#52 writings

[jupiterreed]

erosion

the floorboards hum,  grimy with the gore of a thousand feet; angels rise from murky waters where they made us plead for it. for you.

i won’t talk about how the hope sat poisoned in all of us, guilty of make-believe crimes, weak; at the end of her rope, of ours.

or how the sky hungers for the human body, how you pledged your throat to the cherry tree, bent the knee to a dead fruit.

yet there are far worse forms of worship, how i quit seeing halos in hospital bracelets, or blood in puddles of rain, funerals in the razor-slash  injury of summer. j.r

[perpetualmovements]

I’m trying to think how to describe you without sounding pathetic because I don’t know how to write about things that aren’t dark. about things that aren’t whiskey laced kisses, self-medicated inebriation, shivering in parks in the dark, wanting to go home, wanting to be alone. salty pillows, existential doubt, thinking there’s something wrong with me. regret. regret. regret. I can’t drink whiskey because it tastes like a time I can’t talk about, but I can say this: you’re the honey laced within the whiskey. you’re light. scintillating. you’re things I never thought I’d see; things I didn’t think I deserved. I dreamt of you, three nights in a row, and I didn’t wake feeling like you’d held my head underwater. these waves of good intentions are gentle, summer seas lapping over my skin. for a moment I feel sublime before the doubt comes in. I whisper to the darkness, I deserve this.

pj / learning to be loved

[alfareria]

I am your clenched jaw. A giant black hole cracked open. I am that girl god who cries when her mother is in the room. God. I am an empty space. A sadness. A set of weak teeth. I am apathy and her large brown eyes. I am a fevered dream in my room last night. Awakening in the middle of a sob. A wringing pair of boneless hands. I am some spector afraid of giant goldfish swallowing the moon; leaving the night sky empty and bloodless.

b.r. 52 of 52 writings

[sascerides]

Alicia Buchanan . Week 52

Every week, I pick a name off a list of randomly generated names and write a short short story based on this person. This year, I give them all a special power, or perhaps a curse. I thought I would share some of those stories here. This, is Alicia Buchanan who is the last person of 2016:

————-

The first time she couldn’t figure out how to make it stop. Or rather. Once she did make it stop she couldn’t make it start again. The time. The world. The everything.

For 3 year old Alicia Buchanan it was not so much the All. The existence around her. The passing of time. It was her mum. Alicia sneezed and Mum stopped. Frozen mid-laugh. 3 year old Alicia first panicky. Then hysteric. Then quiet. Sobbing on the floor while the world stood still around her.

For Alicia’s mum the experience was quite different but not any less terrifying. One moment she was playing with her child on the floor. The next, Alicia was sitting in the corner, tears streaming down her face. Cold, shivering and dripping wet. She never found out what happened that day, nor would she ever understand.

After that it did not happen for years. Alicia grew to forget it and her mother told herself it was a bad dream. A bad dream, nothing more. Alicia grew and the world kept moving. For years nothing happened until that one day. 6 year old Alicia sitting at the kitchen table, playing with her doll. Her baby sister crawling over the floor. Mum looking away, just for a second. The baby crawling towards the balcony. One moment Mum is turning to grab the baby’s bottle. The next Alicia is standing across the room. Holding her sister in her arms while closing the balcony door. Her young face a jumble of fear and panic and breathlessness.

6 year old Alicia Buchanan spent hours and days trying to figure out how to control it. Perhaps a word, perhaps a movement. Perhaps a certain way of breathing or thinking. A jump or a snap or a whistle. Staying up late at night staring at the cars on the road far beneath her room. Biting her lip until it bled and yet the cars kept moving and the city kept living and nothing ever stopped.

7 year old Alicia found that it happened more around her sister. The toddler taking her first shaky steps while her sister watches from the doorway. The toddler coming to a halt falling forward only to be caught by her sisters arms. The toddler dropping a spoon only for Alicia to catch it. Alicia catching leaves as they fall and handing them to her sister. Alicia having the favourite toy ready seconds after her mum realises it has been lost.

Little Baby Betty grew up a protected child. Her sister always by her side she never fell far enough to get hurt. She never burned or cut herself. She never lost anything for long and she never went hungry long enough to voice it. When she started school her bullies would only bully her once. After that, their shoes would suddenly be tied together and their belts undone.

Everyone knew Betty Buchanan had a guardian angel and everyone knew who it was. Yet no one ever asked a question.

10 year old Alicia watching from a classroom window as her sister climbs the school yard oak. A flock of children around her shouting their praise or their worry or fear. Betty putting one hand in front of the next. Slipping. Falling. Screaming. Alicia with her heart in her throat as Betty stops mid-air. Alicia running down the stairs. Pushing through a crowd of frozen children. Betty’s scream, paused in her throat, turning to a laugh as her sister catches her. Alicia spending the next 12 years always watching her sister.

The first time it happened Alicia did not know how to stop it. How to make the planet start spinning again. The last time it happened she did not want to. Not yet. Always not yet.

19 year old Baby Betty Buchanan in a hospital bed. Tired eyes looking at her sister. The doctors have told them there’s sure to be a cure. “but she is running out of time. We simply cannot save her fast enough”. The costant beeping of machines keeping tab as baby Betty fades away. Alicia looking at her sister and Betty looking at her. She grew up protected but this Alicia cannot protect her from and she knows it. Alicia biting her lip till it bleeds. Then letting go of her sisters hand.

Between one beep and the next Alicia gets up. Her sister caught halfway through a cough. Momentarily not in pain and Alicia will keep her like this. She leaves the room and she does not look back. Instead she walks and she reads and she searches. 21 year old Alicia loosing track of her age in the space between two seconds. She does not know how long she is gone but when she returns she is holding a cure. As she hobbles into the hospital room. Her knees old with gout and her eyes almost blind from years of searching. 71 year old Alicia sitting down next to her sister and taking her hand before she lets the next beep come along.

For Betty the moment is different. She closes her eyes for a moment and she opens them to her sisters face. Alicia now a jumble of fatigue and satisfaction. Her eyes tired and wrinkled and pale. Her hands crumbled and bent. Her hair thin and dry and grey. Alicia unrecognisable but smiling.

“I did it Baby Betty. I did it. You are safe”

And she never needs to do it again.

———-

For more stories like this. Click here.

[jupiterreed]

I could almost taste it; the sillage of the departed. Lurid whites of faces pressing up against barren shop windows, on street corners in cities that split open at the seams & construct trails of light on the bottoms of our teeth. Here the weather hardly shifts. The crows call out to their dead mothers. The old moon, like a caterpillar, crawls scrawnily up the sky. My brain simmers, a fried egg sizzling in cloud-flesh. And the angels are boiling. And I’m feeding off the lungs of men who left their children for the vivacious banks of the sea. And the boy tells me to forget that he loves me. And somewhere behind the crumbling roof of the old bowling alley my father owned, sleep the ghouls who were hoping to step out of their bodies for one night. And never reclaimed them. I guess next time I’ll make them kiss me dead. Allow my bones to be spurned into rain! Let the night bewitch me! Let me disappear, let me grate like an antique shelf. So that when the hydrangeas saunter, up into the sun’s ultraviolet heart, we can all ignite with them. Reiterate our pleas to Icarus. Beg for a god that is not fooled by sediments of cigarette ash, as we drown ourselves in an entombing siege of holy water. In burnt graves, in dead oceans.

Paraphrasing What The Phantom Decreed To Me In A Grocery Store Aisle || j.r

[jupiterreed]

stray blue light slipping in from the decaying backyard, & our bodies are still aglow in the brooding cusp of the dark. walls crumbling apocalyptically against lullabies of peeling plaster. our heads hung low in our hands. another night ripped out of the pages of an old fairytale, aching for snow. your skin the utterance of a prayer, my mouth bending down your disciple, nights like this the wolves conduct a forbidden waltz & we sweep all our doubts under the old rug with its filigree suns & moons. when the fireflies stir, it’ll be an orchestra for the wounded, & something like magic will havoc the warm spring air, strumming its docile hymns. we’ll dream of receiving blessings from all the gods we used to believe in as kids, we’ll dream of cruising down the coast of santa monica in your brother’s hand-me-down mustang & love letters in the sky. constellations that spell out all the grainy, unspoken noise that sleeps in between us in echoes of spellbound delirium.

[jupiterreed]

girl is not your babe / not your mother / not the flower vase you unearthed from the back of the tool shed or the indignation you carry within you when your lonesomeness stretches a village; clutters the streets & you start tripping into potholes filled with your own blood. she is in the sun that carries disembodied light across the water, musters hymns of breathlessness, she is what burns, plummets, spirals droplets of boysenberry wine. she is weightlessness. gravity in reckless translation, a vigil for all your rabidity, and when she leaves, she’ll leave a grave within you, & the birds will return

to claw at your back, & she’ll still be clutching your skull, she’ll rekindle the embers of a soul you’d thought you’d lost to a factory fire years ago. girl is not your daydream / nor a delicacy / girl quivers & flays skin. she is a series of white flashes before your eyes, as the long night sets in to summer a warring. 

[jupiterreed]

Sunken, raptured, diseased, they called us by many names. Girlhood like a dagger, girlhood as the peacock poised under tangles of rain. Our girlhood is a battlefield, always a body left to float in the river. Always a crumpled moon. Chopsticks for fingers. Pulse detonating grenades. Sometimes which fit in the throat like skewers, others that drowned us in the bleachers with the inconceivable chorus of a thousand-something people chanting death in the stands. I am Hecate, I am Nyx. Beheading the corpses of stars, shooting their toxic plumes up into the woodlands of our fragile veins still often caught billowing in the wind. The aftertaste of which lingers like blood. We were high school girls playing at gods, wolves. With our heads bowed in shame, doom, reverence. We prayed with our teeth. Devouring the light of ancients with reborn hands. Hearts chambered and personified like a missile fired at the nearest stagnant wall, tripping on the shoulders of boys who rattle our skins like poltergeists, always en route our next mid-youth crisis.