kill your darlings,

i saw you. tell me a story about it. august. twenty. writer.

[rithofundur]

blue raspberry

We packed your car and took off out of town the summer we graduated. There was something so freeing in that first day, with the windows rolled down and the radio blasting Jessie’s Girl on repeat until our voices were hoarse from screaming the lyrics. We ate shitty food from gas stations and drank those slushies that stained your teeth and tongue blue until you had to pull over and vomit on the side of the road by the Virginia state line. We laughed about it later after we rode in silence for an hour and a half and I hid my grin in my hand until I couldn’t anymore. You said you’d never drink that shit again, and you didn’t.

You didn’t want to stop at a motel. You had this idea in your head that you wanted to camp, pull off on the side of the road somewhere and sleep on the hood of the car. You romanticized things too much. I told you so, but you just rolled your eyes and threw a balled up cheeseburger wrapper at me. It only took one night for you to rethink that idea, because you woke up the next morning with enough bug bites to create at least a dozen different constellations. You were mad at me for coming out with none because I’d shimmied through the car window in the middle of the night without you knowing.

You had an aunt in Norfolk and she let us stay in her basement. I’d never heard of her before but you hugged her tighter than I’ve ever seen you hug anyone. She was an artist, you said, and her basement was full of canvases and tins of paint. There was one half-finished, a woman rising from the sea with yellow eyes and an awful smile, and you threw a sheet of muslin over it because you didn’t like the way it was looking at you. We slept on an air mattress with Winnie the Pooh sheets and you hogged them all. I woke up with a crick in my neck and your aunt made us breakfast.

You didn’t know where we were going at first and I didn’t either. We had some friends in Wilmington and you thought it might be nice, a summer at the beach. It didn’t matter that I burned every time I went in the sun or that you hated what saltwater did to your hair. You made up your mind that you wanted to go and I couldn’t say no, not when you looked at me like that, so we went.

I got a sunburn and picked at the skin until my shoulders were tender and pink, and you wore your hair in a braid that hung all the way down your back. We did all the things we were supposed to do and half the things we weren’t and I fell a little bit in love with you along the way, which might’ve been my biggest mistake. I looked for you in everyone after that and I think I still do. 

[aphrodites-baby]

[rithofundur]

Even on a Friday night at the height of an endless American summer, when the city is lit from the bottom up, pinpricks of light that replace the stars in the sky; when the streets are filled not with businessmen in neat, four-hundred dollar suits and shined shoes with matching socks and pinstriped ties because they are at home watching reruns of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Wolf Blitzer; when the sounds of rumbling  bus engines and impatient taxicab horns create a symphony that bleeds into the thumping bass of the Top 40 remixes spilling from the doors of the clubs with the bouncers out front, all dressed in black with tiny earpieces tucked into the collars of their shirts; when skinny girls with shaking hands and bleached blonde hair and too much kohl smudged around their eyes wobble on razor-thin stilettos down the sidewalk, ignoring the cat-calls of men with salacious, wolf-like grins and wandering hands; when the homeless man who sits outside the convenience store on 47th drops all of his aluminum cans out of a green bag in a stolen shopping cart and curses his mother and father and Jesus himself as some of them tumble down the open manhole and into the bowels of the city; when the late-night clerk of a newspaper stand bleeds out in an alleyway from a bullet to his stomach and a drug deal gone wrong; when the woman in Apartment 32A stares at the mildew-mottled ceiling of her bedroom and listens to the thump of her neighbor’s headboard against the opposite wall until she swallows a couple of pills from a bright orange bottle and presses her pillow over her face; when the lawyer who is sleeping with his secretary sneaks back into his million-dollar penthouse and kisses the foreheads of all three of his sleeping children before he slips into bed with his wife and claims a big case while she avoids the lipstick stain on the collar of his shirt with all the practice of an award-winning actress; when, down below, the subways barrel through Manhattan with flickering lights and too much noise; when the girls and boys with too much time and too little money sit huddled together in sunglasses and leather, counting dollars into their laps and acting as though they are the only ones who truly exist; even on a night like this, when the city itself seems to swell with life, Violet can still feel the muted pulse of loss throbbing in her throat, weeks after the funeral.

[htsvzn-deactivated20181205]

*eyerolls into another dimension*

[hourlywritingprompts]

Writing Prompt

Writing prompt of the hour: indulge

[thepromptlywriter]

Where will your feet take you?

[rithofundur]

one day i will put something new on this blog

[rithofundur]

nostalgia, or something like it

You haven’t seen her in a year, not since your sister’s wedding, when everything turned upside down and sideways and she screamed at you until her voice cracked, screamed until she was red in the face and then you were too because she’d smacked you. It’s been a year and you wonder if she even remembers now. You do, but sometimes the details are a little hazy, like you’re standing in the doorway of a smoke-filled room trying to pick someone out from the crowd of people gathered there. 

A year is enough time for someone to change, isn’t it?

You think it is. But then again, you’ve been to rehab and back, so maybe your change has been forced more than you’d like to think.

She is standing in the doorway of the coffee shop and she’s just as you remember her, dark hair and fringe cut a little crookedly because she does it herself over the bathroom sink at 3A.M., eyes rimmed in smudged black. She’s still wearing that same leather jacket -- your jacket,  and there’s something sentimental in that, some sense of nostalgia that scrapes against a wound you’d almost allowed to heal. It pulses again, though, when she digs through the pocket to pull out a few crumpled bills (she never carried a wallet, no matter how many times you told her she needed to) and it’s almost like you’re thrown back, two images superimposed over one another because a year ago, you would’ve been standing in line next to her.

You slump a little lower in your seat, hold the newspaper you have no interest in reading in front of your face.

You should say something to her. She deserves it, at least, doesn’t she? But you’re a coward; a year might’ve been enough to change you, but it is not enough to give you courage.

Hello is a five letter word, but it will take a lifetime to say.

You peek over the edge of the newspaper. She is still in line, four people from the man with the thick-rimmed glasses and the close-lipped smile at the register. She looks impatient, but she always was, five steps ahead of everyone else but at least ten ahead of you. You can’t see her feet, but you know she is probably tapping one against the sticky floor, a little rude and abrasive, as if she expects the entire world to hurtle itself forward until it matches her pace.

Maybe she does. She always seemed to expect that from you.

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? She pushed, but not in the right ways; pushed like she was angry and then seemed surprised when you were too. She pushed and you pushed back, pushed as everything built and finally crumbled.

You wonder, absently, if she is still that person.

You think she might be.

You think maybe you aren’t a coward at all, maybe she is.

You stand and walk out.

If she looks at you before the door closes, you don’t see.

[rithofundur]

red licorice

It’s oppressively hot that summer. 

It’s the sort of heat that makes the shirt on your back cling to you in all the wrong places, the sort of heat that means plastic mini-blinds shut tight against the sunlight and the air conditioner wheezing in the corner, the sort of heat that only Mississippi can boast, and what miserable heat it is.

Hollis Cunningham is sixteen years old that summer and she’s got the world in the palm of her hand, or she thinks she does, anyway. She wears cut-off denim shorts and tank tops that are a little too tight and keeps a pack of stolen cigarettes in her purse and smokes them on the broken down swing set in the back yard when she thinks her mother isn’t looking, the butts stained with drug store lipstick the color of red licorice. 

“That color’s too old for you,” her mother says one day, but Hollis rolls her eyes because she knows better, knows that it’s the color all the boys like because it looks the best smeared against white t-shirts. She puts it on and flips her hair over her shoulder, ignores the fact that her mother knew better once too, and look where she ended up -- stuck in a deadbeat town with a deadbeat husband and a yard full of kids with sticky hands clawing at the sides of her dress. 

She ignores it because she is sixteen years old that summer and she’s got the world in the palm of her hand. 

The screen door slaps shut behind her, a harsh thwack, and she kicks up gravel with every step, tiny rocks sticking between her toes and in the arch of her sandals. She walks with a purpose even though she doesn’t rightfully have one, one foot in front of the other with her bag slung across her shoulder and a cigarette held between her fingers. She takes a long drag, lets the smoke burn in her nose and in her mouth before she blows out, trying to imitate the women in movies because they have the type of elegance that burns in the pit of Hollis’ stomach. It’s useless, though, and the smoke hangs around her head instead of curling into a cloud. 

One foot in front of the other -- past the house on the corner where the Murphy’s live with their daughter who ran away with a boy from the next town over only to come back with a broken heart and a baby on her hip; past the Carrey’s, the family with the son who shot himself in the bed of his pick-up truck the winter his wife left him, the sound of the shot so loud someone said they were sure God Himself could hear it too; past the dry cleaner’s and the five-dollar store; past the old man selling boiled peanuts from the shade of a plastic umbrella. 

One foot in front of the other until she reaches the diner, windows smudged with fingerprints and vinyl shades pulled halfway down. There’s a waitress with bottle-bleach hair leaning against the counter, bubblegum smacking between her teeth as she watches Hollis cross the tiled floor and slide into a booth. The seat’s ripped down the middle and there’s foam the color of mustard poking through the crack, flecks of it coming loose the moment her bare legs brush against it. Despite the fact that it’s early afternoon, the place is mostly empty; just Hollis and the waitress and a family of four with a toddler and a girl who looks nearly as bored as Hollis feels. 

The waitress finally comes over and asks what she wants, pen pressed against a tiny green pad of paper like she actually wants to be there. She orders a soda and the waitress looks unimpressed, like she’s seen a hundred girls walk in with lips like red licorice and mascara smudging around their eyes, hopeful and wound up like they’re ready for anything. 

She walks away and Hollis wonders, in the lazy afternoon haze of the diner with heat coming in from the windows and cold air pouring from the air conditioning unit above her, if this is what her life is going to be like too. If she’ll end up like her mother or Mrs. Murphy or Mrs. Carrey or even the waitress, working for tips that probably cover a decent amount of groceries for the week if she’s single and barely cover anything at all if she’s not, or if she’ll get out, throw a duffle into the backseat of a car and slide a pair of sunglasses on her face and drive off into that sought-after sunset. 

Hollis glances over, sees the waitress sliding coins into the palm of her hand from the family’s table with a sour look on her face. She walks back to the kitchen, smacks open the door in the same way Hollis had smacked hers closed this morning, and disappears. 

No, Hollis thinks. She won’t end up like this. She won’t end up like any of them.

Because she’s sixteen years old that summer and she’s got the world in the palm of her hand.

Or she thinks she does, anyway.