They’re too liberal, allowing thoughts to bleed over the pages and through them, seeping through, staining tables underneath. The inkblots grow, color stains. The paper gives; transparent, a morning after rain.
We should hide our hearts behind more than paper. Maybe that’s just me.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Common/Newland
The sound of the lighter, a metallic scratch-and-snap, shocked me out of my panic, and I turned to find that she’d slid down the side of the record store and squatted above the rain-slick sidewalk. With one hand, she took a drag from her cigarette, leaning her head back to blow a smoke geyser into the air. Baby Faithful.
Around us, neon signs created white noise and drew us in subconsciously, city dwellers looking for illumination an hour before midnight. Cars cast our drive-by silhouettes onto the wall and sidewalk; the sound waxed and waned, an irregular rhythm. I joined her then, wading to the wall, immediately feeling the burn in my legs and pull on my high-heeled ankles as I squatted beside her. The rain before had been rough, a sideways rain. The wall behind me felt blunt and grainy, compacted soil beneath my fingers. I could read the street signs then—the intersection between Common and Newland. In front of us, the traffic light turned, bathing the air around us in red. Cars lined up, idling at the intersection. Beneath us, red traveled like electricity through the water, jagged edges distorted by bumps in the street and our own slight movements. I saw pieces of her face in the ruby-and-headlight haze, brown curls turned black by the light.
“So where’s this party, girl?” she asked, tired but still curious. The rain had brought the temperature down twenty degrees. Her soaked skirt skimmed the ground and clung to the curves of her hips and legs. Her wet tank top did what it could, hugging her back, breasts, and stomach into a fluid hourglass. I wondered if I looked like her, underneath day-old jeans and her sweater, which I’d had to change into after the rain turned me into a t-shirted, chattering mess. The shirt sat in the bottom of my bag now, soaking through the already-wet cloth linings, dripping by my side in a heavy mass. Why did wet things take so long to dry? Maybe the world secretly wanted to be immersed in water and people like me were drying up the parade.
“Who the hell knows?” I replied, reaching for a cigarette of my own. “City’s a fucking labyrinth.” I knew I’d made the wrong shoe choice. The acute but widespread protest in the balls of my feet had dissolved into a tender soreness. I slid them off, feeling the pain of relief in my now wet feet. I contemplated sitting—I was already wet. It couldn’t hurt.
“Well, let’s go,” she said, knocking my hand away from my bag. “Let’s find these people.” Behind me, traffic light’s green—I see it reflected in her narrow eyes. Selling ice to a polar bear.
A few moments later, as she’s dragging me down the street (we’d decided on this “adventure” exactly two hours ago, after seeing a flyer on a lamppost), splash-splash-splash, splash-splash-splash, I realize that I love how she’s running in Disney princess flip-flops a size too small. I love that she paints her nails according to her mood (she feels magenta today). I love her after-rain curves and damp-and-strawberry scent of her hair as we nearly collide around a street corner.
She stopped then, so suddenly still I felt I was moving. What law of Newton was that? The first one? I gasped for air, and there was my heart. Splash-splash-splash-splash-splash-splash.
“What’s a labyrinth?” she asked.
Around us, neon signs created white noise and drew us in subconsciously, city dwellers looking for illumination an hour before midnight. Cars cast our drive-by silhouettes onto the wall and sidewalk; the sound waxed and waned, an irregular rhythm. I joined her then, wading to the wall, immediately feeling the burn in my legs and pull on my high-heeled ankles as I squatted beside her. The rain before had been rough, a sideways rain. The wall behind me felt blunt and grainy, compacted soil beneath my fingers. I could read the street signs then—the intersection between Common and Newland. In front of us, the traffic light turned, bathing the air around us in red. Cars lined up, idling at the intersection. Beneath us, red traveled like electricity through the water, jagged edges distorted by bumps in the street and our own slight movements. I saw pieces of her face in the ruby-and-headlight haze, brown curls turned black by the light.
“So where’s this party, girl?” she asked, tired but still curious. The rain had brought the temperature down twenty degrees. Her soaked skirt skimmed the ground and clung to the curves of her hips and legs. Her wet tank top did what it could, hugging her back, breasts, and stomach into a fluid hourglass. I wondered if I looked like her, underneath day-old jeans and her sweater, which I’d had to change into after the rain turned me into a t-shirted, chattering mess. The shirt sat in the bottom of my bag now, soaking through the already-wet cloth linings, dripping by my side in a heavy mass. Why did wet things take so long to dry? Maybe the world secretly wanted to be immersed in water and people like me were drying up the parade.
“Who the hell knows?” I replied, reaching for a cigarette of my own. “City’s a fucking labyrinth.” I knew I’d made the wrong shoe choice. The acute but widespread protest in the balls of my feet had dissolved into a tender soreness. I slid them off, feeling the pain of relief in my now wet feet. I contemplated sitting—I was already wet. It couldn’t hurt.
“Well, let’s go,” she said, knocking my hand away from my bag. “Let’s find these people.” Behind me, traffic light’s green—I see it reflected in her narrow eyes. Selling ice to a polar bear.
A few moments later, as she’s dragging me down the street (we’d decided on this “adventure” exactly two hours ago, after seeing a flyer on a lamppost), splash-splash-splash, splash-splash-splash, I realize that I love how she’s running in Disney princess flip-flops a size too small. I love that she paints her nails according to her mood (she feels magenta today). I love her after-rain curves and damp-and-strawberry scent of her hair as we nearly collide around a street corner.
She stopped then, so suddenly still I felt I was moving. What law of Newton was that? The first one? I gasped for air, and there was my heart. Splash-splash-splash-splash-splash-splash.
“What’s a labyrinth?” she asked.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Japanese Lovers: An Urban Legend
Their story is an absurdly urban tale of boy meets girl, girl hates boy because he works the DPS counter and she forgot her second form of photo ID and has to drive all the way to the other side of the city in rush hour to get it and all the way back through the detour that goes through the interstate that curves up high and she hates heights, really hates them and is shaking when she walks back through the doors because it’s raining and she looks like the hairball at the bottom of the shower with her matted hair on that one spot on the side of her head. She glares at him, trying to contain his laughter in her presence and she’s freezing and curls her fingers at her sides, trying to keep from strangling him. Instead, she tilts her head to the side and rests her cheek on her hand. You want to hear a story? He wants to give her the default answer, the cordial remark he makes to everyone who attempts to break the fourth wall beyond a how are you, but here’s this edge to her voice that’s slightly tempting and almost completely pissed off, so he says yes, and he listens and laughs and jokingly tells her that he’ll buy her dinner to make up for it, and she half-jokingly says yes, and (as they’ll tell the story later) it begins.
They share her working lunch on a Saturday in the hospital cafeteria—she needs the extra hours. She gets paged twice and their burgers are cold by the time she gets back, but they establish that John Mayer is overrated and Republicans suck, so they consider it a success. Four dates after that, they decide that they can agree to disagree on the subject of Boondock Saints (she loves it, he can’t stand it) and change their Facebook relationship statuses.
Except it’s hard. Because he works days and she works nights and weekends—their license plates are from different states, for Christ’s sake. They invest in more caffeine so they can keep awake when they see each other—breakfast and dinner, breakfast and dinner. After a while, she starts sleeping over—not because they’re having sex (they’re always too tired) but because it’s just practical. Granted, it’s the only practical aspect of their relationship because they’re spending more money at a point in their lives when they really shouldn’t, but they know that you have to fight sometimes to find someone who also changes the station when it plays “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.”
When it ends (because it does have to end—fighting is sometimes necessary but love doesn’t conquer everything, like distance and a need for sleep), the realization comes like a big wind, and they’re blown, washed up on the uneven landscape of his bed, naked as newborns, and he tells her the story of the Japanese lovers Kengyuu and Orihime, who neglected their duties and were punished by God, only allowed to meet once a year in the summer, when their constellations brushed against each other in the heavens.
They usually end the story there. Too many more details are awkward, because they’re still Facebook friends, and most of their friends are friends with the other’s friends. Lots of friends, and they have a nonverbal agreement to keep something private. It’s their due, their acknowledgment that something happened in an age where relationships are like dandelion seeds, floating around and getting stuck to your new sweater. The story, as they tell it, does it justice, in their opinion. At the end, people always sit back and look thoughtful. “That’s really something,” they’ll say, pause, then go back to whatever they’re doing, change the subject. The idea of such a pure connection is somehow too overwhelming.
They share her working lunch on a Saturday in the hospital cafeteria—she needs the extra hours. She gets paged twice and their burgers are cold by the time she gets back, but they establish that John Mayer is overrated and Republicans suck, so they consider it a success. Four dates after that, they decide that they can agree to disagree on the subject of Boondock Saints (she loves it, he can’t stand it) and change their Facebook relationship statuses.
Except it’s hard. Because he works days and she works nights and weekends—their license plates are from different states, for Christ’s sake. They invest in more caffeine so they can keep awake when they see each other—breakfast and dinner, breakfast and dinner. After a while, she starts sleeping over—not because they’re having sex (they’re always too tired) but because it’s just practical. Granted, it’s the only practical aspect of their relationship because they’re spending more money at a point in their lives when they really shouldn’t, but they know that you have to fight sometimes to find someone who also changes the station when it plays “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.”
When it ends (because it does have to end—fighting is sometimes necessary but love doesn’t conquer everything, like distance and a need for sleep), the realization comes like a big wind, and they’re blown, washed up on the uneven landscape of his bed, naked as newborns, and he tells her the story of the Japanese lovers Kengyuu and Orihime, who neglected their duties and were punished by God, only allowed to meet once a year in the summer, when their constellations brushed against each other in the heavens.
They usually end the story there. Too many more details are awkward, because they’re still Facebook friends, and most of their friends are friends with the other’s friends. Lots of friends, and they have a nonverbal agreement to keep something private. It’s their due, their acknowledgment that something happened in an age where relationships are like dandelion seeds, floating around and getting stuck to your new sweater. The story, as they tell it, does it justice, in their opinion. At the end, people always sit back and look thoughtful. “That’s really something,” they’ll say, pause, then go back to whatever they’re doing, change the subject. The idea of such a pure connection is somehow too overwhelming.
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Grifter(s)
Melanie's one regret in life was losing her name in a game of chance.
Shehe and her sister had placed their birth certificates between them and played Paper, Scissors, Rock by their fireplace. Best three out of five turned into best one out of thirteen. Shared DNA rarely dictated shared personalities, but this was a business merger, and Melanie watched as Lucy Blake Ryther burned, calligraphy first.
Together, they reveled. Together, Melanie could be in two places at once. Together, they overlooked the fact that life bore a shocking resemblance to a con. They could not control the circumstances.
His name was Ian. Melanie won him on the twenty-third time, paper over rock.
Now, she stiffens as he kisses her goodnight. Her reflection has waved at her through the window. He doesn't notice and leaves the room. Melanie waves back, knowing that what happens after will not matter.
Either way, his wife will soon join him in bed.
Shehe and her sister had placed their birth certificates between them and played Paper, Scissors, Rock by their fireplace. Best three out of five turned into best one out of thirteen. Shared DNA rarely dictated shared personalities, but this was a business merger, and Melanie watched as Lucy Blake Ryther burned, calligraphy first.
Together, they reveled. Together, Melanie could be in two places at once. Together, they overlooked the fact that life bore a shocking resemblance to a con. They could not control the circumstances.
His name was Ian. Melanie won him on the twenty-third time, paper over rock.
Now, she stiffens as he kisses her goodnight. Her reflection has waved at her through the window. He doesn't notice and leaves the room. Melanie waves back, knowing that what happens after will not matter.
Either way, his wife will soon join him in bed.
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