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.