The landscape is in turmoil. A wreck of what was once an ideal habitat for all living creatures. Even back in the days of landfills and pipelines, mountain mining and permafrost melting, when all they could seem to think of was a picture as big as the bottom dollar. We didn’t know how good we had it. How good we could have it, if feeling wasn’t outcast by the mind and the pseudo intellect of societal standards. Replacing intuition and compassion with a pack mentality based in personal greed. We tear each other down with the contradictions of our supposed purpose. The fight for survival, but with no primal sense. We are animals trapped in a cage we now call earth. There will be no freedom. No salvation. Their pointless planetary explorations doomed from the start. All they did was further pollute the atmosphere with the noxious fumes of their phallic creations while children starved and guns killed those who wouldn’t be silenced by the virus.
It pounds against my chest. A ticking time bomb. A reminder of our pressing mortality. We will never see the forest for the trees. All the bees are dead. People roam the streets, despondent zombies unable to think for themselves, but thanks to the revolutionary upheavals of iniquity’s vendetta, they have to. It is the repercussion of people being pushed too far, left feeling they have no other recourse than to push back in exactly the same manner. Meeting the violence, the villainy, and the noise with more until all leadership was wiped out.
There will be no requiem.
I remind myself of these truths, hoping to come to terms, but, you see, I can’t help myself. It doesn’t matter how many layers I wear to protect my skin from the harsh rays of the sun, or the erratic chill of the winds, it sways and it persists in its countdown. My heart-shaped locket. A blessing, but my curse.
“Hey, you look familiar.”
I cannot see the face of the man who lays down this accusation. It is covered by a large piece of cloth. Most don’t like to take their chances nowadays. The train car is packed with bodies, but he makes his way closer. Unconcerned with the fact that anyone at any point might consider the light fabrics that drape his body a commodity in the compact quarters of our destination. We are on a track over fifty-feet high. It would be no big thing to push and grab. It might even be considered one of the more polite pillaging’s, especially regarding his race. Why do we think it is easier to kill one color, one religion, one gender, predilection, feature or demeanor than another? When the deed is done, the blood stains the same. Each one of us granted the chance to put the inhuman in humanity’s fate.
I do not mind that he moves towards me, his intense gaze holding mine in unwavering connection, but it is how he maneuvers on the outside of them that disconcerts me. Confident in a way that almost dares them to try it. Yet not one of them so much as attempts a dirty look at his inconvenient progression. Who is this who approaches me… recognizes me?
Finally, I break our connection. People are moving now, obstructing our view, in a rush to get out before the next wave swarms in search of a seat, or worse. I exit the platform, free of another burden.
The terrain is sandy but moist. Environment knows no climate anymore. It is as nomadic as its inhabitants. Coexisting with each other’s inflicted destruction, we keep pace in our race to extinction.
Are those footsteps?
The market is always crowded. We may not have commerce, but we still have needs, bartering our goods in a way that would make Jesus rethink his sacrifice. Can he see us now, I wonder? But faith is not my talent. I have the taint of another stigma’s path to walk.
A path I now rush down. What am I afraid of?
I turn down a side path. It is narrow and dim. Not much light can get through the crumbling buildings’ teepee collapsed dependency on one another. I do not look up as I hurry through the broken concrete cobblestone of this metropolis graveyard. I don’t want it to happen again, despite knowing better. One cannot outrun fate. Cannot stop time from happening, or the events brought to life by the sinister pendulum keeping beat on my heart.
Why do we fool ourselves by thinking this time might be the exception? This person we find ourselves drawn to a departure from all the others when we ourselves have not changed? I cannot change. I am not meant to. At first I tried to be the change I wanted to see in the world, but that is not my purpose. I am a reminder. I am a lifeline. I am the last.
I take a sharp left and go into a building whose door bears a red streak. Babies cry, people cough and sneeze, uncovered and unperturbed by proximity. They shit and they sleep in the same corners. Personal freedom, if only we could have seen what it looks like in the bigger picture. One gesture of goodwill and community can make all the difference, and that is the gift of the individual. Singular but never alone, pieces of the great divine’s consciousness. We are a collective capable of greatness when we come together. A tide that moves things forward, but we become chaotic ripples when trapped in the defensive struggle to maintain our own course. Wayward in focus, we force things to stand still as they are being torn apart.
No one would follow me here… unless…
I freeze, paralyzed by the realization I have walked straight into the hands of my condemnation. Mask still on, his eyes smile as he looks up from the basket of necessities he is handing out to the obstructionists, sparkling like he has won an optimistic bet with himself.
“Well, I hope you got to wherever you needed to be in such a hurry.” He says as he comes to stand before me. “I’m Isiah.”
“What do you want?”
He nods, respecting the abnormality of our interaction.
“I would like to show you something.”
Resigned to my role, I allow him to lead me to our fate. We walk through the courtyard of an old tenement structure where I am surprised to see children at play. How long has it been since I’ve seen such a novelty? I do not ask, of course, but follow his lead up the steps, when another man appears in similar apparel. In fact, they all wear layers and masks of white and dusty browns.
“Who is this?” he asks as he looks behind us, then around.
“Someone from the transport.”
“Are you sure it’s safe to bring her here?”
“Chris,” He puts a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. “It’s as safe as anywhere else.”
The man nods in quick succession.
“It’s just,”
“Nothing. Life is what we make of it.”
After slapping him on the back, we proceed to a top floor dwelling where I am amazed to find the walls covered in photographs and papers. I move forward, reaching out to the events and memories I thought lost. I turn to him, but words escape me.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” He walks towards me, removing mask. “I knew I had seen you before, but I now realize it was on more than one occasion.”
He begins pulling photo after photo from the wall.
“The Twin Towers, The Tulsa massacre, Hurricane Katrina, Covid-19, The flu Pandemic, The Holocaust, storms, famines, trials, genocides, purges, wars…” He stops his frantic gathering of evidence to look at me. “How is it possible?”
In all of my years, I have never found myself accused of the truth. I have never spoken it out loud before and expect to be ridiculed and torn up, repressed, so I do not make the impression that what I say could be anything less than treason to the human spirit. I have seen it happen many times before. Yet I have no other recourse.
“Because I am all that is left.”
He does not understand, but for a moment, I think I see a desire to. I hold my heart in my hand and take a step towards him. He pulls back, afraid.
“When the world was born, and we were but scattered pieces of light meant to bring presence to life, the worst of what that could mean was kept hidden, untapped in our hearts from inexperience. What was fear, hate, evil, in the eyes of purpose?”
His posture shifts, intrigued by my words. An intellect at work to comprehend the implications of what is being said. I dare to step closer. He does not retreat.
“But our hearts were torn open by our need to be resounding. To not only survive, but comparatively, and thus the individual was born and what was once seen as consciousness multiplied became divided.”
“You cannot be serious.”
He knows I am.
“That’s it then? The cycle of life? We create to destroy, and what is born innocent remains destined to be corrupted?” He shakes head. “I can’t believe that is all there is.”
“And that is why I am here, and there.” I point to the photos.
I put my heart in his hands. He is captivated as things instantly become clearer.
“She’s a witch!”
Chris has barged in.
“She’s the reason for all these tragedies. I recognize her, Isiah.”
Isiah moves forward to get between the frantic individual and me.
“Chris,”
“Think about it, if we destroy her, it can all go back to the way it was.”
“We can never go back.” I say.
“Even now she speaks of our extinction!”
“She is right, Chris.”
Chris is winded by this perceived betrayal.
“Why would we want to go back, look at where it has brought us?”
Again, Chris nods manically.
“Sure, sure, but life was better than. We had homes, we had food, we had guarantees.”
“Not everyone.”
It is in this moment the color of their skin hangs heavy and apparent in its distinction. Chris suddenly straightens, bravado rising. He feels the entitlement of his ancestors.
“The world has gone to hell and you are going to stand here and tell me we are better off?”
Isiah does not falter, does not shy away from the tension. Does not rise to its infuriating refrain nor cow to the threat of its dissident tendency to oppress by any means.
“I am saying there is better still.”
“How? When? When will it get better?”
“When we no longer consider ourselves the victims to the consequences of our actions or rise to violence every time we are called to face it.”
“She is a plague.”
“She is one person.”
“Haven’t you always said that is all it takes?”
Isiah is struck by the use of his own words against him, but in a way that opens his mind further to their meaning… and ours.
“Yes… but for its inspiration and what it invokes in the collective. We choose whether it is for fear or…”
“Survival!”
Chris lunges at me with a jagged piece of crafted glass. Isiah has no time to respond with strategy, it is only through intention he is able to get between us and take the glass for me.
“You did this!” Chris says.
“No.” I kneel beside Isiah. “You chose to.”
He cannot take the truth and runs from the room in denial. I look at Isiah, still conscious and smiling.
“Will I survive this?”
“My friend,”
“I know, I know,”
With difficulty, he readjusts himself, nuzzling head upon my lap as a grateful tear falls from his eye and he sets his hard jaw, more determined than ever to keep the faith.
“The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own.”
How I longed to embrace the woman on the other side of me: Marty Nelson. As it states on my birth certificate, at least, but I am Madeline. That is who I am, heart and soul. I thought the day I lifted my head to the heavens and sang out “she is me” proudly, with my bright red lipstick painted on, would be the happiest of my life. They make it look so magical, so easy on tv. But this personal declaration and embrace of one’s true self is a call to arms. In this country, it has become an act of war on one’s body and person.
As I stare into her gaze, I feel tears begin to swell. My gawky frame begins to wither. I won’t last long. Not in their world for I hardly exist in my own.
I love her, I love her, I love her. But I am not strong enough to be her. She is the version of me I have awkwardly been trying to become. Tall, sophisticated, and pretty. So very pretty. She wears her confidence like a brightly colored boa. She is not an insecure twenty-something whose parents cast her out, friends abandoned, and society shamed. It’s not her fault that she still stubbles when left unshaven, or her long neck exposes the apple of biology, and strong bones lead to questioning stares, she has shed all that. Baby has become the butterfly. They won’t throw rocks at her. They won’t question her. They won’t condemn her for a metamorphosis she cannot hide. A second puberty full of experiment and error on display for all to condemn or condone without touch, eye contact, or personal involvement. Ally? I just want love and the sweet embrace of someone’s open acceptance of me. Not the movement, not the act of brave defiance, but me. I am not a righteous act. I am a human being. A soul searching for its human container. I don’t need a community, I need to feel like a human being the same as anyone else. When I first saw her, identified her as the missing piece, as the ghost haunting the empty existence of him, a living shadow, I thought I would know what it was like to be like anyone else in the world… but I was wrong.
She is my everything, but as much as I want to become her, I want to live, and they want her to die. They would rather he conform and fit the shape of a mold that does not suit them. To walk as a lineation rather than something that could be considered offensive.
A woman, a human as is should not be offensive as they are, but I was born into a world determined to hate me. So, I paint the barbie pinkness onto my lips one last time. I smoosh them together and what a mess it creates on my teeth with that play-do meets crayon taste. A joyous creation and an act of defiance. But this is not a revolution. This is a life.
I choose how I die. Not you.
“Please,” I touch the mirror, “embrace me, Madeline, even though I failed, and ran away from you.”
I will take her before you can take her from me.
“Jesus, man, what is wrong with you!”
“Dude, wash that faggy shit off, and let’s get going.”
They roar with laughter, can you believe it, their buddy showing up with a mug of makeup on? Hysterical!
He runs upstairs to wash it off so they can hang for real, but when he comes to the bathroom door he finds he cannot open it. Something is barring the way. Stranger still the light is on. He knows no one else is up here.
“What the,” It didn’t make any sense. The gang came by to pick him up, get a little grub, and get going, besides they are not allowed upstairs, and he was the only one in the house before they came. Maybe something fell. No biggy, he pushes against it only to step in the thick moisture of something seeping out from behind the door…
“What is this?”
Madeline asks, her voice more frantic than the first time as she had looked to the stars in her broken desperation, but no answer came from its vast and sparkling depths.
“What condemnation is this?” She says, choking out what little voice she can find, but no more. She too is now silent, yet her mind is as sharp as ever jumping between acceptance, misery, stoicism, and rage. Searching, longing, praying for explanation in anything left to her.
“To still be seeking once succumbed, left with nothing and no one in the wake of one’s own desolate solution. Life is hell,” she thinks without movement. “Maybe it actually is better this way.”
She sits collapsed on the cold tile of the dingy bathroom floor, locked inside a state of incomprehensible regret.
“Please,” She whispers. Her palms lay upward in her lap for she no longer has the strength to lift them. They had backed her into this corner, yet still, it was she who ached. This buildup of cascading resentment for all they had pushed her to, would it ever end?
Slowly she dares move sight downward, hoping not to see what had triggered this state of moral confusion, but knowing better. In the limbo of this breathless silence, she takes in the truth of her hands and all they had been capable of. She cannot go back. What she has stained can no longer be washed off. The crimson shade is a highlighter to the cracks in her skin’s story, it splashes crisscrossing without pattern or reason, for there was and is no reason. What could possibly be the reason?
“Let something regret me.”
The dampness underfoot causes the rug to saturate the sole of his shoe as his step sank in the soaked compression of its grain.
“What the f-” He looks down. “No…nonononono…” It’s blood.
Before his mind can even comprehend the depths of possibilities, his fist beat against the door. Flashing before his eyes is the thought of every person he has ever loved… That is, except for one.
They say we hurt the things we love, but Madeline thinks that cannot be true. People have always been too willing to hate, freely and openly, but a sympathetic touch and compassionate words are hard to come by. Even those who dare look at her with contempt while those who might sympathize avert their gaze. She is too awkward a situation and they are busy living their lives. So their incessant but detached remarks on her person and the predilection they claim he chose, become the standard, her normal. How hard is it to respect? To grant someone a pronoun, for god’s sake? Why are we so eager to protect establishments over individuals?
People are careless in their treatment of others’ emotions, remaining aloof to the fact that someone like her, her, HER could have them, let alone express them with any kind of agency. They will not give her the benefit of expression or the credit of individuality. They will judge her by appearance alone and be happy to leave it at that. They don’t care that it keeps her in the mirror for hours trying desperately to prove them wrong. Their ignorance is the choice. Yet she is being forced to conclude that she will always fall short of everything, but especially herself.
The glint of a star reflects off a hand mirror that hangs eye level to her position on the floor. “Oh, Madeline…”
Never a revolutionary, hardly a fighter, crusader, or civic leader, she remained invisible. A mere nuisance to their existence. An easy excuse to hate.
“I’m sorry I gave in.”
He knows all too well how a feeling can take over. How that looming darkness we keep hidden can overwhelm, all-consuming, as it lures one in with the promise of freedom. He should have recognized the signs.
Bracing his shoulder against the door he gives one concentrated heave-ho. It didn’t matter that no one ever dug any deeper into the mess of his own inner world. At this point, he considered himself a master of illusion. He didn’t want them to see or to know. His love knew no bounds but understood the limit of others. It was always for others. And the more he struggled against the weight, the more he felt them slipping away.
Was it his fault? Had he been too caught up in his own battle, indulging the duality within that he forgot himself at his demon’s pleasure and those he must protect from its exposure?
Finally, the door gave way! In fact, he stumbles over himself into the bathroom for its ease. As though there had never been anything preventing him.
“How ironic,” Madeline thought, for it gave her mind somewhere to go besides the mirror and the self-inflicted torment that bore the resemblance of their perception. “That it should come to this in a bathroom of all places, with its dingy yellow atmosphere and stained tiles.’ She laughs, but it comes out more as a cough. A body’s last reprieve.
Tired eyes roll around in hollow sockets.
“For this, they fight. For this they get to live as I…” she cannot bring herself to speak it. “Sorry slaves to idle worship, for they hardly act their faith, but you tried kid, and now they get to win again.”
The blade of a razor pressed gently to the skin, yet still, the emptiness grows. Trapped inside this never-ending cycle, constantly living in the fear of speculation, of what they might see, or think they see. Silence and loneliness are the only way to stay safe but true.
“Why me?” Madeline asks, though her mouth does not move, and her head begins to lull. She still longs, hopes, and seeks salvation from a human source. “Why could I not be born already free?”
But humanity is inherently inhumane.
But he was wrong. As soon as his hands hit the counter, to keep him from falling, he sees the bloody prints left in their wake.
Too late does it occur to Madeline that this is exactly what they want. The actualized nothingness of those they deem unnatural and offensive. A threat to the lives that would shame, bully, and take another’s.
Live out loud. Coming out. Out of the closet. Out. Absence hangs over the very definition of the word that now consumes her. Beginning, middle, and end. She thought this would be a tally, be a choice she could make but now sees that it was still under the condemnation of their terms.
There will be no second chance. Her vision has already begun to blur, and the world begins to spin itself in crimson and blackened swirls all around her, coming for her. Again, it is something she cannot escape but is.
Jerking head at every angle, he looks around the bathroom to find that he is alone. The blood is coming from him. From his hands.
Until we are all free none of us are free. Oppressed, we live hating others for how we hate ourselves. Defining another’s meaning based on how we affirm our own. It is strength as subjection. Hate vs rejection. Some strike outwardly, others go inward, taking a world of hate out on ourselves in the name of their evils, but under our control.
We live to hate.
We hate to live.
Steam expels from the sink where he scrubs his hands raw. Desperately he tries to recall his last steps before his buddies came over. What has he done? What did he do? And what is it that keeps him trapped in this limbo of emptiness?
Once the water runs clear he looks to the mirror to make sure he has not missed anything else, deep down knowing that all he will see is her and a reality too late to correct,
A detail where unfinished.
Life where unlived
Love left where ungiven… despite her constant warning.
Madeline just wanted to be loved so that she could love and live as herself, never meaning to cause anyone any harm or fear she ran into its empty arms… but that is why we do these things, is it not? Why we punish in plain sight other bodies and plague minds with constant criticism: to gain the attention of those we choose not to understand by inflicting the ignorance we refuse to correct inside ourselves and multiply its means.
As sacrifices they live and die for this twisted aversion and so recreate the cycle of cruelty, perpetuating this self-feeding loop of self-inflicted punishment and hate.
Feeling abandoned and powerless, Madeline had sought her absolution from the only person that had ever loved her enough to free her: herself. And hoped in doing so to take back some control, for who could callously look at a body empty of life, however fleeting, and a soul, however seeking, now trapped and imprinted for the loss of what it could not obtain, and not feel the sting of remorse that the body she haunts is her own.
Then the transfixion they have on one another is broken by the very thing they are doing it for:
“Come on Marty, Jeez man!”
He swallows against his guilt. “I’m coming.” with one last look in the mirror he wipes the remains of the lipstick from his teeth.
Emptiness…
He turns his yet still she remains seeking what will be enough for her to move on, for she has lived as a ghost for too long
Could they ever be enough in the end for them, what is a body without a pure heart? But she knows the answer. There will never be enough regression for those who refuse to learn. But as she fades there remains in the evidence of his crime one last message, one last cry for help, one last truth…
They’re not worth it… but you are.
Useful Links for Helping and Understanding LGBTQ+ Rights and Equality
Good and Evil. They go by many names, creeds, races, sacrifices, and indulgences. But their common denomination is human nature. We are neither inherently good nor evil. Those trademarks are carefully taught and defined by the vast world of manipulation around us.
Every one of us is capable of great service and great sin, but perspective draws the thin, stark line of interpretation. Grays of all shades and varieties exist, but we are learned out of our understanding to make room for the much more convenient truth of opinion. Therefore, we learn how to hide what could otherwise make us stand out for the wrong reasons. We repress those inner demons, as well as the angels, and race to reach all the societal standards of success others deem to make life and individuals worth something.
Desperate to be the richest, the prettiest, and most popular, we forget who we really are and become who they want us to be. Cogs in the circle of life beating against nature’s conscience to become the commercialized version of what distinguishes moral from immoral behavior: control.
Several years ago, Vickie Hughes and Victor Minus, two high-ranking and well-educated scientists, met, fell in love, and began working towards the common goal of solving the great biological puzzle of fertility. Of course, it was more than just scientific interest that spurred their passion for this subject. They themselves could not conceive. But rather than perusing the many fertility treatments available for such couples in their predicament, Vickie and Victor decided to pursue a new solution.
“I’ve got it!” Victor said as he rushed into their remote laboratory. Overwhelmed by excitement, he picked Vickie’s stiff and subdued form up and spun her around.
“My god, Victor, what has gotten into you?”
She said when he put her down. Quick to run a calculated hand over her tight bun and coat so not a hair was out of place for long. Since their struggle began, she had become more rigid and severe. Vickie had never been one to give in to her emotions easily, if indeed she had ever allowed herself to experience them at all, but the shroud of gloom and shame her inability to carry a child cast had left her as close to an automaton as a red-blooded creature can get.
“The answer to our problems, darling!”
Victor was the opposite. He approached everything he did, from his morning porridge to his groundbreaking research in the biological animation of inorganic tissue, with a child-like enthusiasm capable of getting ahead of itself if left to its own devices. There was no problem that wasn’t exciting to solve.
They made up the two halves of a beautiful team. Where one lacked, the other expanded. So, nothing was a weakness when they worked together. Victor often teased that they could take over the world if they were so inclined, but they settled for being in control of their own.
“Nature may have thrown us a curve ball, darling, but we’re going to hit a homer!”
Vickie rolled her eyes as a slight grimace curled the corner of her lips. It was both endearing and vaguely cringing when Victor tried to talk sports. It was like a clown attempting to compose Mozart and be taken seriously. Victor walked over to the lab table and took out of his coat a rolled-up sheet of what appeared to be blueprints.
“What’s that?” Vickie asked, coming to look over his shoulder with arms crossed and the skeptical imprint of apathy etched upon her brow.
“That’s our boy.”
Though he smiled with Cheshire confidence, Vickie, with a hand at her turtleneck’s throat, recoiled from the outline. Still, Victor’s armor remained undented.
“Nature won’t let us have children, so why not use what nature will let us have?”
Vickie shook her head, too shocked to comprehend.
“Our inventive minds! So what if we can’t create a child through the typical means? Since when has that ever stopped a scientist?”
“An artificial child?”
“Dear, we are not mere tricksters of gears and parts but nature’s mortal hand. This will still be an organic child, but grown like a plant, like a beautiful flower, right here! With us there every step of the way.”
Though her hesitant posture remained frozen in its retrograde, a spark of pointed intrigue came to light in Vickie’s unnerving gaze.
“We play God?”
Whether it was the power or the possibility that cast this flare, one could not say.
“We use the best of each of us, our DNA, so it is our child in every way but one. We have ultimate control.”
The more he went on, the more resounding its illumination became.
“We play God.”
“We assist God. Why would he grant us such means if he did not want us to use them?”
Vickie’s breath was heavy in her chest as her eyes went from Victor’s to the blueprints of what could be everything she’d ever wanted without the sacrifice of her body and time. An actual biological child. What every woman at her age should naturally desire to prove the worth of her sex.
“What do you say, Vickie? Our boy… our Tommy.”
“Our Tommy.”
It did not take long for the pair to get to work on their child. To decode their DNA to pluck, splice, and reconstruct life’s equation to form the basis of what would become their perfect child. In a master stroke of eugenic construction, it did not take long before they moved on to the fermentation process. To grow an egg into an embryo into a baby.
The stress of the past three years now gave way to the happy possibilities of years to come. So engrossed in its process, they felt like newlyweds. Alive once more in the act of prudent creation, Vickie’s depression eased, and her life’s pursuits — now that she had a living child to call her own — became meaningful again. There was no fear of missing out or wasting the only window of time. She had to make this goal a reality. She didn’t have to choose between a family and her career. They were one and the same. She felt like herself again… that is until Tommy turned one, and the reality of what having a child meant, hit both of their realities like a tidal wave.
It didn’t take Tommy long to outgrow their monitoring. To talk back and grow tired of his parents’ endless hours of monotonous research. By six, he could easily run circles around them! What would have taken them months of intense study and troubleshooting, he could do in a few hours of play! Scientific theory meant nothing to the boy. He saw everything as one giant game and approached it with the enthusiasm of his father’s child-like eagerness. Yet, unlike normal children of his age, he was never overpowered by his emotions or limited understanding of the world due to possessing his mother’s clear-headed control.
I need to get my life back. How can I get my life back?
This became Vickie’s pressing question and concern. Wasn’t it enough to have the child? Must he take up every aspect of their lives?
“Now can we go outside?” Tommy said one morning when Vickie came to find her thesis on developmental tissue completed.
“I told you not to touch this!” She was furious. Why, just that night, she had kept herself awake, reworking the part of the symbiosis analysis she felt was falling flat in the example. She was excited to see it worked out on paper. Yet there was Tommy, beaming over its completion, drawn up in crayon.
“No, what you said was that no one was going anywhere until you were finished with this paper, so I should mind my own until then. There, it’s complete! So, can we go outside now, please?”
Vickie’s eyes went small as her mouth pursed in the clench of subduing its chiding reaction.
“No, because I’m still not done with this paper. You are. Now go back to your table.”
“But I want to go outside!”
“We don’t know yet how your skin is going to react to the elements.”
“I do! Look!”
He grabbed Vickie by the wrist and drug her over to one of the many chalkboards they had set up, but the equation on its surface was half-erased, replaced by Tommy’s own unique brand of interpretation.
“Our work!” Vickie said, half breathless. “What have you done?”
“Proved I can go outside and play!”
Tommy was proud of himself. He didn’t care that Vickie was fuming over months of careful consideration, erased without so much as a warning.
“Do you know what this means?”
“Of course I do, silly, I wrote it.”
“Victor!”
Vickie ran out of the room to find her husband just returning from a supply run.
“What are we going to do?” She said without greeting.
“What now?” Victor’s expression became grave as he headed into the lab.
Tommy was up on one of his stools, pouring something into his tissue sample from one of his mother’s beakers.
“What on earth!”
Victor ran over to grab the child off the stool, but it was too late. What had been the perfectly curated ecosystem for his non-organic tissue sample was now a dried-up wasteland. Slowly, he put down the giggling child as the realization of his destructive tendencies set in.
“It wasn’t going to work, daddy. It was suffering.”
“You mean,”
Tommy nodded. “You successfully animated non-living tissue, Daddy, but not very well.”
Victor’s eyes were wide with horror as he turned to the nodding Vickie.
“It’s a problem.”
“Not to worry, dear,” Victor nodded as he gave his wife a gentle kiss on the forehead. “I’m a problem solver.”
“Say, Tommy?”
Victor said one afternoon, looking up from his work. Tommy was sitting close by, idly playing with a ghost cube. Instantly, the child perked up.
“Yes, father?”
“Would you like to go on an adventure?”
The kid practically jumped to his feet.
“Yes, I would!”
“Come here then. I’ve got something for you.”
Tommy was hesitant by this inference and dubiously approached.
“Not another brainless puzzle or IQ test, I hope.”
Victor twitched. He had created those challenges for the boy!
“No, not another brain teaser, but a game.”
“A game?” Tommy asked, intrigued.
“Come with me, child.”
Victor held open a door at the end of the lab and motioned for Tommy to go in. It was a dark box of a room. Barren, with no windows and only one chair in the middle of its empty floor.
“Pretty stark, father. Where’s the game?”
“Take a seat, and I’ll get it.”
Tommy did as he was told, noticing the straps on the arms of the chair with wires attached, but his father came back before he could explore the contraption more thoroughly, holding a helmet. One that would cover the eyes of its wearer when put on.
“A virtual reality?”
“Yes, and no, Tommy. Here, let me put it on you.”
Victor helped Tommy place the helmet on his head. Everything got even darker and Tommy’s senses seemed to instantly dull. He could hear nothing outside of his own thoughts.
“Daddy!” He reached for his father, but his wrists had already been strapped in.
“I don’t like this!”
“Wait for it, son.” His father said into his ear over a mic. Then, suddenly, with the white light of a fluorescent bulb, a room appeared before his eyes.
“Now, Tommy, this is your world. You are in control.”
“Can’t I just go outside?”
“Perhaps, if you behave yourself.”
Tommy smiled.
“But I must warn you, Tommy, for every action, there is a reaction, so it is important you follow the rules.”
“What rules?”
“You will see.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because then you wouldn’t learn.”
Tommy settled into his chair with a soft sigh.
“Oh, don’t fret, they are here to help.”
Suddenly, two figures appeared out of nowhere. One was dressed in a white cloak, the other in black.
“Let me guess, good and evil? Isn’t that a bit predictable?”
“After all my hard work, that wasn’t a very gracious thing to say.”
Slowly, with the popping click of crunching bones, the dark one turned to him. The shroud falling from its shoulders to reveal the wiry exoskeleton of its metal framework body. The shrill sound of its nails, which hung like the claws of a vicious beast beside her body, dragging across the floor as she turned, made every pore on his skin stand at attention. Its eyes were black voids of color and soul. Its teeth protruding with the venom-laced grin of a jackal, causing its own tongue to bleed as it moved across the thin lips of its twisted smile, which raised its high cheekbones to a sharp point capable of doing just as much puncturing damage.
Tommy pulled back, frightened, in his chair.
“I’m sorry!” He said as he squirmed.
“Very good, Tommy, apology accepted.”
Suddenly, the shroud dropped from the shoulders of the other figure, and with its reveal came a gold and blinding light that seemed to envelop the other in its purity, causing it to seek refuge in the shadows of a nearby corner.
Once Tommy was safe, the light retreated into the form of its provider, who stood tall and pale. Like an angel standing before the sun, it gleamed with the innocent rays of the clearest crystal waters you could find here on earth, and Tommy was immediately humbled by its pleasant gaze upon him.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Imagine.”
“What?”
“How you wish to be. Have fun now.”
Tommy nodded, thinking he knew what this meant.
“Can you hear me?” Tommy said to the figures awkwardly.
“Hear you? Child,” Good replied with a shake of the head. “We are you.”
“So you want what I want?”
“That all depends on how you wish to get it.”
Subtly, Evil was perking up.
“I think I want my parent’s lab.”
“Why do you want that?” Good asked.
“Why wouldn’t he want that?” Evil challenged as it slinked closer toward their conversation. “He’s smarter than both of them! Just think of what he could accomplish!”
“Is that really what you want, Tommy?”
“It’s what’s important to my parents.”
“Oh, think of the wonders we could do!” Evil said. “Why, we would never be bored again!”
Tommy smiled and nodded to himself.
“Now, Tommy,” Good implored.
“Oh, shut up!”
With a simple gesture of her right arm, Evil sent Good crashing into the far wall. Tommy gasped. Evil came closer.
“Think of it, Tommy, you and me, your parent’s lab. The inventions, the formulas, the experiments! Oh! Just say the word Tommy, and I can give you it all!”
“Word!” Came from behind Evil, for Tommy’s mind was still torn.
Evil turned only to be tackled back into the ground. Squirming under its throttling posture.
“His parents work so hard!”
“But they don’t have to, they have him!”
Evil’s legs came up around Good’s neck and, with the jerk of its double-jointed pelvis, reversed their positions.
“They just don’t want him!”
“Of course they want him! They made him!”
“But they don’t want to have him!” Evil brings joined fists down on Good.
“He loves them!”
Good catches Evil’s fists before they can land.
“And they love their lab!”
“Their lab is unnecessary!”
Good brings a knee up under Evil’s stomach and flipped it overhead and away. Landing crouched like an animal, Evil takes in the scene facing Tommy, head cocked in confusion, for he is the one who had spoken.
“Mommy’s pregnant.”
They both seemed dumbfounded, but Tommy just smiled. He was too much like his parents and understood how to get what he wanted despite the reality of what that might mean.
“The lab is unnecessary. I’m in control now.”
Time means nothing when you are over the moon, and that is where the revelation sent Victor after Vickie told him the good news over a special night out. They were having a baby. A natural child! They had almost forgotten about their problems with Tommy altogether.
So imagine their surprise when they returned to their secluded dwelling to find it destroyed. All burnt up and exposed to the elements. All but the chair and the boy, who had been strapped down without a means to escape. Who now sat facing the sun with the faint expression of a smile etched into what remained of him.
Victor and Vickie wanted a child. Tommy wanted to go outside. In their single-minded aspirations, it never occurred to them who it might affect outside of themselves.
We give everything we have to accomplish our goals and reach the righteous peaks of our beliefs, but more often than not, we end up corrupting ourselves in their pursuit as we forget what made having it worth anything: life.
We just do what we can to outrun what we create, chasing meaningless fulfillment and freedom from expectations.
Is control really such a good thing?
And Brick By Brick, The Road To Hell Was Paved
Must be Halloween Time because this is one of my first attempts at a short story, way-WAY back many subtexts ago! I share with you out of nostalgia and a nice fear based adrenaline rush!
I jest, but honestly, I have such a soft spot for all my schoolgirl attempts at literature! You can take the space out of the sci-fi but you cannot take the science out of fiction!
ENJOY!
~Glory!
Good and Evil. They go by many names, creeds, races, sacrifices, and indulgences. But their common denomination is human nature. We are neither inherently good nor evil. Those trademarks are carefully taught and defined by the vast world of manipulation around us.
Every one of us is capable of great service and great sin, but perspective draws the thin, stark line of interpretation. Grays of all shades and varieties exist, but we are learned out of our understanding to make room for the much more convenient truth of opinion. Therefore, we learn how to hide what could otherwise make us stand out for the wrong reasons. We repress those inner demons, as well as the angels, and race to reach all the societal standards of success others deem to make life and individuals worth something.
Desperate to be the richest, the prettiest, and most popular, we forget who we really are and become who they want us to be. Cogs in the circle of life, beating against nature’s conscience to become the commercialized version of what distinguishes moral from immoral behavior: control.
Several years ago, Vickie Hughes and Victor Minus, two high-ranking and well-educated scientists met, fell in love, and began working towards the common goal of solving the great biological puzzle of fertility. Of course, it was more than just scientific interest that spurred their passion for this subject. They themselves could not conceive. But rather than perusing the many fertility treatments available for such couples in their predicament, Vickie and Victor decided to pursue a new solution.
“I’ve got it!” Victor said as he rushed into their remote laboratory, so overcome by the excitement he picked Vickie’s stiff and subdued form up and spun her around.
“My god, Victor, what has gotten into you?”
She said when he put her down. Quick to run a calculated hand over her tight bun and coat, so not a hair was out of place for long. Since their struggle began, she had become more rigid and severe. Vickie had never been one to give in to her emotions easily if indeed she had ever allowed herself to experience them at all, but the shroud of gloom and shame her inability to carry a child cast had left her as close to an automaton as a red-blooded creature can get.
“The answer to our problems, darling!”
Victor was the opposite. He approached everything he did, from his morning porridge to his groundbreaking research in the biological animation of inorganic tissue, with a child-like enthusiasm capable of getting ahead of itself if left to its own devices. There was no problem that wasn’t exciting to solve.
They made up the two halves of a wonderful team. Where one lacked, the other expanded. So nothing was a weakness when they worked together. Victor often teased that they could take over the world if they were so inclined, but they settled for being in control of their own.
“Nature may have thrown us a curve ball, darling, but we’re going to hit a homer!”
Vickie rolled her eyes as a slight grimace curled the corner of her lips. It was both endearing and vaguely cringing when Victor tried to talk sports. It was like a clown attempting to compose Mozart and be taken seriously. Victor walked over to the lab table and took out of his coat a rolled-up sheet of what appeared to be blueprints.
“What’s that?” Vickie asked, coming to look over his shoulder with arms crossed and the skeptical imprint of apathy etched upon her brow.
“That’s our boy.”
Though he smiled with Cheshire confidence, Vickie, with a hand at her turtleneck’s throat, recoiled from the outline. Still, Victor’s armor remained undented.
“Nature won’t let us have children, so why not use what nature will let us have?”
Vickie shook her head, too shocked to comprehend.
“Our inventive minds! So what if we can’t create a child through the typical means? Since when has that ever stopped a scientist?”
“An artificial child?”
“Dear, we are not mere tricksters of gears and parts, but nature’s mortal hand. This will still be an organic child, but grown like a plant, like a beautiful flower, right here! With us there every step of the way.”
Though her hesitant posture remained frozen in its retrograde, a spark of pointed intrigue came to light in Vickie’s unnerving gaze.
“We play God?”
Whether it was the power or the possibility that cast this flare, one could not say.
“We use the best of each of us, our DNA, so it is our child in every way but one. We have ultimate control.”
The more he went on, the more resounding its illumination became.
“We play God.”
“We assist God. Why would he grant us such means if he did not want us to use them?”
Vickie’s breath was heavy in her chest as her eyes went from Victor’s to the blueprints of what could be everything she’s ever wanted without the sacrifice of her body and time. An actual biological child. What every woman at her age should naturally desire to prove the worth of her sex.
“What do you say, Vickie? Our boy… our Tommy.”
“Our Tommy.”
It did not take long for the pair to get to work on their child. To decode their DNA to pluck, splice, and reconstruct life’s equation to form the basis of what would become their perfect child. In a master stroke of eugenic construction, it did not take long before they moved on to the fermentation process. To grow an egg into an embryo into a baby.
The stress of the past three years now gave way to the happy possibilities of years to come. So engrossed in its process, they felt like newlyweds. Alive once more in the act of prudent creation, Vickie’s depression eased and her life’s pursuits — now that she had a living child to call her own — became meaningful again. There was no fear of missing out or wasting the only window of time. She had to make this goal a reality. She didn’t have to choose between a family and her career. They were one and the same. She felt like herself again… that is until Tommy turned one and the reality of what having a child meant, hit both of their realities like a tidal wave.
It didn’t take Tommy long to outgrow their monitoring. To talk back and grow tired of his parents’ endless hours of monotonous research. By six he could easily run circles around them! What would have taken them months of intense study and troubleshooting he could do in a few hours of play! Scientific theory meant nothing to the boy. He saw everything as one giant game and approached it with the enthusiasm of his father’s child-like eagerness. Yet, unlike normal children of his age, he was never overpowered by his emotions or limited understanding of the world, due to possessing his mother’s clear-headed control.
I need to get my life back. How can I get my life back?
This became Vickie’s pressing question and concern. Wasn’t it enough to have the child? Must he take up every aspect of their lives?
“Now can we go outside?” Tommy said one morning when Vickie came to find her thesis on developmental tissue completed.
“I told you not to touch this!” She was furious. Why, just that night she had kept herself awake, reworking the part of the symbiosis analysis she felt was falling flat in the example. She was excited to see it worked out on paper. Yet there was Tommy, beaming over its completion, drawn up in crayon.
“No, what you said was that no one was going anywhere until you were finished with this paper, so I should mind my own until then. Now it’s complete, so, can we go outside now, please?”
Vickie’s eyes went small as her mouth pursed in the clench of subduing its chiding reaction.
“No, because I’m still not done with this paper. You are. Now go back to your table.”
“But I want to go outside!”
“We don’t know yet how your skin is going to react to the elements.”
“I do! Look!”
He grabbed Vickie by the wrist and drug her over to one of the many chalkboards they had set up, but the equation on its surface was half-erased, replaced by Tommy’s own unique brand of interpretation.
“Our work!” Vickie said, half breathless. “What have you done?”
“Proved I can go outside and play!”
Tommy was proud of himself. He didn’t care that Vickie was fuming over months of careful consideration, erased without so much as a warning.
“Do you know what this means?”
“Of course I do, silly, I wrote it.”
“Victor!”
Vickie ran out of the room to find her husband just returning from a supply run.
“What are we going to do?” She said without greeting.
“What now?” Victor’s expression became grave as he headed into the lab.
Tommy was up on one of his stools, pouring something into his tissue sample from one of his mother’s beakers.
“What on earth!”
Victor ran over to grab the child off the stool, but it was too late. What had been the perfectly curated ecosystem for his non-organic tissue sample was now a dried-up wasteland. Slowly, he put down the giggling child as the realization of his destructive tendencies set in.
“It wasn’t going to work, daddy. It was suffering.”
“You mean,”
Tommy nodded. “You successfully animated non-living tissue, daddy, but not very well.”
Victor’s eyes were wide with horror as he turned to the nodding Vickie.
“It’s a problem.”
“Not to worry, dear,” Victor nodded as he gave his wife a gentle kiss on the forehead. “I’m a problem solver.”
“Say, Tommy?”
Victor said one afternoon, looking up from his work. Tommy was sitting close by, idly playing with a ghost cube. Instantly, the child perked up.
“Yes, father?”
“Would you like to go on an adventure?”
The kid practically jumped to his feet.
“Yes, I would!”
“Come here then, I’ve got something for you.”
Tommy was hesitant by this inference and dubiously approached.
“Not another brainless puzzle or IQ test, I hope.”
Victor twitched. He had created those challenges for the boy!
“No, not another brain teaser, but a game.”
“A game?” Tommy asked, intrigued.
“Come with me, child.”
Victor held open a door at the end of the lab and motioned for Tommy to go in. It was a dark box of a room. Barren, with no windows and only one chair in the middle of its empty floor.
“Pretty stark father. Where’s the game?”
“Take a seat and I’ll get it.”
Tommy did as he was told, noticing the straps on the arms of the chair with wires attached, but his father came back before he could explore the contraption more thoroughly, holding a helmet. One that would cover the eyes of its wearer when put on.
“A virtual realty?”
“Yes, and no, Tommy. Here, let me put it on you.”
Victor helped Tommy place the helmet on his head. Everything got even darker and Tommy’s senses seemed to instantly dull. He could hear nothing outside of his own thoughts.
“Daddy!” He reached for his father, but his wrists had already been strapped in.
“I don’t like this!”
“Wait for it, son.” His father said into his ear over a mic. Then, suddenly, with the white light of a fluorescent bulb, a room appeared before his eyes.
“Now Tommy, this is your world. You are in control.”
“Can’t I just go outside?”
“Perhaps, if you behave yourself.”
Tommy smiled.
“But I must warn you, Tommy, for every action there is a reaction, so it is important you follow the rules.”
“What rules?”
“You will see.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because then you wouldn’t learn.”
Tommy settled into his chair with a soft sigh.
“Oh, don’t fret, they are here to help.”
Suddenly, two figures appeared out of nowhere. One all done up in a white cloak, the other in black.
“Let me guess, good and evil? Isn’t that a bit predictable?”
“After all my hard work, that wasn’t a very gracious thing to say.”
Slowly, with the popping click of crunching bones, the dark one turned to him. The shroud falling from its shoulders to reveal the wiry exoskeleton of its metal framework body. The shrill sound of its nails, which hung like the claws of a vicious beast beside her body, dragging across the floor as she turned, made every pore on his skin stand at attention. Its eyes were black voids of color and soul. Its teeth protruding with the venom-laced grin of a jackal, causing its own tongue to bleed as it moved across the thin lips of its twisted smile, which raised its high cheekbones to a sharp point capable of doing just as much puncturing damage.
Tommy pulled back, frightened, in his chair.
“I’m sorry!” He said as he squirmed.
“Very good, Tommy, apology accepted.”
Suddenly the shroud dropped from the shoulders of the other figure and with its reveal came a gold and blinding light that seemed to envelop the other in its purity, causing it to seek refuge in the shadows of a nearby corner.
Once Tommy was safe, the light retreated into the form of its provider, who stood tall and pale. Like an angel standing before the sun, it gleamed with the innocent rays of the clearest crystal waters you could find here on earth, and Tommy was immediately humbled by its pleasant gaze upon him.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Imagine.”
“What?”
“How you wish to be. Have fun now.”
Tommy nodded, thinking he knew what this meant.
“Can you hear me?” Tommy said to the figures awkwardly.
“Hear you? Child,” Good replied with a shake of the head. “We are you.”
“So you want what I want?”
“That all depends on how you wish to get it.”
Subtly, Evil was perking up.
“I think I want my parent’s lab.”
“Why do you want that?” Good asked.
“Why wouldn’t he want that?” Evil challenged as it slinked closer toward their conversation. “He’s smarter than both of them! Just think of what he could accomplish!”
“Is that really what you want, Tommy?”
“It’s what’s important to my parents.”
“Oh, think of the wonders we could do!” Evil said. “Why, we would never be bored again!”
Tommy smiled and nodded to himself.
“Now Tommy,” Good implored.
“Oh, shut up!”
With a simple gesture of her right arm, Evil sent Good crashing into the far wall. Tommy gasped. Evil came closer.
“Think of it Tommy, you and me, your parent’s lab. The inventions, the formulas! The experiments! Oh! Just say the word Tommy and I can give you it all!”
“Word!” Came from behind Evil, for Tommy’s mind was still torn.
Evil turned only to be tackled back into the ground. Squirming under its throttling posture.
“His parents work so hard!”
“But they don’t have to, they have him!”
Evil’s legs came up around Good’s neck and, with the jerk of its double-jointed pelvis, reversed their positions.
“They just don’t want him!”
“Of course they want him! They made him!”
“But they don’t want to have him!” Evil brings joined fists down on Good.
“He loves them!”
Good catches Evil’s fists before they can land.
“And they love their lab!”
“Their lab is unnecessary!”
Good brings a knee up under Evil’s stomach and flipped it overhead and away. Landing crouched like an animal, Evil takes in the scene facing Tommy, head cocked in confusion, for he is the one who had spoken.
“Mommy’s pregnant.”
They both seem dumbfounded, but Tommy just smiled. He was too much like his parents and understood how to get what it was he wanted, despite the reality of what that might mean.
“The lab is unnecessary. I’m in control, now.”
Time means nothing when you are over the moon, and that is where the revelation sent Victor after Vickie told him the good news over a special night out. They were having a baby. A natural child! They had almost forgotten about their problems with Tommy altogether.
So imagine their surprise when they returned to their secluded dwelling to find it destroyed. All burnt up and exposed to the elements. All but the chair and the boy, who had been strapped down without a means to escape. Who now sat facing the sun, with the faint expression of a smile etched into what remained of him.
Victor and Vickie wanted a child. Tommy wanted to go outside. In their single-minded aspirations, it never occurred to them who it might affect outside of themselves.
We give everything we have to accomplish our goals and reach the righteous peaks of our beliefs, but more often than not we end up corrupting ourselves in their pursuit as we forget what made having it worth anything: life.
We just do what we can to outrun what we create, chasing meaningless fulfillment, and freedom from expectations.
*Trigger warning alert: the topics and reality of abuse and violence against women are dealt with in this text.*
Drip…
The monotonous sound of a leaky faucet.
Drip…
Of rain in a downspout.
Drip…
Of blood falling from the opening of a fresh wound.
Drip…
“Counting down the blood in my hourglass. Drip by,”
Drip…
“How else would I keep time?”
Drip…
“Born backwards,”
Drip…
“Living to die.”
Drip…
“How else would you measure a year in my life?”
Brie shivers on the floor of an industrial meat locker in her torn satin negligee. Her skin has started to take on its cold lavender hue.
“The night is bitter, dark, and lifeless. No illumination from the moon or the stars.”
She rocks back and forth, cradling his limp body to her breast.
“Enlightenment is not a beacon. It is cold. It is lonely. And it is hard.”
Her face hangs torn up and into a cascade of broken skin, blood, and tears, a reflection of the body she now holds lifelessly in her lap. Yet the pain she feels is more intrusive than flesh could ever be. Her heart is breaking because of her ignorance.
“This is bottom.”
Because of her arrogance. What made her ever think she was so untouchable? What had made her so cocksure?
“My beautiful Brie.”
How long had it been since he uttered those last words? Since he breathed his final breath and his hand touched what used to be her face, now gone forever?
Like him.
With him.
Drip.
Eyes flash like a spotlight through the city’s dusky night, bearing witness to the waste and the want. She skulks, surveying the castoffs and conveyors from her shadowy perch. A gargoyle hidden within the architecture, looming and in wait.
“Why is it they always choose the night?” she asks herself, leaning against the cool brick. “What is it about the darkness that makes people feel so invincible?”
The answer, of course, is obvious. Like liquor, the night’s obscurity enables and emboldens our private truths. In fact, she cannot help the involuntary twitch of its reminder in her right eye. It is a trauma still too recent in her muscle’s memory to be controlled. Not when her skin can still feel the icy steel being slowly and repeatedly dragged across her skin from chin to eyebrow. A playful tease. Light at first, until his impulse got the better of him and its sharp blade became jagged and ruthless in its vicious endeavor.
But she shakes the image from her mind.
“Soon, the light, like a cold slap of water, sucks us back into the pretense of our reality, and all we suppress, conceal, and run from is neatly tucked away. Dawn chases twilight, good after evil, truth after lies, after our humanity… or whatever’s left of it, at least… Why am I here again?”
“No, please!”
Comes the pleading cry of a young woman from the street below. She rolls her eyes at the predictability of the scene.
“That’ll do.”
Apathetically, her eye’ roll now moves to the corner of their perspective sockets to calmly take in what plays out below. A story as old as time. Where a rather stout, husky, shit of a man turns the corner, dragging behind him a reluctant woman, well out of his league.
She shakes her head.
“Without fail. Take a walk with awareness and you are bound to see a thousand hateful things. But start predicting evil, and you’ve become it. It is a fine moral line we humans walk between awake and asleep. Between complacency and righteous survival’s ego.”
“Stop!”
The poor thing stands firm in her resistance. She thinks that if she is determined enough and stands her ground, he will see sense and be embarrassed enough to let her go—at least enough to get a running head start while he checks in with his “bad behavior.” But that’s not how this story goes. That is not how this world works.
She could be any young woman out at night, looking for a way to blow off some steam and have a good time. The life of the party if the shots are good enough, free enough, flowing enough. Forget about the world for an hour or two. About the state of things. Ignore the fact that women have to do extensive research to know all the best ways to get away, moves to get away, and people to signal if something goes wrong. There is so much we have to consider before we even get dressed in the morning. It’s stupid. It’s unfair. But when you take a stand against society’s unwritten guide to knowing your place, you take a huge risk. Never stopping to think that you will be the next headline the world will forget about is the fastest way to get you there.
“Good, evil, and passive denial. Martyr, psychopath, over caring, and indifferent.”
Does anybody really want to stop to consider the other things that go bump in nocturnal ambiguity and genital immunity? We think it could never happen to us. No one really wants to believe they will be the victim of their own story or this week’s call to arms and rallying hashtag.
Not until it’s too late.
“In the real world, last-minute rescues are few and far between.”
“Seriously. Stop.”
He almost laughs at her defiance. That is until he turns with the back of his hand across her face.
“Heroes don’t make headlines. Atrocities do.”
The girl is stunned as she hits the sidewalk. Her arm jerked nearly out of its socket because he refuses to let go of her wrist.
“The nice guys are the fluffers in this porno called life. They finish last. The feel-good stories get ‘blink, and you miss it’ coverage because it’s not real journalism. We breed our own problems and encourage a world full of psychopaths and narcissists.”
It is not the sting of the blow she feels but the sinking realization of what comes next—what she is helpless to stop. He lifts her back onto her feet and continues to move away from the crowds.
Amazing how a city can go from the hustle and bustle of good times to the sinister seclusion of dead-ends and distant sirens. Not that a room full of people could help her now. Screaming rarely ever works to curry anything outside of your attacker’s wrath. You can see it in the way her posture has shifted from one of defense to one of complacent resignation. Still, she tries to appeal to his humanity. She wants to make it out of this alive.
“I really don’t want to do this.”
It’s almost sweet, her optimism. She still believes he has an angel keeping the devil in his pants company. That he could fill the role of anything other than king of the shit pigs, who walk this world entitled to label anything and everything as their right.
The man responds to her petition by turning her around as if they were dancing, to illustrate his point.
“Then you should never have grinded up on me like that, baby girl.”
Underlining it by slamming her against his body.
“Stop playing hard to get, you little slut. I know your type.”
Frantic disgust and its instinctive need to pull away from his sweaty aggressions gets the better of her, but he just laughs. It is when she starts to cry that he is offended. Not a fan of the reflection it invokes, he shoves her away from him as though she were the repulsive one. How dare she molest the image he has of himself to make herself the victim for having to pay for the consequence of her coquettish behavior and good looks!
Thrown up against the side of the building, she is subsequently winded by the contact. He grabs her by the chin, and the streetlight illuminates his features.
Despite their numbers and ranks, they begin to look alike. The desperate need that subconsciously drives their every action in its desire to prove something etches the same grime on the lines of their skin. The pomp they wear as a moniker of their gender that they think entitles them worthy.
This one is trying to get people to believe he is the tough guy. So he appears rough around the edges, with patchy facial hair that only makes his round face look dirtier than it already is. The muscular arms that hang from his ripped tank and faux leather vest prove he is a man who likes to lift weights. While the hard round gut that protrudes from its Metallica casing says he doesn’t really do it because he cares, but because, again, he is trying to prove he is the man. He has all the pretense of masculinity with nothing to show for it.
“This will be too easy.” She smiles to herself.
Pinned against the wall as his face bobs about her own, the girl is forced to endure the intense aroma of cigarettes and alcohol that leak from his pores and mouth.
“You loved on me when I was paying for your drinks, baby,”
“Yes, but I believe the bartender is the only one who will receive your tip tonight, bud.”
“Who the hell…”
More annoyed than defensive, the man looks over his shoulder to see where and who this declaration has come from. Still, she takes it, because the look on his face when he is only met with the empty shelter of his precious night, as though it has betrayed him, is priceless.
“But was that the best line?” She thinks out loud. “How about, I’m afraid that the only one directing you to ‘insert tip’ is the bartender’s jar?”
She shakes head, “How does Spider-Man do it?” But soon realizes the man has completely disregarded her threat and is on the move again, girl in tow. Then it catches her eye. A flagpole only a couple of buildings down from where she is and where they are headed.
“Well, he does whatever a spider can, now doesn’t he? Wahaha.”
With a mischievous grin, she ducks back into the dusky shroud of her window’s ledge and ascends from the alcove, using the texture of the brick to sidle her way around to where the neighboring structure’s fire escape hangs.
It is a steep fall and quite the leap to make it across. Though she is trying not to look down or think too much about the statistics, she can’t help it.
“Crap.” Quickly, she pinches her eyes against the view.
“Let’s talk.” The girl’s voice pleads from below, still attempting her appeal. But he is feeling more and more confident the longer he gets away with it.
“Please!” the girl half shrieks, half sobs.
It is in this she resolves to keep going, stretching her reach across the alley’s width to the metal railing of the fire escape, only to find it is too far to reach. She will have to jump.
“Don’t worry, baby girl, we’re almost there.”
She opens her eyes and lets her body fall, pushing off the brick to make up the difference between the two buildings. Never stopping to take into consideration the fact that it had rained, she manages the distance only to land her hand on the slick wet of the railing, which causes her to slip and her body to fall. Thankfully, because she had pushed off the brick instead of clinging to it for dear life, she lent her progression enough forward momentum to get her heels on the inside of the lower level’s railing. This sends her descent forward, sliding down its thin metal base with every vertebrate. It plays her spine like a xylophone before she smacks her head on its surface to save her neck before landing hard on her ass.
“Two points!” she grunts as she throws her limp hands up in a goalpost sign before picking herself up to climb the ladders to the roof.
Quick to run its length, the flagpole now sits directly across from her current position.
“A real super eight,” the man says. “There we can have all the long, hard talks ya want!”
They are below her. The girl is losing faith in her salvation, she can tell, as silent tears pour out of her.
She cracks her neck against her shoulders, backing up while attempting to reinforce instinct over doubt. Of course, she knows she is going to do this no matter the probable outcome, but hell, what she wouldn’t give to be as cocksure as the asshole below.
“In fact,” the man says, pulling the girl into the alley below, unable to wait any longer. “I think I’ve got something I want you to hear, right…” Continuing on with his idiotic attempt at innuendo, he pushes the girl against the wall and fiddles with his pants.
“Now” she says and charges forward without another thought, and leaps into the narrow alleyway.
What momentum she has built, she uses to kick off the opposite building’s wall to hurdle the distance between her and the pole. Arms extend, fingers stretch, she catches the flagpole, but her velocity refuses to be ebbed and the lower half of her body rebels against the jerking bluntness, her arms sudden anchoring takes on her joints. The pole itself is slick, and as her legs fly forward, her body is thrown up. She cannot keep her grip and so flies forward, straight into the man’s side as though he were the pins to the bowling ball of sloppy landing.
They skid out of the alley and into the street’s slimy gutter, breaking apart upon contact. She scurries up and onto his chest before his mind can make any sense of what just happened. Grabs him by the collar and slams his back into the ground, winding him into submission.
“Yeah, that’s right,”
He squirms under her, but she has pinned his wrists and pinches his ribs between her thighs, obstructing his airways, keeping him winded and light-headed, so with every motion, he is only getting weaker.
“I even…” She attempts to blow the hair out of her face, but it is no use. It won’t be tamed. “Got the name of the brick wall that hit ya, it’s ass, as in kiss mine. You alright?” She attempts to ask the girl over her shoulder.
“Uh…” the man groans, but she smacks his forehead with their shared grip.
“Not you, you.”
The girl, who hangs back in the alley’s shadow, is paralyzed by this whirlwind of activity.
“I… I,” she says, cautiously stepping out.
“I know,” she says, alleviating the girl’s need to answer. Then, she begins to dig around in the man’s pockets, but only after taking the precaution of holding his wrist with the extended boot of her leg.
The girl blinks as the slow realization of what was about to happen sinks in.
“Oh, my god…” Backing up against the wall. “Oh, my god…” Sinking against it as her hands run themselves through her hair. “My mom was right,”
In her scavenging, she finds a half packet of cigarettes she tosses into a gutter puddle. A Superman key chain she can’t help but scoff at before throwing it into the actual gutter.
“She was right.” The girl continues in blank horror. “I shouldn’t be doing this, be dressing like this…”
“True.” She says. “A shorter inseam would do more for your leg line while also lifting your butt.”
This response surprises the girl, shocking her out of her frenzy before it got out of control.
“Look,” she turns, taking a hard seat on the man’s stomach, crossing her legs as she fixes her hair behind her ears.
In an instant, the girl forgets herself and stares slack-jawed and horrified by the gruesome sight that now reveals itself on the woman’s face. A roadmap of hate and pure evil. The entire right side of her face is layered with the thick engraved healing of torn and sliced-up flesh.
The girl shakes her head. She cannot believe, cannot accept that her salvation should come from one so violent and disturbing.
But, hardened to this reaction, she shrugs off its reflection.
“I know, I know…my hair is a mess.”
The girl’s mouth moves, but nothing escapes its breathless judgment. Then the man makes a noise, moving his head. He’s regaining composure. This is now an even more horrific threat than before. The proof is in the woman who sits before her. What men are capable of when thwarted by their claim. She wants to scream, but before she can, the woman lunges forward, grabbing her up by the arms with a slight — though not violent — shake.
“It is going to be okay. Okay?”
The girl shakes her head, eyes still focused on the scars, on the man, and the possibilities. She shakes her again, demanding her attention.
“You did nothing wrong. I need you to get that. Okay?”
This time, the girl can’t bring herself to nod.
“Repeat after me.” She jerks her again. “I. Did. Nothing. Wrong.”
The girl’s eyes can’t help but meet the intense conviction of the woman’s penetrating stare.
“I did nothing wrong.” She says in a barely audible whisper. But she needed to hear it from herself. It brings her back. Lip quivering as the woman pulls her into a hug as comforting as it is empowering.
“Don’t walk in the shadow of this filth. Don’t take it on. You’re better than this.”
She pulls her back and once more looks her in the eye with a reassuring confidence capable of making you believe in anything.
“Keep living your life. He isn’t worth your fear.”
As she bobs her mindless head, determination sinks into her features.
“We’re better than that.”
Touched by the sentiment, she smiles, then hands the girl the wad of cash she has taken from the man’s wallet.
“Now take this and go and live your life. There is a new boogeyman in town, and this one’s on your side.” She gives a swift, teased kick to the girl’s backend as she runs from the alley.
Alone now with her “prey” now, she turns her attention to an empty street.
“Well, shit.”
Suddenly, hi-beams come on behind her. Languidly, she looks over her shoulder.
“The Super 8, I presume?”
All at once, he guns it, pinning her down the narrow alleyway. There is nowhere to run.
“Toro, toro, toro!” She says as she turns to face it, taking a stance as though she were ready to catch it like the Hulk.
Though the man is angry and hell-bent, he can’t help but shudder with the thought she might be more than she appears, and his instincts react by hitting the brakes. It does little to stop the imminent impact, but it buys her the opportunity to jump the hood.
She hits it hard, bouncing and denting its finish as the momentum sends her up and over its top despite her clawing and gripping at the metal. In the commotion, she pulls off a wiper and, in one last desperate attempt to hang on, stabs it through the windshield, causing the man to swerve in reaction as he exits the alley on hinges and a prayer. Flinging her off and into the overflowing dumpster bags, which collapse onto her body as her weight sinks through their contents.
Leaking, soggy, and sticky piles of refuse and human waste.
“Seems fitting,” she says as she stares at the broken and bent, jagged half of the wiper still in her hand—her trophy.
“Yeah, go, live your life, she says…”
And this, she is reminded, is the one she has chosen.
“We’re better than this.”
With a long sigh, she lets her head fall back upon the garbage pillow of the path she has chosen.
I am a self confessed adrenaline junkie. I love to be physical and literally throw myself into whatever it is I’m doing in the most explosive way. However, it isn’t just for the thrill of it, or the rush, It is for the experience and the mastery of it.
When I was nothing but a wee little lumpkin, I was obsessed with ballet. My mother even gave me the antique nutcracker she bought when she was nothing but a struggling teenager living on her own and supporting herself, because I had always been her Clara (as much as this moment of nostalgia touches my heart – and never loses its fondness – I actually find the nutcracker to be one of the most annoying ballet, but I wont get into that rant, you’re here to seek insight on another topic altogether.)
Not only did I love how pretty it was – from the costumes, to the staging, to the makeup, and movement – I loved its ability to transport and transfix me into its realm, without words. The art of telling a story and conveying emotion – sometimes multiple at a time – without ever directly being told what it was that was happening, that compelled me.
I was never classically trained – we didn’t have the budget for consistent dance classes growing up – but since when has that ever stopped me before? I took it upon myself to study the moments, the movements, and the impact. To practice having that kind of control over my own form, and when I did I began to become naturally in tune to the complex and often time subtle intricacies of how the human body moves and reacts. I awoke an innate awareness over every inch of my person at any given time.
As I grew, my dancing fervor evolved – well I suppose you could say “blended” – into my love for stunt choreography. In particular, fight scenes.
Ballet is all about having complete control over your muscles and movements, so much control that your lines are precise but your motion is fluid. This takes a thorough knowledge of how your body works, how your muscles respond to gravity, what it takes to achieve extension, height, and weightlessness. In stunt work, to stop just short of contact, so that your opponent looks like they are getting hurt without their being any hurt involved, you have to have control of your surroundings, proximity, and the ability to control the power that goes into your movements. And if you are the one taking the beating, you have to understand your body, and its anatomy, intimately enough to react believably. It takes subtly and awareness, control and surrender.
Is this not a perfect allegory for writing?
In both of these physical mediums there is an element of story present, communicated through movement, showing vs telling, what every writer knows they need to master in order to truly transport their audience from words to world.
You have to be able to combine the physical with the story telling. What’s being said with what’s being seen/done and what you need your audience to walk away understanding. Sure, you could be overt, but it falls flat, or worse becomes comical when you intend differently. Sure, you could daze them with the POW! BANG! WAMMY! HIYA! But once the starlight in their eyes clears what’s left to resonate? What do they take away.
A scene can’t just be a scene. It needs to move the story along.
This is where my approach to writing comes in. Just like you need to have the visual and the voice, the description and the point, you have to have the understanding of experience.
A great place to start is with your very own human experiencing body. When was the last time you really stopped and honed in on how your body responds to different actions, emotions, movements, or situations? Gauged the level of feeling, the active nervous response, the tension, and how they all play a part in your emotional response as well?
I’m not saying you need to go and throw yourself off a building, or become the next Misty Copeland or anything, but invoking this kind of active perception mindset can make a difference.
So instead of reading another writing how to book, why not throw yourself into the art of storytelling through physical awareness? Experience what it is to show a story through your body so that your pen can become an extension of all that you learn without words.
It’s funny how life and timing play out when it comes to your dreams. Take me for instance, I wanted to be a ballerina and tell stories through the fluidity of my movements, without the need of words, to convey meaning with my body, however, we didn’t have the money growing up, so I choreographed my own. I wanted to be a Broadway star and tell stories through the infliction of my vocal cords, the expression of my voice and pantomime of motions, but again, we didn’t have the money to further this aspiration, so I learned through others, tempered my voice and tone to match who I was listening to to teach me pitch and tone and control. I would whisper before I would belt to learn the note inside and out before I attempted to be its master. I played greats in my bedroom, basement, and before a plethora of friends, family and stuffed animals. I even wrote my own at the tender age of tween, “Love Sucks”, about a disenchanted young woman, cynical to the over-commercialization of romantic love. Then dabbled in with an adaptation called “Sorta Gypsy” about a female director putting on her first production of Gypsy, integrating the songs in a new way well adding so of my own original pieces. Then a murder mystery – as yet titled – where a lesbian couple works to free their wrongfully accused friend of murdering his newly wed wife.
Yet the stage would have to wait, for quite unexpectedly a new love entered my life, and all because I was being a good older sister and keeping my brother company while he cleaned his room. As it turned out he had a discarded comic book that had come with an action figure. That action figure just so happened to be Gambit. That comic – X-Men.
I would say the rest is history, but as I am still alive and breathing I guess I’d better keep up the type and tell, after all we have yet to hit the main characters struggle to triumph arch.
Well, it’s safe to say that I fell in love. Comic Books became my thing. They seemed to marry everything that I had ever been interested in! Fighting (Thank you Hercules and Xena) Powers (Sailor Moon and Power Rangers) adults ( I never liked ready about children or kids my own age, never!) and real life. I always loved the intricate detailed nuances of interpersonal relationships and the psychology behind interactions/reactions the the multitude of ways the same situation can turn out depending on the people/persons involved (that’s why story telling never gets old even with the same ideas repeating themselves!).
Me and my brother would play like we were part of the team, running around battling, creating new characters and powers ( I never liked being another character, I always wanted to be a part of, so I tended to always make up a new character/background). The more I read the more this game started to take on a life of its own. It wasn’t just one off battles that were played in the back yard. This was a daily episode, story line, continuity, that continued its sequential events where it left off.
I was obsessed with X-men starting from the beginning and working my way chronologically through, that is until I ran out of materials. This was before Marvel was a household name and slow-cooker – you think I kidding?
So I tried out different series runs, Extreme, Series 3, Ultimate – oh how I hated ultimate! Turning them all into petulant children. When it came to Ultimate X-men vs the Ultimates…well I was rooting for the made-over Avengers. Especially when Magneto had Captain America pinned against the wall by his own shield and Cap didn’t break eye contact telling Magneto how he was going to fail. DAMN!
Long story somewhat shortened I began reading Avengers, but not just Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man as well. I began collecting these titles scoring big on so many fronts (I own almost the complete runs of each!), and as my collections grew so too did my own world’s sequence of events.
I almost couldn’t believe that I was that good at it, I had always though of myself as an idea person. That I didn’t have it in me to see the details of story telling through. I thought I would make a better producer then a writer. HA! so young…but then I read Avengers Disassembles and my opinion changed.
Nothing about that graphic novel felt right to me. The characters, the motivation, the sequence of events. I thought it was just because I hadn’t gotten that far in the original series, in the lead up to this devastation, but I had to cut myself so credit. I know good writing – by this point I had read enough to know. It just didn’t sit right. I could do it better…me, but I’ve never been one just to bitch or brag. I had to put my money where my mouth was.
This was no longer a game I was playing with my siblings, this was a series all on its own. Especially after I was betrayed by some friends, left like I was nothing and this world was throw away. I’m a passionate person, so don’t dick with me and what it is I am passionate about. I destroyed that world as a duel story line. Recreating it in an alternate dimension that reshaped the my characters (a whole teams worth or original characters) and the way they interacted with/in Marvel’s own established universe.
I was older (an official teenager) and my work reflected my growth. It was grittier and more grown-up in its approach. I began to write down these stories as they happened. Mind you I never really went into it with any established idea or story board of what or how something was going to happen. I allowed the events to play out according to each character. It was a free flow of improv and imagination. It was their “real life” unfolding according to their interactions/reactions and how they define what happens next. I might have an idea, but was constantly being surprised by its ability to evolve and grow from there.
Well in between this I was dabbling in script writing, thinking that an X-men television series would be kickass! (Again this was riiight before the Marvel Studios, superhero movement). I established where this continuity would pick up, wrote a pilot (two parter) and then three episodes after that.
These worlds were my life line, for as they grew m,y outer world shrank. My parents were in a precariously devastating place in their marriage, my older brother was lashing out, my sister was shutting down, we continued to move all around without any roots or extended family to remind us where or who we came from, and I got sick.
It’s hard enough being a teenager, but you add your own body breaking down around you to puberty and you have a recipe for disaster.
My worlds became my escape. They became a refuge and a reliable consistency that I didn’t have anywhere else in my life. My characters were my family and their stories my home.
When I was seventeen I challenges myself to write outside of my comfort zone, just to see if TBM (the being method, the method of acting out your stories before story boarding or pen touched paper to get a better inside feel for character and worlds, atmosphere and situation) would work outside my sequential action series. I decide on a drama screenplay. Now known as Homecoming, set in 1960’s America, a young couple faces the challenges and changes of war and what it means to come back to a life you never had a fair chance to live.
Without proper editing (I was so go-go-go, again the precious invincibility of youth) it placed second round at the Austin Film Festival – my letter even had a handwritten note from the competitions director about how realistic my characters and descriptions were. I’m actually good at this.
It was an incredible high…
Too bad life was the low.
I bottomed out. Chronic illness and the depression that often goes hand in hand with it took over. I had been fighting it for over seven long years. Fighting writer’s block, physical parallelization, emotional fallout, separation, abandonment, perpetual loneliness, and the lack of any kind of direction or stability in my personal or familial life. I was an island. I was a child. I was lost.
If only we could know then what we know now…I never would have given in or given up all that I had fought so long to preserve.
But I did. I walked away.
No one came after me. No one seemed to notice or miss me. No one…but me. It took some time to realize that that was really all who mattered. Hadn’t time showed me that I was meant to be?
I may have known a lot of set backs in my time – I mean it is a bit demoralizing to finally send your portfolio into Marvel’s open submissions platform a week or so before they announce they’re closing it and all current submissions will be disposed of unread, oh yeah and Marvel Studios is a thing and Iron Man the movie will be coming out! Can anyone say bad timing! Those kinds of ironies kept seeming to happen every time I would put myself out there. I could never quite be on the curve I was always just ahead or just behind. Even my age/birth seemed to lend itself to the too soon too late paradox.
Nevertheless, I was being shown by something outside of myself and far bigger than conventional standards or timing. I had to get over the plans I had pout into place from the age of thirteen on. I had to let go of the should be, could be, would be’s. I had to get over myself and the wounds I inflicted on myself because of others own lashing out.
It was probably – all tallied up – about three years I went completely MIA from my creative lifstyle. A nomad complete, emotionally, physically, mentally, a recluse. I had no identity and no direction. I had deleted, stopped, packed up, and turned my back on every outlet I had ever had. I was the fallout of Chernobyl proportions. Until I sat down and I forced myself to face it.
Face the fact that it wasn’t going to be like riding a bike. I wasn’t going to jump back in and be who I was. I would never be that girl again, the one I had idealized in my memory. I couldn’t go back there. It was going to be uncomfortable, frustrating, and lacking. Something once like breathing was going to be hard and forced. It was going to feel unnatural. I was going to constantly be trying to compare myself, my place, my career, everything to someone else, but I had to stay the course. I had to face front and get back to reestablishing me.
Yes I felt scattered and undisciplined, going from one subject, one format, one project to the next. Stabbing in the dark and seeing what blade stuck in where. It sucked, I wont sugarcoat it. Even my taste in music (MUSIC!), what makes my world/s go round, suffered. I was grounded in nothing, foundation devastated by trying to be conventional, forcing myself to be acceptable, and noticeable. I was disgusted with myself but I had to be the first to embrace her, to forgive her, and give her the recognition for still being here after walking through hell, to still be standing despite my intellectualized want to recoil into the fetal position. To still being capable, or at least open to being capable again. To still showing up for me, the me I still believed I could be.
Well something stuck, and here I am, one the second edit of the first installment of a completed trilogy. A whole new world and set of characters. After I said I could never write a book or be an author.
what a difference time makes when your willing to see it through, not on your terms, but for the love of what it creates when you let go of definition and surrender to its illusive synchronicity’s intention.
Throwback Post Pick is a weekly feature where I fling open the vaults of past works – no matter the naivete they reflect – and revel in the making of progress! So come, TBT with me!
There’s just something about this piece that I just adore! I mean not only did I somehow manage to get the line “God and Devil syncopated” in there (seriously) but I also can remember writing it for a now defunct blog back in the day.
It was for a weekly feature that centered around my Tumblr feed. Basically I used pictures to inspire verse, art to inspire writing, etc. and I loved it for a while…that is until it became the only form of expression that seemed left to me. It was a depressing time in my life when I allowed myself to become a hollowed out shell.
Yes there are many things that I would do differently if I could but nothing that I regret for I am in a totally different place now and it is because of the many hell’s that I have walked.
I think we all dream of having a perfect life but it is truly in the details of feeling the lows as well as the highs where true appreciation and experience resides.
Anyway – it came to yet another Tuesday and I was scrambling through pinterest to get something that I could slap stick some rhyme to in hopes of creating at least a semi-passable post. Enter John Bauer – a Swedish painter and fairy tale/folklore illustrator whose (in the words of my post)
Work I absolutely love! The languid lines add such an ethereal essence to the people, it’s absolutely intoxicating! Making me believe all the things!
Yes I can bullshit with the best of them. In fact I have my BS in that very craft!…
You get it. 😉
It’s true that I had often pinned various artist fairy tale renderings, but I was desperate! Now as I peel back the layers of my creation I can see what truly captivated me about the theme.
I was never big into fairy tales like many of my siblings. I wasn’t really read to as a child in fact I hated reading, thanks to a broken public school system whose cracks I just went * swoop* straight through! But that’s a story for another time. I am familiar with several versions and standards and standards of versions (Hello Disney anyone?) but I was never really a princess type. I admired them sure, but I myself was never a princess…unless you count the warrior kind that is. AHLALALALA!
So it is quite the irony that I have more in common with them then I ever could have imagined. I mean I have based so much of my very existence in make believe and fantasy, in far away worlds and mysterious lands. I have existed as woman, I have existed as man. Any many of life I have lived, every manner of human I have at least touched upon the heart or dark hole of. They have existed in me and I through them.
For what else are fairy tales than the sociological and psychological study of human nature?
Ten to one my stories in some form or another come down to the contemplation of good and bad and how no such definition exists. It is based upon ruling opinion passed down to fit the and conform to the societal standards of its day. We deem what is acceptable and unacceptable, moralistic and depraved. Yet look at how over the centuries – hell even decades – it has changed. We grow and we judge by the ever evolving ideals of our times.
And what are fairy tales and folk lore if not a reflection on that?
Still in the words not only do I see a link between the worlds of fairy and me, but also between the lines of where I was and where I longed to be again. Constantly seeking that yellow brick road back to self, back to majesty and mastery that ever seemed out of grasp yet refused to let me go. Trapped in my own form of moralistic torment and making quite the myth of it.
And is that not the truth of regret at its heart? Are we not failing to live up to the romanticized versions of the past we left behind in times unwanted when we ourselves are lost. Instead of using the grandiose versions of past to lift us up with its reminder of capability and possibility we use it to beat us down by its comparison.
Still in the end the worst thing we can do is look away. We must face the beast, slay the dragon, feel the loss without losing the hope, see past the features, walk on the glass, cut off the hands, pay for the sins of another, sleep on the thimble, enter the house, burn in the sun, and hide in the stars, in order to find our happily ever after was in us all along.
Once I was a Queen,
Of Fantasy,
Of dreams.
Worlds you can’t conceive,
For they have yet to be.
Mine was singular but plenty,
Soft and light but still heavy…
…
Once I was a Ruler,
So prestigious and so grand,
I could hold a people in the very palm of my hand.
I was larger than life,
I was hope, I was strife,
I was daughter,
I was son,
I was husband,
I was wife.
…
Once I was a Fighter,
Taller,
Stronger,
Then the rest.
I could beat the bad guys,
And prove I was the best.
Yet best can not be risen,
Till its opposite is given…
…
Once I was a Villain,
Evil you can’t imagine.
Destroyer of that which I had created,
God and Devil syncopated.
Then there came a time,
When all this was forgotten,
All left by the wayside.
So what did I become?
How much grander could I get?
When the future is unknown,
Holding stakes I can not bet.
It seems so dark at times,
How could things be greater?
When there was a time when I was thine own creator?
…
Yet sunny skies emerge,
There still so much I have to purge,
So I will keep on being, still creating, and conceiving,
Writer’s Quote Wednesday is a weekly feature where I delve into famous writer’s words of wisdom and share how I have interpreted the meaning for my own creative endeavors to maybe help inspire yours!
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the readers eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
Bill Barich
And I couldn’t agree more!
Seriously when I found this quote I felt heart warm. In many ways it felt like validation to something that I’ve always believed and practiced as a writer/creative person.Though there have been times when walking an unconventional credo has been tested and even given up – though not to any great lengths of success, let me tell you!
It can be hard to “stand apart.” To exist as something so wholly and fully yet have it not fit into any specific life path. It can be isolating, confusing, and quite frustrating at times but in many ways it’s like screaming in the woods naked – what’s the point? I mean you are where you are with nothing but your innate sense of survival to depend upon what’s the use in fighting it with fits that are sure to see you parish in no time?
Creative is something that can’t be taught once it is found within – I mean you can teach someone to paint, to write, to sing etc, but when it is something that yearning and call to arms then teaching is something that should not be forced.
How do you teach something so subjective as art? How do you fit creativity into such an institutionalized criteria? When you really want to add something to the medium how do you teach the maker what to make?
Inspiration is something that needs to come freely from within and not forced to exist in the confines of curriculum in order for it to have any true heart.
Was it not Picasso who said that it took four years to learn how to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child?
It’s because convention tries to – pardon the pun – paint creativity into a performing arts box. It wants so badly to control something that is better left to be wild. Children have no problem simply creating whatever they feel called to create. To do for the doing, to put hand and mind to task from a sparked idea. To just go for it because they feel called to.
It can be hard as adults to remember this freedom from ego’s reinforced standards of conduct. We grow insecure, we second guess, we start to wonder if its any good, if we are any good. We waste so much time speculating whether or not what we do has any worth, any purpose, or place. We get so caught up in the over scrutinizing comparison in what and where we should be in life and career, who we should be and how to cram out creatives selves into fitting into its expectation that we lose faith in ourselves and our craft when it just doesn’t seem to belong on those terms and when it can’t quite seem to catch up to those liner guidelines.
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the readers eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
A good writer, a good artist of any kind, goes off of instinct, they create from the sheer point of view that it must be done. That they have something to say, they need to get it out, and here is finally the way.
In any true creative medium there is no following in the footsteps of, you have to forge your own path in order to make any kind of impact on the world. That’s not saying that you can’t get anywhere doing something creative in a conventional or formulaic manner, it’s just that in order to become a marvel you need to come from a place where the only true originality exists – you.
You are not Picasso. You are not JK Rowling. You are not Steven King, Quintin Tarantino, Van Gogh, Byron, Angelou, Goya, Woolf, Spielberg, Atwood, Bach, etc, etc, etc…
And that is a truly wonderful thing to embrace, because anything else just exists in the genres ether, in the midst of a million others whose inspiration was clouded with trying to much to be alike and follow the rules set by those who dared not follow the ones that existed before them.
Instead of trying to learn the rules of your craft try first to learn the way of your own. Yes read, but write first. Yes expose yourself to the masters but do not be ruled by them. Do not get buried in the requirements of what it takes to be an artist.
Because in the end true art begins and ends with you.
Why else would childhood exist as the most creative time in our existence? When we are new and unexposed. When what we think comes from an untouched place, comes from a true uniqueness of perspective and independent thought? When we are real individuals co-existing with the world surrounding us instead of just another cog in collective convention?
Just ask yourself when was the last time you looked at something, anything, and allowed your mind to think for itself, without the pressure of other’s imposed standards of opinion?
There is not just one way of seeing anything in this world (with the exception of a few things, like white supremacists, there really is not fine line there) just what we’ve been told. What had been passed down for decades as defined.
But in and of itself definition is a man-made construct of widely excepted opinion!
Everything can be talked in and talked out, talked around and talked through. We are limitless beings with limitless perspectives based in unique cellular coding. Just think about that for a moment…there are an estimated 7.7 billion living people in the world and out of those 7.7 billion no two – not even twins – have the exact same DNA sequence!
It’s about darn time we started acting like it! Creating like it! Living like it!
We want to badly to be a part of a whole but a whole cannot exist without the sum of its parts. We are each a heartbeat adding to the human experience through our own way of experiencing it.
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the readers eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.
Now I don’t know if this is what Bill Barich had in mind but it’s certainly what it inspired within me sitting here at the computer and contemplating its outreach. I am an unconventional creative, unconventional in most things actually, because it conformity has never sat well in me. I have yearned to have a more conventional life, to be more like others, to instagram on the regular, save for vacation with my 2.5, to settle down, to have gone to collage and had the normal participatory social life, hell I even gave up a few years of my life to try, but it just never took to my stubborn ass because deep, deep down I’ve always refused to fall short of my own potential and in doing so my potential refused to fall short of me.
Stop forcing it. Just let it be, and soon you will see that you already have all that you will ever need.
Throwback Post Pick is a weekly feature where I fling open the vaults of past works – no matter the naivete they reflect – and revel in the making of progress! So come, TBT with me!
The nature of emotion. That’s something that compels my thoughts, fuels my writing, and intrigues my observation.
Watching people express themselves, hold back from expressing themselves, how they seem to interact differently with different kinds of people. The good, the bad, the ugly sides of human nature and its desperate need to be noticed and to be loved.
Yet all too often true emotion is chastised as being too overt, too weak and cowardly, too spoiled and embarrassing. We apologize for our raw narrations. For our hurt, our joy, our anger, and dismay.
Feelings are deemed messy and vulgar yet how else are we to understand our true selves? To convey the dark is to make way for the light. To reach into the unknown of reaction is to find the real cause and get to know your own triggers better.
How does one heal when only treating a symptom because they don’t want to deal with what it takes to find the cause?
I have always been a sensitive person and what some may even want to deem deeply disturbed. I have always looked out into the world with a heart that loved and felt too much for its own good. Traumatized by evils, anxious over atrocities that were a part of history, sick with worry for every animal, person, and place that had yet to feel love or know the warmth and tender compassion of a home.
However we are not always a world who coddles a heart so delicate, instead we think it our duty to harden it to a reality we ourselves choose to perpetuate.
My problem was never naivete, was never innocence, where my affliction lie was in my understanding and curious brain that allowed my mind to think too much and too long well still too much intertwined with imagination and in too vivid a reality to be able too look away. My sensitive heart didn’t need exposure it needed to express, to let out what I was being flooded and overfilled with…but I never got that console, that armchair referee, or means to unburden myself and unleash the demons that would see me catatonic.
Thankfully I had as much persevering spirit so as much as my overthinking mind could get me into trouble it could also see me finding my way out of it despite the emotional turmoil is could cause in conjunction with my overly perceptive intuition.
It’s part of the reason I found my way to writing. When overexposure became too much of a problem with no means of an outlet for expression I turned to the imaginative worlds in which I could release and work through my emotions in a healthy means of understanding.
I can not help my nature and I learned first hand how wrong it is to try to beat it down, to conform, or hate on it. Exposure is what I knew and what I live, but I refuse to let vulnerability be a weakness and instead embrace its effects with open mind and open heart, and flow with the sensation of its means.
That being said I will never not find it utterly touching to see and write love portrayed as total accepting of another’s reactions. To not condemn one for their “ugly”pain and instead look past the lashing out of emotions effects and to the person they are at heart, to the hurt it caused further down then the feral response of survival.
To see the person for the suffering not the victim.To me that is love in its purest form – to be able to remind someone of who they are when they are lost or consumed, to see reflected in their gaze not the monster or pathetic mess that other’s might deem you but the essence of the beauty beyond.
In the subtext of reaction lies the truth of another’s pain, read the emotions not the words, don’t react to the anger respond to the hurt and remind them of the essence of their worth.
Art By Esra Røise
Living Full Spectrum
Water color wind and sea,
Carry my form into the deep –
Blue colors seem to fill my eyes,
Red the color of the part which dies,
I seem to blast out a rainbow of emotion,
Turning transparent through all the commotion.
Why chose to see me in sepia tones?
Tones of unenlightened monochrome.
For mine is a color scheme of ever-changing rhythm.
Writer’s Quote Wednesday is a weekly feature where I delve into famous writer’s words of wisdom and share how I have interpreted the meaning for my own creative endeavors to maybe help inspire yours!
I write best when I am either falling in love or falling apart
Rudy Francisco
Though it is true that it doesn’t matter what mood I’m in I write – never one to wait for muse to be inspired to go for it and see what happens/translates – I can still feel this statement ring true in many ways.
One of my more acclaimed poems actually came about in the moment of total nervous breakdown. It came weeping out of my soul, the tormented reflections of one who needed to pick them self up and inevitably try again yet felt on the very verge of giving up and in to the dismal damnation of clawing depression.
The very words Flesh and Blood seem to come from the very depths of my cracked hope – or else from the heavens urging me onward with the bittersweet battle-cry reminder that I am still Flesh and Blood.
There have been many times – in my experience – where I was having a fight with someone, or someone was blatantly ignoring me or my feelings even when I told them exactly what I needed – mind you I don’t play that passive aggressive game, I’m not about that shit, I’m very open about what makes tick/love/all of the above! – when I’m being bated into a fight, aggrieved at every turn, or mentally mindfucked, I sit myself down at my desk and I go to town. I punch it out, I put myself in the scene and fulfill my own damn needs!
There something cathartic about being on the brink of breakdown, alone and falling apart, when at your wits end and every one has counted you out, is avoiding you, is done with you etc, and sticking it to them through your pen!
Writers are nothing if not vengeful commentators…you know satirical shits? 😉
But then vice versa when on top of the world, when in love with life, with a person, a happy day or even just what you have to creatively come back to, its like a hit of adrenaline, a bump of cocaine, something about it makes you anticipate the moment when you can sit down and just produce.
I write best when I am either falling in love or falling apart.
Maybe the reasoning lies in the fact that though often times considered an introverted lifestyle, creatives are just big ol’ exhibitionists at heart. Maybe we don’t like looking people in the eye while we do it but we do love to tell our stories and share our passions brainchild.
So when we are in love the motivation to create gets revved because we have a person – our freakin’ person/people/place/part of the world etc – someone or something that makes us feel wanted and desired for every part of us, and what could be more apart of us then what fuels our life’s blood?
You want to create because finally there is someone to share it with who wants to listen, to partake, to engage with and reap the benefits of/for.
On the other hand, when that comes crumbling down we either need to exist somewhere else or at least have somewhere to channel the pain. We do tend to be – after all – deep feeling, deep thinking creatures who burn on the passionate flame of fevered expression.
We will shut ourselves away to deal with the pain, to engage souly in and as something else to remind our souls of our worth, and subjectively, catharticly bleed out all over the damn page instead of choking out the overwhelming plethora of emotions on someone or something that probably couldn’t handle it anyway – after all isn’t that why we are here to begin with?
And at the end of the day what generates a story or piece of art but drama? Even in cheesy rom-com’s or buddy comedy’s drama is what fuels the story. Conflict is what drives home a narrative. Its all always about the conflict and the resolution.
We find ourselves in something outside of our problem but whose influence is based well within. To quote yet another phrase:
Extremes are what we work in, we have to to be compelling, to be more then just a day in the life. We’ve got to immerse ourselves in that excess in the daily no matter our actual mood. We’ve got to feel deeply, describe the lowest of lows and highest of highs, we’ve got to at any given time call on these deep emotions and pivotal reactions in order to further our creative narratives. So when you have that extreme emotion naturally, right there, heart on sleeve it makes tapping into that descriptive power effortless!
I mean there are so many who actually thrive on the pits of tragedy in order to be inspired to work *cough – poets – cough* – I tease.
Because it can be hard to be so internally vulnerable all the time, to have to compromise your mentality in order to perform, and wear on your sleeve at any given time total and complete honesty in self, in observation, expression, and emotion at the cost sometimes of pride and personal opinion. Some can turn it on and off like a facet, others need to be more method about it, immersing themselves in the surroundings, the feelings the sight, and the sound of their story in order to convey the right amount of emotion. In order to have it resonate with onlookers. There is no one size fits all way to do this, but do it a creative must.
To be able to be vulnerable and receptive instead of just trying to pantomime emotion is a necessity. To be able to invoke its expression within, through your very senses as the vessel of its varying and inexhaustible extents, is imperative to authentically compelling storytelling. Writing not just what you perceive but what touches upon the raw essence of universal truth. And that truth lies in the heart and its reactions to the extremes. To falling in love and falling apart.
Glory Fiction 