We are melting one another
you and I we’re put together
we are melting one another
and we’re not one or the other
where we all are put together
where we’re liquid with each other
when we’re lighting up another
and we’re melting with each other
til we’re dust and nothing other.
Rhythmysticism
Stef
Stars swam in her eyes within a field of red, a wash of glittering burn that left her dazed. “What?” she said aloud, looking around, bewildered. Stef Branford stared down at her tennis shoes, and then looked up toward where her husband been a moment ago, and then over to her shoulder, that he had been gripping, then down at her feet. She stood in an ever-widening pool of blood; it was deep enough to begin to soak into the fabric of her slippers (Fancy ouch shoes, is what her mother had called them) and it was hot enough to be uncomfortable, and confusing.
“Marc?” she said aloud, but her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was whistly, reedy, odd and shaking. “Marc?” she said aloud again, looking for her husband, and when she took a step, her soaked (fancy couch) slipper caught on something, and down she went in a heap. Her hands hit the floor, splashing in the blood, and drops of it hit her face. They felt like summer rain, and smelled like pennies.
She stood up and drew her hands up against herself, as though they were wounded, and then held them out and away, once she realized it was blood, and her voice came out again, shaky and almost whistling from her throat. “Marc?” she warbled. God, she sounded like her mother, in her last days, when fancy couch slipper turned into fucking cunt snapper and every morning was punctuated with the grey-faced matron straining a turd into her bedsheets just after the night nurse left.
“Marc, honey?”
She realized, after a moment, that what her fancy couch shoe had caught on was the curled fingers of her husband, who was laying on the floor. Her eyes traveled up, from the fingers that had left bruises on her shoulder, past the gnarled knuckles and the hairy wrist that disappeared into a shirt sleeve that ended in a ragged snarl of frayed plaid soaked and shining with blood.
She kept following the line of the arm, and it ended where Marc sat, propped up against the wall, his face staring forward, the back of his head grotesquely flattened outward, a pumpkin dropped from a great height, smashed into the concrete of the basement wall by some huge unseen hand. The same hand that must have torn off his arm and left it lying where she could trip over it.
Marc stared forward, unseeing, his eyes wide and watching nothing, and that’s when Stef felt the warmth running over her thighs. She looked down at the spreading patch of her own piss darkening her jeans, and said aloud, “Just as bad as Mama. Turnt my fancy couch shoes n denims to trash.”
When she heard her mother’s voice come out of Marc’s ruined lips, saying “Mama’s gon getchoo now, Steffie. Mama’s gon getchoo good,” she backed away, and tripped over Marc’s arm again. When she fell, her head smacked the floor like an egg on its way to an omelette, and she found blissful unconsciousness so she didn’t have to see her dead husband get up and peel the back of his head off the basement wall.
Posted in Fiction, Flash
Tagged basement, blood, dismemberment, fear, fiction, flash, flash fiction, horror, pieces, piss, writing
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The Holes That Make No Sense
Flick through
the inner story of me,
my tale, my
closed self, where
if you lick your
finger and
drag it over my
surface, I will
page for you
(just don’t walk away in the middle of
a chapter; the temptation to
dog-ear me will be
far too great)
and you can skim
the plot details,
and you can look
for the holes that make no sense,
and the points in time
where your willing suspension of disbelief
is most needed.
Read me through to the end,
and tell me how it goes.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged abandonment, depression, love, poem, poems, poetry, suicide, writing
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The Edge of Heaven
Don’t cry.
Don’t mourn this parting.
It is not forever that we say goodbye, but only for now — only for a moment, even — and even this is not yet a loss, for nothing can truly separate us. Nothing can truly keep our hearts divided — not even for a second.
I believe that one day you and I will join together again, on the shores of some far-off world, toes dug into a distant soil, brows shaded beneath a foreign sun. When you see me, I will turn my gaze to you and you will meet my eyes. I will call out to you, and you will call in return. I will lift my hand to you, and when our fingers touch, every sun that ever was will rise, and the skies will run with flame.
The worlds we have touched will come alive, and sing in exaltation that we are reunited.
In those moments where we exist in togetherness, where all who witness us are flinch-eyed from the brightness of our glory and triumph, we will reach up and take hold the edge of heaven, pull it from the sky, and make it our own.
The Dying Borders Of That Fading World
Cast your eyes on the ocean;
cast your soul to the sea —
when the dark night seems endless,
please remember me.
Somewhere far enough away to be beyond reach, there was a girl who was just a little too perfect. Her flaws were endearing enough that it was infuriating. Nothing was ever her fault. No consequence ever lasted. She never learned anything new. Even so, to many, she was well-beloved, best-beloved. She wasn’t real. But all the same, she was there, sitting on the edge of a little rocky outcropping, the seat of her jeans getting wet from the way it was always damp and stormy and night time, no matter the time of day or year. The clouds always hung low there, purple and roiling. The smell of salt was always thick in the air.
She loved that spot, and hated it, all the same. She loved watching the ocean, and hated it, all the same. There were no ships coming in. It was always high tide. At best, when she looked up, she’d see gulls. At worst, she’d see ravens or crows, or maybe a fallen angel.
She existed in a state of perpetual waiting, torn out of everything she’d known, given up to a new world where she fell in love a thousand times over, and then she was forgotten. The world fell apart. Fragments of it exist, still, in the minds of the gods that made it, but it would never be made whole again. All the forgotten lives within it roamed like ghosts, never again touching for more than a moment. Never again finding peace. She could hear the echoes of their laughter. She held to memories that mocked her, promised her that at one time, gods moved heaven and earth for her.
Not just for her — all of the people of that world. But that time was long since past.
Just outside of the dying borders of that fading world, starfield eyes watched over them all, trying to keep them safe, trying to keep them loved. Even the too-perfect girl who never did anything anymore but cry prettily, and stare out to the horizon, forever waiting.