Ode to Something Dead

A note to the reader of my little work that is no longer so little: remember that as far as you will ever know, what your mind is about to hold is fictitious literature. In fact, I wrote it when I was eighteen, before I had ever been touched by death or love. Also, know that with every piece of literature there is a difference between the author and the narrator. It is incorrect to assume they are the same person. I take pride in my art, and yet in its revelation to the world I find difficulty. If you can read this, truly, you are exceptional.

 

Ode to Something Dead

 

When I was seventeen, my skin was silver and my resolve, iron, which is like silver but uglier. He was one year my senior, and in that period I learned it takes but one year to convert breath to blood. Now, it is sometime in the winter of my eighteenth year. You are thinking I am young and I am thinking it, too. With my cognizance lodged between heavy months of stumbling upon the realization that my mother had been unfaithful to my father, I stalked fat snowflakes with my eyes as they slithered down my window and out of view. I imagined the flakes tasted stale, flecked with undertones of my last life. They flew too fast for their weight, only to be replaced by their identical counterparts, which upon meticulous scrutiny were far from the same. I knew they would soon become the sludgy quagmire that when frozen yields a slick bowling lane perfect for exhausted automobile tires to forfeit all control and careen into each other. Unlike the snowflakes, I did not take matters lightly. 

Terrified, the little animal in my gut seeks new shelter. The air is cold, but this is not by fault of the snow. It is impossible to attribute catastrophe to a single origin, anyway. My eyes dilated out of focus until the spheres can only absorb reality in mottled white and emerald pixilation, while my little animal pounded against the lining of my stomach as it tried to doge waves of the acid in which it dwells. I was thinking only of myself, a game I had been playing all afternoon. Near the ledge, I grip the windowpane and continue to peer out, indifferent to the splintering wood piercing my hands. The snow is both liberating and confining. For a moment, I pretend to free my afflictions with the flakes on the other side of the window, but the glass is thick. My flesh remains inside. Hours passed without blinking, and soon the sun ran from my eyes and resigned its position to darkness, rendering me blind to a steady world on the other side.

 

[As an aside, I ask you bear in mind all of my words are a metaphor reserved for something more distinguished than initial glance].

***

I was resurrecting the past in grandeur of a time unworthy of resurrection.

We are traveling a lone stretch of road that coils and recoils cloudless miles to hell.  Not actual hell, for I’ve come to reckon eternal damnation is not a physical place, but a dwelling situated only in the bible and in the mind, but the closest place to it: Arizona. It is a scorching land and I have yet to step from the car.

As our vehicle rattles in protest its path through rising elevation, cacti stand statuesque along the roadside and dot the coarse gulley below like so many spices peppering hot soup. My stomach, discontented, snarls. The cacti lead me to think that were they endowed the gift of speech, they would speak powerful words with poised eloquence. Or perhaps they would not feel it necessary to speak at all. Members of a clandestine civilization, the cacti know how a merciless ground can produce something so forgiving. The cacti and I share an earth, but we do not share a world; theirs has rendered them fireproof while mine has not. The revelation of many mysteries has yet to include a blueprint for humanity. Still, I cannot help but notice the only barrier excluding me from learning the secrets of the cacti is a thin metal guard rail that outlines our journey, a bony finger pointing. I pass more cacti. With crooked arms, a tall one waves at me. I place my hand to the smeared glass, pressing, and wonder if I am waving back in greeting or goodbye.

Close to my left but far from my desires, the boy brandishes the remains of a bottle of last night’s liquid luxury and situates a cigarette in the crook of his mouth, his concentration wedged somewhere between the depth of contemplation and the cracking leather seats. He thinks hard with a creased brow, a martyr to mental affliction. I sit beside him in the back, consumed by his smoke, unsticking my bare thighs amongst muffled coughs. The air is dry, but I am a drizzle.

No one risks sitting shotgun beside the loud and peevish Jolie. Crouching forward in a half stance, the wonderfully lanky boy thrusts at his younger sister the vodka he was drinking, which she declined on principle of vowing to her dear Daniel that she would never inebriate herself outside his presence, and especially not while driving. She was lucky to have Daniel, she always said. He was the kind of person who bought roses that never died. The boy offered Jolie the bottle once more before bringing it back down beside him. Without words, I was excluded from the offer. I preferred Nyquil, anyway.

“So, if the weatherman says it’ll snow an inch every hour and it’s been snowing five hours, how many inches of snow have, uh…” the boy rambled.

“…Accumulated?” Rose a weary sigh of mine. Feigned, of course; I cherished his sound. Jolie squealed.

 “What? Yeah.”

The obvious answer was five, which must have been a joke pitched at all figures of reality because we were approaching the volatile and sweltering west, not some pristine snowscape. The boy had never seen snow within the realm of his own eyes, although I suppose there exists far harsher white substances for he to obsess about. Meanwhile, the boy scratched his at hair, a rouge brushfire atop a discontented countenance. Tucking a tangled wisp behind my left ear, I tried to form words and choked. The boy rolled from his position looking out the window and shifted his concentration to me, peering with an ensnared pair of blazing eyes that held pacing captives within a heavy skull. If at any point they were reduced to embers, one knew at mere glance they could and would rekindle stronger than before. Those eyes were never destined to see snow.  

We were friends by association, the boy and I; I loved him and that was the very phrase he would never learn to associate with me. I suppose I never sought reciprocation. But, as long as my wretched heart has trembled, I have never sensed this for another human. Unrequited affection in the highest, but surely not pathetic enough to be akin to the follow-him-around-like-a-blind-puppy-dog kind of love one reads about in those undeserving bestsellers. I looked at him the way a child eyes a tree and thinks; I am going to climb you to the sun. I knew clambering up his branches, drawing him closer, was to grapple with the nothing he felt for me. He cut crescents in his leaves with his fingernails from holding on too tightly and letting go too quickly. He ignored all consequence: he always forgot he was but one tree in a haunted forest.

His hubris was his mind, like all humans but entirely separate. It snapped like a twig in a cerebral thunderstorm. Still, his storms were breathtaking; his mind was much more beautiful than his branches. While most girls fell in love with the organ between his legs, I fell for with the one between his ears. I loved the boy for for his mind. And it was that brakeless, graceless, blazing trip and fall I that embraced the hard earth, paining myself so often that I smothered my own thoughts. I wasted mornings trying to crack his quiet façades and evenings collecting his idiosyncrasies to display in transparent glass jars upon my shelf. Some dawns, I awakened to a dark sun. He was always blocking light. In the ensuing hours I would sulk; dragging my spirit behind me like a limp pillowcase of fruitless daydreams and overextended effort. Save the dreaming for nighttime, the silent boy would remind me. He was never there.

I’m still fighting for peace.

***

“What happens after I die?”

It was not I who spoke, but it elicited my surprise in the disgruntled whine typical of unwanted consciousness. Twisting my head, I asked the car radio’s clock what time it is. 5:05am. I had the feeling I had slept in five minutes too late. I let a hand fall to my front, feeling my lungs fill with early air and deflate. We drove in shifts and it was the boy’s turn.  It was not the question that startled me so much as the deliverance of the boy inquiring, shattering the edge of my consciousness to create a fissure and retrieve me from within. This was not the first time.

“I need to know,” he whispered, an anxious follow-up remark to his own inquiry. A cue. The midnight child tugged at my bed sheets, petrified of what lurked after dusk. Ironically, the boy did not deign to speak to me when Jolie and I first befriended each other. Relations were different now, and perhaps he had he feared me then, or perhaps I would never know. Fear is self-imposed. I liked to imagine it was fear.  

Distant yellow lights filtered through my drowsy slits as I opened my mouth, still wider than my eyes.  The car’s tires met the pavement with a gentle whir. The boy's body softened. His question roused my favorite of life’s monologues - indeed, monologues do occur in this life. They are the quiet motor behind reality, the unseen routine. In the explosion devastating the canyon’s ridge, the anxious creek chattering to the grass, the casket laying its cargo to eternal reprieve with a thud, and the dog sighing in affirmation after a romp, life relays millions of monologues to their own realms. Now, one crept into me. I had written it down many years ago and revised it a dozen times since, a natural flaw of mine. Words are my preferred art for the sole reason I enjoy most things I enjoy: only I possess the rules. Writing is manipulation of something other than self, and fiction is a way to present the pain reality conceals. Ponder it, how can my mere words on a thin slip of tree, even if articulated, make you feel? How can ink and breath make you feel? I digress.

I knew what the boy sitting beside me sought: that linguistic dance, that ritualized rhetoric I performed only for him when no other could interrupt. This was not the first time. I thrust my eyes backward in brief apprehension. Over my shoulder, Giulia slept slumped in the backseat.

And so it began, “I don’t know,” except I did. “You know energy begets energy. We, the imposing hypothetical, cannot understand it. But think about the vastness of the universe for a second. Or, think about a second. Time. Humankind invented it, but we can’t even comprehend it, and we never will on this planet. We keep using time, though. And distance. Technically, we should never be able to traverse from point A to point B. You can break distance into halves, quarters, and eighths forever. Forever! There are infinite sectors between these points " you should never reach point B. And yet, you do. It is simultaneously possible and impossible.”

“Our earth is a place of ending. We own it from the time of our first terrified breath to the impending day we squeeze out our final exhalation. We always hear that ‘everything that breathes must die,’ but by ‘everything’ we only mean the things we have come to recognize. We understand how the body works, and thus, the body dies. We do not understand the mind. Humanity cannot grasp what it is - a mind - and so we cannot kill it like we do our bodies. Still, you are your mind, and your mind must live on. This must be because the universe preserves our minds, so logically; the energy of our minds can never cease after establishment. Energy is never lost, only transferred. This has to be, since the universe never ends and the universe is all that we are composed of and all that we will ever be or think about or within…”

I reached for the air to continue, “There are big indicators all over the place hiding behind the guile of insignificance, like how a wave folds before it breaks. Eventually, it becomes another wave. That’s it. Long before your lungs lose their oxygen or your blood begins to coagulate and stick to the weak walls of your decaying guts, you have already begun to continue on. You have to. You don’t have a choice because the never-ending universe does not give you one. That is not how presence of any length operates. Existence consists of consistence. You may have been born six hundred years after Shakespeare, but you’ll continue on after your earthly death just as long as he will. It’s indefinite. In every moment, conscious or otherwise, we are anachronisms of self. Can you grasp this? I don’t imagine our continued existence long after we’re gone is as picturesque as a heaven, but hell, we go on. It would be utterly moronic to believe for even a millisecond that our earth, a miniscule speck on the ever-widening plane of universal existence, is the only place with life that continues just as intelligent as ours. Either that, or we are alone. Both are equally frightening. But we cannot be alone - do you mean to tell me that…”

“I can’t,” the wide-eyed boy interrupted, ten years younger, taking a swig from the bottle of vodka before passing it to me - also ritual. I was too electrified to swallow much. These words of mine were fresh as I felt unadulterated abandon creep up on my ancient, neatly revised script. What if I heeded my begging tongue and turned to an impromptu one directing me towards that unexplored space? I could break my own rule. With one hand gripping the steering wheel and the other lingering dangerously, thrillingly close to my upper thigh, the boy sat rapt. I couldn’t feel if my skin was glowing or rotting. I couldn’t feel. I would break my own rule. I cherished the way his eyes fell upon the road but his attention fell upon me, the way his silhouette was ignited by moonlight relinquishing its last manifestation, the way in which his nose wonderfully curved upwards beneath that pair of broad-burning irises.

I launched the finale, “Do you mean to tell me that we are alone and then we end? Our primal ancestors have only been here six million years, and we, two hundred thousand. That sounds massive, sure, but the universe has an eccentric way of distorting things. Simply, for lack of a better term, that’s one-eightieth of a singular string on the grand bass cello of existence. We are insignificant! But like all things kindled by the universal flame of life, we have been given the greatest power: to continue. And now we have come to realize that we are, in fact, significant. This earth is a place of ending and the universe is a place of infinite continuation, but the earth is within the universe and so, we are within the universe. We are a part of the universe inside, out, and everywhere. That part of us can’t end. We can’t end. You can’t end.”

“The end.” The ritual hushed and fell. Beaming, the boy thrust a fist skyward and struck his palms together in shattering applause. I shed my reverie. With a snuffled snort, Jolie awoke. The boy gulped another mouthful of vodka and held up the bottle for me to press my lips against the smooth glass and welcome the sharp liquid inside. It was the last taste we shared. I wish I could say it never ended for either of us, but this place is earth and a moment is not a mind. 

 

A Short Interlude

 

From the same vein as I, my wiry grey father was consumed by metaphor. Someplace in the middle of reconciling the realization of his spouse’s infidelity, he sat down at my bedside in a long black coat and explained to me that even the moon, the illuminator of the night, has craters. The separation between the moon and the sun lies in how they perceive these shadowy areas: the moon appreciates its imperfections and uses them as a patient harbinger of ensuing brilliance, while the sun burns up. People are the same way, he told me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. I never forgot. I have not seen my father since.

 

Continued

 

After a long while, a heavily caffeinated Jolie, distended with chocolate covered espresso beans and warmer-than-lukewarm Starbucks double-shot lattes, announced with gusto that she had to pee and if someone didn’t escort her to a restroom soon, he was going to become a shameless human urine target. In reluctant accordance, our steadfast driver, who had refused to let me drive when his shift ended, guided the old car between the highway lines and onto an exit that lead to a rather vacant Sunoco with a convince store attached. The vehicle gasped for air, hacking up a petroleum spitball. I arched my spine to absorb impending shock as the boy hit the brakes and Giulia fled from the car with a projected shriek matching that of the tires. I waited for the boy, who was now relatively sober. He pulled the key from the ignition in a singular swift movement and without looking in my direction, asked, “Ready?” Throwing a quick sidelong glance at the glove box, he shook his head, lit a cigarette, and stepped out of the car. He had exhausted five since sunup.   

“I gotta get new tires,” The boy mused, clanging his hand on the hood of the tired vehicle and motioning me to follow him inside the store, “Always be mindful of what comes between you and the earth.”

He snuck a grin at his vague allusion to my words. As we walked, I eyed him askance. My gaze lingered long enough to notice he was gripping the car key like an arrow pointed backwards, the tiny weapon clenched so that blood dribbled from the palm of his hand, the same one that lingered so close to my thigh earlier. Blood, the commerce of agony. The stream beaded and traveled southward down his chest and into his shirt, playing on the ridges of his ribcage, etching at its origin a little crimson spider web between his interior thumb and forefinger. We dared not speak in acknowledgment and he did not shudder even a little as I reached out to him.  He almost held my hand.      

I gathered some static walking through the door, and upon my entrance two matters surprised me. One, there was actually a live cashier staffing the place. Two, Jolie was arguing with him.

“I’m NOT trying to cause any trouble!” she huffed, throwing a barrage of items on the counter. My friend had relieved herself hastily. I figured the lattes would have detained her for some time.

“Miss…” the man tried, a squat, sweaty, breathy fellow. Little wonder he was wilting.

“B***h lies,” The boy rolled his eyes and jogged over to soothe the situation, bumping his sister from the counter with his hip. He cleared his throat, unenthused but charismatic all the same, “My apologies, sir. I’ll take care of this, sir.”

Another man shouted from the back, invisible, asking how to operate a microwave. I wondered if he ever felt like he was eating radiation. The cashier raised a finger and smiled at the boy before jogging to the back of the store. I snatched a medium-sized jar of crunchy peanut butter and a white plastic knife from the shelf and envisioned a heist, but decided instead to pull out my wallet. I had no gun. Jolie slunk away. What I really wanted was cheese puffs and another bottle of Nyquil. I had neglected to eat or bathe for the past three days.

 “Daniel is calling me, anyway,” harrumphed Jolie to no one I could see, anchoring a phone to her ear. “Hello, baby! Yessss, I’ve been waiting. Aw, is it stuck in the fish tank again…?”

I never accustomed myself to the female infatuation with boyfriends. To love is to possess an elastic soul. Mine was something of steel. To love something that did not love you back: now that was ice cold. As a writer, commitment to anything other than words is dangerous, and even those are often stolen artwork. The problem is, boyfriends are fertile soil for literary exploitation - their flaws, quirks, secrets, everything screams to form pages - and they must surrender to eventual oblivion. Writing converts a conscious to stone. This progression is only natural; life mimics art. When a wasp spawns inside the hollowed skeleton of an insect larger than itself, the insect must die, but at what price? In the opinion of the wasp, it is always worthwhile.

We left the store minutes later, the boy, Jolie, and I, after I purchased my jar of lumpy carbohydrates and he bought five packs of Marlboros, discounted by happy consequence of his charming and accommodating demeanor. As we exited, the cashier saluted. It was 5:05 in the early evening.

I plopped into the front seat and Aden jammed the key in the ignition slot, revving the engine for me, although I was the one sitting behind the wheel. I stepped lightly on the accelerator. The most decorated reckless driver in my hometown, I could simultaneously eat, sing, story tell, and drive without much effort, although in the past I’ve had some encounters with pedestrians that briefly robbed me of breath. I reminded everyone in the car with a grin. Jolie smirked, the boy nodded in somber reply.

Predictable.

After unscrewing the lid off my peanut butter jar and jamming the knife in it, I put a bite in my mouth and allowed the edge of my tongue to gently grace the serrated edges, pressing with just enough force to keep my blood within. I paused mid-mouthful and dropped my gaze to the tattered wallet resting on my legs. “Look at this pathetic old thing. So vogue,” I snorted, more than slightly disgusted that my sense of style had yet to catch up with my age.

“Never regret anything. At one time it was precisely what you wanted.”

“That was true, but it’s not what I need now.”

“Pull over.”  

I heeded his request and stopped the car and the boy opened the glove box and I felt confusion and he reached for five items that I later recognized as a bottle of kerosene and another bottle of kerosene and a canister of lighter fluid and a pack of matches and the Marlboros and I did not stop him and he walked a few paces from the car and I still felt confusion and he lit a cigarette on fire and then he lit himself on fire and I knew he was too far because I no longer felt confusion. 

Overkill? Maybe. And that was how I assisted suicide. I had been asleep for five minutes too long. 

I should spare all detail. I should not say that I watched him shriek as cool calculated satisfaction morphed into splitting terror, as human skin peeled off his melting form, slogged to the pavement, and curled like paper flesh exhausting into little gasps that fueled an expanding pile of smoldering flesh. I should not tell you that I watched his blazing eyes watch me back until they burst from the confines of their sockets and gushed down his face, nor should I mention how furiously he crashed to the earth when he went down, kerosene-laden, snapping his bones like a propeller crushing a turtle’s shell. It is incredible how things die in flame, like a rotten pineapple caving inward. And certainly, I should neglect to mention how his brain sloshed around in his skull for a bit before sputtered out gaping holes in his face and the back of his head. I should not remind myself how his hot blood splashed against my body after I bolted from the car. And what, then? You cannot mistake a sigh for a scream.

The only other time death bristled me with any magnitude I could equate to this circumstance was when my first dog died. Her heart had imploded on the inside. My mother tried on a voice that shook, tear-stricken, to announce his passing while I ate chicken wings on the carpeted floor of a hotel room in Boston. I proceeded to vomit and cry.

Lack of sentient recount on my part would be neglecting the preservation of the boy’s truth. When history is spoken, not all will believe it. Everyone testified the boy had died lighting himself on fire. The truth is, he had died long before he thought of striking a match.

 

 

There was no body at your funeral, although I didn’t attend.

What is reality with all these questions? Why does life require death to force existence? I can't rationalize why my head always offends me or why I can only narrate the remainder of my existence in a tired monotone. I can't figure why the air grows denser or why the lights grow dimmer or why my chest grows deeper, but I know these complications trace back to a time when eyes still found a home in your head. I am up to five bottles of Nyquil a week. Still, I crave something more. I crave a thing vanished, whether it is you or my mind. It's probably just the mere memory of you, but the problem with memories is that attractive though they are, they cannot catch me when I fall.

And I am falling. I never got the chance to view myself through your eyes, though I can still taste you in the back of my throat and smell you on my clothes. I coveted your touch and instead, you assaulted me. Still, I am infatuated with your fleeting notion. I want to believe you are out there, stalking the cosmic pace of the universe in every new and dying star, every shrieking solar flare, every fathomless creation sparked by its predecessor. You are a universe inside and out. Inside, out, and nowhere. When I wish upon your star, I am only several million years too late. You are perpetual continuation, burning, and I cannot cool down.  

How long does it take for color to drain from the petals of a dead flower? I am certain you have not evaporated entirely, like how fingers of the sun stretch all day to touch everything: shadows on brick, tides along a shoreline, vomit on a sidewalk. You changed the way I welcome precipitation, the way my pen disgraces paper, the way the lens in my eye adjusts to darkness. Every novel ever authored was written in your awareness. Every code ever cracked and every harmony ever composed was stirred to transport our memories to a fragile place, so you could leave along with them. You formed galaxies in my lungs and although they are beautiful, I cannot breathe.

And even as I choke, I love you.  

I wish I could claim that your absence inspired me to create verses in your honor or traverse mountains in search of a zenith you never reached. I wish I could say that that when you left, I began volunteering in a crowded city with kids whose struggles were identified, resolved, those with an opportunity to make earth-time worthwhile.

You made certain neither of us got that.  

Those who push the limits find that the limits push back. You died a deathless death. My own will be tremendously different, still, you are an exceptional disaster. Your secret was no more unique than the rest: you wanted to die. The brilliance within your scheme lies in that you accomplished it, and on your own terms. This is significant. Most of us never will; cruel situations only make a hero of one. The lasting mark you left was a laceration, unwarranted but at least distinguished from the others.  You are a scar inside and out. Inside, out, and everywhere.

And hell, I still love you like I loved you months ago when you weren’t flying across a parking lot somewhere in a whirlwind of ashes. I will not vilify you. I love you for who you are and for what you did. That ridiculous foreign affair of my mother’s seems so slight given our existential plight. I had been spending my hours imagining a future that had already come and passed.

And as you fall away, I realize your memory is only blurred now because I choose perceive it so. We both had choices.

I am the final reminder of war on a battlefield. After you left, I became obsessed with a covert route of veins that run pulsating races down and across me, blue, concealed by my insubstantial flesh until I summon them to spew their contents at the surface and they reverse, red. I think this is because I contemplate your hand with violent frequency. Was it your blood that stained my clothing and seeped between the seams of my dreams, or was it mine?

With broken fingers, I tried to grasp reality. I used to believe there was something to be achieved by writing, that through artistry I could court my demons like I yearned you would me. Writing, like death, is an impure art. And although you are dead, I remained that tender writer with a control complex for quite some time, a spell before spelling failed. The art of writing does not grow more difficult as years escape because inspiration declines; it is the concept that constrains us. Writing is blind perception. I feel you analyzing the characters I create as my pen delivers a blow my right-side brain, with a breath so thick against the back of my neck that the little animal inside me burrows to guard from your eyes. The interesting part about character analysis, I have discovered, is that a character is never interpreted identically by every person who finds him. We are critics of the horror we find in ourselves.

I stopped writing. Now, I ask a blade to perform the task my pen used to. Plots are far more poignant this way. The surface upon which one writes makes all the difference, and one cannot conquer without a weapon. Some people are artists and others, art. I must lack originality, though, because I cannot stop opening my story with the same line of the same side you did: the same hand, wrist, arm, ribcage, everything. Until I am nothing. Of late, my art is the only company that returns my calls and although it spans my corporeal canvas, we are acquaintances at best. Showers sting when I rouse myself to take them; I am not roused often. Washed watercolor spirals down the clogged drain and rises again. I can’t look away.

I wonder what I will tell my father, if he is endowed any breath when I am finished - that this was a mistake? That these betraying marks are not consequences of my own actions, but of yours? That my mind, not my hand, is a lesion on my humanity? I know I cannot, because I could not tell you - you, with conflagration in your countenance that singed my skin before I could reciprocate. Perhaps I will just tell him the cat got me again. At least I know I did not relinquish myself to ashes. You are dead and hell, I would kill you twice by my own hand.

I stare from a window. I do not know where I am, but for now I am somewhere and even somewheres must continue forever in the universe they share with me. Just as energy begets energy, your tree has transformed into a book. I rummage for answers in your pages, hours from my own eternity, until I realize the book I hold within my hands is only blank expression. One night, I may find the strength to divide the binding and throw it in the trash to lie atop the rest of my waste. But one night is not this night; both it and I are distant.

The animal inside me crawls from my gut to to my lungs, suffocates, dies; my respiration can only respond with a single nonchalant tremor. Without me in it, my mind is a mansion, filled with vast rooms subjected to ruin in locked doors, cracked walls, and shattered chandeliers. There remains a part of you I don’t want to know that must have settled in one of these rooms while I was gone and now you won’t leave. I contemplate setting the room on fire.

It’s lonely inside this mansion.

Now, you are thinking I am young and I am thinking I am old. It is sometime in the winter of my eighteenth year, and with my cognizance lodged between heavy months of stumbling across this place without you, I brace against an uncaring windowsill that is not my own and bleed out fragments of my hollowed figure to watch, as some other form rushes in,

ash become snow.

Reviews

[The Twin Arenas]

Unbelievable. The best thing I've read here in awhile. Describing snowy roads as bowling lanes, turtle shells and propellers, chicken wings on a carpeted floor....great, affected writing. It reads hallucinatory, which is wonderful, and difficult to do well. I look forward to reading more of your stuff.

[Meg Grim]

Thank you so much, I appreciate you taking the time to read my work and comment! I debated posting it publicly but I'm glad I did.

[The Twin Arenas]

It's excellent. Are you still working on it? It's nice to have big, good pieces to edit.

[Meg Grim]

I am still working on it, actually. I wrote it for a creative writing class my freshman year of college - before I had ever been touched by love or death - and am still toying with it a year later. I haven't made any big adjustments, although I imagine I eventually will. Thank you, again.

[The Twin Arenas]

Heh. Yeah, it's a great piece. You might make some big adjustments, you might not. It's good having something like this in the fridge to work on, though. Sometimes I prefer the edit to the write.

[Meg Grim]

I agree :)