The Summer and the Courtyard

Dennis Alan: Im a U.S. citizen! Think about that!
Dargent Peytraud: I dont see the Ambassador here, do you?

The Serpent and the Rainbow



It was by the waning light, just the end of summer, that we arrived.

Streetlights, guttered to life as they sped by past us one by one, and the air, though still heavy with the day's humidity, had begun to hint at a cooler night. I leaned back, my head tilted at the
bruised sky, and wondered how things were going to be... There were only four of us left. And, God knows, there may be no one by the time morning comes along.

Newspapers screamed that the world was ending; left and right, signs of the apocalypse were cited, both supernatural and scientific. Exclamation points and all caps became the rage.
Television was no better, though they tried to keep the hysteria from creeping into their voices, their backs held painfully straight while their smiles held back their panic. The world was ending and, in spite of our movies, no one knew what to do. Some wanted to wait it out, confident they'll be taken to a better place. They barricaded themselves in their cellars and counted the days out in campbells and uncooked microwave dinners. The religious went up mountains in order to be the first ones to go (the politicians suggested the moon). Some, not as sure about the destination they'll be ending up in, tried to find a way out. Usually, it involved the receiving end of a gun. We chose the other option. We ran away. Whether to it or from it is what we'll find out by the end of the story.


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"Hey. Wake up."

When I opened my eyes, we were well deep into the town, and though the streets were lit, the areas outside it were pitch dark. The car was cruising at a steady pace and I could hear someone at the back whistling our graduation theme. Then it was quiet.

The air was too cold.

My eyes strained themselves, trying to take as much of everything in. While the car crawled, so did my eyes over walls and buildings and empty parking lots.

"Nicky."

I turned, and she was clutching my shoulder, my jacket bunching up in her fist. Her eyes were large and shiny.

"I don't wanna go. Please."

I patted her hand, "S'alright, Beth."

She didn't let go.

She didn't let go until the end.

Beth screamed while it dragged her away. We looked at our feet while it happened, our faces stony. She shook me like a ragdoll until it ripped her off her arm, blood arcing, splattering over
vinyl seats and plastic passengers. My ears rang from her screams and my heart thudded in my thin chest. I learned not to breathe past the 60 second mark (an achievement, what with my asthma). 60 seconds. That was all the time it took.

I tried not to pray to anyone or anything. Or even think. I just kept my eyes to my feet. And started counting from 60.

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 beginning 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?