subsilver
“Face down, crybaby. The back keeps them flat.”
“Wow,” I said, “art supplies are sexier than I thought.”
dummies are scored
After the snap rave session, without thinking twice about what was happening, I began writing something which I’ve not only tried, and failed, to put on paper several times in the past few years, but have also repeatedly failed to document and describe in journal entries: postscript. A name which I never grasped until that night.
The product was easily the most coherent and effective effort thus far, to orient myself and my perspective such that adapting the transcription afterward was almost effortless. There was no remainder to puzzle or panic over, no irreconcilable piece – not a word. I saw the method itself, its first volume completed and waiting in comprehensive manuscript. Of the remaining volumes, I could discern no detail; only the impression of the second, and the ghostly notions of the others. It was enough.
So.
virilent
She called me “little boy“ one morning and I have never let that go.
Pettiness, vindictiveness, resentment; no resource is beneath exploitation. This one, though, went somewhat deeper than I expected. Less of a mining job than a coring. In a space like that, you could build just about anything you can imagine. In the end, there was room enough for a room.
I never needed to see her, inside. But, just before it was sealed, I did. Not necessary, and not for nothing; since the first greenshift, I had been increasingly anxious that seeing her face – or not, one or the other – might cause me to be more, or less, cripplingly afraid of her during what’s to come. So I looked. Of course, I’ll never know whether that look left me better off, or worse, than if I hadn’t.
greenlit
A year without a word was coming to an end which I couldn’t see yet. A no-bullshit apocalypse, near enough to forecast the weather for the very last day. The final seconds, ticking away on a watch that had stopped working months ago. Something else, in a place no one had ever bothered to look. Someplace you can only find by accident, standing perfectly still for your life and banging a left.
I hadn’t spent much time wondering whether I was losing my mind, because she was pretty convincing: I’d lost it more than a year ago. You had taken it from me, she said. And I didn’t put up much of a fight, because I wasn’t expecting to go on living. Even if she had been wrong about me, I must have figured: what am I going to do about it? I wasn’t a person anymore. I didn’t have any traits or ideas or a word to offer anyone about anything.
For a long time, I believed she hated me. The way she looked at me seemed a clear-enough indicator, and I could imagine a number of decent reasons why she might: if she blamed me for what you’d done, or if she just saw me as a product of your madness, left to burden and haunt her. Either would have been fair, and neither required much pondering to seem plausible. It was only once I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself that I realized it had nothing to do with me.
In her bedroom, in the instant she knocked my left light out, I saw what she had seen but couldn’t admit:
varial recognizance
dressed to quell
Some doing, is all it takes. A little dying, a diet of lying, and wordless abandon to the strands of thin light playing against the glass. Medicine to begin and end another one night sanguine stand in the sunkissed sand. Manual time, borrowed from a terribly broken watch. A certain number of steps and the grand secret of seductive grief.
Then the process complexifies and tends to vary, night-to-night. Last night, it was a sort of retrocausally prophetic stage play, my own shadow portraying young death himself. The day prior had been deliberately drenched in whiskey, too much, but enough to mine a well-founded fear and its accompanying abject terror. I was still in the late-stage dry blitz, slightly dizzy, and made much worse with my newly minted nightmare laid bare. Then the light ceased dancing and the room ceased to be.
