Muse By The Sea
“You will accept my submission!”
Mario shouted then flouted rational reason, hurling his keyboard through the window, where it flew like a bird somewhere out-of-season.
Miranda knocked, concerned. She was always concerned. Even though there was no reason for concern—she need not be concerned. What a bother it was all this concern she would impose on others. It almost reached the point where it itself was concerning.
“Is everything alright?” she peeked around the corner of the door to the room, an uninvited guest, but it was her lighthouse, and it was her light keeping Mario awake in the hours of the night most unfathomably dark.
“Is everything matter?” Mario replied, imbued with a sardonic rage almost contradictory.
He thought he was being awfully clever, and his temper dissipated into conceited amusement, sitting there on his chair grinning like an ape who just stole the zookeeper’s keys. Little good that does when he still doesn’t know how to work a lock. But Mario was content here, being king of caged apes, stupid and prideful.
“I suppose it is—except when it’s not. They’ve observed non-matter and dark-matter and striped-matter and plaid-matter and… I could go on?
Miranda spoke as tenderly moist as an angel in a bathhouse, soft and steamy. She crossed her arms and Mario knew it was over. He stopped smiling and itched his scaly arms, glaring at the floor, defeated.
Miranda offered him a cup of tea, but he sorely refused. “I have better things to do with my time—much like the matter you so cherish to speak of!”
Mario groaned, climbing out the window without an umbrella, even though it was raining proportions of poseidon outside, and Miranda just sighed. She’d make the tea anyway, for when he returned dampened and damned.
But Mario strolled to the precipice of the shore, swirling night wrapped around him. A full-moon hung in intrepid suicide, illuminating the world with its despair. Craggy rocks slashed foamy beasts in half as the sea coughed wave after wave in perpetual sickness. Mario felt nauseous watching this process. He stared ahead, over the gloomy void of ocean, unto the horizon where the shadowed sky, prickling in glowy stars, caressed the feverishly churning blades of distant sea, melting into each other to a singular point of blurred paint.
This was an illusion, however, for Mario knew the sea was eternal. There was no such physical instance where the sky and the sea actually met. Nor did they blend together like cheap paints.
“Why can I not be accepted?” Mario mused. But nobody and nothing had any sort of answer.
In reluctance, he tilted his view, looking back in lucid nostalgia at the lighthouse, whose height splintered into the clouds. A hazy ray spiraled around it, like some sort of radiant and formless dragon. Then Mario returned to the eternal sea, perplexed and perspired, ready to dive in and let the guts of winding ocean organs digest him.
It was then he considered the inconsiderable: maybe he was unsubmittable. Maybe he was a boring clod with overlong phrases and ridiculously unrealistic descriptors. Maybe his language was unrestrained and quirkily variant for the sake of being quirkily variant. Maybe he had no sense of narrative form or empathetic characterization. Maybe he was pretentious to even think so, or too unaffected to care. Maybe his stories were not meaningful enough, indulging in nihilist literary-noodling, curving in angles unrecognizable for purposes unentertaining and quite turgid.
Oh, but then he remembered Miranda and the cup of tea and the way she folded her arms like an origami volcano—oh, what the fuck is this?
I couldn’t think of the next thing to write because I realized I wrote myself into a corner—one of those irredeemable corners, where even mice scuttle around and spiders snicker at any fool who tries to set themselves there.
I snarled at my screen and snapped the keyboard from its electric veins—
Okay, I brought it back and reconnected it to its life-juice. But the furious discontentment remains as fury-fused as ever, and Miranda still hasn’t finished the tea. Is there even tea? I’m beginning to suspect not. Wait—
Is there even a Miranda?
No, that was a trick. I wouldn’t be so daft to twist a story in such a banal method. No, really, Mario decides it was just the airs of the night or something in the humors of the evening or something like that. He returns to the lighthouse. Miranda greets him with a fresh-towel and tenderizing honey-hibiscus tea.
Mario apologizes. Miranda smirks, then grips him in a sympathetic embrace, whispering to his lonely ear, “I know it doesn’t matter much to you. But I would accept you no matter who you come as and how you be.”
Then she kisses his cheek and they make themselves comfortable by the eternal fire.
Fin.