There is this in
within me,
where I have tattooed
black stars.
They are where the in
within me
reaches out to come out,
where I am feather and hollow bone.
Where I am not
as sturdy as I look,
but where I am delicate
and fragile,
a piece of overblown glass.
My wings are not made
for an eagle,
but instead, a butterfly,
and you snap them
every time
you curl your hands around me,
every time you try
to make me yours,
even if
I want you to.
Within
Hemmed In
She stumbled along, hands outstretched, fingertips clinging to the sides of the alleyway, scraping, the rough brick stinging. Her whole body ached, and she couldn’t remember where she was going, or why she was going there. Everything was blurry, and she could taste copper. She knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that something awful had happened, that something beyond horrific had occurred, and now she was merely scattered, the surface of her rippled by whatever had struck, a large stone tossed carelessly into a pond.
“Are we there?” she asked, but there wasn’t any answer. Blood ran from her lips, and she spat, gagging. “Are we there yet?” she pleaded, breath hitching, caught on cracked ribs. “It was a long fucking way to fall,” she rasped. “I think we broke something.”
When she reached the end of the alleyway, she turned around and around in circles, looking, searching, straining to see something in the distance, but she was hemmed in on three sides, and the fourth was simply the way she’d came, and that was as much of a wall as bricks could ever be.
Posted in Fiction, Flash
Tagged alleyway, blood, blue-eyed man, cat, cat jones, catastrophe, catastrophe jones, caught, death, fiction, fire, flash, flash fiction, jones, pieces, trap, writing
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In Keeping
By the eight faces of the midnight moon,
by her ninth face which is blood,
and her holy reach, which is unto the depths,
I conjure thee.
I give thee the gift of sight, which is fire,
and I give thee also the gift of breath, which is wind,
and I give thee also the gift of form, which is stone,
and I give thee also the gift of blood, which is water.
I bind thee to myself, and I myself am bound to thee.
I bind thee to myself, and I myself am bound to thee.
I bind thee to myself, and I myself am bound to thee.
Thrice have I spake it, thus it is true.
New Moon
When the moon calls us,
when it gets under our skin
and behind our eyes,
all I can think of
is its bright face,
the sweet high bliss of it
screamsinging inside me,
buried somewhere
so far below
it is in the knot of me
that was tied
when I was first begun,
before there ever was a me,
when I was nothing more than howling
beneath the dark
of someone else’s new moon.
For Abbie
This is short, and I’m not sure I truly did it justice, but this was prompted by my dearest friend Abbie, who writes fiction at Dust on the Keyboard.
* * *
Three weeks ago, I died.
It wasn’t a traumatic thing; I think I blew an aneurysm in my sleep. One minute, dreaming about Carly Rae Jepsen all sudsy on her car in that stupid video, the next minute, all the blood supply for my brain comes into it at once, filling it with oxygen rich awesomeness, until it’s too much, everything is suffocated in red bloodcells that can’t leave again to get reoxygenated, my bloodpressure bottoms out, my heart stops, and my neurons go dark.
Pretty sure I didn’t really feel a thing.
But I know I died. When I woke up the next morning, no pulse, my skin a funny grey color on one side, and bruised-looking on the other (post mortem lividity plays hell on your skin tone — no L’Oreal product was gonna fix that) and my left sclera a brown, dead-poppy color, I realized my mouth was dry, and my body was cold, and my lips had gone purple blue. I stared at myself in the mirror for awhile, examining my eye, licking my lips, and brushing my hair, the only thing that looked unchanged.
I was trying to puzzle out how to fix this, when the phone rang.
It was my boss.
I was late for the morning shift, and two other people had already called out. It was one of the busiest days in the business, and he was pissed.
I tried to tell him I was sick, but he yelled back, “I don’t care if you’re fucking dead, get your ass in here!”
I was still living paycheck to paycheck, and I figured since I was dead I might not need food, or heat, or anything like that, but I was certainly going to need a place to stay, and that place would charge me rent… so I put my uniform on, and I headed out the door.
* * *
“Cool costume, brah,” a customer told me. “Walking Dead, right?”
“Yeah,” I answered, not knowing what else to say, and handed him his bag and his receipt. “Happy Halloween.”