Scales of the Marvelous

/ Poems / Prose / Art / Incompletes

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grace sketchies

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sad pretty boys ♥ ♥

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viggo WIP

posting to keep me accountable so i’ll actually finish something one day maybe

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today was my darling meredith's 23rd birthday, so i drew her as wonder woman which was a super lot of fun and i love her very dearly

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Fields Forever Excerpt

Every morning for breakfast Fiona had eggs and toast. It was Scott’s favorite thing to watch: Fiona in a long t-shirt and bleary eyes turning on the Keurig, twisting open the old gas stovetop, cracking two eggs without looking, turning blindly to the toaster, popping in the bread, outstretching her arm to grab the coffee, then flipping the eggs with perfect precision. She scraped jelly over the dry surface of the toast, licked the knife, then used it to scrape her finished eggs onto the plate. Exquisitely rehearsed. Fiona was a creature of habit, and of comfort--she thrived on choreography. 

She kept her hair in a low, loose ponytail, a knot of fine black threads plunging and unraveling across her back, hugging her shoulder blades in a dark embrace. Her eyes were the color of a roasted hazelnut, her skin the color of its shell, emblazoned with freckles. He’d sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her as she watched TV, and count every last one. 44 on her cheeks, 19 on her nose, and one on each eyelid that he counted over and over again as her eyes thickened with wine and she nodded off to sleep cocooned in fleece on the couch. 

Scott liked being alone, but he didn’t care for being lonely. He didn’t live, but he got by as best he could. Fiona was lonely too, anyone could see, but not lonely like the old man who preceded her, or the trodden-upon housewife before him. No, Fiona was young--the child of a digital age, a culture of connectivity. The isolation of old age or an empty life is circumstantial, a raw deal or an inevitability. Fiona chose her fate. Fiona was less alive at 25 than the old man had been at 85. Living off her parents’ inheritance and watching the world flash by her through dated curtains, that’s not quite living.  

He talked to her a lot, asked her about her day, enthused about her favorite shows, he told her everything about his childhood, the places he’d seen, his favorite bands. It was nice to have someone to talk to, even if she never heard. It was just nice to talk. Sometimes he would reach out and touch the back of her neck, so lightly he couldn’t even feel the grains of his fingertip against her skin, and she’d shiver suddenly, gooseflesh darting in a cold ripple up her arms and back. It was satisfying, to make her feel something. 

And now here he was, pacing on her front stoop, wondering for the first time in his life what she was doing. Making tea, maybe. Fiona drank wine when she had something to pacify, but tea when there was something that needed to be dusted off and awakened. He thought about her at the breakfast table, stirring her tea distractedly, the tinny clink of the spoon circuiting her faded mug, ticking a sober staccato. Was she thinking about him? Was she smiling? Scott bounced up and down the stone steps gleefully, because he didn’t know, because it felt good not to know, and because god, it was just nice to talk.

His name was Scott Lance. He was tired, and he was lonely. He had eager gray eyes and honeycomb hair, and he’d been dead for thirty years.

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Flash Fiction

I breathe in that sweet toxicity like it’s my only source of oxygen. The fumes tickle and burn the back of my throat, a familiar chemical warmth that tastes like a lot of things, sure--tar and nicotine, but more than anything tastes like a friend. The kind that picks on you, nudges you a little too hard, eats all your food; but a friend nonetheless. My last smoke. Breathe it in, asshole. Maybe this one will finally do you in.

I lean my whole weight against the brick wall. It’s a good 80 degrees outside, maybe less here in the shade, but my hands are going numb. I exhale, watch the ashy nebula of breath and smoke, and imagine the last bits of my life floating out with it like beads of vapor, fighting through the smog and finding somewhere nice, soft, quiet to die in. A field of grass. A still lake. A topless beach. Not an alley in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. Not here. Not like this.

Some thoughts bounce around dully in my emptying head. You deserve this clangs angrily in the background. It’s your fault, you botched the job.  The girl’s pale face wrenches its way through my cleaving chest cavity, twisted mid-scream like a Munch painting. Kid wasn’t supposed to be home. There’s a target, and then there’s collateral. She was neither. A kid is a kid is a kid. You botched the job. 

I don’t remember sitting down, but here I am, back still against the wall, head tilted up at the dim lattice of fire escapes clambering up the side of the buildings. I won’t lay down. I think about someone finding my body, sooner rather than later I’d hope, a kid on a paper route, maybe someone on their way to work. They’ll stumble across me sitting casually, cigarette still smoldering, and they won’t even realize I’m dead until they see the blood. It’s selfish of me, to want a more dignified end than the ones I’ve dished out, but I never claimed to be a saint. There’s no dignity in dying. I’ll take what I can get.

Between my fingers, the cigarette is sizzling down to its last breaths, and I think I might be too. You know you’re in trouble when you don’t feel it anymore. I pull it back up to my lips with one hand and touch my torso with the other. I don’t feel them connect, but I see the smear of blood, oozing into my palm, and if my stomach could do much of anything right now it would have churned at the sight of myself gutted. There are lines of work where mistakes get you disappointed head shakes, stern talks, seminars, pink slips. And then there’s mine. Your choice. Them’s the brakes.

Some time must have passed, because through my blurring vision I can see the sky start to lighten, the pale blue blush that comes right before dawn, pulling the sun up by its ankles. I take another deep drag to steady my lightening head and close my eyes, relishing the smoke and the afterimage of its orange-embered tip in the blackness. I want it to be the last thing I see, the familiarity of that dim, warm glow, the embrace of an asshole friend. I keep my eyes closed. The orange light fizzles out dully, and my mind grasps for it, blind, but all it lands on is a small mass of limp, cold flesh. A corpse for a corpse, I think, and I’m cut short by a grating scream, muffled at first, then intensifying into a blaring shriek that rings through my deadening ears, reverberating through my whole body in a sickening spasm, ringing and ringing into a numbing silence.

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ANYWAYS HERE'S A TOPLESS DRAWING OF ME

feat. my phoenix tattoo

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All dressed up and no one to kill

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me looking @ you with disgust

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Perpétue Excerpt #1

A wisp. I left life as a corpse, substantial, tangible, and I re-entered it as a wisp. The last air from my lungs swam up through my throat and out my parted lips, and by the time my heart stopped beating I was already smoke drifting over an empty body. It was peaceful, in a way. Like you’ve just had a long cry, and your face is raw and your eyes are all tired, and you lie your head in someone’s lap and they pet your hair till you fall asleep. Nice and calm, but a little sad, too.

I floated in and out, just a breath of air. Every time I opened my eyes people had come and gone and before long there wasn’t anybody in the house I recognized. You know when you have a fever, a really bad one, and you’re lying in bed ice cold and clammy and you’ve got that clenched-up feeling in your throat like you can’t breathe, like you don’t have any lungs, and you keep blinking and everyone’s foggy, standing over you and a few times you hear someone say your name but it sounds like they’re whispering through a muted trumpet or something? That was kinda what it was like. I don’t remember much of the first few years. 

Then, my eyes opened, really opened, and I felt more like a breeze and less like a wisp.  Fever breaking, lurching up from bed all of a sudden with a gasp, taking too much air into my lungs so fast I kick back and it hurts. Muggy air. New Orleans air. That’s what it should have been. But all the air I ever feel anymore is cold, and I haven’t got lungs to breathe it through, or a bed to wake up in. 

I barely remember what it was like to have a body, to feel solid and rooted to something. Once in a while, on special days, I feel like a person, like I’ve got fingers and I can walk around the house like I’m still in it. I go to the kitchen and I pretend I’m gonna cook something, something hot, and I’ll feel the steam on my face till it’s got little wet drops all over it, dripping off my lashes and runnin’ down my nose, and I’m gonna pour so much hot sauce in that gumbo Satan’s gonna spring up from the ground and ask for a taste and say damn, Perpétue, don’t you think that’s a bit much? Ha! But then...then I float back, and I haven’t got arms anymore, and my feet collapse into a cloud of smoke and I’m just a wisp again. 

When I was sixteen, my mother sewed me a silk dress. She’d saved up for months, bargained, talked to every vendor in New Orleans looking for the perfect fabric, the perfect color, the perfect touch. And it was, it was perfect. That’s what I remember, when I think about being real. That dress. There’s nothing like the way silk flows over your skin, the gentle lightness of it. It’s just a kiss, like someone with piano player fingers touching you without actually touching you, getting as close as they can till the hairs on your arms are tingling with gooseflesh and you feel that buzzing through your whole body. I loved that feeling, of something weightless on you, but I don’t love being weightless. Drifting around this house, it’s kind of like being silk, I guess. Sneaking up on people, tickling the backs of their necks and watching them shiver. It’s not the same, to make people feel the way you used to, but it’s as close as I can get. 

I wish I had a body again, just so I could wear that dress. It was pale blue, same color as the sky on a sticky July afternoon. It fit so nice, tucked in at my waist a bit, skimmed over my tummy and fell over my hips like a cool stream.  It had a little white sash that pulled into a clean bow. Everyone on the street knew that dress, how pretty I looked when I spun Jean Daniel in circles in the front yard and it twirled up around my legs like Marilyn Monroe’s. The blue was so beautiful, and I looked so good in it, mother saved up again and when the house needed painting we matched the colors so perfectly that if it wasn’t for my dark skin, if I stood in front of the house I swear you wouldn’t have been able to see me at all. And now here I am, actually invisible.