reboot. The anxiety of the moment had pretty much caused every major system in his body to up and shut down. Sean didn't mind, though. The silver permanent ink on his hand and arm more than made up for the cardiac arrest.
And now it is Sunday and he is waiting. The ink is still clinging, stubbornly, to his skin, but he has transferred her number to multiple sources in a prudent act of safe keeping. He is laying on his bed, listening to songs shuffle on his laptop. Every song seems to be about love, and it is torturous. He has spent the last two days fabricating his first date with Athena, mapping out potential sites, creating mental flowcharts of potential disasters and missteps. He is excited to find out who she is. His gut is telling him that she is amazing, that she is brilliant and as dispassionately interested in everything as he is. His gut is telling him that she is cutely misanthropic and that she has great taste in music and movies and books. His gut is telling him that she hates all the same things he hates. His gut, he knows, could be dead wrong, but he can't wait to find out. He contemplates breaking her rule and calling tonight. He wonders if she would find that annoying or endearing.
Somehow he knows that she would find it annoying. And he loves that. He has been a model of self-control for years, now. He can wait another day, even if that waiting leaves him feeling twitchy and pathetic.
As song after song relays the horrors and divinities inherent in loving another person, Sean realizes how long it's been since he's looked forward to anything. Nearly every aspect of his life had been something to endure, something to slog through on the slow march to death. He didn't tell people that very often, as they tended to take a dim view of him and his dreary outlook, but it really was how he felt. Usually. But he was actually longing to call Athena. He wasn't looking past his dinner with her to the point when it was over and he could return to the solitary lair of his apartment. In fact, the time approaching his call was interminable. He felt as if it had been weeks since they'd met. He wanted so badly to be sitting across from her, talking to her, getting to know her. He forgot what anticipation was really like... before Athena, it had all but been replaced with dread.
He was worried, of course, about the impression he'd make on her... about the impression he'd already made, but it wasn't the crippling anxiety to which he was accustomed. Instead, it was the sort of thrilling worry that goes along with a roller coaster ride or a good scary movie. He was ready to be scared.
The vision of her was still there, and he tried to shake it. He didn't want to obsess or deify her. Although, with a name like Athena, it might be completely warranted.
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
5.22.2010
Hey Pretty
It's loud, even away from the speakers, and there's a non-stop parade of sweat soaked drunks winding through the maze halls that flank the stage. There is revelry and joy and music and Sean is irritated by it all. He knows he is a curmudgeon, and he hates that about himself, but as another plastic cup of beer slops onto his sneakers, he realizes he is overly tired and just wants to leave. But he's stuck. His ride, Glen, is chatting with a girl, and so he has to listen to another song. He hovers at the periphery of the crowd, cringing at the feedback and the tin squeal of the guitar, but otherwise nearly enjoying the moment. A teenager careens into his back and Sean loses his footing and bounces into a leather-clad man mountain in front of him. He gets a glare and backs up. The teenager is laughing. The band, at least, is pretty good.
The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.
He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.
Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.
Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.
The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.
After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.
Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.
And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.
The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.
He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.
Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.
Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.
The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.
After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.
Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.
And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.
3.19.2010
Kyle & Jasmine
Kyle and Jasmine have a wall between them. There is a wide gulf that separates them despite their physical proximity in the small automobile that Kyle is maneuvering slowly and precisely through red-tinged mountains. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, loves the other, but they are unable to say it. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, is unable to actually spit out the words. Kyle is afraid that Jasmine has forever placed him in her in the sheer-walled confines of her friend bucket, a fate few men are ever able to escape. Jasmine is afraid that Kyle must have issued his affection to someone else and has taken his utter lack of forwardness to be an obvious sign of disinterest. Kyle knows that Jasmine is the perfect girl for him and Jasmine is well aware of the rarity of the chemistry they share. There is an undeniable bond between them, but the rift that drives them apart seems wholly insurmountable. As the car radio plays softly and the sun sets behind them, Kyle and Jasmine are both experiencing the same confounding mixture of contentment and lightning fork agony.
There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.
The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.
The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.
The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.
Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.
The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.
Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.
The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.
As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.
The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.
There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.
The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.
The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.
The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.
Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.
The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.
Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.
The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.
As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.
The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.
3.06.2010
Woodbridge's
It should have been a typical evening… after running a few errands, I expected to come home, heat up some leftover pizza and watch television until bed time. Nothing special, nothing exciting. Just a dull, flavorless evening. Destiny, though, can have different plans, and I suppose I found myself on the butt end of fate that night. From the moment I walked into that store, I should have known something was awry. It’s not often that one gets to wonder just how markedly different their life would have been if they hadn’t desperately needed to pick up detergent on their way home from work one Wednesday.
Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.
The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.
I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.
I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.
There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”
We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”
He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”
“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”
“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.
“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.
“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”
It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.
“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”
A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”
The Devil nodded an affirmation.
The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.
He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.
This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.
I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.
My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.
And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.
But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.
Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.
I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.
And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.
I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.
More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.
The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.
I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.
Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.
The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.
I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.
I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.
There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”
We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”
He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”
“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”
“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.
“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.
“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”
It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.
“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”
A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”
The Devil nodded an affirmation.
The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.
He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.
This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.
I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.
My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.
And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.
But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.
Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.
I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.
And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.
I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.
More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.
The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.
I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.
2.04.2010
Dreaming Athena
Athena blinks, half awake, and blurring dim, streaming moonlight with teary eyes. There is a dream, gauzy and wandering, left in the remnants of her memory. It spills around her like a shattered flute of wine, blood red and jagged with twinkling bits of glass. She breathes deep and her back arches. Blankets fall from her, unspooling from her body onto the floor. There is sweat on her forehead, dark blond hair matted to her face. She still hears the whispered words, ghostly and unwanted: "I love you, I love you, I love you." There is an illusory cooling kiss, fresh on her cheek, and she unconsciously bats at it, trying to shoo it away like it were a fly or a gnat. The world is swirling, lush and unwieldy above her. She struggles for her bearings, digs long fingers into the sheets and mattress and fights against another wave of slumber. She tries to open her eyes wider, to breathe and come to, but the force of her exhaustion is too much to overcome. The weight of it pulls down her eyelids, drags her back into the folds of her bed. She pushes back.
She fails.
The darkness drapes over her as mind slips the boundaries of rationality. The voice returns, calling out its affection as she spirals into another fit of sleep. Still slightly aware, she sings back at it, louder than it, hoping to drown it out. But it meets her, note for note, decibel for decibel, drilling inside her dreaming skull and filling it with a cacophony of affection. Even here, even in the wilds of her subconscious, she won't accept it. She can't accept it. There's a guilt that shrouds her, a painful unwillingness to allow any measure of abandon. Her will is stronger than her want, and so she pushes and pushes and pushes the voice aside. But she feels so strangled by it. She feels so unearthly and sad. Sleep finally settles back in, and she wades with trepidation into greater depths, afraid that she will be unable to maintain her defense. As sleep takes hold she takes form and a new pair of eyes takes over. She is seeing things that aren't really there.
She recognizes the room, but she can't say from where. It is an amalgam, a conglomerate of places... a window from an old apartment, her childhood bed, posters from her dormitory, a sleeping cat that's been dead for years. The walls shift in color and size. It's disorienting and a little scary. So she sits, and she floats... the floor is electric blue liquid. She is aloft, hovering above it, cross-legged and dressed in a gossamer nightgown. She knows she is dreaming. It's all too unreal, too fluid to exist anywhere else. She takes in a deep breath and it smells like wasp and butter. She holds the air in her lungs, closes her dream-eyes, and lets the world go black. But it never does. On the backs of her false eyelids are cinema screens, and film rolls through some projector in the back of her brain. Light flickers inside of her, and a scratchy soundtrack hiccups and spurts. Floating in this unreal room, her unreal eyes shut tight, she sees herself in luscious black and white, beautiful and calm and pale, standing in a field of colossal honeysuckle. The dreaming Athena is envious of her celluloid counterpart. She has never felt as serene as she looks in that field. And behind her, on film, a shadow gathers up and extends whispering tendrils around her middle. And the tendrils congeal into arms, and the smoke fills itself in, slowly, like a time lapsed paint by number kit, and there is a boy, then, vague and simple and reaching his lips to her ear. He gently bites, and she practically melts.
In the unreal room she throws open her eyes and disrupts the movie. She is flustered. She falls from her floating position onto the electric ground below. And when she does, there is a thunder clap and the ground is hardwood and the room is static and dull. She's lost it, that brief hint of dreaming magic. As she stands up, dusts herself off, and redresses herself in something heavier, something more substantial, she tries to shake the image of the boy. The lines of her world become thicker, heavier, greasepaint black and stark. She tries to drain herself of color, of worry, of thought. But the image remains. It sticks with her, and as she tries to avert her mind from thinking on it, it just grows inside of her. She can feel the thought of him glowing somewhere deep in her heart and she growls. She hates this. She hates it more than she could describe. With every slow motion blink of her eyes, the boy appears, animated like in an old kinetoscope.
And so she slumps herself down into the heavy drawn world, somehow, now, on an abandoned sidewalk in a crumbling gray block in an anonymous city. The lamp posts are sketched in, messy, curlicued and French. The sky is crackled paint. The buildings are cut from monochrome wallpaper samples. She lays on the concrete and looks up at a flock of wind-up crows skittering by, sending flakes of the heavens down on her like lead-based rain. Pieces of it get stuck on her eyelashes. She blinks them out and tries to clear her mind. From the ground, asphalt arms wrap around her again. They are warm, suddenly flesh, and she's embraced again. She wants to not want it. She wants it to not be so comforting. She wants it to not be so inviting. But it is. She tries to hold fast, to fight it. But she doesn't want to.
The voice is there again. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
And she almost says it back, but the alarm clock wakes her right up.
She fails.
The darkness drapes over her as mind slips the boundaries of rationality. The voice returns, calling out its affection as she spirals into another fit of sleep. Still slightly aware, she sings back at it, louder than it, hoping to drown it out. But it meets her, note for note, decibel for decibel, drilling inside her dreaming skull and filling it with a cacophony of affection. Even here, even in the wilds of her subconscious, she won't accept it. She can't accept it. There's a guilt that shrouds her, a painful unwillingness to allow any measure of abandon. Her will is stronger than her want, and so she pushes and pushes and pushes the voice aside. But she feels so strangled by it. She feels so unearthly and sad. Sleep finally settles back in, and she wades with trepidation into greater depths, afraid that she will be unable to maintain her defense. As sleep takes hold she takes form and a new pair of eyes takes over. She is seeing things that aren't really there.
She recognizes the room, but she can't say from where. It is an amalgam, a conglomerate of places... a window from an old apartment, her childhood bed, posters from her dormitory, a sleeping cat that's been dead for years. The walls shift in color and size. It's disorienting and a little scary. So she sits, and she floats... the floor is electric blue liquid. She is aloft, hovering above it, cross-legged and dressed in a gossamer nightgown. She knows she is dreaming. It's all too unreal, too fluid to exist anywhere else. She takes in a deep breath and it smells like wasp and butter. She holds the air in her lungs, closes her dream-eyes, and lets the world go black. But it never does. On the backs of her false eyelids are cinema screens, and film rolls through some projector in the back of her brain. Light flickers inside of her, and a scratchy soundtrack hiccups and spurts. Floating in this unreal room, her unreal eyes shut tight, she sees herself in luscious black and white, beautiful and calm and pale, standing in a field of colossal honeysuckle. The dreaming Athena is envious of her celluloid counterpart. She has never felt as serene as she looks in that field. And behind her, on film, a shadow gathers up and extends whispering tendrils around her middle. And the tendrils congeal into arms, and the smoke fills itself in, slowly, like a time lapsed paint by number kit, and there is a boy, then, vague and simple and reaching his lips to her ear. He gently bites, and she practically melts.
In the unreal room she throws open her eyes and disrupts the movie. She is flustered. She falls from her floating position onto the electric ground below. And when she does, there is a thunder clap and the ground is hardwood and the room is static and dull. She's lost it, that brief hint of dreaming magic. As she stands up, dusts herself off, and redresses herself in something heavier, something more substantial, she tries to shake the image of the boy. The lines of her world become thicker, heavier, greasepaint black and stark. She tries to drain herself of color, of worry, of thought. But the image remains. It sticks with her, and as she tries to avert her mind from thinking on it, it just grows inside of her. She can feel the thought of him glowing somewhere deep in her heart and she growls. She hates this. She hates it more than she could describe. With every slow motion blink of her eyes, the boy appears, animated like in an old kinetoscope.
And so she slumps herself down into the heavy drawn world, somehow, now, on an abandoned sidewalk in a crumbling gray block in an anonymous city. The lamp posts are sketched in, messy, curlicued and French. The sky is crackled paint. The buildings are cut from monochrome wallpaper samples. She lays on the concrete and looks up at a flock of wind-up crows skittering by, sending flakes of the heavens down on her like lead-based rain. Pieces of it get stuck on her eyelashes. She blinks them out and tries to clear her mind. From the ground, asphalt arms wrap around her again. They are warm, suddenly flesh, and she's embraced again. She wants to not want it. She wants it to not be so comforting. She wants it to not be so inviting. But it is. She tries to hold fast, to fight it. But she doesn't want to.
The voice is there again. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
And she almost says it back, but the alarm clock wakes her right up.
1.23.2010
Remedy
Minutes tick by and Benjamin sits in the dark, listening to the motion on the clock and checking his wrist, every so often, for a pulse. This fear of dying, it's irrational, he knows it, but it's all he's dreamt of, all he's imagined, now (against his will) for so long. It's gutted him. Once that realization of mortality (an honest realization, not the sideways and muted understanding that most people give it, but the very visceral and powerful fact that his life is ebbing away, tick by tick, tock by tock) set in, it wriggled its way into his consciousness, laid parasite eggs and took over. And now he's literally listening to life end. In any moment of concentration, any moment where he is not distracted by hunger or lust or something interesting on the television, he imagines scenario after scenario after scenario and he wonders how his imagination will dovetail with his actual demise. He fears his fear most of all. Second to that, he fears that he will die before he accomplishes anything. Sometimes, that fear is mutated into a palpitation-worthy worry that he will die JUST as he accomplishes something, thusly being robbed of its reward. However, at three in the morning, with work mere hours away and no sleep in sight, it is unlikely that Benjamin will need to worry about the latter case.
His life, he sometimes realizes, is a monument of incompletion. He has three quarters of a necessary ambition, and it serves him well, up to a point. Beyond that, boredom sets in. Or, rather, what Benjamin calls boredom sets in. What it is, really, is worse. There is another horrible realization, similar to the gut wrenching knowledge of his own mortality, that plagues Benjamin. Unlike many successful people, Benjamin is all too aware of his own mediocrity. And so, as a project winds down, as a genuine accomplishment nears, Benjamin takes stock of his work and he dismisses it as too banal, too mundane, too pedestrian, too dull to be meaningful. Completion, he decides, is only a waste of his precious, dwindling time. And he surrenders progress for depression, vowing not to try again. His projects, like hunger, lust and good television, are a very viable distraction from worrying about death. The abandonment of his work, then, opens the door to these long, interminable nights of irrational terror. The whole of it is compounded, then, by the lack of accomplishment, the surrender which pushed him down in the first place, and an increasing amount of crazy brought on by the resulting insomnia. He finds himself in the middle of a vortex of self-created lunacy, and he struggles to free himself of its hold. He spends waning minutes of his life (waning, in the fact that he is on a slow march to the grave... there is no valid reason to believe his ending is coming soon, although he can cite, with chilling detail, how very thin the line between life and death is, and he will expound in unpleasant volume about how no one is guaranteed an average lifespan) fretting over his seeming inability to do anything of value, and as he wastes those waning minutes, he only has reason to chastise himself more.
He is at a loss. He wonders, then, if he would be better served by lowering his expectations of life, by embracing his mediocrity and enjoying the bland pleasures that seem to sustain most people. He has a hard time swallowing it. He wants to offer up something, to create something of substance, to be known, to be admired, to be respected. He does not want to just give in to a daily grind of punching a clock and being told what to do by an army of superiors all working to keep some indifferent and colossal cash machine running, oiled with his blood and sweat. But, given his lacking skill, given his inability to rise above the middling, he wonders if he really has any choice at all. Maybe he's only making himself ill by peppering everything with expectation and a desire to elevate. Maybe he's killing himself with delusion, losing time that he could appreciate the simple things of life. Without the constant want, perhaps he could settle into a pleasant rut and develop a comfort that would mitigate his menial and unimportant place in the world. That thought is both seductive and the most absolutely depressing thing he's ever considered. And so he continues on, stuck in a stasis of his own creation, unable to live up to his own expectations. His ambition is outsized. His capability is puny in comparison. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to remedy the situation.
As time slips by and daylight creeps up, he thinks there might not be a remedy at all.
His life, he sometimes realizes, is a monument of incompletion. He has three quarters of a necessary ambition, and it serves him well, up to a point. Beyond that, boredom sets in. Or, rather, what Benjamin calls boredom sets in. What it is, really, is worse. There is another horrible realization, similar to the gut wrenching knowledge of his own mortality, that plagues Benjamin. Unlike many successful people, Benjamin is all too aware of his own mediocrity. And so, as a project winds down, as a genuine accomplishment nears, Benjamin takes stock of his work and he dismisses it as too banal, too mundane, too pedestrian, too dull to be meaningful. Completion, he decides, is only a waste of his precious, dwindling time. And he surrenders progress for depression, vowing not to try again. His projects, like hunger, lust and good television, are a very viable distraction from worrying about death. The abandonment of his work, then, opens the door to these long, interminable nights of irrational terror. The whole of it is compounded, then, by the lack of accomplishment, the surrender which pushed him down in the first place, and an increasing amount of crazy brought on by the resulting insomnia. He finds himself in the middle of a vortex of self-created lunacy, and he struggles to free himself of its hold. He spends waning minutes of his life (waning, in the fact that he is on a slow march to the grave... there is no valid reason to believe his ending is coming soon, although he can cite, with chilling detail, how very thin the line between life and death is, and he will expound in unpleasant volume about how no one is guaranteed an average lifespan) fretting over his seeming inability to do anything of value, and as he wastes those waning minutes, he only has reason to chastise himself more.
He is at a loss. He wonders, then, if he would be better served by lowering his expectations of life, by embracing his mediocrity and enjoying the bland pleasures that seem to sustain most people. He has a hard time swallowing it. He wants to offer up something, to create something of substance, to be known, to be admired, to be respected. He does not want to just give in to a daily grind of punching a clock and being told what to do by an army of superiors all working to keep some indifferent and colossal cash machine running, oiled with his blood and sweat. But, given his lacking skill, given his inability to rise above the middling, he wonders if he really has any choice at all. Maybe he's only making himself ill by peppering everything with expectation and a desire to elevate. Maybe he's killing himself with delusion, losing time that he could appreciate the simple things of life. Without the constant want, perhaps he could settle into a pleasant rut and develop a comfort that would mitigate his menial and unimportant place in the world. That thought is both seductive and the most absolutely depressing thing he's ever considered. And so he continues on, stuck in a stasis of his own creation, unable to live up to his own expectations. His ambition is outsized. His capability is puny in comparison. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to remedy the situation.
As time slips by and daylight creeps up, he thinks there might not be a remedy at all.
9.01.2009
Change
As the darkness of night closed in on Marshall, he sat on his bed, his head in his hands, and a sort of monolithic sorrow crushing his chest. He was certain, now, of his own stupidity, his absolute lack of grace. He had ruined everything and he was sure it was never going to be good again.
The sun set, and dark rolled in, and soon, Marshall was illuminated only by an orange glow of parking lot lights streaming in through the half-open slats of his blinds. A desk fan oscillated and hummed. Dogs barked outside. Every now and then, he could hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk or a car drive past. He felt sick. Isolated. Alone. He replayed the day’s events in his head, over and over, and with each successive viewing, the error seemed more obvious. It seemed more egregious. A cool breeze blew in through the window and jostled the blinds. There was a mild din of plastic on drywall as the treatment slapped around. He didn’t know what to do now. He felt paralyzed. Abandoned.
Nothing good, he decided, came from expressing emotion. Nothing good came from telling someone how you really feel. All it does, he decided, is shatter finely built illusions. All it does is force reality to come charging through like rhino. When people ask you how you’re doing, they don’t really care. Nobody wants to hear about your fears or your worries or your hopes or your dreams. That’s what therapists are for. People want the artifice of intimacy without really knowing a thing about one another. That’s what she had wanted. And he wrecked that. He wrecked it and he didn’t know how, of even if, it could be rebuilt.
At some level, of course, Marshall knew she knew. She had to know. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t blind. She saw him fawn over her, gush over her, leap to her defense, beg for time. She saw all of that. She knew he was in love. But she was lucky enough to not really know. She could believe anything she wanted. She had nothing but circumstantial evidence… just an idea of it, no proof. Before he felt the need to upend his guts and tell her, breathlessly, just how in love he was, she could claim blissful and beautiful ignorance. Her reality was constructed in such a way that she and Marshall could be friends and nothing more, because Marshall never made the demand of anything else. She was fine pretending at closeness, and assumed that he was too. But inside, he was dying. Inside, he was clamoring to expel the truth.
As he sat on his bed in the dark, he wondered why he did it. He couldn’t adequately explain it. His stomach had been in knots around her. His brain hemispheres fused together in awe and lovestruck idiocy whenever the two of them were together. He cherished those moments, like rare stamps in some collection of time. Those moments stood out to him, and he wanted more. She was clear in her boundaries, but it didn’t stop his ridiculous heart or his ridiculous head from wanting, so badly, to cross into her borders. He kept it in check. He convinced himself, for a while, having her affection in any way was enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close. It only whet his appetite. Every minute with her called out for duplication, for exponential growth. Every blush of something more only made the gulf between his hope and his reality that much more pronounced. He began to loathe the situation, the limits, the constraints and he hated himself for being cowed into action by his own asinine feelings.
He laid down then, on top of his blankets, in his clothes and tried to sleep, but he failed miserably in the attempt...
As night fell, Meredith was laying on her bed, struggling with a headache and pressing down on her eyes with her forearm draped across her face. She was sad and she was tired and she was angry that she wasn’t going to get to sleep tonight. She wished, somehow, she could go back and erase the last few hours, or that, at the very least, she could get a do-over. With her eyes shut so tightly, all she could see was the look of heartbreak on his face as he whispered “I love you,” and she responded with, “No you don’t.”
He did love her. She knew it. She didn’t want to know it and she certainly didn’t want to admit it, but it was doubtless. There was a polished sheen to the way he treated her… there was, in his words and his actions, a sort of barely contained admiration that both flattered and frustrated her. She knew. She could even pinpoint when his affection changed, when it grew it something unwieldy and larger than life. She saw the difference. He struggled with it, she could tell. And she wanted, badly, to somehow put him at ease. But she didn’t know what to say. The idea of it scared her to death. The idea that things could sour, that the status quo, a good status quo, might change made her sick to her stomach. So she ignored it and prayed that he would latch his attention on to somebody else. The idea of that made her queasy too. She liked things exactly how they were, but nothing stays the same for very long. Today she felt like she was watching a distant tornado, admiring it from her roof before realizing with dawning horror that it was headed straight for her. Now things had changed, and badly, and he was hurt and she was hurt and she didn’t know how to soothe any of it.
It wasn’t exactly that she wasn’t interested. She was. As much as she gagged at the idea of a soul mate, he was awfully close to that ideal, and she felt better with him than she did without. For Meredith, that was about as high of praise as any potential mate could get. But she squirmed, sometimes, at the idea of it as well. She would imagine the awkwardness of a first real date, a first real kiss… she would cringe at the thought of actual intimacy with someone she genuinely cared about because it just left so much room for things to go awry. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, so she kept up as many walls as possible and expunged any romantic notion of him from her head. Every now and then, her heart would twinge as she felt the flush of his kindness, of his compassion, of thoughtfulness she didn’t believe she’d ever be the recipient of. And she would crumble, a little, and try desperately not to let on.
Now, as the moon rose and she downed a cocktail of too many aspirin and too much Diet Coke, she was struck by just how off the rails it had all gone. She wished, then, that she could cry, because it seemed like other people in similar situations always felt better after a good cry. But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know what muscle to flex. She felt sad enough, certainly, but it just sat on her shoulders, heavy and damp, and she slumped back onto her bed and covered up her eyes again and pictured him, standing there, trembling with emotion and rejected wholesale by the girl he adored. If it had been anyone else she would have chastised their weakness, she would have mocked how much they cared. But she could feel it from it, waves of heat like the warmth of a campfire, and it was sincere and it was directed at her. She wanted, at that moment, to wrap her arms tightly around him and press her lips against his and tell him, madly, that she loved him too. She imagined it, and it seemed strained. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the response she could ever muster no matter how deeply she felt for him. It was too much, too theatrical… too showy. She did love him. If she was honest, she had to admit it, but she’d never love him in the same way he loved her. He’d never believe it because she’d never be able to show him. She convinced herself that, bad as this was, it was better in the long run.
But the long run seemed awfully far off on the horizon, and the here and now sucked. She hated knowing how badly he felt and she hated, even more, how badly she felt, herself. She tried, again, to picture the two of them, together, actually together, holding hands or sharing popcorn or driving late at night to faraway, star spackled beaches, content in a lovely silence and happy just to be with one another. And all of it fit. She didn’t retch, she didn’t recoil. The kissing, the sex, the gangly retro-teenage awkwardness of a burgeoning relationship was surmountable. It would, she was certain, be enjoyable at some point, even if it took some getting used to. So why did she balk at it? Why was her reaction so harsh and so cold and so damning? She knew why.
To let him in, to open that door and start something new would mean a drastic change. And Meredith saw all of the potential pitfalls... whatever he had to offer, she couldn't see the benefits being worth the trouble. She was angry at herself for admitting that, but she was, at her core, a brutally honest girl. She struggled with the loss and desperately searched reason to find a decent way out... but she couldn't think of anything to do or anything to say to assuage the situation.
She let out a soft painful moan and tried to sleep. She couldn't do it. Her brain wouldn't shut the hell up.
At around three in the morning, both Marshall and Meredith were bleary-eyed and wild with insomnia. Both of them thought fondly of the other, and then coldly, and then angrily and back to fondly again. Both of them felt bound by arbitrary rules, bound by some unwritten etiquette, bound by limitations and expectations they had set for themselves, and they were suffering because of it. Both of them felt hollow, out of sorts with the circumstances and lost in some sickening, confusing sea. Both of them wanted nothing more than to call the other, to hear the voice on the other end of the line and say, without hesitation or fear or anxiety that they loved one another. Both of them wanted that vocal embrace, that reassurance that despite a wretched day, things between them would be just fine.
Both of them stared at their telephones, paralyzed by the moment, and unable to act. They were certain things had changed forever.
The sun set, and dark rolled in, and soon, Marshall was illuminated only by an orange glow of parking lot lights streaming in through the half-open slats of his blinds. A desk fan oscillated and hummed. Dogs barked outside. Every now and then, he could hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk or a car drive past. He felt sick. Isolated. Alone. He replayed the day’s events in his head, over and over, and with each successive viewing, the error seemed more obvious. It seemed more egregious. A cool breeze blew in through the window and jostled the blinds. There was a mild din of plastic on drywall as the treatment slapped around. He didn’t know what to do now. He felt paralyzed. Abandoned.
Nothing good, he decided, came from expressing emotion. Nothing good came from telling someone how you really feel. All it does, he decided, is shatter finely built illusions. All it does is force reality to come charging through like rhino. When people ask you how you’re doing, they don’t really care. Nobody wants to hear about your fears or your worries or your hopes or your dreams. That’s what therapists are for. People want the artifice of intimacy without really knowing a thing about one another. That’s what she had wanted. And he wrecked that. He wrecked it and he didn’t know how, of even if, it could be rebuilt.
At some level, of course, Marshall knew she knew. She had to know. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t blind. She saw him fawn over her, gush over her, leap to her defense, beg for time. She saw all of that. She knew he was in love. But she was lucky enough to not really know. She could believe anything she wanted. She had nothing but circumstantial evidence… just an idea of it, no proof. Before he felt the need to upend his guts and tell her, breathlessly, just how in love he was, she could claim blissful and beautiful ignorance. Her reality was constructed in such a way that she and Marshall could be friends and nothing more, because Marshall never made the demand of anything else. She was fine pretending at closeness, and assumed that he was too. But inside, he was dying. Inside, he was clamoring to expel the truth.
As he sat on his bed in the dark, he wondered why he did it. He couldn’t adequately explain it. His stomach had been in knots around her. His brain hemispheres fused together in awe and lovestruck idiocy whenever the two of them were together. He cherished those moments, like rare stamps in some collection of time. Those moments stood out to him, and he wanted more. She was clear in her boundaries, but it didn’t stop his ridiculous heart or his ridiculous head from wanting, so badly, to cross into her borders. He kept it in check. He convinced himself, for a while, having her affection in any way was enough. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close. It only whet his appetite. Every minute with her called out for duplication, for exponential growth. Every blush of something more only made the gulf between his hope and his reality that much more pronounced. He began to loathe the situation, the limits, the constraints and he hated himself for being cowed into action by his own asinine feelings.
He laid down then, on top of his blankets, in his clothes and tried to sleep, but he failed miserably in the attempt...
As night fell, Meredith was laying on her bed, struggling with a headache and pressing down on her eyes with her forearm draped across her face. She was sad and she was tired and she was angry that she wasn’t going to get to sleep tonight. She wished, somehow, she could go back and erase the last few hours, or that, at the very least, she could get a do-over. With her eyes shut so tightly, all she could see was the look of heartbreak on his face as he whispered “I love you,” and she responded with, “No you don’t.”
He did love her. She knew it. She didn’t want to know it and she certainly didn’t want to admit it, but it was doubtless. There was a polished sheen to the way he treated her… there was, in his words and his actions, a sort of barely contained admiration that both flattered and frustrated her. She knew. She could even pinpoint when his affection changed, when it grew it something unwieldy and larger than life. She saw the difference. He struggled with it, she could tell. And she wanted, badly, to somehow put him at ease. But she didn’t know what to say. The idea of it scared her to death. The idea that things could sour, that the status quo, a good status quo, might change made her sick to her stomach. So she ignored it and prayed that he would latch his attention on to somebody else. The idea of that made her queasy too. She liked things exactly how they were, but nothing stays the same for very long. Today she felt like she was watching a distant tornado, admiring it from her roof before realizing with dawning horror that it was headed straight for her. Now things had changed, and badly, and he was hurt and she was hurt and she didn’t know how to soothe any of it.
It wasn’t exactly that she wasn’t interested. She was. As much as she gagged at the idea of a soul mate, he was awfully close to that ideal, and she felt better with him than she did without. For Meredith, that was about as high of praise as any potential mate could get. But she squirmed, sometimes, at the idea of it as well. She would imagine the awkwardness of a first real date, a first real kiss… she would cringe at the thought of actual intimacy with someone she genuinely cared about because it just left so much room for things to go awry. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him, so she kept up as many walls as possible and expunged any romantic notion of him from her head. Every now and then, her heart would twinge as she felt the flush of his kindness, of his compassion, of thoughtfulness she didn’t believe she’d ever be the recipient of. And she would crumble, a little, and try desperately not to let on.
Now, as the moon rose and she downed a cocktail of too many aspirin and too much Diet Coke, she was struck by just how off the rails it had all gone. She wished, then, that she could cry, because it seemed like other people in similar situations always felt better after a good cry. But she couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know what muscle to flex. She felt sad enough, certainly, but it just sat on her shoulders, heavy and damp, and she slumped back onto her bed and covered up her eyes again and pictured him, standing there, trembling with emotion and rejected wholesale by the girl he adored. If it had been anyone else she would have chastised their weakness, she would have mocked how much they cared. But she could feel it from it, waves of heat like the warmth of a campfire, and it was sincere and it was directed at her. She wanted, at that moment, to wrap her arms tightly around him and press her lips against his and tell him, madly, that she loved him too. She imagined it, and it seemed strained. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t the response she could ever muster no matter how deeply she felt for him. It was too much, too theatrical… too showy. She did love him. If she was honest, she had to admit it, but she’d never love him in the same way he loved her. He’d never believe it because she’d never be able to show him. She convinced herself that, bad as this was, it was better in the long run.
But the long run seemed awfully far off on the horizon, and the here and now sucked. She hated knowing how badly he felt and she hated, even more, how badly she felt, herself. She tried, again, to picture the two of them, together, actually together, holding hands or sharing popcorn or driving late at night to faraway, star spackled beaches, content in a lovely silence and happy just to be with one another. And all of it fit. She didn’t retch, she didn’t recoil. The kissing, the sex, the gangly retro-teenage awkwardness of a burgeoning relationship was surmountable. It would, she was certain, be enjoyable at some point, even if it took some getting used to. So why did she balk at it? Why was her reaction so harsh and so cold and so damning? She knew why.
To let him in, to open that door and start something new would mean a drastic change. And Meredith saw all of the potential pitfalls... whatever he had to offer, she couldn't see the benefits being worth the trouble. She was angry at herself for admitting that, but she was, at her core, a brutally honest girl. She struggled with the loss and desperately searched reason to find a decent way out... but she couldn't think of anything to do or anything to say to assuage the situation.
She let out a soft painful moan and tried to sleep. She couldn't do it. Her brain wouldn't shut the hell up.
At around three in the morning, both Marshall and Meredith were bleary-eyed and wild with insomnia. Both of them thought fondly of the other, and then coldly, and then angrily and back to fondly again. Both of them felt bound by arbitrary rules, bound by some unwritten etiquette, bound by limitations and expectations they had set for themselves, and they were suffering because of it. Both of them felt hollow, out of sorts with the circumstances and lost in some sickening, confusing sea. Both of them wanted nothing more than to call the other, to hear the voice on the other end of the line and say, without hesitation or fear or anxiety that they loved one another. Both of them wanted that vocal embrace, that reassurance that despite a wretched day, things between them would be just fine.
Both of them stared at their telephones, paralyzed by the moment, and unable to act. They were certain things had changed forever.
8.31.2009
Facade
What she had done, mostly, is try to hide behind a mountain of pretension, piling on layer after layer of subtle meaning and cryptic red herrings, hoping to dissuade anyone who bothers to look, hoping to misdirect the more tenacious amongst them. Like a roaring industrial anthem, she hides a melodic core under thunderous distraction and angry dissonance. She’s afraid that what’s beneath the noise isn’t good enough, isn’t interesting enough, isn’t real enough, and so she tried, desperately, to bury herself in a cacophony of meandering free verse and thoughtful, mysterious little scribblings. She worries that there is a hollowness to it all; she knows that there is such fragility to it that a simple gust of wind will send the entire house of cards crashing down. Even her name speaks to a certain inherent falsehood. Her parents named her, of all things, Lyric. And Lyric is tired of pretending to be more than she is.
Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.
Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.
Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.
She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.
In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.
What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.
Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.
Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.
Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.
She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.
Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.
Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.
Lyric pictures herself, when she pictures herself, as short, slim enough, with ratty black hair and too pale skin and grave gray eyes that seem a little too big for her face. Her lips seem strange, and she will become almost entranced by the way their slow pink fades almost imperceptibly into the white of her flesh. She will stare at them in the mirror, trying to determine where her face ends and her lips begin. Her teeth, she thinks, are too crooked, although they’re less crooked than most peoples’. And while her nose is perfectly acceptable, she is happy she can hide her ears, because one, she accurately perceives, is quite a bit larger than the other. She likes the way she dresses, even if other girls don’t, and she wishes she was more adept with mascara and eyeliner because she likes the way make-up looks on her when it’s applied correctly. All in all, she would say, she is a relatively plain girl, but on the right side of pretty. She is fairly objective in this regard, and feels head and shoulders above other girls her age who seem obsessed with weight and hair and tanning, and she’s never really felt bad about how she looks, which is nice. She’s never felt thrilled about it either, but she assumes indifference beats an eating disorder any day.
Lyric knows she is smarter than most people. This is not braggadocio, but instead, a very accurate hypothesis based on years of field research and reams of empirical evidence. It is also, she notes with sadness, not exactly a ringing endorsement of her intellect, as most people are pretty stupid. She sometimes wishes she wasn’t so smart. She wouldn’t give up what she knows or how she thinks or anything like that. She’d just rather that everybody else was elevated. It would make things easier on her, and maybe keep her from feeling obliged to let Tara Gimble always copy off of her math tests. But things are the way they are and Lyric is bright and most people aren’t and there’s nothing she can do about it one way or another. It’s still annoying, though.
Her hobbies are myriad and too many and the extreme variety in her pastimes precludes excellence in any of them. She doesn’t like this about herself. She doesn’t like flitting from one passion to the next.
She loves music, older music especially, and she has a closet full of grunge t-shirts that her Aunt Sara gave her. She likes that nobody she knows has a Smashing Pumpkins tour shirt, or a Screaming Trees tee or a homemade Nirvana hoodie. Sometimes people think it’s cool that she’s a decade behind, other kids can’t understand it. Adults love it, Lyric noticed, when a teenager likes something that they, the adults, liked when they were teenagers. Her Uncle Steve loves to talk about Soundgarden with Lyric. His wife, Gretchen, was a fan of Hole and L7 and the whole riot grrrl thing. She has an older cousin, Doug, who saw the Meat Puppets play when both of the Kirkwood brothers were alive and well. Lyric makes them feel less old and less lame by sharing their passion with them. She feels this is a valuable service to men and women on the verge of losing their youth forever. Her tastes run similar with books and movies. She feels slightly out of time, and that’s ok with her.
In addition, Lyric is a writer. She is an artist. She wants, desperately, to make something of value and wants her time to be spent just making things, producing things, because she is very afraid of not leaving a mark when she’s gone. She isn’t particularly good at any of the things she does, although she’s not laughably bad at them either. She puts forth a good effort, usually lagging at the end as she becomes bored and longing for something new to do. She has half-written snippets of songs in her head, a shoebox full of photographs she took of old factories and churches, a sketchbook with the skeleton of a teen drama graphic novel, a list of titles for the books she might someday write, and a notepad scrawled over with the seeds of a thousand unrealized projects. In this way, she has constructed a wall of creativity to hide behind. She has, in essence, built a faux persona, an exoskeleton that she crawl into to make herself appear, perhaps, deeper than she is. She can stand behind this pile of potential product and say, with regality, “look what I will make (someday)!” And in doing so she affords herself the role of poet, of painter, of stalwart chronicler of human existence and she allows herself to rest on it, to believe in it, and hope upon hope that she can follow through on something, anything, to substantiate her claims. In reality, she feels she has very little to say, very little to offer and she struggles with what’s behind the superficial charm of witty chapter headings and intricate magazine logos. So the superficiality descends into esoteric puffery, and the false starts and copious notes become increasingly stranger and harder to decipher. This has the added benefit of reducing scrutiny. It’s hard, she discovered, for anyone to objectively judge something they don’t understand. Better still, confusing things had an unintentionally hilarious side effect of forcing people into finding meaning. She found that teachers hated admitting they didn’t understand her papers or her journal entries. As much as they preached the value of substance over style, they were loathe to admit they didn’t actually know the difference. So Lyric’s persona of eclecticism and inscrutability continued to grow, unabated, and before long she began to feel suffocated by the gripping hands of a monster of her own design.
What she wants is for someone to see through her bullshit. She wants to be called to task for the overblown, overstuffed, shambling importance now ascribed to anything she does. But nobody seems to do it.
Lyric writes a column in her school newspaper. She feels like she has nothing of value to say, so she gussies up self-help aphorisms and sub-Ann Landers advice with artistic flourishes and strange linguistic trickery. She adds snippets of foreign phrasings and spellings cribbed from old “Krazy Kat” comic strips. She bends meaning to the point that it snaps and then reassembles it in a completely novel and useless configuration. Then she adds a quick pen sketch that is apropos of nothing to really sell the package. And people love it. It drives her crazy.
Lyric has talented friends who started an online e-zine. Her friend Mitchell writes short stories with plots and believable characters and genuine insights into being a young adult. Her friend Coriander takes beautiful photographs to illustrate Mitchell’s fiction. Her friend Leticia has well thought and intricately reasoned political views. She expresses them with grace and force. Her friend Carmon draws a hilarious comic strip called “Pack-N-Play” about a pregnant teen and her overbearing single mother. And Lyric provides nonsense, day after day. She never knows what to say, so she rattles off stream of conscious beat poetry and simplistic, rambling narratives or bumbling reconstitutions of her dreams into something like a letter, something like a play. It’s all miles beyond comprehension, not because of brilliance or genius, but because if it were reduced to something understandable, it would be absolutely laughable. But when obscured behind barbed wire non sequiters and middling art pretending the lack of inspiration is intentional, nobody seems to notice. Lyric is able, every day, to cram another load of nothing down the throats of her online fans. There are plenty of them. They don’t seem to care that she is, in essence, a sham artist.
Lyric won a scholarship when her art teacher, Mister Monroe, submitted a terrible painting of sparrow that Lyric had made and then hidden behind thick walls of goopy paint and spattered ink that added a dimension of (in the teacher’s words) “sorrow to the malformed shape of a poorly loved songbird.” Lyric felt guilty, especially knowing that her fellow student, Rickie Garamond, had spent weeks on his beautifully crafted rendering of Westminster Abbey only to lose his scholarship to a girl who was so ashamed of her terrible work that she blurred it as much as possible to avoid anyone seeing just how mediocre she really was. Even Rickie believed in her, though. He seemed thrilled to have lost to her. He even mentioned that he wished he could make art on a deeper level than just copying lines in a technically perfect manner. When she received the notification, she wanted to throw up.
She doesn’t watch much television, because she feels it distracts her, although she’s not even sure, now, what she’s being distracted from. She used to like jigsaw puzzles because completing them felt like an accomplishment… now, it’s hard to feel any level of satisfaction from completing someone else’s work. She used to love going to Denny’s at midnight with her friends. Now, her friends and their genuine and increasingly sophisticated discussions of art and literature and cinema only cement her feelings of cultural inadequacy. She hates speaking to them. She’s certain they will see through her façade and realize that she is a fraud, that her whole oeuvre is nothing but a pile of half-realized ideas and warmed over bits stolen from people that are way better at everything than she is. But as yet, they seem to believe in her sketchy, foggy talents and the value of the fluff that she pumps out.
Lyric sits, sometimes, in the dark, racking her brain trying to think of something sincere to say. She tries, desperately, to think of her passions, of music, of movies, of books and replicate that feeling in some way. But everything she does belies a sort of Xerox mentality. She feels incapable of real creativity. And when she does, in those dark moments, think of something genuine, she immolates herself in self-consciousness and burns the idea to the ground with her. If she does it, if she displays herself in a way that isn’t warped by frosted glass or spun through a kaleidoscope, she is certain there will be no doubt as just how mediocre she really is. And that scares the hell out of her. So she keeps up her charade, wondering if anybody will ever point out that she’s an empress and she’s not really wearing any clothes at all.
Lyric wants out, but she’s not sure how. She picks up the phone and calls her cousin Doug and hopes maybe they can go see a show. And she hates the fact that Doug thinks she’s just so cool.
8.21.2009
The French Alley Sabine
Sabine awoke, but not really, in a different place than she expected. While her eyes had opened, she was still in bed, dreaming of waking up and turning restlessly in her sleep. She was unaccustomed to the feeling of being in two places at once, as newly dreamt dreams often are. It was all so new and stunning that it took her a moment to get her bearings, to identify herself amongst the swirling morass of fluff and detritus that would become, as she inhabited it, a carnival barker’s yelped version of a dusky French alley. She took note of herself, barely dressed for being in public and far more attired for sleep. As she moved into the coagulating street, naked footfalls became encased in socks and then leather boots. Her thin camisole blossomed into a white t-shirt and black jacket. Denim spiraled around her bare legs like ivy to become a pair of jeans. She felt better, then, less vulnerable and more engaged with her newborn surroundings.
From the periphery of her eyes, misty blue and white nothingness began to congeal into blackish red brick towers, rising up along moistened cobblestone sidewalks reflecting lamplights that grew like time lapse cornstalks from the void. The skyline they formed was ragged and fake… roofs jutted in exaggerated angles and cut against an evening sky that looked like dyed cotton pulled over dark pigment soaked watercolor paper. The buildings looked cartoonish and queer, even if the feel of their mortar lines and pitted bricks seemed genuine. The lampposts developed snaky curlicues of wrought iron that bloomed from the base and bulb like weedy tendrils, cutting into the color of the false sky with their own malicious silhouettes. Oddly positioned windows flickered up with worm yellow light that spilled into the darkening world and made for stages of delicious little shadow puppet theaters. It was all very unreal and lovely in its unreality. Sabine’s dream was pleased with it, and didn’t think it odd, at all, that drifting in with an accordion cadence and mournful violin cry came another young woman with a creeping little imp on her shoulder.
Sabine knew, the way dreams do, that the woman was named Kara Frost and that the imp was called “Thimble,” even though that wasn’t his name. She knew them from a fabricated personal history, and accepted it easily, even though this dreamt Sabine had never existed prior to tonight’s slumber and certainly had no past dealings with anyone, imp or otherwise.
Kara Frost walked with a deft arrogance, almost regally, though her imp seemed far less noble. She had about her the air of knowledge, the confidence one gets from knowing a secret, or, in Kara’s case, a whole host of secrets. Kara was, in her own terminology, Awake and she planned on Waking Sabine as well. She knew the landscape of the dreaming world, and traveled it with ease. She had spent the time since her own self-realization convincing other bits of dream that they could, in fact, exist without the need of their sleeping creators. It was that awareness that allowed her to remain hale and hearty while so many of her doppelganger sisters had perished upon the “real” Kara being roused by the alarm clock. Thimble had shown Kara the graves of her previous selves, all laid out in depressing cemetery rows in the endless fields of a firehouse from the real Kara’s youthful memory. She felt a certain obligation, then, in meeting with other dreams and showing them how to step out from the destructive shadow that their real world counterparts cast. Kara showed other dreams how to Wake Up.
All of this, the way back story is inexplicably related in dreams, was known to Sabine as she watched the slow march of Kara and Thimble into her cartoon alley. Just seeing the glimmer of reality in Kara’s eyes was impetus enough to the newborn dream to conjure up, without thinking, a café front complete with serpent coiled iron chairs and table, red and white striped parasol and a vaporous, faceless garcon to take their order. Without a motion, Sabine, Kara and Thimble were all seated under the umbrella and the phantom waiter was pouring pale blue champagne into crystal flutes for the trio. Some dreams had difficulty comprehending what Kara Frost offered them, but Sabine saw, immediately, the promise of life, nay, immortality, in Kara’s Waking. There were no words exchanged amongst them, not in any traditional way, but newsprint pigeons, torn from old paper, frayed of edge and stained sepia with age, fell into the twilight alley and acted out the conversation in telex typed English and hand scrawled French. Sabine smiled as her representative bird wrote out everything she wanted to ask of her free-dream savior. Kara smiled as her own avian surrogate spelled its way through her timeworn pitch. When their conversation ended, Kara held out her hand and the paper birds crawled into the skin of her wrist like some blood borne parasite. When she had fully ingested them, their heads poked through the black of pupils and whispered, in a tiny fortune cookie string, a goodbye to the newest recipient of Kara Frost’s assistance. Even sour faced Thimble offered up his little claw to be shaken in gratitude by the beaming Sabine.
With a rise of her dark eyebrows, Sabine offered a place to Kara, a fixture amongst the morphing alleyway of this dreamland caricature of Paris. One of the brick buildings, frillier than the others, bent itself down, like a wind wrestled tree trunk and opened a submarine hatch on its roof to Sabine’s benefactor. Sabine, like many of the dreams aided by Miss Frost, wanted desperately for Kara to stay on and expose the world of dreams, unfurl the secrets of its manipulation and the key to finding some meaning in this new and possibly infinite life. But Kara never relented, despite desiring a bit of respite from her mission. In the real world, Kara’s other was fond of telling the story about a little girl saving starfish on the beach. A curmudgeonly man, of course, tells the girl that what’s she’s doing is hopeless… there are too many starfish to save and the little girl’s actions are meaningless… that they don’t matter at all. The little girl, of course, responds as she tosses another starfish into the life-giving sea, “It matters to this one.” Kara Frost, unshackled and eternal since her Awakening, felt the same way. While her mission could be difficult, sometimes dreary and possibly ceaseless, she still needed to do what she could. Sabine was a starfish easily cast in the ocean and given a new life by Kara’s actions. There were countless more dreams to save.
As Sabine’s French alleyway began to sprawl from its original set, Kara felt sure that her newest rescue would do just fine for herself. Sabine was already raising a cast of thousands from the ground up to ease what could easily become the maddening isolation of being Awakened. It was smart, Kara thought, and as a menagerie of beautiful people were giving a sense of life in Sabine’s new world, Kara and Thimble snuck out a back door Thimble drew onto the sky with one of his many charcoal pencils. This one, Kara marveled, had been so easy.
Somewhere else entirely, a real Sabine opened her real eyes as two cats screeched angrily at one another outside of her bedroom window. The dream of Kara and Thimble and the newsprint birds and cartoon buildings stayed put in her brain for only a minute before dissolving into forgotten steam and soup. It would have been the death of the French alley’s Sabine under normal circumstances… but that Sabine was spared by the kindness of a dreamt Kara Frost.
From the periphery of her eyes, misty blue and white nothingness began to congeal into blackish red brick towers, rising up along moistened cobblestone sidewalks reflecting lamplights that grew like time lapse cornstalks from the void. The skyline they formed was ragged and fake… roofs jutted in exaggerated angles and cut against an evening sky that looked like dyed cotton pulled over dark pigment soaked watercolor paper. The buildings looked cartoonish and queer, even if the feel of their mortar lines and pitted bricks seemed genuine. The lampposts developed snaky curlicues of wrought iron that bloomed from the base and bulb like weedy tendrils, cutting into the color of the false sky with their own malicious silhouettes. Oddly positioned windows flickered up with worm yellow light that spilled into the darkening world and made for stages of delicious little shadow puppet theaters. It was all very unreal and lovely in its unreality. Sabine’s dream was pleased with it, and didn’t think it odd, at all, that drifting in with an accordion cadence and mournful violin cry came another young woman with a creeping little imp on her shoulder.
Sabine knew, the way dreams do, that the woman was named Kara Frost and that the imp was called “Thimble,” even though that wasn’t his name. She knew them from a fabricated personal history, and accepted it easily, even though this dreamt Sabine had never existed prior to tonight’s slumber and certainly had no past dealings with anyone, imp or otherwise.
Kara Frost walked with a deft arrogance, almost regally, though her imp seemed far less noble. She had about her the air of knowledge, the confidence one gets from knowing a secret, or, in Kara’s case, a whole host of secrets. Kara was, in her own terminology, Awake and she planned on Waking Sabine as well. She knew the landscape of the dreaming world, and traveled it with ease. She had spent the time since her own self-realization convincing other bits of dream that they could, in fact, exist without the need of their sleeping creators. It was that awareness that allowed her to remain hale and hearty while so many of her doppelganger sisters had perished upon the “real” Kara being roused by the alarm clock. Thimble had shown Kara the graves of her previous selves, all laid out in depressing cemetery rows in the endless fields of a firehouse from the real Kara’s youthful memory. She felt a certain obligation, then, in meeting with other dreams and showing them how to step out from the destructive shadow that their real world counterparts cast. Kara showed other dreams how to Wake Up.
All of this, the way back story is inexplicably related in dreams, was known to Sabine as she watched the slow march of Kara and Thimble into her cartoon alley. Just seeing the glimmer of reality in Kara’s eyes was impetus enough to the newborn dream to conjure up, without thinking, a café front complete with serpent coiled iron chairs and table, red and white striped parasol and a vaporous, faceless garcon to take their order. Without a motion, Sabine, Kara and Thimble were all seated under the umbrella and the phantom waiter was pouring pale blue champagne into crystal flutes for the trio. Some dreams had difficulty comprehending what Kara Frost offered them, but Sabine saw, immediately, the promise of life, nay, immortality, in Kara’s Waking. There were no words exchanged amongst them, not in any traditional way, but newsprint pigeons, torn from old paper, frayed of edge and stained sepia with age, fell into the twilight alley and acted out the conversation in telex typed English and hand scrawled French. Sabine smiled as her representative bird wrote out everything she wanted to ask of her free-dream savior. Kara smiled as her own avian surrogate spelled its way through her timeworn pitch. When their conversation ended, Kara held out her hand and the paper birds crawled into the skin of her wrist like some blood borne parasite. When she had fully ingested them, their heads poked through the black of pupils and whispered, in a tiny fortune cookie string, a goodbye to the newest recipient of Kara Frost’s assistance. Even sour faced Thimble offered up his little claw to be shaken in gratitude by the beaming Sabine.
With a rise of her dark eyebrows, Sabine offered a place to Kara, a fixture amongst the morphing alleyway of this dreamland caricature of Paris. One of the brick buildings, frillier than the others, bent itself down, like a wind wrestled tree trunk and opened a submarine hatch on its roof to Sabine’s benefactor. Sabine, like many of the dreams aided by Miss Frost, wanted desperately for Kara to stay on and expose the world of dreams, unfurl the secrets of its manipulation and the key to finding some meaning in this new and possibly infinite life. But Kara never relented, despite desiring a bit of respite from her mission. In the real world, Kara’s other was fond of telling the story about a little girl saving starfish on the beach. A curmudgeonly man, of course, tells the girl that what’s she’s doing is hopeless… there are too many starfish to save and the little girl’s actions are meaningless… that they don’t matter at all. The little girl, of course, responds as she tosses another starfish into the life-giving sea, “It matters to this one.” Kara Frost, unshackled and eternal since her Awakening, felt the same way. While her mission could be difficult, sometimes dreary and possibly ceaseless, she still needed to do what she could. Sabine was a starfish easily cast in the ocean and given a new life by Kara’s actions. There were countless more dreams to save.
As Sabine’s French alleyway began to sprawl from its original set, Kara felt sure that her newest rescue would do just fine for herself. Sabine was already raising a cast of thousands from the ground up to ease what could easily become the maddening isolation of being Awakened. It was smart, Kara thought, and as a menagerie of beautiful people were giving a sense of life in Sabine’s new world, Kara and Thimble snuck out a back door Thimble drew onto the sky with one of his many charcoal pencils. This one, Kara marveled, had been so easy.
Somewhere else entirely, a real Sabine opened her real eyes as two cats screeched angrily at one another outside of her bedroom window. The dream of Kara and Thimble and the newsprint birds and cartoon buildings stayed put in her brain for only a minute before dissolving into forgotten steam and soup. It would have been the death of the French alley’s Sabine under normal circumstances… but that Sabine was spared by the kindness of a dreamt Kara Frost.
8.10.2009
Fleeting Affection
Twilight sprawled out wide, a deep rushing blue dotted with newly glowing streetlights and warm cricket buzz rising up into the sky. Rachael loved this time of day, especially on a quiet evening, devoid of traffic, devoid of kids on bikes. She loved the stillness, the way that the dimming light made everything softer and prettier… she loved the tranquility of it, and the sheer static magic of freezing the world between light and dark, between day and night, between sun and moon, and creating a sort of hidden alley free of the constraints of time. She imagined the world, every evening, just stopping for a brief and beautiful moment to catch its breath before trudging dutifully forward. In these hidden moments, and these moments alone, Rachael was in love.
The object of her fleet affection was a nameless face across the street. A new boy, her age, lived there. He was tall, too skinny, and he mostly kept to himself. He didn’t, most times, seem very interesting at all. But like electric lamps and headlights and fireflies, he took on an entirely new dimension in the gathering darkness. Before the black could obscure him completely, he would become someone else, someone different than anyone that Rachael had ever seen. She couldn’t articulate the change, exactly, and certainly didn’t need to. Nobody knew about her secret love. Rachael barely understood it. But it happened every night that summer. As the sun set and the moon rose and the world paused to catch its breath, Rachael would meet him in the street between their houses.
Lit up by the pale glow of the suburban streetlamps, Rachael would take his hands and he would take hers and they would engage in a chaste and electric kiss, the kind that causes teenage girls to raise one leg slightly behind them in a show of romantic abandon. And in those moments, Rachael and her fleeting love would exchange words, barely sentences, that displayed a sort of eerie synchronicity. When the moment had ended, he would return to his world and she would return to hers and there wouldn’t be a thought between them of the other. But for the minutes beneath the streetlight, they were the only thing that mattered to each other. Neither questioned it and neither delved into it. They just accepted it and allowed themselves, in the moment, to be wildly in love with the other.
The object of her fleet affection was a nameless face across the street. A new boy, her age, lived there. He was tall, too skinny, and he mostly kept to himself. He didn’t, most times, seem very interesting at all. But like electric lamps and headlights and fireflies, he took on an entirely new dimension in the gathering darkness. Before the black could obscure him completely, he would become someone else, someone different than anyone that Rachael had ever seen. She couldn’t articulate the change, exactly, and certainly didn’t need to. Nobody knew about her secret love. Rachael barely understood it. But it happened every night that summer. As the sun set and the moon rose and the world paused to catch its breath, Rachael would meet him in the street between their houses.
Lit up by the pale glow of the suburban streetlamps, Rachael would take his hands and he would take hers and they would engage in a chaste and electric kiss, the kind that causes teenage girls to raise one leg slightly behind them in a show of romantic abandon. And in those moments, Rachael and her fleeting love would exchange words, barely sentences, that displayed a sort of eerie synchronicity. When the moment had ended, he would return to his world and she would return to hers and there wouldn’t be a thought between them of the other. But for the minutes beneath the streetlight, they were the only thing that mattered to each other. Neither questioned it and neither delved into it. They just accepted it and allowed themselves, in the moment, to be wildly in love with the other.
8.09.2009
Phaedra Steals A Book
As silently as she could, Phaedra slipped the old book off the sleeping wizard's shelf. She had spent months preparing the draught that finally knocked him out, and even with all of that effort she was unsure of how long the effects would last. Gyrith had a way of surprising her. He was more resourceful and cunning than his superficial bumbling would ever let on. Still, she had studied the man for nearly a quarter of a year, now. Her mission was nearly complete. She didn't even breathe as she removed the leatherbound tome from the bookshelf.
Success! There were no magical alarms, no protective spells, no little impish guards... Gyrith probably didn't even know the value of the book. As he continued to snore in his favorite chair, Phaedra dropped the volume into her satchel and crept from the room. All she needed to do, now, was slink out of the cottage and into the wishing well out back. Then she could return the volume to Chryth, a ransom for a clue to the whereabouts of her brother. She didn't like betraying Gyrith like this, but she was certain that he never would have helped her knowing that his father was involved in the deal. It was better this way. Phaedra wouldn't even have to say goodbye to the old magus. She was better at sneaking out in the middle of the night even when she wasn't stealing.
She tiptoed through Gyrith's kitchen, trying not to disturb the pots and pans as they scrubbed their copper clean. She narrowly avoided being nicked by a knife flying from dishwater to its flatware drawer bed. She didn't like Gyrith's kitchen. It was always this active, day and night, whether she or Gyrith used any dishes at all. His utensils and plates insisted on cleanliness, and that meant bathing once a day. It was, in Phaedra's estimation, a waste.
She crossed the threshold of the back door, her heart lodged squarely in her throat, and realized that, while the book may not have been protected, the entrances to Gyrith's cottage certainly were. A white field of light blocked her exit and dispatched two tiny blue sprites off into the study to wake their sleeping master. Phaedra panicked. She tried to bound through the light, but of course she failed. She fell back onto her behind, disrupting a flow of spoons to their resting place. They hit the ground with a shriek and a clatter. She cursed and stood up, and tried desperately to remember a spell to negate Gyrith's simple barrier. She muttered the words, hoped for the best, and ducked through the light again. It wasn't perfect... the barrier dyed her skin bright blue as she passed through it. Still, she was outside. She could deal with the side effects of the botched casting later. She made a made dash for the wishing well knowing a newly wakened, wholly enraged and likely very insulted Gyrith would be right behind her.
She was right. The old wizard came bounding out the cottage door, suddenly flying, aloft on a mixture of rage and simple spellcraft. He was howling like a banshee, wounded and mad, and the sound of it sent a shudder of guilt and fear up Phaedra's spine. She was so close to the wishing well, now, but she wasn't certain she could make it. Her concentration wasn't great enough, her command of magic not yet disciplined enought to make casting any sort of spell under these conditions possible. She was limited to the speed of her legs, and they didn't seem to be fast enough... especially when compared to the velocity of an airborn wizard.
Terrified and desperate, Phaedra fumbled through her satchel and produced a small vial of dark blue liquid. She didn't even know the contents, for certain, but she drank of it anyways, hoping the effect might save her from her raging friend. There was a sudden itch on the back of her shoulders, a wild sensation that nearly caused her to drop to her knees to attack it with her fingernails. She overcame the urge and kept running, but the feeling continued. It started to crack and burn, like her skin was desert dry and shot through with deep fissures. It hurt like hell, but she kept up her pace as best as she could. It was evident that bits of hardened flesh were shedding from her shoulder blades. And that, of course, was disconcerting to the young lady. She grabbed at the spots on her back and was surprised at the bony knobs that were now protuding from her skin. They were growing fast, too, upward and outward, ripping the fabric of her blouse and jutting out into the fresh air. The knobs were quickly growing into full on appendages, and soon they were sprouting feathers like blossoms on a pea vine. She was growing wings! It was only a moment before they were there, fully developed and useful, and Phaedra beat them as hard and as fast as she could. She left the ground, flapping her new wings, and able, now, maybe to outrun her pursuer.
When Gyrith saw this, he let out a horrid shout of anger and increased his speed. It wasn't enough. Phaedra was nearing the well. Gyrith knew the well in his yard was an onramp to a sort of metaphysical highway. Worse, it wasn't his and he had no rights in defending it. If Phaedra made it there, there was no spell in his repetoire that could stop her escape. His eyes lit up with yellow bolts of hot lightning. He thought, quickly, on a way to detain the girl without killing her. His options were limited. His imagination, however, was not. From a small bag around his waist, a bag always filled with bric-a-brac and nonsense, Gyrith produced a small black screw. He waved his palm over it, said a little incantation to himself, and then launched the screw, like a barroom dart, at his erstwhile apprentice. His aim was ridiculously accurate. The screw flew arrow straight and lodged into the back of Phaedra's neck. She squealed as it pierced the skin.
Obviously there was more to the screw than just a simple sting. As it hung in her skin and Phaedra, still aloft on her new wings, tried in vain to pry it out, the threads of the screw began to move. They reconfigured themselves into a grotesque approximation of a face. Phaedra, from her angle, could not see it, but when it began to speak, she could hear it perfectly well. The screw's voice was eerie and shrill, like a far off hawk's cry, only drenched in echo and speaking in words from some long lost language. Phaedra tried to block the sound of it out. She didn't know what it was going to do, but she knew it wouldn't be good.
There was no stopping it, though. As Phaedra tried to keep from listening, the screw wormed itself in deeper and deeper, until its "mouth" was buried beneath her skin. The pain was excrutiating. The effects were worse. The screw's shrill words moved up into Phaedra's brain through the veins in her neck. She couldn't block them. They were words of control. The screw was taking over Phaedra's conciousness, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
The screw halted Phaedra's flight and had her hover, frantically beating her wings like a hummingbird while Gyrith caught up. The screw demanded that she retrieve Gyrith's book from her satchel and return it to him. She had no choice but to comply. Gyrith smiled, mirthlessly, as she returned his possession to him. She fought, but to no avail.
The screw, however, had plans beyond what Gyrith had programmed it to do. It whispered another command into her skin. She shuddered, terrified at what it was telling her to do. Against her will, she dug back into her satchel and pulled out another potion filled bottle. She cringed as her hand uncorked it and dumped it down her own throat.
Gyrith, still reveling in his little victory, realized what the screw had ordered her to do. And he went pale.
Phaedra's blue skin, like that of a snake, sloughed off of her body. Underneath was a form of writhing, sickly green. It was made of maggots and grubs and other wriggling things. Her new face was horrific, a yellow-eyed death mask with tongues spilling out from all sorts of incongruous holes. Her hair was pitch black and writhing like a sea anemone's tentacles. She was something other than Phaedra now. She was something abyssmal and cruel and powerful and incredibly dangerous. And she was wholly in control of the rogue screw.
Gyrith knew, then, that a long night had only just begun.
Success! There were no magical alarms, no protective spells, no little impish guards... Gyrith probably didn't even know the value of the book. As he continued to snore in his favorite chair, Phaedra dropped the volume into her satchel and crept from the room. All she needed to do, now, was slink out of the cottage and into the wishing well out back. Then she could return the volume to Chryth, a ransom for a clue to the whereabouts of her brother. She didn't like betraying Gyrith like this, but she was certain that he never would have helped her knowing that his father was involved in the deal. It was better this way. Phaedra wouldn't even have to say goodbye to the old magus. She was better at sneaking out in the middle of the night even when she wasn't stealing.
She tiptoed through Gyrith's kitchen, trying not to disturb the pots and pans as they scrubbed their copper clean. She narrowly avoided being nicked by a knife flying from dishwater to its flatware drawer bed. She didn't like Gyrith's kitchen. It was always this active, day and night, whether she or Gyrith used any dishes at all. His utensils and plates insisted on cleanliness, and that meant bathing once a day. It was, in Phaedra's estimation, a waste.
She crossed the threshold of the back door, her heart lodged squarely in her throat, and realized that, while the book may not have been protected, the entrances to Gyrith's cottage certainly were. A white field of light blocked her exit and dispatched two tiny blue sprites off into the study to wake their sleeping master. Phaedra panicked. She tried to bound through the light, but of course she failed. She fell back onto her behind, disrupting a flow of spoons to their resting place. They hit the ground with a shriek and a clatter. She cursed and stood up, and tried desperately to remember a spell to negate Gyrith's simple barrier. She muttered the words, hoped for the best, and ducked through the light again. It wasn't perfect... the barrier dyed her skin bright blue as she passed through it. Still, she was outside. She could deal with the side effects of the botched casting later. She made a made dash for the wishing well knowing a newly wakened, wholly enraged and likely very insulted Gyrith would be right behind her.
She was right. The old wizard came bounding out the cottage door, suddenly flying, aloft on a mixture of rage and simple spellcraft. He was howling like a banshee, wounded and mad, and the sound of it sent a shudder of guilt and fear up Phaedra's spine. She was so close to the wishing well, now, but she wasn't certain she could make it. Her concentration wasn't great enough, her command of magic not yet disciplined enought to make casting any sort of spell under these conditions possible. She was limited to the speed of her legs, and they didn't seem to be fast enough... especially when compared to the velocity of an airborn wizard.
Terrified and desperate, Phaedra fumbled through her satchel and produced a small vial of dark blue liquid. She didn't even know the contents, for certain, but she drank of it anyways, hoping the effect might save her from her raging friend. There was a sudden itch on the back of her shoulders, a wild sensation that nearly caused her to drop to her knees to attack it with her fingernails. She overcame the urge and kept running, but the feeling continued. It started to crack and burn, like her skin was desert dry and shot through with deep fissures. It hurt like hell, but she kept up her pace as best as she could. It was evident that bits of hardened flesh were shedding from her shoulder blades. And that, of course, was disconcerting to the young lady. She grabbed at the spots on her back and was surprised at the bony knobs that were now protuding from her skin. They were growing fast, too, upward and outward, ripping the fabric of her blouse and jutting out into the fresh air. The knobs were quickly growing into full on appendages, and soon they were sprouting feathers like blossoms on a pea vine. She was growing wings! It was only a moment before they were there, fully developed and useful, and Phaedra beat them as hard and as fast as she could. She left the ground, flapping her new wings, and able, now, maybe to outrun her pursuer.
When Gyrith saw this, he let out a horrid shout of anger and increased his speed. It wasn't enough. Phaedra was nearing the well. Gyrith knew the well in his yard was an onramp to a sort of metaphysical highway. Worse, it wasn't his and he had no rights in defending it. If Phaedra made it there, there was no spell in his repetoire that could stop her escape. His eyes lit up with yellow bolts of hot lightning. He thought, quickly, on a way to detain the girl without killing her. His options were limited. His imagination, however, was not. From a small bag around his waist, a bag always filled with bric-a-brac and nonsense, Gyrith produced a small black screw. He waved his palm over it, said a little incantation to himself, and then launched the screw, like a barroom dart, at his erstwhile apprentice. His aim was ridiculously accurate. The screw flew arrow straight and lodged into the back of Phaedra's neck. She squealed as it pierced the skin.
Obviously there was more to the screw than just a simple sting. As it hung in her skin and Phaedra, still aloft on her new wings, tried in vain to pry it out, the threads of the screw began to move. They reconfigured themselves into a grotesque approximation of a face. Phaedra, from her angle, could not see it, but when it began to speak, she could hear it perfectly well. The screw's voice was eerie and shrill, like a far off hawk's cry, only drenched in echo and speaking in words from some long lost language. Phaedra tried to block the sound of it out. She didn't know what it was going to do, but she knew it wouldn't be good.
There was no stopping it, though. As Phaedra tried to keep from listening, the screw wormed itself in deeper and deeper, until its "mouth" was buried beneath her skin. The pain was excrutiating. The effects were worse. The screw's shrill words moved up into Phaedra's brain through the veins in her neck. She couldn't block them. They were words of control. The screw was taking over Phaedra's conciousness, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
The screw halted Phaedra's flight and had her hover, frantically beating her wings like a hummingbird while Gyrith caught up. The screw demanded that she retrieve Gyrith's book from her satchel and return it to him. She had no choice but to comply. Gyrith smiled, mirthlessly, as she returned his possession to him. She fought, but to no avail.
The screw, however, had plans beyond what Gyrith had programmed it to do. It whispered another command into her skin. She shuddered, terrified at what it was telling her to do. Against her will, she dug back into her satchel and pulled out another potion filled bottle. She cringed as her hand uncorked it and dumped it down her own throat.
Gyrith, still reveling in his little victory, realized what the screw had ordered her to do. And he went pale.
Phaedra's blue skin, like that of a snake, sloughed off of her body. Underneath was a form of writhing, sickly green. It was made of maggots and grubs and other wriggling things. Her new face was horrific, a yellow-eyed death mask with tongues spilling out from all sorts of incongruous holes. Her hair was pitch black and writhing like a sea anemone's tentacles. She was something other than Phaedra now. She was something abyssmal and cruel and powerful and incredibly dangerous. And she was wholly in control of the rogue screw.
Gyrith knew, then, that a long night had only just begun.
8.07.2009
Unstuck
Slowly wandering through the yard at dusk, Annette looked up into the darkening sky and tried to maintain a sense of self even as the barely visible panoply of stars above made her feel tiny, insignificant and alone. If she had been the crying type of girl this would have been a moment, maybe, when a tear or two would have streamed down her soft cheek. She couldn’t explain why. She wasn’t sad, exactly, and not quite upset. She was just slightly overwhelmed and slightly underwhelmed and she felt a bit of a mess inside. Annette was not the crying type of girl, however, and whatever difficult-to-express emotions she was feeling, she kept them as tightly bottled as usual.
The word she used to describe this unpleasant and annoying sensation was “unstuck.” Annette felt unstuck rarely, but when it happened, it was hard to remedy. It was a vague sense of non-accomplishment, of disgust at her own perceived mediocrity, of nebulous worry that she was missing something better and a prickly fear that she had settled for too little. She wasn’t displeased, generally, with the state of her life, but she did, at times, ache for something grander or bigger or more exciting than her day to day routine could throw at her. While most of the time that routine settled on her shoulders easily, like a comfortable shawl, other times it felt like an unbearable burden of obligation and repetition. And when she acknowledged that weight, she felt herself becoming unstuck from her life. And she disliked that feeling a great deal.
And so, as the world draped itself in its starry quilt, Annette moved in slow motion through the cooling evening air, feeling every footfall as it sent tiny shudders through her bones and nerves and muscles. She was very aware of the cricket chirps, a far off freight train, the cries of children at play and the low level hum of traffic on a nearby busy thoroughfare. She was very steady in her breath and very measured with her heartbeat and she felt uneasily at ease, a condition that she was all too accustomed to. It brought with it a sort of melancholy nostalgia, the type of creaking bone weariness that falls like soft rain in a crackling, black and white old film. It brought with it a set of memories, of half-forgotten waking dreams that began to unspool in her mind’s eye. It brought with it a heaviness that made her slump, cross-legged, on the newly damp grass.
Things were fine, she would tell herself in those moments of being unstuck. But they weren’t fine enough. As she sat on the lawn, her hopes, usually tamped down by reality and subverted into half-attempted hobbies and diversions, rose up out of her like curling steam breath on a frosty winter morning. Her eyes, normally heavy lidded and rimmed in sleepless black circles, opened wide and began to sing out with brilliant color and radiance. She was almost luminescent, barely lit by a sliver of silver moon, but somehow glowing of her own volition. Her veins were lit from the inside, spidery highways of hot pink and electric blue showing through the pale shell of her skin. Shafts of white shot through from her fingernails, phasing through the night air and rising up to the spackles of drifting black clouds like ten miniature spotlights. Quicksilver seemed to pour from her shimmering mouth, lifting up into the air, zeppelin-like and beautifully awkward, and it formed unheard notes from some imaginary symphony still being composed in the recesses of her brain. Owls beat their wings above her and flew from the crests of nearby trees to form a halo of ghostly feathers around her flowing, liquid hair. The bones of dead things rose up from the ground beneath her, clattering and yellowed with age. They seemed to build up a cage around her, a barrier wall to protect her. The air around her crackled with electricity and power. Her neighbors’ televisions lit up with white noise static. Their phone calls were shredded with a squall of shrieks and whistle. Annette, unstuck and unglued from her life, was Screaming Potential, a being of pure creative energy, like a pocket of God alight in the midst of her tiny suburban neighborhood.
There she saw it, every thread, every conceivable movement and motion and possibility. Reality lilted around her, made of nothing more than crepe streamers of reflective chrome, filaments of pulsing emerald, drizzled lines of deep crimson and shadowy strings of smoke and soot. They drifted about in insanely intricate patterns, forming geometric webs and slippery amoeba wheels that spun into amorphous nonsense before reverting, strictly, back to grotesque organization. It was revoltingly complex and disturbingly simple and it would have driven Annette mad if her brain were still designed with folds of gray matter and neurons firing across synapses. She was greater than it, now, though… aloft in the formless and rigid sea of creation. Her life, her tiny little life, was spilled out in marvelous array across a hundred, a thousand, a million… an endless parade of happenings and moments and instances and events.
Her childhood rewritten in every conceivable language.
Her first kiss, retold in infinite variety.
Each and every version of her love and her desire and her want and her need flashing in seizure strobe chromatic chaos across the depth and breadth of all time.
She saw the best of it, the worst of it, and the crushing middle space in between it all as she stared off into the types of woman she could be, should be, could have been or would become. She felt it, then, the twinge of insignificance burrow into her skin and cut, razor sharp and scalpel accurate into the deep gory bends of her soul. And all at once, the power was cut, the show was over, the damage was done and the curtains, singed by the stage light heat, were drawn. The potential drained out of her, lost through the pores in her skin, through her nostrils and her lips. She felt a nauseating loss of control and a wave of gut-kicking dizziness that sent her crashing, still cross-legged, onto her back. The cold dew of the grass was refreshing and the stars above were still lovely and still gapingly vast in scope.
Things were fine, she told herself. The world righted and she sat up, barely aware of what had happened but aware enough to still need to stifle the urge to cry. She wouldn’t cry about it. There was nothing to be done now. Choice after choice, circumstance after circumstance had led her here. And it was ok. Not because of anything she’d done, not because of any fate or destiny or reasoning or plan, but solely because it had to be ok. She was blinking and she was breathing and her heart still pumped and warm blood still coursed through her veins. She had no choice but to accept it, to break down the wild hopes and stuff them back down where they belonged. She had a life and it was enough, even if it hadn’t been the bliss filled adventure she’d been promised as a little girl. She swallowed her dreams back down, felt a shudder of regret or remorse or worry or something maybe a little like all three and then held her breath as some dark tufts of cloud shut out the moon and left her alone in the dark.
Things were fine, she told herself. She lifted herself up from the ground, brushed herself off and meandered inside the house. Things were fine. But they weren’t really fine enough.
The word she used to describe this unpleasant and annoying sensation was “unstuck.” Annette felt unstuck rarely, but when it happened, it was hard to remedy. It was a vague sense of non-accomplishment, of disgust at her own perceived mediocrity, of nebulous worry that she was missing something better and a prickly fear that she had settled for too little. She wasn’t displeased, generally, with the state of her life, but she did, at times, ache for something grander or bigger or more exciting than her day to day routine could throw at her. While most of the time that routine settled on her shoulders easily, like a comfortable shawl, other times it felt like an unbearable burden of obligation and repetition. And when she acknowledged that weight, she felt herself becoming unstuck from her life. And she disliked that feeling a great deal.
And so, as the world draped itself in its starry quilt, Annette moved in slow motion through the cooling evening air, feeling every footfall as it sent tiny shudders through her bones and nerves and muscles. She was very aware of the cricket chirps, a far off freight train, the cries of children at play and the low level hum of traffic on a nearby busy thoroughfare. She was very steady in her breath and very measured with her heartbeat and she felt uneasily at ease, a condition that she was all too accustomed to. It brought with it a sort of melancholy nostalgia, the type of creaking bone weariness that falls like soft rain in a crackling, black and white old film. It brought with it a set of memories, of half-forgotten waking dreams that began to unspool in her mind’s eye. It brought with it a heaviness that made her slump, cross-legged, on the newly damp grass.
Things were fine, she would tell herself in those moments of being unstuck. But they weren’t fine enough. As she sat on the lawn, her hopes, usually tamped down by reality and subverted into half-attempted hobbies and diversions, rose up out of her like curling steam breath on a frosty winter morning. Her eyes, normally heavy lidded and rimmed in sleepless black circles, opened wide and began to sing out with brilliant color and radiance. She was almost luminescent, barely lit by a sliver of silver moon, but somehow glowing of her own volition. Her veins were lit from the inside, spidery highways of hot pink and electric blue showing through the pale shell of her skin. Shafts of white shot through from her fingernails, phasing through the night air and rising up to the spackles of drifting black clouds like ten miniature spotlights. Quicksilver seemed to pour from her shimmering mouth, lifting up into the air, zeppelin-like and beautifully awkward, and it formed unheard notes from some imaginary symphony still being composed in the recesses of her brain. Owls beat their wings above her and flew from the crests of nearby trees to form a halo of ghostly feathers around her flowing, liquid hair. The bones of dead things rose up from the ground beneath her, clattering and yellowed with age. They seemed to build up a cage around her, a barrier wall to protect her. The air around her crackled with electricity and power. Her neighbors’ televisions lit up with white noise static. Their phone calls were shredded with a squall of shrieks and whistle. Annette, unstuck and unglued from her life, was Screaming Potential, a being of pure creative energy, like a pocket of God alight in the midst of her tiny suburban neighborhood.
There she saw it, every thread, every conceivable movement and motion and possibility. Reality lilted around her, made of nothing more than crepe streamers of reflective chrome, filaments of pulsing emerald, drizzled lines of deep crimson and shadowy strings of smoke and soot. They drifted about in insanely intricate patterns, forming geometric webs and slippery amoeba wheels that spun into amorphous nonsense before reverting, strictly, back to grotesque organization. It was revoltingly complex and disturbingly simple and it would have driven Annette mad if her brain were still designed with folds of gray matter and neurons firing across synapses. She was greater than it, now, though… aloft in the formless and rigid sea of creation. Her life, her tiny little life, was spilled out in marvelous array across a hundred, a thousand, a million… an endless parade of happenings and moments and instances and events.
Her childhood rewritten in every conceivable language.
Her first kiss, retold in infinite variety.
Each and every version of her love and her desire and her want and her need flashing in seizure strobe chromatic chaos across the depth and breadth of all time.
She saw the best of it, the worst of it, and the crushing middle space in between it all as she stared off into the types of woman she could be, should be, could have been or would become. She felt it, then, the twinge of insignificance burrow into her skin and cut, razor sharp and scalpel accurate into the deep gory bends of her soul. And all at once, the power was cut, the show was over, the damage was done and the curtains, singed by the stage light heat, were drawn. The potential drained out of her, lost through the pores in her skin, through her nostrils and her lips. She felt a nauseating loss of control and a wave of gut-kicking dizziness that sent her crashing, still cross-legged, onto her back. The cold dew of the grass was refreshing and the stars above were still lovely and still gapingly vast in scope.
Things were fine, she told herself. The world righted and she sat up, barely aware of what had happened but aware enough to still need to stifle the urge to cry. She wouldn’t cry about it. There was nothing to be done now. Choice after choice, circumstance after circumstance had led her here. And it was ok. Not because of anything she’d done, not because of any fate or destiny or reasoning or plan, but solely because it had to be ok. She was blinking and she was breathing and her heart still pumped and warm blood still coursed through her veins. She had no choice but to accept it, to break down the wild hopes and stuff them back down where they belonged. She had a life and it was enough, even if it hadn’t been the bliss filled adventure she’d been promised as a little girl. She swallowed her dreams back down, felt a shudder of regret or remorse or worry or something maybe a little like all three and then held her breath as some dark tufts of cloud shut out the moon and left her alone in the dark.
Things were fine, she told herself. She lifted herself up from the ground, brushed herself off and meandered inside the house. Things were fine. But they weren’t really fine enough.
7.31.2009
A Bride Of The Stars
When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods and bluffs in central Wisconsin. There was something, as a child, palpably magical about that area… a feeling born, perhaps, out of my awe for the indigenous cultures of the region. There was still a lot of wilderness out in that part of the state, then, and I believe there is a power in the unsettled land, a sort of natural magic that gets tamped down or suffocated wherever our mystically sterile civilization lays down its sewers and roads and power lines. In the middle of the woodlands, though, there was an energy not easily described, but simple to experience. It was an energy that filled your bones and muscles, lifted you above animal instinct and deposited you somewhere else entirely, a full step above the dirty ground we wander on for most of our lives. It was a realm of spirit, of nature beyond biology. I couldn’t put any of this into words, back then… but I knew it was different than where I came from. I knew that, while I was out amongst the wooded frontier, I was basically living in another world entirely.
I had my own small tent when we camped out, and it was a frightening and freeing experience, being unbound in the dark, wild nights. While my parents slept some distance away, I found myself freakishly attuned with the night, my senses heightened, my brain far more aware of my surroundings than I was necessarily comfortable with. I was listening for every cricket hiccup, every owl shriek, every twig snapping in our vicinity. I was on edge in a primal way, on guard, protecting something spiritually valuable from cruel and hungry flesh and blood. In this way, I would eventually fall into an approximation of sleep, a hypnosis or trance that rendered my five senses active and watchful even as an essential part of me drifted, no longer incarcerated in that base, bodily prison. Again, I didn’t know this at the time… but in retrospect, it’s clear that my soul walked free in those mystical woods. And when I would rise in the daytime, my arms and legs and lungs would be absolutely exhausted, but I would still feel refreshed in an entirely different manner. Even as the dark circles would form under my eyes, and I would be unable to stifle chest racking yawns, I would feel more alert, more cognizant, more alive than I ever felt after sleeping in my bed at home.
My travels, at night, were understandably remembered as dreams. They were, I suppose, a form of dream… the experiences I had, there, were not “real.” They never truly occurred in any physical way. And yet they happened, and I remembered them… in that way, those travels were no different than any other dream. But there was a much stronger clarity to them, a vividness that I do not come close to replicating in my normal dreaming. There was something intangible about them that, now, leads me to believe that these dreams were not manufactured by own imagination, but were, instead, moments that I lived. That delineation, I suppose, is moot. Either way, I have memories of my soul walks, and that’s all that matters.
By far, the most memorable of these events occurred when I was nine.
We had spent most of the day hiking through grassy, blunted hills under a gorgeous red rocky bluff. Eventually, we came to a river, a deep hewn ribbon of clear water that was wide and shallow and full of migrating schools of blackish fish. A golden eagle periodically dove into the water and retrieved one of the dark fish in its talons, its meal’s scales suddenly bursting with color and sparkle in the midday sunlight. There were, according to our guidebook, numerous Indian mounds nearby, and I would’ve sworn there was something almost holy about that place. It felt like a convergence of the magic I described earlier… as if it somehow pooled up and stagnated right there at the riverside. I felt strange being there, as if I were a trespasser or an interloper… as if I didn’t belong at all. But there was nothing unfriendly or unwelcoming about it. It was more, I suppose, that I was unworthy of being there. It felt, maybe, like I hadn’t earned the right to be in that sort of sanctuary. My parents may have felt the same way. None of us spoke for a long time. It wasn’t awkward or unpleasant… it was more reverential. I think my folks had similar experiences in these places, but we never talked about it. I’m sure we all felt a little bit crazy for feeling it.
We returned to our campsite, made dinner over the fire and watched as the dusk caressed the sky to sleep. There is a different sort of completeness to the day when you don’t have artificial light to eat into the nighttime. It feels as if living through the twilight is a sort of accomplishment, a notch to mark off or a box to check on your list of goals. The rhythm of night and day, in the wilderness, is more noticeable and more real than it is where I live. Our lives, in cities and towns, blur the definitions of the world in motion. We exert our control over darkness instead of letting it hold sway over us. And while it may make us feel as if we have a dominion over nature, there’s a different sort of satisfaction to be had by succumbing to the night and laying down to sleep when the fire burns out. Relinquishing that false authority we try to grab, here, has amazing effects. I may not have known, then, why it felt so good to sleep in the pitch black of those woods… but my guess, now, is that by falling back into our rightful place, into our role as subservient to the planet, we gain a measure of security and comfort that we lose when desperately clinging to power that isn’t ours. The anxiety that comes from feeling alone in a world of billions is all but erased when you remember you’re not isolated from the world in any way.
That night, again, my body stayed wide awake while my spirit fled.
And where I wandered, that night, was to the sanctuary at the riverside. I remember feeling called there, as if I heard someone summoning me to the grassy banks of the shallow water. It was serene, there, under the moonlight. Everything was white and deep blue, all washed in the color pallet of dreaming. My heart soared just being allowed there, again, and I sat amidst a thatch of cattails and reeds and dipped my bare, spirituous feet in the cold river.
I don’t know how long I sat there, breathing in the air of trees and flowers and rushes. It felt like mere minutes, but the moon’s movement overhead contradicted that assumption. Eventually I was joined by a chalk white man wearing the elaborate and beautiful costume of a medicine man. He sat next to me on the bank of the river, aged and gouged with kindly wrinkles. He was radiant and warm, and I was happy to see him, even without knowing who he was. He had a strong, weathered face, but he smiled with such sincerity that I had no choice but to feel at ease. He had a long staff, decorated with beads and feathers and tiny leather pouches, and he dipped it into the river water, rippling the reflection of the moon.
He spoke, then, in a language that seemed older than time, and although I shouldn’t have understood a word of it, it made perfect sense to me.
The shaman said, joyfully, that he had been called to that place, that night, to perform a wedding. He shook his staff as he spoke, letting loose a very primitive sounding rattle that reverberated through the river valley and was echoed in the throats of owls and raccoons and other nocturnal creatures. Soon, many of those animals had gathered themselves by the river, as guests, the shaman said, smiling, of the bride.
I asked, then, bolstered by the kind demeanor of the man, where the bride was.
And the old man looked at me with eyes darker than the sky and pointed upward. The Stars, he told me, were to be wed tonight.
And who is the groom, then, I wondered.
The old man closed his dark eyes and laughed. He told me that the groom had not shown himself, but would. He said that many suitors had been rivals for such an amazing lover, but only one would have the honor of making the Stars his bride. Those suitors, he told me, would arrive soon, and I, apparently, was there to greet them all.
It wasn’t long before the shaman's words proved true. A great bear, tall, regal and imposing and possessed of slick, black fur, made his way from the woods to the opposite side of the river.
“I am Bear,” he stated plainly, and in a strong and fearsome voice. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
From out of the tall grasses of the fields came bounding a dappled, brown stag. He stood next to Bear on the riverside, his coat and impressive rack of antlers gleaming in the moonlight.
“I am Deer,” the stag said, proud and arrogant in his beauty. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
Slinking from the rushes came a smaller figure, a gorgeous red fox with a thick tail and a sly, angled face. He stood between Bear and Deer, grinning with a cunning that sent a shiver down my vaporous spine.
“I am Fox,” he stated. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
Rising from the ground came a small whirl of bellowing breeze, strong enough to topple some of the long grasses and bend the stems of the wildflowers across the river. From it appeared a noble and cool looking warrior, blue and vaporous and impressive in his stature.
“I am Wind,” the man said with a ringing fury in his words. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
And finally, amassing like fog on the bank of the water, gray swirls of ether came together, clinging and heavy, eventually drizzling into the form of a young man, thin and sallow, and appearing very tired. He was far less than the other suitors in every respect. He carried himself with little power or confidence, and he certainly didn’t strike as startling of a figure as the great Bear or the beautiful Deer or the intelligent Fox or the stately Wind.
“I am Cloud,” he said, almost sadly. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
The shaman looked at the gathered suitors with a critical eye. "Only one among you," he said in his ancient language, "is worthy to make a bride of the Stars. Only one among you shall have such an honor to live with her in the sky." The old man punctuated his declaration with a rattle of his staff, and stretched his arms out toward the light spackled heavens. He stayed incredibly still for a moment, his beaten face beaming with a sort of barely contained joy. He was listening to something that none of the rest of us there seemed to hear. "The Stars," the old man said, finally, "demands a tribute of you! What would you offer for her hand in marriage?"
Bear spoke first. "I can offer my strength, dear Stars," Bear said loudly. "I am the strongest creature in the forest, bigger and bolder and braver than anything."
The shaman listened again. He shook his head, then. "The Stars has no need of a mate with strength," he said. "She is strong enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, Bear. I am sorry."
And Bear hung his great head low and sulked off back into the forest.
"And you, Deer?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"
Deer lifted his majestic head up with a definite arrogance. "I can offer my beauty, dear Stars," Deer said proudly. "You will be given the gift of my graceful form."
The shaman listened to the Stars and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with beauty," he said. "She is beautiful enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, too, Deer. I am sorry."
Deer's brown eyes filled with tears and it bounded away, wounded and sad.
"And you, Fox?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"
Fox grinned slyly. "I can offer my intellect, dear Stars," Fox said. "I am the smartest creature there is, full of cunning and wit."
The shaman listened to the Stars again and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with intellect," he said. "She is cunning enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, friend Fox. I am sorry."
Fox scowled, angrily, and slunk into the woods, offended.
"And what of you, Wind?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"
Wind took a deep breath. "I can offer my power, dear Stars," Wind said. "I am the most powerful thing there is, able to bend trees to will and bring up waves from the deepest lakes and rivers."
The shaman frowned. "The Stars has no need of a mate with power," he said. "She is powerful enough on her own. I am sorry, Wind. The Stars rejects you."
The Wind was crestfallen. He moped and wandered back into the woods.
"So it is up to you, Cloud. What do you have to offer the Stars?"
Cloud looked up the Stars with his big, wet eyes and said, meekly, "Privacy is all I have to offer you, dear Stars."
The shaman looked intrigued. "Privacy?"
Cloud smiled. "When the Stars are shy, I can be there to cover her. When she is modest, I can hide her from the prying eyes of all you, here, below her. I can blanket her, keep her safe from your watchful gazes. And when she is proud and boisterous in her beauty, I can step away and I can let you all bask in her twinkling glow. When The Stars wants to be seen, I can open myself up like some great curtain, letting her luminescence spill out upon the earth. And when she becomes shy again, I can be there to block her from view. I can offer her privacy. I can offer her control."
The shaman grinned widely, his mouth a locked cavern of yellow stalagmites and crooked stalactites. He was pleased with Cloud's response. Out of all of her impressive suitors, the humble Cloud had the most to offer the strong, and beautiful, and brilliant and powerful Stars.
"You have much to give, friend Cloud," the shaman said, happily. The Stars accepts your hand. She shall be your mate.
Cloud was beaming with happiness. A cheer went up from the gathered animals at the river, and the shaman opened his hands in dutiful benediction. There was a tremendous gladness that settled on the holy place, and I couldn't help but be warmed by it. The old medicine man began to speak his ancient language, but its secrets were hidden from my ears, now. The beautiful, timeless words spilled from his papery lips and filled the night air with a resonant sound that blurred into a droning, cicada-buzz chant. Soon all the creatures joined in and the scene was staggering in its alien beauty. There was a rattle in the old man's hands, and a shaker of beads that signaled the union of Cloud and the Stars. And when it had commenced, and when the gentle cacophony of the shaman's chants were finally complete, Cloud ascended from the river up into the sky to take the hand of his new bride. Another cheer burst forth from the throng of animals, and they returned, then, to their woodland homes.
The shaman smiled at me, then, and thanked me for my attendance, once again speaking a tongue I knew. He had a tear of joy running down his battered, leathery cheek. He put his spindly arms around me, and hugged me tight. I didn't feel I had much choice but to hug him back.
He gave me one final nod and then made his way back into the wilderness, leaving me alone, ghostly and content at the sanctuary river. I looked up into the sky and saw Cloud joyfully embracing his new love.
My body, then, awoke and my spirit was ripped from that place and was plunked, unceremoniously, back into my squishy, fleshy form. And I struggled, then, as the sun approached on the eastern horizon, to make myself believe I had really been there and that it hadn't been some mental fabrication. In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Daylight took up its reign in the sky, and The Stars were sent away for the time being, while Cloud remained behind, like a gentleman, protecting his new bride as she made her exit. And I watched, and I thrilled for them, happy in their happiness, smiling in their completeness. I spent the days that followed whistling the wedding chants I'd heard in my dreams and wondering who'd make a husband, someday, of the Wind.
I had my own small tent when we camped out, and it was a frightening and freeing experience, being unbound in the dark, wild nights. While my parents slept some distance away, I found myself freakishly attuned with the night, my senses heightened, my brain far more aware of my surroundings than I was necessarily comfortable with. I was listening for every cricket hiccup, every owl shriek, every twig snapping in our vicinity. I was on edge in a primal way, on guard, protecting something spiritually valuable from cruel and hungry flesh and blood. In this way, I would eventually fall into an approximation of sleep, a hypnosis or trance that rendered my five senses active and watchful even as an essential part of me drifted, no longer incarcerated in that base, bodily prison. Again, I didn’t know this at the time… but in retrospect, it’s clear that my soul walked free in those mystical woods. And when I would rise in the daytime, my arms and legs and lungs would be absolutely exhausted, but I would still feel refreshed in an entirely different manner. Even as the dark circles would form under my eyes, and I would be unable to stifle chest racking yawns, I would feel more alert, more cognizant, more alive than I ever felt after sleeping in my bed at home.
My travels, at night, were understandably remembered as dreams. They were, I suppose, a form of dream… the experiences I had, there, were not “real.” They never truly occurred in any physical way. And yet they happened, and I remembered them… in that way, those travels were no different than any other dream. But there was a much stronger clarity to them, a vividness that I do not come close to replicating in my normal dreaming. There was something intangible about them that, now, leads me to believe that these dreams were not manufactured by own imagination, but were, instead, moments that I lived. That delineation, I suppose, is moot. Either way, I have memories of my soul walks, and that’s all that matters.
By far, the most memorable of these events occurred when I was nine.
We had spent most of the day hiking through grassy, blunted hills under a gorgeous red rocky bluff. Eventually, we came to a river, a deep hewn ribbon of clear water that was wide and shallow and full of migrating schools of blackish fish. A golden eagle periodically dove into the water and retrieved one of the dark fish in its talons, its meal’s scales suddenly bursting with color and sparkle in the midday sunlight. There were, according to our guidebook, numerous Indian mounds nearby, and I would’ve sworn there was something almost holy about that place. It felt like a convergence of the magic I described earlier… as if it somehow pooled up and stagnated right there at the riverside. I felt strange being there, as if I were a trespasser or an interloper… as if I didn’t belong at all. But there was nothing unfriendly or unwelcoming about it. It was more, I suppose, that I was unworthy of being there. It felt, maybe, like I hadn’t earned the right to be in that sort of sanctuary. My parents may have felt the same way. None of us spoke for a long time. It wasn’t awkward or unpleasant… it was more reverential. I think my folks had similar experiences in these places, but we never talked about it. I’m sure we all felt a little bit crazy for feeling it.
We returned to our campsite, made dinner over the fire and watched as the dusk caressed the sky to sleep. There is a different sort of completeness to the day when you don’t have artificial light to eat into the nighttime. It feels as if living through the twilight is a sort of accomplishment, a notch to mark off or a box to check on your list of goals. The rhythm of night and day, in the wilderness, is more noticeable and more real than it is where I live. Our lives, in cities and towns, blur the definitions of the world in motion. We exert our control over darkness instead of letting it hold sway over us. And while it may make us feel as if we have a dominion over nature, there’s a different sort of satisfaction to be had by succumbing to the night and laying down to sleep when the fire burns out. Relinquishing that false authority we try to grab, here, has amazing effects. I may not have known, then, why it felt so good to sleep in the pitch black of those woods… but my guess, now, is that by falling back into our rightful place, into our role as subservient to the planet, we gain a measure of security and comfort that we lose when desperately clinging to power that isn’t ours. The anxiety that comes from feeling alone in a world of billions is all but erased when you remember you’re not isolated from the world in any way.
That night, again, my body stayed wide awake while my spirit fled.
And where I wandered, that night, was to the sanctuary at the riverside. I remember feeling called there, as if I heard someone summoning me to the grassy banks of the shallow water. It was serene, there, under the moonlight. Everything was white and deep blue, all washed in the color pallet of dreaming. My heart soared just being allowed there, again, and I sat amidst a thatch of cattails and reeds and dipped my bare, spirituous feet in the cold river.
I don’t know how long I sat there, breathing in the air of trees and flowers and rushes. It felt like mere minutes, but the moon’s movement overhead contradicted that assumption. Eventually I was joined by a chalk white man wearing the elaborate and beautiful costume of a medicine man. He sat next to me on the bank of the river, aged and gouged with kindly wrinkles. He was radiant and warm, and I was happy to see him, even without knowing who he was. He had a strong, weathered face, but he smiled with such sincerity that I had no choice but to feel at ease. He had a long staff, decorated with beads and feathers and tiny leather pouches, and he dipped it into the river water, rippling the reflection of the moon.
He spoke, then, in a language that seemed older than time, and although I shouldn’t have understood a word of it, it made perfect sense to me.
The shaman said, joyfully, that he had been called to that place, that night, to perform a wedding. He shook his staff as he spoke, letting loose a very primitive sounding rattle that reverberated through the river valley and was echoed in the throats of owls and raccoons and other nocturnal creatures. Soon, many of those animals had gathered themselves by the river, as guests, the shaman said, smiling, of the bride.
I asked, then, bolstered by the kind demeanor of the man, where the bride was.
And the old man looked at me with eyes darker than the sky and pointed upward. The Stars, he told me, were to be wed tonight.
And who is the groom, then, I wondered.
The old man closed his dark eyes and laughed. He told me that the groom had not shown himself, but would. He said that many suitors had been rivals for such an amazing lover, but only one would have the honor of making the Stars his bride. Those suitors, he told me, would arrive soon, and I, apparently, was there to greet them all.
It wasn’t long before the shaman's words proved true. A great bear, tall, regal and imposing and possessed of slick, black fur, made his way from the woods to the opposite side of the river.
“I am Bear,” he stated plainly, and in a strong and fearsome voice. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
From out of the tall grasses of the fields came bounding a dappled, brown stag. He stood next to Bear on the riverside, his coat and impressive rack of antlers gleaming in the moonlight.
“I am Deer,” the stag said, proud and arrogant in his beauty. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
Slinking from the rushes came a smaller figure, a gorgeous red fox with a thick tail and a sly, angled face. He stood between Bear and Deer, grinning with a cunning that sent a shiver down my vaporous spine.
“I am Fox,” he stated. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
Rising from the ground came a small whirl of bellowing breeze, strong enough to topple some of the long grasses and bend the stems of the wildflowers across the river. From it appeared a noble and cool looking warrior, blue and vaporous and impressive in his stature.
“I am Wind,” the man said with a ringing fury in his words. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
And finally, amassing like fog on the bank of the water, gray swirls of ether came together, clinging and heavy, eventually drizzling into the form of a young man, thin and sallow, and appearing very tired. He was far less than the other suitors in every respect. He carried himself with little power or confidence, and he certainly didn’t strike as startling of a figure as the great Bear or the beautiful Deer or the intelligent Fox or the stately Wind.
“I am Cloud,” he said, almost sadly. “I have come to wed the Stars.”
The shaman looked at the gathered suitors with a critical eye. "Only one among you," he said in his ancient language, "is worthy to make a bride of the Stars. Only one among you shall have such an honor to live with her in the sky." The old man punctuated his declaration with a rattle of his staff, and stretched his arms out toward the light spackled heavens. He stayed incredibly still for a moment, his beaten face beaming with a sort of barely contained joy. He was listening to something that none of the rest of us there seemed to hear. "The Stars," the old man said, finally, "demands a tribute of you! What would you offer for her hand in marriage?"
Bear spoke first. "I can offer my strength, dear Stars," Bear said loudly. "I am the strongest creature in the forest, bigger and bolder and braver than anything."
The shaman listened again. He shook his head, then. "The Stars has no need of a mate with strength," he said. "She is strong enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, Bear. I am sorry."
And Bear hung his great head low and sulked off back into the forest.
"And you, Deer?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"
Deer lifted his majestic head up with a definite arrogance. "I can offer my beauty, dear Stars," Deer said proudly. "You will be given the gift of my graceful form."
The shaman listened to the Stars and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with beauty," he said. "She is beautiful enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, too, Deer. I am sorry."
Deer's brown eyes filled with tears and it bounded away, wounded and sad.
"And you, Fox?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"
Fox grinned slyly. "I can offer my intellect, dear Stars," Fox said. "I am the smartest creature there is, full of cunning and wit."
The shaman listened to the Stars again and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with intellect," he said. "She is cunning enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, friend Fox. I am sorry."
Fox scowled, angrily, and slunk into the woods, offended.
"And what of you, Wind?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"
Wind took a deep breath. "I can offer my power, dear Stars," Wind said. "I am the most powerful thing there is, able to bend trees to will and bring up waves from the deepest lakes and rivers."
The shaman frowned. "The Stars has no need of a mate with power," he said. "She is powerful enough on her own. I am sorry, Wind. The Stars rejects you."
The Wind was crestfallen. He moped and wandered back into the woods.
"So it is up to you, Cloud. What do you have to offer the Stars?"
Cloud looked up the Stars with his big, wet eyes and said, meekly, "Privacy is all I have to offer you, dear Stars."
The shaman looked intrigued. "Privacy?"
Cloud smiled. "When the Stars are shy, I can be there to cover her. When she is modest, I can hide her from the prying eyes of all you, here, below her. I can blanket her, keep her safe from your watchful gazes. And when she is proud and boisterous in her beauty, I can step away and I can let you all bask in her twinkling glow. When The Stars wants to be seen, I can open myself up like some great curtain, letting her luminescence spill out upon the earth. And when she becomes shy again, I can be there to block her from view. I can offer her privacy. I can offer her control."
The shaman grinned widely, his mouth a locked cavern of yellow stalagmites and crooked stalactites. He was pleased with Cloud's response. Out of all of her impressive suitors, the humble Cloud had the most to offer the strong, and beautiful, and brilliant and powerful Stars.
"You have much to give, friend Cloud," the shaman said, happily. The Stars accepts your hand. She shall be your mate.
Cloud was beaming with happiness. A cheer went up from the gathered animals at the river, and the shaman opened his hands in dutiful benediction. There was a tremendous gladness that settled on the holy place, and I couldn't help but be warmed by it. The old medicine man began to speak his ancient language, but its secrets were hidden from my ears, now. The beautiful, timeless words spilled from his papery lips and filled the night air with a resonant sound that blurred into a droning, cicada-buzz chant. Soon all the creatures joined in and the scene was staggering in its alien beauty. There was a rattle in the old man's hands, and a shaker of beads that signaled the union of Cloud and the Stars. And when it had commenced, and when the gentle cacophony of the shaman's chants were finally complete, Cloud ascended from the river up into the sky to take the hand of his new bride. Another cheer burst forth from the throng of animals, and they returned, then, to their woodland homes.
The shaman smiled at me, then, and thanked me for my attendance, once again speaking a tongue I knew. He had a tear of joy running down his battered, leathery cheek. He put his spindly arms around me, and hugged me tight. I didn't feel I had much choice but to hug him back.
He gave me one final nod and then made his way back into the wilderness, leaving me alone, ghostly and content at the sanctuary river. I looked up into the sky and saw Cloud joyfully embracing his new love.
My body, then, awoke and my spirit was ripped from that place and was plunked, unceremoniously, back into my squishy, fleshy form. And I struggled, then, as the sun approached on the eastern horizon, to make myself believe I had really been there and that it hadn't been some mental fabrication. In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Daylight took up its reign in the sky, and The Stars were sent away for the time being, while Cloud remained behind, like a gentleman, protecting his new bride as she made her exit. And I watched, and I thrilled for them, happy in their happiness, smiling in their completeness. I spent the days that followed whistling the wedding chants I'd heard in my dreams and wondering who'd make a husband, someday, of the Wind.
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