Him
The worst part for her were the signs.
The license plate with his name on it.
The bar sign with a portrait of a man that bore his striking resemblance.
The entire day where the ID number of the tickets at her workplace were his birthday, down to the year.
She tried to move on with her life, go back to before, but there was no denying the imprint that he had made. One that infected every part of her day, a hum that would not cease no matter how much she tried to focus.
Even if she wanted to see him, she had no way of finding him. He had only left the note. Ten words. Three lines.
I love you.
But we know
This will never work.
The parts that were bad for her but less worse than the signs:
1.) His kindness
2.) His playfulness
3.) The fact that he had told her he loved her
4.) The adoration in his eyes
5.) How they laughed together before they knew it would never work
She had read once that one of the major components of love was self-expansion. You fell in love with a person because they felt like an extension of you. So, really, the reason it hurt so much was because she had lost a part of herself when he left.
Or at least that's what she liked to tell herself when even with three glasses of wine she still felt the pain.
The Boy in the Straw Hat
Not being very special had become a habit by the time I was fifteen years old. The summer before tenth grade, the world had broken my trust with it and now it just looked grey with shades of blue. I didn’t care much for food the way I had before. My relatives commented on how thin I was getting with a concerned look shot to my parents at the end of the summer barbecue.
Needless to say, I had low expectations from my tenth grade English class. We were assigned to read three chapters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn our first day. After school my classmates hung back for sports and hang outs. I got on the bus and rode home, watching the last vestiges of summer pass me by through the window. I lugged my heavy backpack all the way up to my bedroom after I got home and emptied the contents onto my bed. My eyes landed on the book. I scrutinized the cover with the red-faced boy in the straw hat.
When the first three chapters had passed, my mother called for dinner. I tried my usual routine of taking a couple bites and then rolling around my food until she started clearing plates. She would not have it. Now that I was starting school again, she insisted that I finish what was on my plate or I couldn’t leave. I really wasn’t hungry. But Chapter 4 hung over my head. I had already grown attached to the mischievous ragamuffin. And I needed to know what predicaments he would get himself into. So I ate. And ate. To my mother’s surprise, I finished my plate. She showed a rare smile to my father and gestured that I could go.
My belly was full, but with the time apart from Huckleberry’s world I had grown voracious. I crawled in my bed and fell back into Missouri.
You don’t expect things to change you until they do. Huckleberry Finn was just a kid who refused to grow up. He refused to let people try to change him. He wasn’t perfect, but he was admirable because he let himself make mistakes and learn from them. His life was an adventure, not because of the events that transpired in his story but of who he was. Someone like him - life could be nothing but an adventure.
The book laid to rest beside me finally in the early hours of the next morning. Huckleberry Finn’s story, for now, was at an end. But finally, I felt my own story was beginning.
Ruth Chapter 7
Vanace’s was a gorgeous glass building set in the shape of a crystal. It was an architectural masterpiece built in the 1980s and maintained at the breathtaking extravagance it was on the day that its doors opened.
That is, Ruth thought angrily, when its doors opened to the fancy folk. In order to even walk through the doors of Vanace’s and admire its expensive collections, one had to have a membership. The fee for an annual membership was not something Ruth or anyone Ruth knew could ever pay.
She glared at the entrance to the pompous jewelry store. How those greasy men from the warehouse ever thought they could get through those doors un-noticed, Ruth had no idea.
Over the past week, she had spent a lot of time pondering what they could have possibly been after, what they had paid with their lives in the pursuit of. Her hand wrapped around the pendant in her pocket and she found that she was walking straight towards the entrance. She would soon find out.
As Old Jack promised, today Vanace’s was throwing a gala. More of a crowd, less security. She pulled out the ticket Old Jack had procured somehow. The name on it; Mary Elizabeth Waterfield; was clearly not one that belonged to her in an itchy blonde wig, fake glasses, her best holey sweater and creased jeans. Inside there were a few men in red suits milling about amongst divinely dressed people.
In the middle of the store was a mouthwatering assortment of food centered around an ornate chocolate fountain. Her stomach grumbled and she remembered her constant hunger.
The man at the door looked suspiciously at her ticket. Before he could ask any questions, she put on a snobby face and grabbed it back from him, gliding into the main hall. Old Jack had told her to get her bearings first while he got into position, so she headed straight towards the food.
The store on a regular day was enough of an extravagance, too intimidating for an unkempt teenager to wander into. The walls themselves were made of this white silk material with glittering pendants and the entire ceiling was a shimmering glass. The fresh face of a beautiful midmorning sky looked down at her from above; somehow even the smoggy city looked better from in here.
She waded through a few more unreturned smiles from a bunch of men in nice suits and finally stood steps from the snack table, evading any of the employees or security. She saw ice cream from Lafayette’s Dairy Brewery, fudge and chocolate chip cookies from Grandma Shirley’s Bakery downtown, and finger sandwiches filled with the most precisely cut deli slices.
“Ow!” In her captivation, she’d stepped on someone. She looked down to see a little boy’s face, lips pouted in anger.
“You stepped on me,” he complained, propelling the hand that was playing with his toy truck to point accusingly up at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She sighed, having to force herself to stoop down and plaster an apologetic look on her face. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not! I’m gonna tell my daddy!”
“Okay, calm down. You’re fine.” She got up, thinking better of placating him. He would be her little pawn.
She made her way over to the snack table and grabbed a paper plate and napkin. She heard the boy get up and scurry off. That means he was headed to his daddy, who would talk to the manager, who would find her, realize she wasn’t Mary Elizabeth Waterfield, and call security. This would all work into her plan, so long as Old Jack created the distraction soon.
A woman in a blazer and a tight pencil skirt walked up to the table on the opposite side of her and her hand glided over the finger sandwiches. She was probably trying to find the healthiest option, preferably vegan or something. She looked the type.
Ruth grabbed three or four of the sandwiches and pretended like she didn’t see the woman’s raised eyebrow.
Five cookies. Unfortunately not enough time to sit and eat ice cream. A handful of truffles. Maybe two more finger sandwiches. The last time Ruth had eaten such quality food was at a wedding five years ago that she had attended with her second foster mother, Mrs. Robinson.
And then she heard it. The clicking pair of heeled shoes and jingle of keys of someone in charge heading her way, prepared to tell her to leave. She opened the flap of her messenger bag and dumped her plate in.
She turned around and right on cue there was a pretentious looking man with a high nose and thin, unkind lips behind her. His eyes had that hooded, “why am I forced to be looking at such mediocrity” kind of a look to them.
“Just leaving,” she said, almost mockingly. He didn’t even release how much easier he had made this for her.
“No problem,” he said. “I just have to confirm that you have a ticket and matching ID and I’ll send you right on your way.” Despite his sophistication, Ruth could see him fighting a cheap smile of satisfaction.
She was about to open her mouth to spew out a poorly formed lie when a large rock shattered through one of the glass ceiling sections entirely. The timing could not have been more perfect. The attendant’s focus was momentarily redirected to the gasping fancy folk, some who dropped for cover to the ground.
Ruth reached forward and ripped the keys out of the manager’s unsuspecting hands. She took off, farther into the store. She recognized the one belonging to the storage room behind a particularly short clerk, brandishing a large gold watch to a bored looking man.
“Somebody stop that delinquent!”
She could feel the whip of many heads turning to spot her as she ran full speed towards that door, sorting through the keys in her hand until she found the one labelled STORAGE.
She pushed through a stupidly-in-love couple standing in her way, ducked underneath a man handing a baby to his model-thin wife, and before she even fully comprehended what she was doing, she slapped her hands down on the glass display counter and leapt over it.
“Grab her!” one of the security guards, still running behind yelled to the unfortunate clerk next to her, still with the watch in his hand.
Before he even put down the watch, she threw in the key, unlocked the door and ran in. She promptly turned around and threw the lock - although she doubted that would keep her alone for long.
She hurried into what appeared to be a large storage closet. In a few moments, a sharp knock sounded behind her, no doubt from the nervous clerk.
He called, “Hey, open up, ok? You’re only in more trouble by resisting now. Hello?”
She ignored him and rushed through rows and rows of cabinets and stock frantically, hoping to find whatever it was that she was looking for.
The aggressive shaking of the door behind her subsided. They’d probably found a key. She didn’t have much time.
Boom! Was that a gunshot? Yelling, people screaming. Frantically, she ran through rows and rows of stock, further and further into the endless room as a slew of what she was certain now were gunshots went on.
Her heart sinking, she realized the room just seemed to be more and more storage space. She found herself running panicked through rows and rows of boxes.
And then, finally, she hit a wall.
Looking around she searched for something, anything despite a sinking assurance that she was stuck.
Suddenly, a glimmer of something on the wall caught her eye. It was a strangely familiar indentation in the wall. As she walked closer to it, she realized it was an indentation that she knew only one reincarnation of. A reincarnation that was now tucked into her pocket. Almost as if in a trance, she found herself poising her pendant just so, ignoring the wash open of the door far behind her. The pendant gasped into place, a perfect fit.
She felt the wall sink in under her hands, freeing her pendant and disappearing to reveal a slide beyond the wall, into darkness. Hearing the boom of footsteps quickly approaching now not too far behind her, she slid in, not very reassured when the wall reappeared abruptly behind her and left her winding downwards into complete darkness.
With a thud, her feet hit the bottom of the spiral. The thunder of footsteps or even gunshots were by now a distant memory. She was too captivated, anyway, by the slowly growing intensity of light somehow coming from her pendant.
Finally, she pulled off her necklace and examined it. Feeling the warmth of the metal, she realized that some sort of chemical reaction must have occurred when the pendant contacted the wall. In a few moments, it was bright enough to light her surroundings.
It seemed that the slide had brought her to the opening of a very long, dark tunnel. This must be the safe.
The light from her necklace climbed up the walls. She tried to make out how far the tunnel went on but it seemed that it had no end. She gulped.
Dancing on the Skyline
I wasn’t always like this.
Head down, shadow on my face, trying to avoid eye contact with every person I pass by on the street. My knee length khaki-colored jacket is buttoned all the way up and shades are sliding down my thinning nose. I’m hungry but I can’t eat, lonely but I can’t be with people.
I am a person with one and a half years of needs unmet. I used to be free. A little too free. That’s how all this trouble started.
The night was like any other in my careless twenties. The thrum of a bar’s music. The backbeat of my body swaying drunkenly. Sloppy screams of the half-remembered lyrics to my friend. I went to the bathroom for a moment, and then when I reemerged my friend had found her night wrapped up in a well-built man. His friend; lankier, a little sweaty, was waiting to pair up with me. I had believed, in that moment, that this was my inebriated friend playing Cupid.
As I later found out, this was all planned. They had been following me for months, tracking the places that I frequented, knowing it was just a matter of time and assortment of circumstances before we would end up following them, willingly, back to “their place”. As soon as we walked into their apartment, I knew something was wrong. There was no furniture. Just a lab chair, a station of computers and a stack of guns on the countertop. All the windows were boarded up.
My friend’s giggling confusion was quickly silenced with the staccato-staccato of two gun shots. My screams were muffled with duct tape and hands that pulled me to the lab chair. Sharp poke, burning pain, and then I was out.
When I woke up, the place was completely empty. I was laying on a concrete floor chilled by the breath of late December wafting in from an opened window. I had made my way back to my place at the time, dazed. There was a package, waiting outside the door of my apartment. It was a stack of documents, the first page of which read “The End.”
It took me a week to read through the documents; a week after that for me to process and recover from the grief I was later told all people who have been tapped for conversion go through.
I didn’t really believe what I read at first. Instructions like “Don’t attempt to contact poltergeists. Notify your section leader if one visits you” were so bizarre that I would throw the documents to the side and drink. But when I woke up, hungover, I would keep reading.
Eventually the sum of the documents was this:
1.) I had been killed and brought back to half-living
2.) Half-living meant that I was an intermediary between the dead and living, who were currently in Universe War Five (abbrev. UWV)
3.) If either side won over the other, the Universe would be thrown into an imbalance that would destroy all existence
Like I said, it was all so bizarre I didn’t really believe it until one of my friends from college, Ricky, dropped into the city for work about a month after my conversion. He had already had dinner, so we watched TV and shared gossip about our mutual friends. Ricky looked great; he was working long hours at a hedgefund but he could’ve been fresh off of vacation. I was haggard and unkempt; he was glowing. I no longer had the desire, but if I was my old self, I would’ve pushed us into the bedroom to hook up like we used to. I assumed he didn’t initiate because he had lost his attraction for me after seeing my new look.
He went back to his hotel early in the morning and promised he would stop by before leaving the city tomorrow.
It was disappointing that he didn’t stay over, but it was just as well. I had a meeting to go to. They held one in each city for those of us that had been converted. There were five of us that showed up: a crumpled man with too-large glasses named Roger, a quiet foreign lady whose name was S- something, a kid who looked haunted by the youth ripped from his unwilling fingers, and a homeless man named Farrow who tried to turn everything someone said into a joke.
“My friend Ricky is visiting.”
“Friend?” Farrow raised his eyebrows and sneered.
“Nice,” the kid said. “Haven’t seen my friends in a while.”
“We went to college together. He looks great.”
“He was...the boyfriend?” S-something looked mildly interested for once.
“No,” I sighed. I had always hoped...but now it was all too late.
The group focused on Ricky for a while, excited to focus on something other than death and UWV for once. When I admitted that we used to hook up, everyone laughed and Farrow exclaimed, “I knew it!”
We were all getting up to leave, when Roger, who had been sitting quiet and motionless the entire meeting finally asked, “How did Ricky come into town?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. The train I’m guessing.”
“Luggage?”
“Dropped it off at a hotel.”
“You guys had dinner?”
“He had already eaten. What exactly are you getting at, Roger?”
Roger looked straight into my eyes, unblinking. “Don’t you think it’s weird that your friend who you haven’t seen in - ?”
“Three years.”
″-is now, out of the blue, coming to visit you?”
“We’re old friends. And he was in town.”
“Well say hello to Richard -”
“Yadley. Richard Yadley.”
“Yes. Say hello to him for me.”
We looked at each other for a long while. I finally broke away. Whatever he was implying, he was wrong.
When I got back to my apartment, Ricky was waiting on the porch, still wearing his suit from yesterday.
“Hey old girl, everything okay?”
“Of course,” I said. His eyes were bright green and still kind. He was vibrant.
When we walked into my apartment, he settled into the couch.
I busied myself with preparing us a snack of apples and peanut butter, checking back at him every so often. His smile was fading.
“Everything okay, Ricky?”
“We’re old friends.”
“Yes.”
“We knew each other long before the world came and ruined us.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“You know, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“The way you’re half-living...I mean just look at you.”
He got up, one arm now missing. A mischievous smile crept up to his lips as he drew closer.
“Ricky?”
“You’re so miserable,” a step closer now, his head splitting open, blood pouring out over his face.
I took a step back, knife in hand.
He chuckled. “You know you can’t hurt me with that, don’t you old girl?”
“Ricky, what happened to you?”
“Do you know how hard it was getting humiliated every day by those sadistic jerks? How hard I worked? And then one day I go in and they tell me I’m fired. I put all my money in the wrong stocks. Lost everything.”
I could see in that moment the sum of his life; his dog, his collection of Freddie Mercury albums and his illustrious high-rise apartment; falling away in front of his glassy eyes.
“We belong together. We never got the chance when I was alive. We have the chance now.”
He was behind me now, his sadness pressing down against me. It was true. I did not have much life left in me anyway. Maybe at least I could finally find peace.
The front door crashed down all of a sudden, and on the other side stood Roger and the others. S-something gasped, and I looked down to see that I was holding the knife at my wrist, already drawing blood.
Roger stepped forward, an urn in hand, muttering the incantations from our book. S-something, eyes closed, joined and walked in behind him. She held up a printout of a newstory with the screaming headline “Stock Broker jumps off of Company Building to Death” at the top.
Ricky laughed and whispered, “Come on, don’t lose your nerve now. Forget these losers.”
The kid and Farrow then walked in, shouting the incantations. Ricky started screaming, “Don’t be a coward, now. Don’t you love me? Don’t you miss me?”
The group walked in and surrounded me, chanting louder to compete with Ricky, who was growling, “Don’t listen to them!”
Slowly, I didn’t feel so alone. I dropped the knife and began to mutter the incantations with them. Ricky’s weight lifted away from me, and he began to spiral towards the open urn in Roger’s hands.
As the final tendrils were whisked inside, Roger sealed the urn quickly.
I am no longer the person I was before. I see the living and the dead. I am an unwilling soldier in a universal war. But starting that day, I started to feel a little less alone. Starting that day, I began to see why fighting the war was so important.
Thanks for the lovely time
You took a swig of your sour beer
I took a sip of mine
There was no pause for fate’s applause
As you quickly probed my mind
And you quickly then decided
You were really out of time
To play out the quirks and niceties
Of a night of lovely lies
You are really something else
Vitriolic divine
Pessimistic know-it-all smile
And the unkind burnt out eyes
But it’s fine
I insist
I’m sure you’re just fine
Rushing home to your solitude
Metastatically dissatisfied
Unremarkable ineptitude
To see radiance when it shines
I thought I knew all flavors of my distaste
But this night was a nice surprise
Get home safe and best of luck (not really)
And thank you for the lovely time.
Immaculate Scarlet
The primordial sin
Scarlet drops from my carnation
Clawing pains of lost creation
The stain of being lesser, weaker
Burdens that we should not speak of
Hearken to the nimble whimpers
Of grabbing stares that flirt with evil
And swelling fruit that sinks its keeper
And petals plucked with reckless hunger
They go over
We go under, under, under
And then,
Miraculous tragedy
For which
We are faulted for an unpaired carriage
But assaulted for discarded package
We are there to be danced with
But not to dance
Only to sing the song they ask
And finally
When we are wilting
Disregarded
Forgotten, bartered
Nothing to ask of
And told we sowed the soil we’re in
But it’s hard
Hard to stand against the wind
When you are cast as
Primordial sin
Liar
I don't get why people like to inflate
Things that should lay flat
Why they grab a butterfly out of the wind
And tell people that it scarred them
When they crushed it in their fingers in zest
They blame the fallen
With words that can not be undone
They take the bright
And infuse them with the darkness
They carry in their own heart
This is obviously personal
This is obviously scars in my own heart
I hope you don't get angry
That I am forcing you to listen