I just want to feel normal, I think, or not abnormal, something other than the abortive chemical intrusions that constitute my emotions. My doctor gave me these pills to level me out, demure little blue things barely bigger than my pinky nail. The side effect sheet reads like an apocalyptic to do list cataloguing third world contagions. I may experience some or all of them. It’s supposed to be a tangible response to an intangible problem, it’s like the emperor’s new clothes if the dude was into skeet shooting, you know. Though, you can’t kill what you can’t see.
The three of them draped around my lounge in various states of disrepair, two bottles of wine and three hourglass figures. I’m trying to teach them how to smoke, how to get high really, all of them failing with saccharine adolescent resilience. Sarah pulls out the Velvet Underground and holds it up like a boxing ring round girl. Maybe when you’re older, I tell her, and she pouts, puts the record back and continues not to care. The other two tangle on the couch, blowing full-stop smoke rings at each other, laughing the way rain feels in summer.
Silence for days amidst the noise of the machines, bubble, drip, rattle and beep, as they orchestrate my husband’s final days. I take his hand in mine and squeeze, searching for life under the callouses and indifference. It all feels so familiar. There’s nothing left but cold comforts offered in consolation and intravenous platitudes. Thirty years of stone crumbling beneath starched white sheets, while I wait for the dead to die. It isn’t right. So many accidents never happen, he would have understood. I can’t be alone any more. Silence for days and then he calls out her name.
Inspired by the story An Accident by mridula
The rain keeps falling like a heavenly suicide club, so eager that each droplet barely leaves space for individuality, all the water in the world condensed into a sheet, flagellating itself against the ground. Liquid corpses pool in immortality below my deck, their moaning susurrations drowned beneath the familial patter-splash drumming of the departed. I watch with envy while the water grows, puddles of kismet formed into a body of one mind denied. I’m fascinated by their solidarity and long to acquiesce. I lay myself upon the ground and stare into the clouds, wondering what evaporation feels like.
She wraps her little hands around my throat and I push myself into them, feeling nothing. They’re so delicate, paper thin instruments unused to violence. I want you to hurt me, I say, and she squeezes, firm but uncertain. You can hit me if you like. Her cheshire smile wavers, a heat haze mirage, and she shakes her head. No, there’s no pleasure in her eyes, only the hope of mine. Candles go out one by one until the dark lays upon us with an unwanted suitors charm, and I tell her, I can be hurt in other ways.
You never look back when you walk away and I always wonder if you have to think about not caring like that. Afterwards I list the things I didn’t say and listen to how they sound in my head. All the things I don’t, filling little tomes like a library of missed opportunities. Some of them are great and none of them would have been any good. I don’t say that I’d rather be lying in bed with you somewhere, listening to records and finding out which part of you is my favourite. I don’t say or do anything.
Hours before the day crew found his body, the old man walked. The silence of the night broke under the shuffling, pad and hush of his threadbare nylon slippers. He walked on into the dark suburban stillness, where winter’s future wove itself through the fabric of his flimsy woolen shawl, though futures didn’t matter, he was padding through the past. Somewhere beyond the fingers of the frost, over dunes a decade old, she called to him. She was where the cherry petals flew, pink succulent blooms carrying the sweetness of days since gone. He walked on into her arms.
Inspired by the story Final Destination by Mridubala
We huddled together in our own fractured silences, slender tendrils of levity prodding at opposing seams. I shivered a little inside myself each time our smiles died. Some sadness is contagious. As I sat there next to her I could feel it creeping over me, that slow helplessness that seeps into your pores and crystallises somewhere near the heart. I wondered what I could do. I wanted to burn it away with the heat between us but I kept the distance of unsalted wounds. I got up and left, believing that leaving was the best that I could do.
The monstrosity dragged itself across the cold linoleum floor. Gritting his teeth, Carter watched it draw closer, watched its mouth working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore. A raspy hiss, slurred and husky, a sound like cutter but more familiar, percussed by a sickening snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. Carter tightened his grip, shut his eyes and hove the axe hard against his wife’s once white neck, severing the life they’d made. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence. There would never be another future.
She goes down on me then blows me off. I’ve barely got time to sigh and dry out before she’s kissing me on the stoop. You know, I don’t really mind, it’s just weird that it happened so early in the day. Normally I don’t get into complicated post-sex shame until after the sun’s gone down. So I stand on her street looking at the afternoon sun and wondering what to do with myself, now that I don’t feel the need to. There’s a couple hours left until hard liquor, but I think a beer would be okay.
She watches him go, slightly bored, with an onset of the musty disappointments you find at the end of dreams. Her thoughts a slithering question mark. Under the surface she says, surreal, full punctuation unseen. She washes her hands of electricity, fingertip sensations tightly strung end to end in to a webbing that she rubs free of care. Stung now empty, watching at nothing, she captures the wait. Tapping tap tapping, heels’ rapping kinetic, churning the water wheel. Under the surface she says, refresh, zero punctuation clearly heard. Rising she goes, following a stream of consciousness, only flotsam now.
I prowl through Sasha’s bookcase while she cooks, fingering the philosophers couched between the classics. There’s something purposefully eclectic in her selections, Kafka and Satre cuddled up to Caroll and Chaucer. I trace a line down The Catcher in the Rye’s spine and ask, how many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? She does that little laughing sigh thing that sounds like resignation. The question is irrelevant, she tells me plating another pancake, the answer is in the question. Fish, I say hopefully, and this time it’s all sigh and the smell of burning sugar.
You can do anything you want, she says, and I could have died right then, instead I run my tongue from her collar to her chin savouring the taste of caramel and sin. I move my hand against her hip, braced and grinding, her splay legged wrappings around my waist. Anything, she says, and my hands make memories and break promises, our intentions hard between us in the heat of the moment. She tastes my lips again for seconds at a time that feels like the finite spread from one end of forever to the present. Anything, she says.
They watched each other through the open wedge of door and jamb, both seeing the end. I’ll do it, he said already lowering the knife, I’ll fucking do it, but the heat was gone. His threats condensed, wavered and dissipated, only as real now as the breathy steam their shouts had purged into the chill winter air. I’m tired, she said, do it or don’t but be done with it. And the knife clattered with a shrill tinny trill upon the blackened white and unfeeling linoleum. Silence then, tears after that, and finally an end to all that was.
A Few Short Words 