Fissures

She was in a middling sized valley sitting on the bank of a river that was really more of a trickling stream. The sun bounced rays with abandon, off of amber lenses and scabby knees.

“I’m so pale,” she murmured. “I’m porcelain.”

She took off her glasses and squinted at the white hot sky, vaguely wondering if it was already on its way.

She looked back down at her naked self, dusted a palm down a long white leg. Fine fissures appeared, running from ankle to calf. She beamed at the trees. “I’m coming undone,” she told them proudly. The breeze blew, scooped up a leaf on a lazy draft and kissed her rounded cheek with its edges.

The tiny lips of flesh that were peeling back seeped a golden incandescence that drew glyphs on her body that she couldn’t decipher. It was a tale from a time before words were needed to tell a story; what leaked from her now was pure, and it was ecstasy.

The fissures played a merry game of chase across the expanse of nerve endings that had been her skin, was still her skin, but cracking open and sloughing off to the ground around her. She was a hatchling, her body the egg broken out of, useful but no longer necessary.

Something was staying behind to shape itself into a new figure altogether. Maybe this one will have wings, she laughed. The noise dripped into the air like liquid, stretched out and elongated, a melted candlewax of sound.

She slid, glided and schmoozed her way toward the water, a whirling dervish not quite in control of her dervish. Idly she wondered what life might be like as water nymph.

****

The soundtrack to this short story is Skrillex, because nothing is more life affirming than music that makes you want to move.

There was a moment of inspiration in the comments section of a favorite blog yesterday. The author isn’t having the best of times at the moment, and the commenter left a really thoughtful and insightful comment that ended with the question: “What color are your wings?” For some reason it really stuck with me.

I got to pick the Master Class prompt line this week, as I obviously bribed the teacher or she’s just a silly bugger, so I went with Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show: She took off her glasses and squinted at the white hot sky, vaguely wondering if it was already on its way. The prompt had to be used in the middle of the story this week, which was tricky but worked okay for me because my paragraphs are short as shit.

If there is anybody who happens to read this that isn’t already playing and wanted to jump in on the Master Class game, it really is a blast. Each week a different line from a different place in a different novel is picked by a different person to use in a different way. Just go check out SAM at www.frommywriteside.wordpress.com, we would love to have you.

Not Enough Me

A story for Master Class that is more disjointed than usual…

****

“But it’s not enough,” I whisper. My fingers twist together, twining and untwining like restless snakes, held before my heart. I feel its thud, too heavy, squeezing in all the beats skipped in the past; it is a pulse point the size of a planet.

“When the dreamer wakes, the dream is not done it is undone. That’s all I remember.”

His watery blue shrink eyes try to bore over the tips of studiously steepled hands held in front of his chin but fail to hit their mark. It is a look that speaks of being practiced in a mirror: this should be your super serious face.

I arch an eyebrow back at him, a look that I freely admit to having practiced in a mirror. Silence does not make me feel awkward or prone to chatter. Silence is my default setting. I’d often wished that I had a mind with a criminal bent, simply to test my demeanor against their interrogation. There’s still some time, I suppose.

After a pointless minute of this strange stare off, he clears his throat and adjusts his bony ass on the leather chair with a whisking sound that makes me flinch. Wings, silky wings and gossamer wings and broken dirty and decaying wings, beating around my face, floating my hair in a nimbus of static. I flinch and stand abruptly.

“I’m going to leave now,” I begin, holding up my hand when he makes as if to speak. “This isn’t a break up, there’s no give and take, so please just shhh.” I hadn’t brought anything up here with me and I head for the door unhindered, unencumbered. I don’t want to tell this man anymore about my dream.

As I close the door behind me I hear him start to speak. “Well, what the fuck…” The door clicks, coolness and blessed silence on the other side, finally alone, finally enough oxygen so I do not have to share my deep breath.

Down to the sidewalk, cross the street, my car barely squeaked in before a No Parking sign standing sentry of nothing but an expanse of concrete curb. I tilt my head up, let the afternoon sun beat a staccato tattoo of warmth against my eyelids, let the sweat drip down my back unheeded.

The icy breath of the dream that was not a dream, the dream that is not yet undone, gusts around me, billowing linen pant legs out like little parachutes. My eyes are open wider than they’ve ever been and still sight escapes me, the world of heat and sun, the world where my hand clamps on my door handle, an anchor for my feet, my reality.

The man had come to me while I slept. It was a good sleep, a deep sleep, the sleep where you wake in the exact same position with a little puddle of drool on your pillow because your body has given itself over completely to its own natural machinations and you wake feeling like someone slipped you a Xanax in the night. Blasphemous, to intrude on this type of sleep.

He whispered in my head. He whispered that he had things to show me, and asked did I want to see. I want to see all there is to see, and how could I not? The whispers turned into skitters that reached groping fingers and I was enveloped in the dream.

I had thought it just a dream and while the dangers of dreams are well known I had counted on my thorny and threatening roving gang of thoughts to keep me safe from intruders.

He insisted. He cajoled. Against my wishes, he delivered his messages and he showed me what he wanted to show me. He showed me all of it, the end of it. The end of me. And there isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough me.

*****

For this weeks Master Class, Professor SAM (http://frommywriteside.wordpress.com/) chose Tara to head up our class because she wrote a piece about a father taking justice into his own hands that delivered a punch to the gut (http://thinspiralnotebook.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/a-fathers-right/).  Tara chose Christopher Moore’s Lamb for her prompt this week:

That’s all I remember.

Who knows…maybe I can.

The sun makes a lazy attempt to shine

And gives up the ghost,

Returns to its bed of pillows, goes back to sleep.

I would lay my head back down, too, if I could

On a pillow that was always cool,

And delve into dreams that don’t make me whimper

and throw elbows,

Protecting myself in nocturnal sojourns that I don’t remember,

If I could. Who knows….maybe I can.

I would wake refreshed , stretch long limbs

Like an elastic cat, kiss the stubbled cheek of a healthy him

And roll to my feet, loose, like a boxer ready for the bell,

Ready to fight

For my daily dose of peace of mind

Amidst the pieces of my mind,

If I could. Who knows…maybe I can.

I would journey out of this half world,

Hobo pack hitched up on shoulders that would put Atlas to shame,

Stuffed full of intention and ambition, integrity and gratitude,

A patchwork of all that I would like to be

Travelling the path of my own making, forged through a jungle

Choking itself on the mundane, I would climb the trees to the sun’s front door

And ask it to come out and play,

If I could. Who knows…maybe I can.

I would put yesterday’s mistakes into a box and label it

“Lessons Learned”

And put them away in the back of the closet;

I would put today on a pedestal and stand like a bastion before it,

Feel the wind tickle hair tendril hellos on my neck, slap some color back into my face

And drink in the two-toned spring light,

If I could. Who knows…maybe I can.

Trifecta Week 73: From 33-333 words using the third definition of the word color:

3: complexion tint:

a : the tint characteristic of good health

b : blush

The Marauders

A Master Class tale….

Dunkirk had been overrun in the night.  The Marauders wore masks; some said it was to hide their lack of humanity, but he figured it was because the stench they left in their wake was so foul that even they at their animal best could not stand to marinate in it.

Jensen didn’t wear a mask.  The others, huddled in the corner and scrunched into tiny balls of quivering skin and watering eyes, had wrapped whatever they could find around their noses, their mouths.  He breathed in the death, the burning flesh and singed hair, opened his ears wide to the screams and the pleas, the grating laughter and raucous cat calls that erupted in the night around them.

You cannot overcome an enemy that you will not face.  You cannot triumph over an evil that you refuse to comprehend.

He sighed, and locked away the corner of himself that wanted to weep for the rest of his days, the weak willed human side that wanted to quiver to jelly with the rest of them.  He wasn’t even sure how he had ended up with this gaggle of geese traipsing after him; he certainly hadn’t intended to gather a flock as he had sped, hunched over and silent as a hunting cat, behind the Marauder’s line of fire and into the basement of a gutted house on the outskirts of town.

Yet here they were. Four men and three women, one holding an infant the size of a loaf of bread against her chest, muffling its whimpers as she soothed and murmured into its ear.  He shrugged his broad shoulders, rolled them forward and back, trying to loosen the weight of them that dragged like a yoke around his neck.  There was nothing for it.  Desperation had given him authority.

He crouched down to eye level with the rest of them and pitched his voice so low they had to guess at some of the words.

“They’ve already been here, this is where they started.  Chances are they’ll do another sweep through before they leave, but it’ll be cursory at best.  They wanna get back home, start their feast.”  The woman with the baby shuddered so violently that the child let out a wail, quickly stifled under Jensen’s calloused palm.  He swore, quiet but vicious, and stared the woman in her fear-stupid eyes.

“Yeah, I get it.  Their feast is our flesh.  Maybe someone you love was taken, right in front of you.  Maybe you lost one, but you saved another.  Now you keep yourself still and you keep that baby quiet, or I will throw you both out that front door without a second thought.  If you understand what I’m saying, shut the fuck up.”

She froze, all but the hand stroking the baby’s back.  The kid’s solemn brown eyes studied Jensen’s pale green ones as he took his hand away from the red rosebud of a mouth.  Please, peanut, Jensen silently prayed, just shut up shut up shut up…

There was a sound of breaking glass from the floor above them, muffled footsteps.  A thin scream escaped the woman with the broken mind.  Sensing its mothers distress, the infant’s lips quivered, its brow puckered.  Before it could draw breath to squall, ever again, Jensen shut off his humanity for good and stretched his hand out towards that tiny face once again.  Only desperation could bestow this kind of authority.

******

For this week’s Master Class, I disturbed myself…

Prof SAM (http://frommywriteside.wordpress.com)  jumped back in the saddle and had last class’s star pupil Renee (http://elsetimeandotherwhen.blogspot.com) turn to page 152 of her chosen book and use the 2^nd line of the last paragraph for our story prompt.  She chose T.H.White’s The Once and Future King:  Desperation had given him authority.

To Dream is to Wake

 

 

 

 

 

 

if i squint just right

and discern the truth of myself,

not the prepackaged one displayed on the shelf,

i can dare to break the mold

and truly live before i grow old

*****

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo
Coelho, Alchemist

http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2013/04/trifextra-week-sixty-three.html:

33 words exactly inspired by the above quote.  My dream is just to live, through mania and doubt and anxiety and joy, to feel the sun on my face in the worst times and remember the cold on the best ones.

A Jester’s Juxtaposition

Trifecta Challenge:  http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2013/04/trifecta-week-seventy-two.html

Weekly writing challenge 72:  use the third definition of the given word in your story.  Alchemy: an inexplicable or mysterious transmuting

***

The Harlequin’s soft pointed shoes shuffled across cracked and chilly flagstones, picking his way slowly from his quarters to the prince’s minor receiving hall.  He gave his head a little shake to set his motley grouping of bells jingling and thought of the momentary warmth that he had been pulled from, his head pillowed between his mistresses’ plump breasts.  The dark and heavy door that he came to swung open with an irritated groan at his shove.

The prince smarmed from his repose upon the guest couch.  “I cannot sleep, fool.  Sing to me a song of love and magic, or I shall have your tongue removed as I have ordered it done before.”  He flapped an arrogant hand towards a wall decorated with ghastly shriveled things.  “Get on with it.”

Ah, a request it was to be.  Obligingly he sketched a mocking bow and dipped his head and began to sing, almost sweetly.

“O’er time the land we sow changes, the wind blows o’er to the nor’east

The lass, she makes her plans and arranges, to prepare for the sorcerer’s feast”

A small and wicked smile on his face, the jester capered and sang, his voice growing reedy and thin.  As his countenance began to fade to translucence, so too did the prince.  His grace held up that arrogant hand and saw his fool right through it.  “What alchemy is this!” the prince hissed, as his doublet morphed to patchwork and his gold to beaten bronze.

The Harlequin smiled from his place upon the couch and raised his own arrogant and pampered hand.  “Deep down inside, your former grace,  all men are fools.  Now sing me a song fool, of love and magic, for the hour grows late and I would rest.”

****

Today’s story brought to you by a weird obsession with creating a Harlequin character over the past few weeks, and Tibet Trance by Red Buddha (yogic electronica, seriously fantastic shite)

~whoop~ 🙂

No Excuses

 

My first attempt at the Trifextra Challenge for week 62: http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2013/04/trifextra-week-sixty-two.html

 

33 Words of Advice

 

*****

 

if you have something to say, say it.

 

if you have a question, ask it.

 

if you have a song, sing it.

 

there’s no excuse not to. except maybe if you have laryngitis.

 

*****