The Sandbar Mermaid

Faith is found in a clutch of human flesh.


Staring into a flute of champagne, the color of mellow sunset skies, I raised my eyes, looking into hers where I found clouds beginnning to form. Laughing, each syllable hitting me like rain , she pulls away, spinning on heels so high they made me dizzy (imagining looking down from such heights). The lights caught in her hair turned it to gold, and I could see how it was going to be, how the summer was going to be; one day melting into the next as another season fades away, leaving me memories of a girl who danced as if she could walk on ocean waves, and whose laugh still fills my heart with water.

I met her when I was 10, still laughing, yes, and still at me, on a day the sun was just about finished with its noonday course. I had built a sandcastle of such melancholic design, that even the turrets drooped, heavy with the weight of barely repressed tears. I was confounded with what I had come up with, searching deep what error in architecture brought it about, when I heard a giggle drop quietly behind me. I remember turning just as quietly, my eyes glancing across a sea of gold and topaz, before settling on a girl about my age, whose hair mutedly recalled to me the same metal and the same stone. She was looking at me fixedly, a smile dangling at the corner of her lips, drily clutching a coral in one hand, and my heart, beating fast (a frightened bird), in the other.

"Are you Thomas."

Taken aback, I wondered what sort of faerie-kin she must be, absently fishing my name out of the air, her voice, lilting, sounding low and deep (telling me to be still), when I realized she must be the landlady's granddaughter my mother had told me about. Had told me to look out for.

"Yes, y-yes, I am. Are you Heloise?"

"That's a pretty castle."

Her eyes, I could see, were the color of watery sunrises (sun-irises), played lightly with sarcasm and amusement, before amusement finally won out. I felt safe enough to trot out an answer by then:

"It was. In my head."

"Then your hands may have had a different idea."

This time, she smiled, taking the sting out of words I knew she had not meant unkindly. It slowly broke through her lips, and began to rearrange the lines in her face into even more agreeable patterns. All this time, we both stood still, as if afraid to disturb the silence that lay like settling pigeons across the sand.

The Secret Medusa, Prologue:

The sylvan rush of green, the sun a catching flute of stars. The wind was like water, the road a stream, and the car cut through it all like a knife. Destination stood in the distance, like our very own northern star-- a compass tracing the leylines on a map.

Words lost their meaning; expectation was a breath caught in our throats, and our hearts tried to be still but couldn't. We knew she was waiting and that thought shone for us like a Pharos and illuminated the grey sea road.

"We're getting there..." Tobias sang, driving with both hands on the wheel, hunched as if on horseback, as if in a race. And maybe we were.

All four of us nodded in assent.

The End of Innocents

Man's character is his fate.

Heraclitus


Though there must be Choice in the world, there are those, their Life Lines engraved in stoic concrete, people whose courses have been so deeply etched that the waters of Life can have but little choice but to rush in that same direction.

Should one pity or envy? The loss of decision, is that freedom or bondage? To slave under what current thought or to rebel at what one must have as one's predilection?



Whatever the case may be, Everything turns circumspect.

The Treacle Well

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

George Eliot


That bright red monkey screams and I remember. My vision turns a shade darker, my heart drums a slow angry beat. My fingers twitch, imagining a throat, and my mouth twitches at the pictures in my head. What dark thread, running through the seams of my mind, has begun to unravel? And under that benighted skin, I see:

(twisting, shining)

Your face.

Solo Sport

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world - a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

Virginia Woolf


Desire is a rat in my belly. It scampers up my throat, cutting off air. Lying down, looking up, I hear its chitinous feet clicking in my head, dislodging a memory or two, digging up the odd recollection or so. My eyes travel the cracks in the ceiling while it begins to move farther South. I feel it nibble, a glancing pain-- a darting twisting presence in my lower belly. It takes a bite and I feel a pain, pins stuck to my chest. I see a mouth run red, a throbbing hiccuping thing in its hands.

It is then that I realize, that It has my heart in its mouth.

The Augur of Water

The night is stained a darker black, the stars having hidden themselves behind their hair, refusing to look at what I have done. The ground swells before my deed, placing her at an elevated plane: within reach, within eyesight.

But Forget's a wily slippery thing-- coming up when you least expect it. Yet shieing away when you reach for it in need. So I close my eyes and play its game, biding my time (and feeling its centipede feet run across my face)...

A Random Thought

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play --
In accidental power --
The blonde Assassin passes on --
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God.

Emily Dickinson
Apparently with No Surprise


Redemption, or to seek it, must be an invention fit for the House of Atreus. If not Comedy.

High Noon

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”


Thomas Hardy
Hap

A bird flies overhead and its raven wing throws a shadow across your face; a pattern of maculate geometry, a puzzle I longed to figure out. I put the pieces in my head and find a picture: Memory blurs the edges of what must be, and instead paints another-- what it longs you to be. A picture caught in shifting physics, of light and shade, and its colours running to form another question. You stare at me, mouthing sentences. I stare back and place my mouth firmly against yours, swallowing all your words.

The Foundry

They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden:
It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride,
But did not listen much when they were chidden:
They knew exactly what to do outside.

Wystan Hugh Auden
They Wondered Why The Fruit Had Been Forbidden...


Alcohol ignites my tongue, unfetters what propriety and moral code would hold back, and sets lips to claim what truth that lie within reach. My heart flutters against the cage of my breast, and find myself caught against the bars.

Alcohol burns my throat in its headlong course to set fire to my heart, it leaves a wake resonant with the memory of heat. A trajectory though ponderous moves with unassailable Certainty, an accuracy borne only to the Reckless.

But what of consummation, what of destination? The expanse of flesh travelled, the truths woven to secure what flailing quarry, spoor and spur?

The Crucifix

"Weep for the lives your wishes never led."

Wystan Hugh Auden


And it falls, the weight crushing, the catch of air whistling an abbreviated tune. Night falls from the sky and a blackness covers the stars. My eyes swim, seeing fancies. My hands clutch at themselves and my heart finds itself caught between my ears. A great ocean moves in me; the susurrus of the waves lapping at one another lulls me to the deep. And in the absence of air, I discover breath.