Harriet saw the gaping maw in her chest, yet she was curiously alive. She could not pull her eyes away. And as she peered in, her head drifted down to observe it up close. The next moment it became clear it was pulling her in, her face dragging ever closer. There was weight and gravity in the collapsing space. Light stopped and reversed as she eclipsed the point of no return. Like a camera framerate set low in pitch black, every photon of luminescence dragged and left streaks in her vision.
And as fast as the light had stopped functioning properly, she found herself in the hole in her chest. It was as if she was looking at a black hole in negative. The streaks of light became dark tree trunks ending on a wide, snowy expanse. She was now sitting cross legged on the round slice that once filled her chest. She rocketed down the hill wherever this place was taking her. Her heart had collapsed as well and was sitting in front of her on the circular copper red remnants of her chest. It was a dark, dreid-blood clot that panted forming a trail of blood out its... mouth? ventricle? The other, what she knew logically must be a ventricle appeared to wag like a tail. It sat there apparently excited to go wherever this took us.
Eventually the descent slowed, and the trees of photon streaks became too dense to navigate with great speed. So she dragged the bloody sled and her continuing-to-excitedly-pant heart on it. Sometimes it burbled, the sound it made was too close to a bark that Harriet could no longer stop fully anthropomorphizing her dog heart. It was just a dog now, that lived in a black hole in her chest.
She continued and it became clear something was steaming in the distance, only visible by the slight contrast of the vapor from the blinding white snow. At first it looked like a mirage, a reflective pool of what at a distance appeared to be water. In this frigid space, a molten pool of water sounded amazing. However, when she arrived at the hot spring, she dipped a finger in. It stuck to her and separated into globules as her hand retreated back. She understood what it was, a molten heavy metal. But the temperature serene, so she slipped in. The dried-clot black dog curled behind her to take in the ambient heat.
The heavy metal spa was the seed for a new sun, and Harriet lived for this kind of steaming experience. Her atoms being recombined and she didn't mind the change. It was only slight, beside the hole in chest, of course. The dog now paddling around in it, doing a loop around then back to her. Sniffed the ominous hole, made a concerned whine, and licked across the wound. It was as if this lovely canine had pulled back the curtain of time leaving a fully intact chest, the universe remade.
Harriet threw the phone at the floor. Unintentionally it twirled and skipped, like a stone skipping across a pond it deflects over and up. If it had been a pond, it would have repeated this cycle for several more skips. Her TV wouldn't have been the second surface it bounced toward. If this had been a pond, it would have drifted into the glossy pewter blue expanse meeting its end on top of a pile of smooth, elongated oval rocks. The ones ideal for crossing lakes in repitious strokes. It would sit there, no longer able to hold power but intact.
Only time would break it, as pill-shaped rocks poured over it. It would have an abundance of them to peel off its rubber, plastic, and conductive metals. Harriet imagined the now fractured black surface being pressed to bursting on the opposite side with those stones. That the digital patchwork now encompassing the screen was the only thing protecting her from swift, lethal lapidation.
Back on Tumblr, forgot how much stuff was on here. Lots of ESL blogs and random stuff from when I was... * checks notes * living as a different gender and at least 10 years younger! 🙀
It troubles me that I feel you are my youth.
That what I was had always been you, and
when we met, it was like losing my first tooth.
A light-footed fairy stole it away to a faraway land.
While my brain was a mess,
a new confidence was born.
It was not well worn.
In fact it became stress.
My words were so hollow.
I wish that I could follow
all the places they go,
where I want to be, and to sew.
What you knit me was a warm wrap,
with a ball that drew me a new life.
In the Winter I might use it as a map
to find what we were and what felt so safe.
(Originally written for LiveJournal by a much more stream of consciousness me.)
Harriet forged a factory on her fingertips. She had sparks dancing from hand to hand. Her eyes filled with delight, surprise, and the need to sufficiently expand her production rates in order to fulfill this quarter's shipment. She saw the small hairs on her hand handle welding and cutting. Those hairs had formed a union in order to escape Harriet's demanding production schedule. Harriet was an industrialist when her fingers began their industry. She demanded profit out of profit. Money was everywhere to be had and Harriet knew how to squeeze and wring it out with her hands. Harriet bought the condominium on her thumb and opened it up as a retirement home for the hairs on her fingers. They spent their last terrifying days on Harriet's hands in relative posable comfort.
More from the Math Department... [Nov. 29th, 2007|02:50 am]
(Originally written for LiveJournal by a much more stream of consciousness me.)
Harriet sewed all her socks closed to keep the change out. She sewed her pockets together to keep her hands out. She sewed her belt loops to her pants to keep the belt away. Harriet sewed the rugs together to keep the hard wood floor from getting jealous. Harriet sewed her cat's tail to the dog's. Harriet sewed her scarf together to make a nice noose. Harriet weaved herself a nice wedding dress to hang in. Harriet bought herself an apartment to hang herself in. Harriet got herself a job to get bosses to die in spite of. Harriet made friends to write a note for. Harriet married a husband so someone she knew would discover her body and cut her down. Harriet gave birth to children so they could remember her sad story as a house wife. Harriet grew old in order to make her children feel guilty for her death when they abandon her for their own lives. Harriet was the longest suicide.
A short story I wrote for my friends with a line for every wish.
In a town not too far away lived a ghost staring across a highway.
This ghost filled its days guessing the speed and temperament of those unsteady and unruly riders, whom always seemed easily befuddled by the ghost's presence and longing gaze.
That ghost lurked and loomed as the cars swept past like rhinos hurtling their massive bulk across a scarecrow's path.
When it finally came to stop staring, the ghost put one ethereal foot in front of the other and strode as if on a cloud across the highway.
As the ghost came up on the center of this raging torrent, one driver decided that ghosts don't exist and twisted their wheel to such an extent that their bulk reeled over end on end.
Once the car stopped turning, the ghost stood still for a moment, dumbfounded by what it had caused.
Cars piled up on the highway converging upon that point with tires spinning and pulling on the ground.
With a great ruckus the ghost pulled at its petty coat and twiddled its buttons, the screams that erupted around it made things awkward. So awkward in fact that the ghost decided to recede to its former post at the side of the highway.
As it was drawn down past tar level into the depths of those cracked and rocky roads of past, there was feeling that the ghost had done something wrong back there and this would be its path to eternal torment and inhuman soul-sucking torture.
It was half wrong; and as this momentum pressed on, it became clear from the remains of a thousand beasts and burdens that the past is never as haunting as the present.
El fantasma seguía su curso a través de todos los siglos compactados y teje a través de kilómetros y kilómetros.
And once the ghost viewed this, it recognized that it could see far beyond itself.
Time is built into the structure of life, and with its great fall it could see it enact itself before the ghost in moments rather than millennia.
When the ghost hit upon the skeletons of those native peoples with whom it had traded gods, tobacco, and furs, the ghost said excuse me and heard what it assumed was a friendly response, but the road ushered it on without expense.
If whatever moved this ghost wanted to rattle its centuries-weathered resolve, it had to some point drudged up the emotional state leading up to the ghost's death.
A time when the land of the Great Lakes was a blooming harvest for the wealthy and distant lords who shuttled galleons of their own people to endure harsh and foreign climates.
The ghost still had yet returned from its wearying journey to speak to a chief who frequently shared his fish fixed with a spicy, delectable recipe that the ghost would in the end die for.
With this recognition the ghost's perspective broadened and dispersed far across the span of this magnetic whirligig that had propelled the bulk of its existence.
As this spectre outpaced the thermosphere it filled the black and void of space, not neglecting to touch upon all aspects that intrigued it while it wandered past the frontier of civilization into the hinterlands.
In the winters, the ghost recalled logging its activity, accounting for each trade and trail taken.
It mapped out some of Lake Huron and Michigan; and had taken in a great haul of furs which were to be shipped back across the Atlantic.
As the tallies rose, so to did the number of trappers and thieves that the ghost met our in the wilderness.
On course to the sun, the phantom accepted the momentum as its own motion as it willed it.
It truncated its route by wrapping its entity around itself, thus transporting this conciousness across greater leagues of space/time.
Thus the ghost could now transport its logic and receptors to greater and greater lengths.
Such as a relay, when one horse was too tired, a messenger could trade its mount for another, the ghost could launch what functioned as its eyes between points of existence near instantaneously.
Yet with this accomplishment, the ghost still took a blinks to cover the length from its home to the sun.
It was not as it had thought using its now rotted brain that the sun was like a glass orb full of liquor and fire.
It seemed to the ghost to be more like a top spinning on no single point, it churned to no specific end.
And as it examined this it too looked behind itself, viewing the expanse of this Milky Way.
The Earth is round.
The Sun is the curl at the center of this pinwheel.
The whole of existence violated all the ghost had known and was promised.
It had to quench one last thirst.
The ghost folded itself to a distant star, the one the captain had used to reference all his movements across the open ocean.
The one star that commanded the most respect across all professions, with sailors, explorers, or even priests.
When the spectre warped space/time enough to have found Polaris, it now had to shed all presumption.
Polaris, the North Star, was another sun in the black map across the sky.
It marked nothing more or less than that its God had created a thousand twirling orbs to spark life in all galaxies.
When the ghost wandered back to its own memories, fur trading and becoming familiar with the people it had met along the way, its trip to Polaris lost its cohesion.
It was as if an anchor had been dropped, and the ghost was dragged back past time and place.
Once it hit land, it was as though it hadn't just been slingshotted across a great ocean of calm formlessness.
The ghost had pulled back to the precise second it had taken its first step on the shores of the New World.
This memory loomed like a depthless anxiety in its conciousness.
When it stood there, it stared at the men unloading the ships and giving orders like cannonade on the ears of travel-weary souls.
The ghost took a step forward and stopped.
It was no longer moving empty limbs through an altered space, the ghost was now moving its own limbs and running to help.
Excited he drove forward, no longer thinking of itself as a soul escaped, and lifted the largest box he could find. When the ghost remembered his name it was a nice Dutch name, and then he sang a nice Dutch tune. The dream of his afterlife faded a little. The spectre tried to remember its death and the sun he'd visited so far away, the one which he had watched endlessly aboard ship. Its death appeared so far away now, but it was predictable, oh so predictable.
It tried to keep the memory close that the sun is but one in a near infinite set. It wasn't a delicate bulb readily blooming a seed of fire within. He had seen it with his own eyes as a phantasm traversing the universe. But there was too much to remember now, he was alive and wouldn't undergo many more ocean crossings before traversing across that lake country.
The ghost would write to his home as much as he could, to leave a tale of his passage. He was raised to read and write, but what he'd seen was far out of his bounds to reiterate. It would be as though to explain that humanity could sail across the oceans in a few weeks to a man who has only ever dwelt in caves. It wasn't as though he hadn't tried, but his vocabulary could only be stretched so far. A ship's manifest, a letter to an old friend, these were the things his mind could put on paper.
The memory of the ghost who had fled this land could now only be expressed as though wisps of straw. The clarity was all well and good when one's mind made it a point to hold on, but thoughts intrude and life moves one to think on and on. The straw comes loose, and into an ocean of black goes one's mortality.
So as the days wore on, the ghost left the shores of his homestead with the feeling as if on another expedition.
It was as if the illustrious hinterland had become not a secluded sanctuary for the dispossessed, but was a sun unto itself, twirling on an axis unaware and unafraid of the systems beyond.
That night, after the crew had unloaded the ship and made camp, he sat across from the incoming tide.
He sat there for a long time.
Until the sun the ghost remembered touched the tide once again.
After being overcome by a Texan's rant about how we have to teach useful skills like how to make Koolade, I wrapped myself up and left the bar, “Big Chill”. Half way down the street, searching for my card to pay for a taxi, I realized I'd left it in the bar with the tab unpaid, so I returned intending to leave immediately.
Then I met an Irish man who shared my frustration about the Texan, and spared a few words of encouragement, then walked away; and now it’s 6a.m. and I’ve just finished some great big stew with an australian-accented Korean guy, who’d led us, a party of Americans to a restaurant but a short walk down from my workplace.
The trip from Bar to Bar was one of the more disconcerting moments of the night. This night’s party split and I, with a spicy couple who gave the chills of thug rap wannabes, grabbed a taxi. From what I saw, we took a cab the wrong way around and ended up where we started, then walking down the wrong way an alley, to which I responded with walking the right way. The nice looking Korean girl of the two pulled me back revealing that one of their group had already secured us transit from here, they’d just forgotten all about it.
Playing rap, cursing like sailors, and innuendo out the window, we got to Ajou-ro(ad), but somehow it looked unfamiliar once we got on, I swore it couldn’t have been it until I saw that shambling restaurant I spent most of my first night in Suwon at lit up like a ghost ship at the onset of bursting into flames. We got to Plan B, a movie about the Korean War was on tv. We drank 2 dollar beer. This was good.
