Medusa~response to catcher in the rye

Yesterday I dyed my hair green. The snakes were originally blue but now they are permanently green. They talk to me when I am walking down the city street. They say nasty things to me that noone else can hear. You used to say they were my friends but I don’t believe that anymore. They talk to me in my bed at night and when they have my nightgown all pinned down with my knife collection and they know I cannot escape they slither from my head to the altar and smash the mirror there. Then when I am in a nightmare they unpin me and slither back in my head before I awake screaming and crying.

Every morning I go to the cramped Botanica near Fairmount Park and buy a new mirror, if there’s a good fur I’ll get that too, but that’s rare. Usually when I leave my apartment the sun hasn’t even risen yet. Sometimes you can see stars. The stars in Philadelphia are weird. They kinda wink and sputter out. They remind me of this glass eye I found once in the ancient piping in the basement of the first house of mine. I swear, when I first connected them, I almost cut my own eye out so I could put the glass one in instead. My thought was that I would have a star for an eye. I swear on Jezebel's ashes.

I was bleeding this morning so I bartered with the old lady behind the counter. Six clots of my youthful menses for one s****y tin mirror, made by some malnourished child in Somalia who probably just died last night. I don’t even know what she uses the blood for. Maybe to help recover from her mushroom trips.

I never really minded sharing. In preschool I remember there was this boy with long dark eyelashes who would cry in this dug up tunnel that was outside. No one else would go in there because the children said the moss that grew on the walls was cursed or poisonous. The instructors wouldn’t even go in there to find Andrew either. That was the childs name; the one with the long eyelashes. Andrews abuela was always the last guardian to get there. My father was always the second to last. When Andrew was waiting to be picked up he would usually be sitting on the wood floor, wide-eyed and intent. Watching one of the shows that show faraway places but since the speakers were blown out you couldn’t really hear anything. It looked like he was listening though, more than people do when your talking to someone normally even.

One time when his abuela came to get him he was still in the tunnel. His abuela called his name on one side of the tunnel but he wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t even hear him weeping through the mosscovered airhole. So I crawled in. The dirt ground was scraped away in places so that bruising silver metal rivets shoved through. I thought of a starving monster. Whose sharpened bones pierced through its vital organ I was in. My little heart was beating so fast I thought it was a grape shriveling. “I would never taste the wine of it’s toil!” my spirit screamed. It was so dark in there that when I saw the bone I thought it was a light. Maybe it was. Then I saw Andrew. He moaned and shifted his head to the side so from a veiled patch of light I could see the watery moss dripping onto Andrews head and clothes. Ichorous curses. And for the first time since I had entered I could smell the rotting and river at dusk scents intertwine as mating fish. In that emerald manifestation I saw that Andrew had been torn apart. As my veins rushed faster than his flooding Ganges, my hands felt his blood pool and whirl in the dirt and silver. I told him I would give him all my limbs to make up for those he had lost to the wild beast. I told him he could have my entire body if he couldn’t use his anymore. I told him these things but he did not care. He was not crying with mourning anymore, but held out to me the most comely gold-bewitching bloom and said

“Do not lose the countenance of mirrors.”

His bones turned to beryl snakes and twined around my dreadfully unrent limbs. His iris and pupil rose as in prayer, holding the last bit of light from the setting sun behind the moss’s veil of dew. Verdant lids fluttered and closed. For the first time, I saw him smile.

© 2015 _nymphofthecross_

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Sesame

Hello Nymphofthecross,

Thanks for entering the competition. Alas not a winner this time. I do not have the time to provide a detailed critique on all the submissions, but a few remarks:
- "The snakes were originally blue" -> from the title I get "snakes" but not from what is written yet
- noone -> no one?
- kinda - > kind of
- the first house of mine -> awkward sentence
- wood floor -> wooden floor?
- more than people do when your talking to someone normally even. -> you're?
- could you elaborate how this is a response to catcher in the rye? to me this is more of a horror story, but maybe I haven't understood all of the story they way you have meant it

Regards,

Sesame

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