NATURE OF INVITING - [HIATUS] - alternate universe - canon div., feuding families (shelby vs solomon), protective!polly & finn & ada, romeo and juliet but make it ganglands i guess?
SAY IT - alternate universe - canon div. , hurt, angst, secret relationship
A LOSING GAME - hurting tommy, alternate universe - mod. setting?), comforting Polly
HEART SHAPED BOX - alternate universe - canon div., secret relationship, tommy in denial, pushy alfie
fallout tv
BLOODHOUND - The Ghoul/Cooper Howard x You/OC - [ONGOING]
“Oh, well, I don’t have any. Uh, not anymore, I mean. Not really.”
“Shame. When did you lose them?”
A pondered thought. A second guess.
“A long time ago.”
I think I lost my parents sometime before I was born. Maybe in the midst of conception or somewhere in between their first glances of me, when the reality that life and its children, their children, could not fix the brokenness writhing inside their chests or the fatality festering in their minds. A reality that they could not fix themselves in their pursuit to hurt and be hurt again and again. It wasn’t this loop they inflicted on us. In a child, one after the other, five so in a row it turns out. It felt like they were creating life again and again just to see what element or factor in this particular run of a predisposed offspring could and would destroy it. Destroy us. Or maybe they were searching for a cure, trying to create it. But a child cannot be a cure. A child cannot mend. A child could not mend by any means the seeds which a compulsion for chaos pain had so planted.
So many writers describe the chest like this: rib bones a cage, lungs and moving parts just cogs in the machine to a cluster of blooming organics and wood rot that grows into something beautiful. The whole act so botanical, so ethereal. The petrichor and deciduous balm reeks, chokes me just to think about. But I think the chest, the heart, the soul, doesn’t always grow. Not in the way poets describe. Sometimes—like a cage burdened with an unwilling animal trapped and left with nothing to sustain itself—it rots. Sometimes those same outstretched curved ivory arches that act like a metaphoric literary greenhouse are more akin to a catacomb. Rather than cultivate and feed, birth, it bleeds and putrefies while it sits. Sodden like a drenched and decaying unwanted thing.
I imagine my parents' chests something like a chapel. I’m watching from outside, of course, vision colored by the pristine glass work (blues for wisdom, reds for sacrifice). The foundation is crumbling and worn by the years, but up-kept by a community that does so out of obligation: never need. Beneath the bare bones of those sanctified walls lay a truth that would rather just stay buried. Bodies on bodies on bodies—all of which were once love—or that’s what they tell themselves. Now they were just mummified by many means to lay away in dark, damp earth in case my parents wanted to revisit them one stormy night with a trip to the cellar.
Maybe my parents kept me there, petrified parts of me they deemed worthy or consolable. Maybe they viewed me through a rose colored coffin glass, something akin to Rosalia Lombardo, except even her father had purer intentions in preservation than mine.
What is most confusing about the loss of my parents is that they never felt like mine to begin with, and so their loss too falls onto the hearts and minds of everyone I know they knew. I mourn through the idea of my parents, or what they could have been, who they were for other people but never myself.
That’s not to say it was all bad. I can mourn the filtered moments, little streaks of luminance that scatter through the dark of my memories like morning’s first daybreak peeking over the horizon in reprieve from a darkest night. There is scattered happiness, and even that feels like mourning dressed up in my father's coat, so to speak. These filtered mournings wear my mother's blouse and boast her heels, but the way they look at me is all wrong. A wrongness I’ve known since birth. A wrongness that my grandmother and her mother before her knew as well.
I think this loss, this mourning, has been with me all my life. Were my parents the ones to begin it, set it in motion? Surely not. And what of their parents…or theirs before? Is it their burden then, too? It just feels like the consign. A chalice. A drinking cup for the generations. Something passed down out of necessity. Drink, my mother’s-mothers-mother whispers to me from the dark liquid filling the cup. Drink and begin again. I would rather starve than begin again what my parents did to me. What theirs did to them. To feed the rot inside their chests, let it mulch between my teeth like a false sustenance. I would rather choke.
Alluvium - clay, silt, sand, gravel, or similar detrital material deposited by running water
Apophenia - the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)
Asterism - a group of stars that form a pattern in the night sky
Atrabilious - given to or marked by melancholy; gloomy; ill-natured, peevish
Bloodroot - a plant (Sanguinaria canadensis) of the poppy family having a red root and sap and bearing a solitary lobed leaf and white flower in early spring
Camelopard - an archaic word for giraffe
Clairsentience - perception of what it not normally perceptible
Decumbiture - a horoscope calculated at the time of taking to one's sickbed
Fluvial - of, relating to, or living in a stream or river; produced by the action of a stream
Gamboge - also spelled camboge, can be used to describe the vivid yellows of autumn
Grimalkin - a domestic cat—especially an old female one
Hibernaculum - a shelter occupied during the winter by a dormant animal (such as an insect, snake, bat, or marmot)
Monochromatism - complete color blindness in which all colors appear as shades of gray
Mordant - biting and caustic in thought, manner, or style
Offing - the near or foreseeable future
Pareidolia - the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern
Riparian - relating to or living or located on the bank of a natural watercourse (such as a river) or sometimes of a lake or a tidewater
Sirocco - a hot desert wind that blows northward from the Sahara toward the Mediterranean coast of Europe; more broadly, it is used for any kind of hot, oppressive wind
Squall - describes a sudden violent wind often accompanied by rain or snow
Stereognosis - ability to perceive or the perception of material qualities (such as shape) of an object by handling or lifting it; tactile recognition
Struthious - of or relating to the ostriches and related birds; and more specifically, ignoring something that needs attention
Susurrous - full of whispering sounds
Synastry - concurrence of starry position or influence upon two persons; similarity of condition or fortune prefigured by astrology
If any of these words make their way into your next poem/story, please tag me, or send me a link. I would love to read them!
More: Lists of Beautiful Words ⚜ More: Word Lists ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs
We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims —
that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.
Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself
personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,
— casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,
then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,
politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak
of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;
that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss
of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;
— what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction - subgenres of science fiction that are set in a time period where the earth as we know it is coming to an end. Post-apocalyptic novels almost always take place in the future, although some describe the end of past civilizations that no longer exist.
Common Themes in Apocalyptic Fiction
The themes that govern apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books tend to involve circumstances that lead to mass unrest, societal breakdown, and widespread death. These include:
Climate change
Nuclear holocaust
Medical pandemic
The rise of sentient robots
The destruction of a major city
Endless war
A fascist government engaged in mind control
In novels with these themes, a main character is usually tasked with navigating the deathtraps of a world afflicted by the prevailing apocalyptic conditions.
Origins of Apocalyptic Fiction
Apocalyptic literature has existed for millenia.
Major western religions ranging from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism contain multiple tales of a civilization or locale reaching its end.
The stories of the garden of Eden, Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the book of Revelation all contain apocalyptic themes.
The ancient Mesopatamian epic of Gilgamesh is also concerned with the end of the known world.
Apocalyptic stories of Babylon have been written all the way from antiquity to the present.
The Romantic and Gothic authors of the early 19th century explored apocalyptic themes, perhaps most famously in Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826).
Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" centers on disembodied souls discussing the recent destruction of the Earth.
In the 20th century, the apocalyptic genre grew in the wake of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War nuclear arms race.
Novelists, essayists, and filmmakers conjured many an apocalyptic world that offered everything from zombie wars to a desolate post-nuclear wastelands.
Examples of Apocalyptic Fiction
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have given rise to what many consider the best post-apocalyptic books and post-apocalyptic stories ever written. These books are often also cross-categorized as dystopian fiction and speculative fiction. Some also fit the young adult subgenre. Here are some highlights of the genre, divided by theme:
Post-Disaster Wastelands
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Stand by Stephen King
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
One Second After by William R. Forstchen
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Swan Song by Robert McCammon
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Postman by David Brin
"A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison
Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, a trilogy by Margaret Atwood
The Mad Max film series by James McCausland and George Miller
Nature Gone Awry
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
Zombie Apocalypse
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Walking Dead, a graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard
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origamiaround
janainaart
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
