Spell

I have a secret desire to be a hipster, so I'm not going to tell you all I'm alive in italics. But I'll tell you I'm alive. The only writing of quality I've done lately has been for academic purposes, although I have a scathing epic poem that really only makes sense if you know its subject. So, without further ado, I present one of my favourite pieces. I wrote it half a lifetime ago, it seems, but it's still proof that I'm alive.

If I could conjure you, make you of my deepest desires realized?

I would give you skin as strong and beautiful as a spider’s web, covering muscles made from the most ductile steel and bones of purest diamond.

I would give you eyes made of crystallized thunderstorms and fingers as long and graceful as silverbirch trees.

I would make every hair on your body from strands of love and all your cartilage from salt-sea tears.

I would give you a personality as rich and sweet and exotic and many-layered as raspberry ginger cheesecake with mint sprigs and a cocoa crust.

I would give you a voice as smooth and deep as dark chocolate melting slowly over a low flame and a smile made from three hundred half-burned candles; it would light up your eyes in a way that shamed the very stars and broke your face into a thousand perfect fragments.

I would give you a will of indomitable, steadfast silver and a heart of soft, resilient gold.

I would distil into you the best qualities of every myth that I love; the most tragic flaw of the most tragic hero I would lightly dust over your consciousness to avoid the jinx of desiring Perfection.

Retire

You

announced your resignation

from the world

of the living,

with a gunshot and

another mess for me to clean:

on

the floor,

the family;

in

the house,

my heart.

Stagefright

I sit, curled, at the base of your spine: a malignant Kundalini ready not for awakening but already awake, ready for a taste of your fear.

Alternatively, you could think of me as a pool, where your face reflects distortedly and time loses its meaning as you stare into everything that is wrong with you and everything that will be wrong with you, failure looming beneath the surface like Grandfather Carp.

It could also be that I am a creature with tiny fingers and tinier joys, tying your intestines into complicated knots out of sheer malicious boredom; I am a brownie, if you will, and you have eaten me and I am wreaking havoc on the most delicate parts of you.

Perhaps you would rather see me as a virus whose only functions are to send ripples of discomfort through you, make your fingers and hands and knees and legs shudder as if it were the coldest day of the year and you were out in your birthday suit, make your mouth dry and your palms wet and the worry lines etch themselves into your forehead.

To me, it does not matter how you daydream and nightmare my form, only that you recognize it when I invade you, body and soul, and that you do not banish me before I kick your words from your head, loosen your hair and your clothes and your stomach, and prick holes in whoever it is (I do not care) that you intend to be when you walk out to glaring lights and thunderous applause.

Rhetoric

We, changeable as the salty sea, impossible as a storm-laden sky, volatile as the roiling hot springs in the middle of the mountains – we, feather-fickle in our choice choices between, for all intents and purposes, delirious or delirious; we, jagged rocks on a crashing shore and jagged lines on a graph of something relative to something else, are somehow fixed here, now.

And where is “here”? And when is “now”? And why are “we [...] fixed”?

And when we say “fixed”, do we mean that we have settled upon a decision, an opinion, a state, one of a multiplicity of everythings? Or do we mean, perhaps, that we have been repaired, disabused of some notion, transformed for the better from our changeable, changeling selves?

Breakdown

Day Seventy-Three: I fall apart. I fall apart through every orifice, I fall apart at every seam, I collapse so quickly that I find it hard to believe that I've done so; in pieces, in pieces on the floor. This day...this day, this moment was long in coming, and I wish I hadn't seen it from so far away, I wish there hadn't been --

Day Five: I stop and stare. I stop and stare and say "You. You don't like books. Oh." It's the "Oh" that should have been "we're over" that turns into --

Day Eleven: I look at my watch for the seventeenth time and you finally get the hint and tell me where my coat is so I can catch the bus because you've made me miss my train again. Which is significantly better than --

Day Thirteen: I look at my watch for the thirty-fifth time and try to call you for the ninth. You got stuck in traffic or in class or in one of your artistic blue funks, I tell myself for over a week, until --

Day Twenty-Nine: I hold my breath to prove a point and you tickle me until I really can't breathe and we laugh until our sides hurt and I forget that you ever disappointed me. It feels as though you never could, even with --

Day Fourty-Four: I laugh. I laugh even though, once again, it's not funny; once again, it's offensive, it's insulting, it's immature, and it's. not. funny. It's still not funny on --

Day Fourty-Seven: I hold your hand. I hold your hand and your arm and the entire left side of your body, and you're still finding it hard to stand. Your hand still thinks it's subtle, thinks it's smooth, slipping its way into my back pocket, and it doesn't bother me until --

Day Fifty-Two: I tell you for the three hundredth time that I have to leave, to get home, to bake a cake for my sister, but you're comfortable with your head across my knees and you won't let me go, want me all to yourself, which really only starts to frighten me when --

Day Sixty: I kiss my oldest friend on the top of his head and your grip on my hand tightens, your jaw tightens, your voice tightens, and the next thing I know, you're whispering that we should get out of here, that you're uncomfortable, and all I want to say is "you never care when I'm uncomfortable". But I don't say it, and I do drag the evening out, and I tell myself that everything's still going to work out until --

Day Seventy-Two: I swallow my pride. I swallow my pride, I swallow my pride, I swallow my pride. I can't. I can't breathe. I can't breathe or laugh or hold your hand or check the time or find my coat or miss my train or stare or do anything but --

Day Seventy-Three: I fall apart.

I always right these things where I like the concept and am a little "eeehhhhh" about the execution. So. If there're things I could have done better, I want to do them better.

Dear,

I am a sword. I am a sword and a flame and a flaming sword, a cutting heat cauterizing as I slice, biting into you to hurt, to maim, but not to kill, to leave you with livid, puckered scars.

I am a flood – a screaming, teeming, turbulent flood of water and memories and blood, blood, blood, splashing and bubbling malignantly over your head again and again and again, cutting your breath, filling your lungs, crashing over you until you stop fighting, can’t try anymore.

I am an altar; I am an altar open to the raging heavens, offering you up to the god of my fury, slicing you open at the core and burning, searing your flesh, letting the stench rot in my nostrils, breathing you in until nothing is left of you but soft, dark, bitter ashes.

I am a pen, I am a story, I am an immortalization of everything and everyone you have caused to suffer, forcing you to read, to see, to admit that all of this, all of this, all of this is yours.


I blame Medea.

Simply:

I find it an exercise in style
To contemplate you for a while
To map out inexorably
The way your hair falls perfectly
The way there’s so much subtlety
In corners of your smile
I think of every curl and fold
Of all the shadows soft and bold
I cast an artist’s measured eye
So that I cannot wonder why
It seems so purposeless to try
To sketch a one so cold

I find it an exercise in style
To rhyme you and your crooked smile
To stretch out my creative limb
To try a new thing on a whim
To through my murky feelings swim
And let my words beguile
I write on aspects of your face
Of things said that I would erase
In ways that make me cock my head
And struggle for a proper thread
Of words that only end up dead
When I run out of space

I find it an exercise in style
To drama in my head a while
To be playwright and actor too
To smile as I think of you
And change a conversation’s hue
Play on Miss Fortune’s smile
It polishes my acting skill
Allows me to do what I will
And allows decisions in advance
So I can keep this song and dance
Act like your gaze is not a lance
Whose in-heart punctures thrill


Dress rehearsal week = no time for new stuff. I did, however, have time to edit one of my few attempts at poetry. I like rhyme and meter. I am sorry if you don't.

Metaphors

Soren sits down next to me at Hatter’s one night, although I don’t know his name at that point, orders a pitcher of Rickard’s Dark, offers me a glass, and starts to talk.

“I wanna tell you something, Anthony,” he begins, punctuating his sentence with a deft pouring of another glass. The head on his beer is the perfect size, and we scrutinize it for a while in silence as the rest of the bar shrieks and chuckles around us. I don’t tell him that he’s mistaken me for someone else - I’m not entirely sober, and it’s quite clear that the beer he’s gulping with a speed that makes my stomach turn is not his first of the night, and mistaken identity seems such a pointless accusation for two people who probably won’t remember too many details of this night.

I poke him a little, right beneath his rib cage, at the intersection of two lines of his plaid, and he starts from his contemplation, takes a long pull, licks the foam from the corner of his mouth, and begins again.

“Something I wanna tell you, Anthony. About life.” I’m only half listening, the remainder of my functioning brain scanning for a waitress to bring me a tequila shot, but I nod for him to continue all the same. “Life is a flirt, a tease – life isn’t a bitch, she’s a whore.”

I’ve found the waitress and am gesticulating with what my inebriated self considers to be subtle grace, and his words don’t alter my determination to perpetuate the pleasant slowness of everything I’m doing and thinking. He’s insistent, though.

“Have you ever had that, a woman who you thought was gonna go for you – or at least go down on you – and it turns out that she already has a boyfriend or she thinks of you like a brother or she’s into your best friend? Life is exactly like that. Kisses you with her hands in your hair then turns around and makes you make a list of all the assholes she’d have a chance with.”
The waitress finally sees my pointed stare and mad waving and saunters over. Soren takes the rest of his beer in an extended gulp and pours himself another, spilling a bit on the table. He stares at the puddle mournfully as I order two tequilas and watch her walk away.

“I know the feeling,” I say to him. Someone crashes into us, apologizes with flushed, teenage cheeks – I don’t understand how anyone could mistake her for eighteen – and pulls herself back onto what passes for a dance floor here. We stare at her as she inserts herself into the middle of a group of equally drunk, equally young boys; they fumble awkwardly to find the beat as the song changes.

We turn back to each other when my tequila arrives, and though I offer him one, Soren declines. He does buy another pitcher while I’m searching through my change for a tip, and when our waitress leaves again, he claps my shoulder in a conspiratorial way and leans into me.
“The chick who cuddles up next to you and dances with you and always calls you the next day – the one who doesn’t seem to care that you told your best friend he couldn’t go for her? Who singlehandedly takes away everything you care about? You know her?”

“I know her,” I say. “I know her all too well.”

“Fuck. She gets around more than I thought,” he mutters as he raises his glass to his lips again, and I nod in miserable agreement before tossing back a shot and shoving the lemon wedge between my teeth.

I’m getting into his argument, and as he pays the waitress for his beer with a crumpled twenty, waiting for his change and almost forgetting to tip until she stares at him pointedly and clear her throat, I pick up where he left off. “She lulls you into a sense of security, doesn’t she? But she’s doing it to everyone at the same time, and she screws everyone eventually. Right, yeah! Definitely a whore. Looks really good when she’s treating you right, but she’s never actually giving you anything, not really – definitely not anything she’s not already giving to everyone else.”

The music kicks up to a screeching volume, and I can only see his lips move for a minute, until the DJ manages to turn the music down, and I have the chance to ask him to repeat himself. By then, he’s forgotten what he wanted to say, and we lapse into a comfortable silence.

A new crowd surges in around midnight, packing the place so tight that it’s hard to move. I’m glad I’m not the people on the pitifully small dance floor, who look like they’re trying to pick each other up, but aren’t succeeding very well: dance with one girl, you also dance with three others, your best friend, and a random guy you don’t even know. It’s like a lame sort of mosh pit, everyone jostling and bumping and getting into the music as best they can. I point this out to Soren and he laughs into his beer, scrutinizing the crowd to see if I’m right.

My buzz is slipping. I take my second shot.

As I bite into the lemon, wincing at the taste of the god-awful tequila they serve at this place, he sinks further into his chair, looking for all the world as if he’s hiding behind his empty pitcher. “She’s here,” he informs me, and my mind, swimming in an unpleasantly bitter tequila bath, wonders why I don’t see a towering goddess holding the threads of fate or something equally ridiculous.

“Who, life?” I wonder, looking up owlishly from my contemplation of my empty shot glasses.

“Life?” he responds, looking a little confused. “I was talking about Amy.”

Three

If anyone knows any good cures for writer's block, I will pay you in baked goods.


There is a moment, a silent moment, and it hangs in the air between them like the rapidly descending night of a dark December, like a blanket, water-soaked, straddling a clothesline or a tree branch.

One doesn’t dare break it; holds breath, crosses fingers behind back, looks over Two’s shoulder, at Two’s feet, at a spot above Two’s head, suspends all thought and simply waits.

Two glances to the side, glances at One, glances, confusedly, down at slightly dishevelled shirt, glances at One again, and wonders what the tension is.

Seconds pass, and One’s face is turning a peculiar shade of blue and Two is beginning to worry about health and safety and sanity, and still the moment lingers in the way that rich and musky perfume applied too liberally leaves a trace of itself long after the wearer leaves.

Two considers the gap between their fingertips, considers a brush of hand on hand to see if One will wake from this comatose state, to see if One needs help at all. One considers the gap between their fingertips, considers a brush of hand on hand and nearly faints imagining the touch and the delicious goosebumps bound to spring up in its aftermath.

The silence is almost painful, now, suffocating, as if the blanket had been thrust over top of them and the wet folds had trapped them and stifled every breath, sucking up every last drop of oxygen as it weighed its oppressive folds over lids and lips and nostrils.

One takes a shaky, gasping breath to test lungs, and is shocked by how loud it sounds. Jumps a little, eyes wider than the night sky and as full of starshine, and lets out an awkward, reluctant burst of laughter, shattering the silence into shards of inky glass that threaten to cut as they fall.

Boom

So. It's not my day. But - pretend it's Wednesday? This took me a long time to be happy with it. And I'm still not really overly pleased with it, but wanted to post it before the week was up.

"No one ever really wins in heartbreak warfare," John Mayer crackles through the shoddiest radio signal possible, and I'm thinking how perfectly suited the song is to the view above my dishwater. There's a moving truck outside the house two doors down.

Some of the neighborhood kids - just Elyse, Jacob, and Morgan now, but more are sure to come - are hanging around, hair bleached by the sun and, at ten o'clock in the morning, faces and pudgy hands already looking like they've been through some serious mudpie battles. They don't know the woman who's shoving a mattress into the back of the truck, but they know the girls, thirteen and fifteen, who are tearfully hugging the man standing on the doorstep.

Julia and Rachel have babysat the entire block, almost, so the six and eight and ten year-olds are out in force as, suitcases in hand, their icons walk down the driveway to meet them.
I can't hear the questions, but I was once the eight year-old tugging with grubby fingers on a teenage sleeve.

"Why do you have a suitcase?" Elyse is asking, as I once did, and Julia is answering the way that my own Julia, whose name I long ago forgot, did, saying something about moving and leaving.

"Why are you crying?" Jacob wonders, where I had known not to ask, but I was eight and he is six, and there is an eternity of wisdom to be gained in those two years. Rachel answers as my Rachel would have, I know: "It's just sad."

Morgan lisps as my sister lisped back then, struggling to ask why their father isn't helping pack the truck. Julia and Rachel look at each other as they hand pillows to their mother. "He's staying here," they answer, bracing themselves for the curious looks and childish questions.

"Why?" Elyse and Morgan ask at once; I know because we asked that question, then, not understanding what we asked, and not understanding the answer. Julia and Rachel answer in long, stilted, stuttering phrases, trying so hard to make sense of something that doesn't yet make sense to them - I see it in their faces, and I recall the struggle in the eyes of my idols as they put tentative hands on my shoulders and their mother glared from the sidelines, much as Julia and Rachel's mother does now.

The children are confused now, the three with their runny noses and faded shorts, and the others who, attracted by the anomaly of the moving truck, are gathering slowly around girls who only want to disappear.

I remember the confusion, remember being sad and not knowing why. Children cannot understand something that even, at fifteen, Rachel struggles to put to words, and I remember the confusion as I look out into the street, my crackling radio playing something completely different now, my dishwater getting cold.

There's nothing quite like heartbreak warfare; I know that now, with every fibre of my being; I have learned my lessons since that day when I abandoned my bicycle in the middle of our lazy street to watch and wonder at lamps and boxes marked "KITCHEN" piling their way into the back of a truck. Elyse and Morgan and Jacob will learn, too, and Rachel and Julia will one day understand how to put their sorrow into words, and I wish they wouldn't have to.

I wish that children wouldn't have to grow into understanding loss, that growing up didn't mean growing accustomed to heartbreak.

They don't understand, these small sun-bleached, sun-browned things, that this is their last goodbye, but they understand that something has changed. And as Rachel and Julia give them lingering hugs and wave silently at the man on the doorstep whose tears are rolling down his nose and soaking his beard, I watch the culmination of a battle lost before it even began and sigh.

Elyse turns around as the truck begins to pull away, and I catch a glimpse of her face beneath the dirt of a morning well spent. Her brow furrowed, her fingers tied in knots around each other, she's a mirror to the small self that I was, once, understanding only that something has changed, and I cry for her.

I cry for her innocence - will she, like me, one day replay the same scenario, bidding goodbye to neighbourhood children as she hands her mother a pillow and struggles not to look at the father crying bitter tears on the front lawn? Will she, like me, one day be powerless to stop the heartbreak from happening to her best friends? Will she, like me, one day watch out the window of her new kitchen, light glinting off the diamond on her finger, and wonder if, since no one ever really wins in heartbreak warfare, any of it is worth anything?

Ring

I stare at you. I crinkle my eyebrows, raise my hands, palm-up, think to myself that you’ve lost it completely, and whisper, “What?”

You repeat yourself. “I told him I wouldn’t marry him.”

I stare at you. I gesticulate madly, hoping you’ll keep talking as I search for something to say.

“I mean, seriously – the man had no sense at all. Kept taking me to French restaurants even though I must’ve told him a million times that I hate French food.”

“You...you turned down his proposal because he took you to the wrong restaurant?”

“No, we had Italian tonight. That’s not why. It’s...he’s so insensitive! You know me, I like them tough, but he extended that to me. Remember when Bambi died? He didn’t understand why it was a big deal!”

“Didn’t he buy you a new goldfish the next day?”

“No, it was a week later. But that’s not the point. He...if you must know, he just isn’t a good kisser at ALL. Or...or anything else.”

“So you won’t marry him because he’s not...sexually satisfying? Why didn’t you break up with him before it got to this point?”

“Well, he’s improved significantly. But not really enough. And another thing! He’s so old-fashioned and expects me to do all the housework and he’ll probably want me to be a stay-at-home mom or something.”

“YOU’re old-fashioned. And you’ve always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, for as long as I’ve known you.”

“No, no, I just want kids. I wouldn’t mind staying at home, but I’d rather choose it on my own. And his mother hates me.”

“You’re probably the first girl to refuse marriage because of mother-in-law issues, you know that?”

“No! Sandra wouldn’t marry whatshisname because of his mother! Remember? Anyways, it’s not even really that. I just...can’t really talk to him, I sometimes feel. And it hurts me every time he acts as if he doesn’t care about things and lets me get my way. And I never know what he’s thinking!”

“I don’t buy it. Just last week, you were raving to me about how amazing your communication is. Look, are you sure you don’t want to marry him? Or are you just afraid that, once you make that commitment, you’re going to be trapped? He’s an amazing guy, L. Don’t throw it away because you’ve got cold feet. He’s been patient with all these little issues of yours, and he loves you, and there’s nothing wrong with getting engaged and there’s nothing wrong with getting married. Just because some people’s go downhill is no reason to throw out the institution altogether. If –"

You look so miserable that I have to stop and pull you in for a hug.

“It’s not any of that,” you whisper into my chest. “I just don’t think...I can’t...I won’t marry someone I don’t love, Desk.”

“And you’re sure you don’t love him?”

“Positive.”

I thought you did, I want to yell at you. I thought you did. I thought I would finally have a reason to get over you. I thought I wouldn’t have to hold you anymore, that he could deal with your heartbreaks, that I could move on with my life and move away from you if I couldn’t let go. I thought that someone else was going to be everything you needed and I’d lose the bittersweet title of Best Friend. I thought you loved him.

I can’t say it, though, so I just hold you until you fall asleep.

Let me just say: I know the fall-in-love-with-your-best-friend thing is as overdone as burnt toast. But.
In other news: creativewritingprompts.com
This is #296: List 7 reasons not to accept a marriage proposal.

Enough

I have a habit of trying to get inside the minds of characters that I play, and I'm currently working myself into Medea. So this is only partly original. It's the first of many, many character studies, taking inspiration from the play as much as possible and trying to make it work. I was planning on writing something a lot more interesting for this week, but. These things happen. Have, essentially, an extrapolation of Medea's various monologues. The last 6 paragraphs are, I think, the only truly original things in this whole piece. Uhm. Also. I don't know, yet, if Medea swears. But. It was a lot less powerful without the swearing.

You’ve got some gall, you arrogant, selfish bastard.

I’d like to point out, right here, right now, that I never asked for this. So where do you get off telling me that this is all my fault? Where the hell do you get off assuming that you have absolutely nothing to do with this situation, that I’m seeing ghosts, that I’m paranoid, that, for some reason, what you did to me was something that was good for me? That I asked for?

You know, I don’t even understand how you can think I would buy any of your excuses. It’s as if you think that I’m an idiot or something. Is that what you think? That I’m an idiot?

Well. I was clearly an idiot when I abandoned everything for you. You can’t remember those nights where we were too busy to sleep – too busy planning a way for you to complete your stupid little quest so that you could get your kingdom back, or, later, too busy touching each other in every possibly way, over and over and over again.

I gave myself to you.

I gave you everything I had and everything I was. For you, I surrendered “daughter” for “lover”, abandoning my family, my home, the way of life that I loved, the values that I held close to my heart. Who was I to know what it was to kill? You taught me that.

Witch, yes. Murderess? Never. Not until you, not until there was something worth more to me than life, than reputation, than family, than home. And if you had told me at the start that I wasn’t worth any of that to you, was worth nothing more than a way to succeed in your...your fucking ambitions, your fucking goals, your fucking crown, your fucking ship, your fucking Golden fucking Fleece – if you had told me, I still would have done it. Do you hear me? I would still have done everything in my power for you. But you gave me hope, so that I was reckless and didn’t stop to think about how my life would be after you had gone because every look, every touch, every moan said that you would take me with you.

And nothing about you said that you would ever leave me, so I kept going. Brother-killer, treasure-stealer, home-leaver, that was me. I couldn’t go back – can’t go back, not ever – and you knew it. You held me that night, on that ship of yours, held me and rocked me until my tears stopped and promised me – promised me – that it would be worth it, that you would be worth it.

And I believed you. I believed you when you said that even with my father’s treasure it was impossible to get your throne back before your uncle died, and because you had taught me to kill, I killed again, called on my magic again for you, earned the hatred of yet another people for you, bore the price of death-magic, and for what? For a child to grow inside of me, pushing and kicking and making me tired and old before my time. For my entire body to fever and chill and explode into flames of violent, vibrant, impossible pain that made day into night and night into day until your son screamed his way through blood and water and tearing flesh into the cruel, cold world.

I gave you two sons, I gave you a throne, I gave you the deaths of all your enemies and in the process earned myself too many enemies to count, lost my home, lost my family, lost my virtue, lost my soul. And you held me and promised that it would be worth it.

You ran your hands over my body, made me ache with desire, whispered to me that I was everything, and I believed you.

And somehow you still maintain that this is my fault, that I brought down pain and suffering upon myself. Of course, it was very clearly I who encouraged you to take a princess to your bed.

I have to hear from your friends and from the gossip of servants that she is sweet and kind, that she knows languages that I have never heard of and reads and writes and is impossibly gifted with voice and look and that her household management is incomparable and she can tempt you more than I with the slender shape of her body. I have to hear that you are madly, passionately, vocally in love and I have to see, every day as I pass the courtyard of the palace, that the only one who lies to me is you.

Even the look of your eyes, which I had always thought so soft, so shining, so full of love, is instead a deception, has always been a deception, has always been straying elsewhere, looking for a more suitable object of your affections.

And now this is my responsibility, the fact that you never loved me. Was I not enough? Did I not do enough? What...what more could I have done? Tell me! Tell me why I was never enough for you. Tell me what it is that I lacked, what it is that lets her make you cry out her name while mine falls with scorn from your lips. Tell me why the sun and moon and stars dance in her eyes and mine are dull as lead, why her bloodless hands are more pleasing than ones that have held your head while you fevered, bound your wounds while you bled, caressed you into ecstasy.

Tell me why it wasn't enough that I've never loved anyone as I love you.

Promise

There was a day when we were happy, right on the edge of something wonderful. We were going to be poets and we were going to be professors and we were going to save the world one sentence at a time, then. We weren’t holding on to fantasies, we were living them, I in my baseball dress and you in your tricycle shorts. We were learning to make things out of air, fashioning with our words things that we could only see if we shut our eyes tight and listened.

There was a day when we were lonely; there were days and weeks and months and years when we were lonely. Poetry came harder and harder, and there was no moment of relief, no moment of release where we could be happy with what we wrote. Professorship seemed a ridiculous, far-away goal, a fantasy. Everything seemed a fantasy then, when I would come to school with purpling bruises under my eyes and you would go to work with the same sweater for a week at a time.

There will be a day when we are happy again: we are learning to make fire, now, fire in people’s minds, fire in their hearts, in their guts, in their eyes. Grim and determined, your jaw set as you file away notebook after notebook, my hand cramped from a constant flow of words, we cling to our fantasies now, hold them desperately as if they could turn away the night, as if they could pull us towards the dawn, as if they could do what the words as yet cannot, and make us free.

In other news, one day I will break the habit of the academic three.

Re[venge]

I am your non-linear sense of time, making it possible for you to feel exactly the same way as you did months, weeks, days ago. I take no notice of the intervening heartbreaks and joys; I pay no attention to how you’ve grown or regressed; I have no care for the emotions I stir up and I am here to make you remember.

I am your late-night heart palpitation, coming with neither rhyme nor reason, my own internal logic dictating when and if I plague you. I want to stir you up, make you deliciously uncomfortable, and I simply do not care that you decided to never feel this way again. I am familiar, I am deadly, and I am here to make you remember.

I am your memory, pouring myself down over your synapses, flowing with sickly fluidity through every moment. I push past all of the things occupying your mind and fashion myself into phantoms with which you daily battle; I simmer over the stove of your consciousness, tempting, taunting, haunting you, and I am here to make you regret.


I'm happier with the idea of this piece than I am with the execution thereof.

Something about 3 AM

I present to you: Jordano a la Jessica. There's not very much dialogue, because I don't trust myself to write up to Jordano's freaking awesome dialogue standard. Let me tell you, this was possibly the most difficult thing I've ever written.
I apologise in advance for my massacre of your style, Jordano.

Two nights ago, I couldn’t sleep. I pulled open my bedroom window and managed to wedge myself through the opening, out onto the snow-covered roof. It must’ve been about 3am, and I had expected some stars or at least the occasional plane, but there wasn’t anything in the sky, just the dim haze of light pollution and smog. We moved from the city when I was a kid, but I think it followed us out, or at least the city sky did. There isn’t any flashing signage and the trees have replaced the skyscrapers, but the sky is a city sky, dark and starless.

I stood for a while, and then my legs got tired, so I tried crouching. Crouching made my body a lot less cold, but after a while my thighs were burning and my ankles felt like they would give out any second, so I gave in and half-heartedly brushed myself a clear patch of roof to sit down on.

It’s crazy, how at 3am on a roof, with your ass freezing off and no stars in the sky, all you can think of is how much you want to smoke. It had been a week, at that point, since I’d quit, but I reached back through the window into my room, anyway, and thought, What the fuck. Might as well as I grabbed my pack and my lighter from the windowsill. I’d shoved them there when I decided for the sixteenth time to stop smoking for real this time. My windowsill is pretty accessible, but usually when I’m anywhere near the window, I’m opening it with my mom yelling at the door about how stuffy my room is. It’s her fault, I tell her every time, for owning such a fucking tiny house.

I don’t smoke because it’s an addiction, I think, but because I like it. Elliot calls it the lazy man’s masturbation, because you manage to satisfy a craving and have something between your fingers at the same time, and you don’t really have to work for it. The first time he said that, we all laughed, mostly for the implication about the size of his dick, but now I think we all agree with him to some extent. Dean has some fancy psychology explanation about oral fixation and childhood, but we don’t like it as much. Whatever the reason, smoking is still right on the top of my list of things I like to do. I think, if I were on death row, I’d definitely ask for a last smoke before they injected me or strapped me to an electric chair.

Sometimes I think about that, about what it’d be like to be on death row, knowing that there was no going back, and having your death scheduled. Most people I know are afraid of death because you never know when it’ll hit you, but if you know when you’re going to die, and you have time to sort everything out, say your goodbyes – are you still afraid of death, then?
I asked a girl that once, when we were stuck waiting for one of those night buses in the East End that just never comes.

“I don’t really know,” she said, clicking the bright pink plastic beads of her necklace through her fingers. “What about what comes afterwards? I’d still be afraid of that, I think.”

“Really? Are you religious?”

“Not technically. I mean, my family is – the whole go to church thing, right? My mom’s really into that – but I don’t really think I believe in all of that.”

She had this cute crinkle thing going on between her eyebrows, right underneath those thick bangs that were everywhere last summer. I guess philosophical discussions at bus stops really got to her. The next thing I knew, she’d turned to me – I saw a strip of bluish lace under her cardigan – and said, “The bus won’t come forever, probably. I’ve been here for like an hour already, and it’s missed the last two scheduled runs. There’s a 24-hour Tim Horton’s nearby, do you want to grab a coffee with me and wait out the metro?”

I was thinking of her, two nights ago on the roof. Her name was Patricia or Priscilla or something like that, and she talked more than anybody I’ve ever met. It was too quiet, at 3am, and I guess I just really wanted someone to talk to, so I pretended she was there with me. I almost offered her a cigarette, until I remembered that she didn’t smoke. I just let her talk inside my head instead, trying to think about what she might have said.

I figured she probably would have said it was too cold to talk, which got me thinking again. What if you were lost in the woods with someone, and it started snowing or icing or something, and you had nothing to do, would you still say it was too cold to talk, and just sit there being miserable together? What if you thought you were going to die? Wouldn’t you want to get everything out before you croaked?

I think I think about death too much. But it’s a big hang-up for me, the way we act towards death. I guess that’s why I started thinking of that girl from the bus stop. She thought the same as everyone else I’ve ever met, scared of death for whatever reason, but for all she knew, as she told me over coffee and Boston cream doughnuts, I could’ve been a murdering rapist, and even talking to me could’ve earned her the trip to the afterlife that scared her so much.

Oops

Fate met me at the glassed-in menagerie, smiling her slow sweet smile and playing with the fringe of her scarf. “Herbert,” she said to me in a coquettish half-whisper as she stared at the elephants and I stared at her hips, “Herbert, don’t be so awfully lewd.”

I didn’t think to ask how she knew my name, caught as I was by the splendour of organza draping over curves so luscious that a dehydrated man would instantly have been revived simply by looking at them, but I moved closer to her and let my gaze roam where my hands could not. She moved on and I moved with her, through the caged wildness of a scaled-down Africa; by the time we reached the patchwork-furred tiger, I was close enough to hear every catch in her breath.

She was puzzling over Latin names on faded placards when my knee brushed the back of her thigh through the layers of palest pink, her exasperated/desire-filled sigh mixing with the sigh of the fabric as my leg and the breeze pushed it in different directions.

At the giraffe enclosure, where the leaves were so wilted that the long-necked cage-walkers weren’t anywhere near interested, I slipped my hand along her ribbon-covered waist and tried to remember all the sorts of suave and charming things one says to disastrously beautiful women who are playing with scissors.

I met Fate at the glassed-in menagerie, gasping with shock as something exploded in my chest and a piece of fringe fell from her scarf. “Herbert,” she said to me with a dangerously wrinkled, one-eyed leer as she stared at the hyenas and I tried not to look at her sagging hips, “Herbert, don’t be so awfully rude. You’re bleeding on my dress.”

I'm really not sure where this piece wanted to go. Or what it's about. Or if I like it. In other news, I'm trying to get out of the habit of bookending my pieces with the same/similar paragraphs. Step One: admit that you have a problem.

Assume

“When,” she wondered, when their breathing had calmed down and the sheets no longer clung with uncomfortable dampness to their entangled bodies, “did you decide this?”

It was, as usual, a continuation of a conversation that had been interrupted by a flurry of heated kisses and frantic movements. She could never recall when they’d formed this habit of bookending pleasure with business, and she couldn’t imagine how life would be if they couldn’t return to being their normal, sedate selves as soon as their appetites were sated. She privately compared it to a luncheon meeting she had once had, where the duck had been so exquisite that they had had to postpone negotiations until the coffee had been poured, and was secretly pleased that they managed to be so efficient, so wonderfully effective at managing their time together.

“I don’t really know – recently, I suppose. Since we last spoke.” His lazy reply resonated through his barrel chest to the curves and swirls of her inner ear, making her whole head buzz as he spoke, a delicious headache.

She nodded, trusting him to feel the movement and take it as an understanding. Surely they knew each other well enough physically, she remonstrated the inner control freak telling her to make things clear, that he was able to know what she meant when she did a certain thing.

Aloud: “And you’re certain about it?” as she traced the scant black curls beneath her cheek with a delicately manicured finger.

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”

It bothered her, that he wouldn’t discuss with her ideas not yet fully formed, and she told him so as she rearranged herself to look into his slate-grey eyes. An old argument. She knew his response would be a reluctant protest against the notion, or he would simply draw her down and kiss her, causing another sizeable break in the conversation.

“It bothers me,” he shot back, gentle hands on her back belying the harshness of his tone, “that you can pick up conversations right where they left off, as if all of this was just an interruption.”

Engineer

Demigod of the workshop - son of flame, daughter of iron, Hephaestus' child - you ponder weighty matters, clasping saw and drill and fragile copper wire in fingers stained with blood from glass shards or metal splinters impregnating your flesh, skin marked beneath it all with burns from too-hot tools and under-calculated friction.

Demigod of the workshop, my world will see your slender arms, your fingers, pencil suited, climbing haphazardly over each other as if dying to escape; my world will see your thick-framed glasses and ill-fitting shirt, your sunless smile, and not know, not care that it is you who makes our city run, our fires warm, our lives complete.

I've been hanging out with the robotics club for the past few days. They. Uhm. They get to you, after a while. I think my days as a Snobby Arts Kid who Only Secretly Likes Science are over.
I don't know if the paragraphs are two different pieces, so I don't know if they fit together particularly well. But I wanted to say both, perhaps at the price of some level of elegance or artistry.

Cheat

Emma sat at the table, a plate of fear in front of her and a glass of worry in her hand.

She stared at the man across from her, shuddering as his eyes ghosted over hers as if she didn’t exist. “Please,” he said silkily, that voice of his running smoothly like a melted stream of dark chocolate. The thought made her hungry, and her eyes followed his gesturing hand to the plate in front of her. Steam coiled up to meet her nose, and she tasted bile in her mouth at the smell. She put down the glass.

“Please,” he repeated, a little more insistently, eyes like twin coals smouldering at the edges. She knew those eyes, knew the holes they could burn in her paper heart, so she reached tentative fingers towards the silver.

He smiled as her left hand closed around the fork and her right around the knife.

It was not a pleasant smile. He couldn’t, she knew, smile pleasantly. He had tried, too long ago for her to remember, and too recently for him to forget, but he had failed as miserably as she was failing at resisting him.

Perhaps, she wondered, he hungered for pain as much as she hungered for food, and it made it more difficult for either of them to do what they wanted to?

She felt his gaze on her and carefully cut a slice.

It had been like that the last time, except she had been watching him and he had been eating, and what was on the plate had been infused with saffron rather than the most dangerous kind of magic.

“Emma,” he remonstrated, chunks of butter melting into his voice, making it smoother, richer as she listened, “we don’t have all day.”

She’d said that to him, she remembered, except he didn’t glance back to his bedroom as she had, didn’t appear in any way impatient. He was replaying everything almost exactly, watching for even the slightest reaction.

I won’t give you that, she thought fiercely as she brought the fork to her mouth, I won’t make this worth anything.

His musician’s fingers, magician’s fingers gripped the edge of the table, and his eyes darted from fork to mouth, mouth to fork, not wanting to miss the instant when her tongue brushed it and her senses exploded.

Emma remembered watching him like that, before he’d stopped being able to smile pleasantly.

At the last second, she dropped the fork with a clatter.

“You’ll break the china,” he murmured, voice as soft and thick as velvet.

She’d said that to him, more loudly, with more anger in her voice, and he had replied, “At least it’s not your heart.”

Saul had come from the back then, and pinned his arms behind his back, and made him promise to leave peaceably.

Emma remembered the look in his burning-ember eyes.

There was nothing of that look now, only an insistent concern. “You’re hungry, Emma. You should eat. Trust me, this is just what you need.”

Her memory spun forward. “Trust me,” she had said, pushing his hands away, “this is just what you need,” and he had tried to smile as Saul had laid an arm around her waist and gently led her away.

“It’s getting cold,” he pressed, that silken voice wrapping around her senses, distorting reality. The worry in the pit of her stomach was digesting. It was getting cold, she reasoned, and picked up the fork again.

The instant it touched her tongue, she reached out her arms to push herself away from the table, but the chair was chained to the floor and she was somehow held to the chair, and his eyes were burning, now, burning into her as his fingers tapped on the edge of the table in anticipation.

She gulped down the mouthful and he gestured to the plate. “Surely you’re not finished.”
He was as sarcastic as she had been when he had tried to show her what a fool she’d been. Her mouth was parched and her fingers trembled as she lifted the glass to her lips and worry washed over her tongue, numbing it.

“I’ll leave you,” he purred, magic coiling around his fingertips as he pushed himself from the table, “to think. You mustn’t,” he continued, unpleasant smile just touching his lips, “think that I will change my mind about any of this, Emma.”

He reached the door and swung it open with a thought as she felt the fear and worry gnawing away at her stomach lining and remembered that she had told him that she wouldn’t change her mind, either.

Emma sat at the table, a plate of fear in front of her and a glass of worry in her hand, as David locked the door behind him and left her alone.

Illegal

“You should be put in jail,” she said casually, interrupting the silence of their tree-branch-sitting, leg-swinging moment. He laughed deep in his chest; pondered shifting his arm to look down into her face, but tossed aside the notion and leaned his head against hers instead, hair mingling in the breeze, tightening his grip on her and the branch as he did. She let out a sigh and extricated herself from the embrace. “I’m serious.”
He cocked an eyebrow and chuckled a little. “And who would arrest me?”
“The Love Police.”
“And who would try me?”
“A jury of your peers, obviously. We have to follow procedure.”
“And who would defend me?”
“Who WOULD defend you?”
“Ouch. Who would prosecute me?”
“I would.”
Still amused, taking his cue from the half-smile on her face and the teasing tone in her voice, he made as elegant a bow he could while sitting on a tree branch, and gestured with a theatrical wave. “Proceed with your prosecution, and we’ll see if I can make my defence.”
“Well. I’ve never made a formal prosecuting statement before. And there’s no jury...” she trailed off, laughing and making origami cranes from the maple leaves.
“Excuses,” he shook his head, “You brought it up. You have to finish it. It’s a little cold; come back over here.”
She threw down a half-finished crane and swivelled her head to glare at him, a half smile still dancing on her lips. “CASE IN POINT. You can’t keep doing that cuddling thing every time we’re alone or we’re on stage or...or...you just can’t. It’s unfair to the extreme – I think I’d classify it as cruel and unusual punishment, torture of some kind, and that, my friend, is illegal.” He pulled back the hand that had been reaching for her shoulder and furrowed his brow, sensing the shift and wondering what exactly had just happened.
“I...I’m not sure I understand, Madame Prosecutor,” he managed, flashing her a half-hearted grin and pulling off maple keys to send spinning to the ground.
“Forget it,” she sighed, “it’s not a big deal. Forget I ever said it, okay? It was stupid of me.” She pulled her hat off of the branch where she’d put it and jammed it on her head, began to struggle with her sweater. He reached over and held it for her as she pushed her arms through the sleeves, lifted her hair out from under the collar as she adjusted the shoulders, feeling the familiar tension in her muscles. Let his hands trail to the base of her neck, smiled a little as she let out an exasperated sigh but didn’t pull away.
“You’re not helping your case,” she grumbled. “A little to the left.”
When he didn’t say anything, she sighed again. “It’s just...you do this thing where you have no idea what you’re doing to me, and I don’t know how or why you’ve decided that it’s okay for you to play with my emotions like this, but your actions are speaking loudly and your words were ambiguous and...and...and I just don’t want to get hurt. Because every time you hold me instead of just hugging me, every time you make some pretence to pull me into you, every time you smile at me as if we have an inside joke, every time you talk to me as you’re passing by and then go back the way you came, every time you touch my arm or my back instead of just saying “hi”, you steal a little piece of my heart. And I don’t want you to have enough of it that I start caring too much, because I’ve been there, done that, bought the freaking t-shirt and I refuse to do it again. PLUS,” and here she spun out of his grasp to face him, eyes flashing into his with a sudden return to something resembling good humour, “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to steal anything, much less someone’s heart.”