Solaced
I think I have my rough copy for my short story. It’s a (highly) revised version of "the world in shades of red and brown" that I’ve renamed "Solaced." I got my last assignment back and my teacher was extremely flattering, which is always good. But I don’t know if she’ll like something this surreal. So, if (whoever) manages to read all of this, let me know what you think. What works and what doesn’t. Yeah.
Solaced
The day dawned a crisp and cold crimson, a deluge of deep red light pouring over Purgatory like blood from a bucket. It washed out the indifference growing across my chest and confining the inclinations of my feet. Even now, though, I knew that I didn’t know where they might go. Where I might end up. Where the random desires of my restive legs might take me.
I don’t even know if I cared.
I stepped into the aortic highway running lengthwise across the city-street grid, the circulatory system of a concrete organism slowly passing. The air hovered rank and stagnant with the ripe smell of a fresh wound, and I knew that I sanctified my lungs with each mouthful I mustered. I spit stained and jagged teeth like a smoking machine gun standing on a rigid bipod, fatalistic and ready to fulfill some grand and obscure deity’s destiny. Something undyingly heroic. The lassitude of a particularly dreamy red-sunned day lulled me, and I didn’t see it coming.
Agitational and restless, the cirrus ceiling had stirred itself towards a bottomless burgundy. The cabernet drooled sanguinely from the corners of my lips as I uttered, “In vino veritas,” before falling limply through the spiderweb floor.
Devolution. Projection to projection—changing lights for shades.
In the darkened stillness of my bedroom I stared intently through the plant silhouettes to the near full moon beyond. Even now, as just the black shadows of miniature slate blue roses, they exuded a brilliant beauty that radiated with vehemence. Traffic had died down now, even as the clock that had chimed three o’clock just moments earlier continued to count down the precious moments until sunrise, a nefarious promise for the collective awakening of exhausted lovers everywhere. It filled me with an unspeakable dread.
A stirring in the sheets beside me recalled my attention from the dawn’s centurion, a mutinous gaze that then lingered, heart-held. Steady breathing became a little ragged with a tattered consciousness, and whispered words drifted up to my attentive ears. "What are you still doing awake?" Even with the lethargic pace of her muffled words, her voice rose and fell like a songbird newly returned. I spoke, my words firm and vulnerable blue in their earnest honesty.
"Watching you, I suppose." I smiled slightly, bright briny blue eyes beacons of emotion cloaked in the night. "I guess…I guess I’m a little concerned."
I couldn’t see a smile, but I could certainly here it in her tired, hushed voice. "Concerned? What on Earth about?" Her half-lidded brown eyes held floating motes of tasteful rouge in the dull streetlamp glow, and they shone like twin lighthouses in the navy moonlight. I could sail all day and by those lights find a safe shore always. Always. Her delicate face searched mine for an answer.
"It sounds a little silly, stupid, corny, I know…I guess I am those things…but I’m afraid to blink. I’m afraid to look away. Even now, when things seem so perfect, so unbelievably perfect, I’m afraid I’ll blink and you’ll disappear. Just…gone. Like a fiercely infallibly benevolent wraith into my life, and like a lost, unheard whisper out. I…I used to be afraid of being alone. Now I’m afraid of being without you. I’m afraid of the dark without your soft breathing, reminding me there’s still someone alive out there. In here." I stopped for a second, if just to take a deep, quavering breath. "You know that REM line, "At my most beautiful, I could your eyelashes secretly, with every one whisper ‘I love you,’" I let you sleep." I’ve done that at least fifty times tonight. I swear, I’ve never been so meticulous in counting anything in my life."
I looked at her. She unfurled like a lovely, fully-bloomed forget-me-not, blue and patient and altogether at home with love. The sight begged to not be forgotten.
We waited for dawn together, then, if only because it might come sooner for just the one of us.
Shift and surge. Breakdown. Relapse. Demit.
<p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%”>A golden agrarian yellow stretched out like a flat felt blanket, a welcoming sight for the mountain-weary. I shambled slowly out into the foreyard of the quaint auxiliary barn nestled up against the edge of the wheat field, a short span of tightly-spun rope trailing dejectedly in the dirt behind me. I’d fought my share, but after you fight for so long, you decide the time has come for a warranted escape. I needed out.
By the sun I made it to be about three o’clock.
The barn door swung open easily, the result of regular oil and conscientious upkeep. I shuffled in like a palsied old man, the strong scent of fresh hay assaulting my pinched nostrils. I stood straight and rigid, allowing the whole of it to imprint itself on me like a lithograph. I appreciated it all, you know, but I was just so tired. So unbelievably tired.
The rope sailed easily over the low rafter, and I caught the knotted end as it swung eagerly down towards me. The rickety stool I’d placed several years ago in the midst of some weak moments still rested conveniently in place. But this wasn’t a weak moment–this was a moment a long time coming. They should have looking into my glowing, lupine eyes and seen this coming. I was so much older than they ever thought.
I climbed up the creaking chair quavering like a sapling tree in a violent storm, and tried to breathe evenly. This didn’t make sense. I knew it, but I also knew I’d made up my mind, and it needed to happen. I extended my leg forwards, breathed one last time, and then flung it backwards into the stool, sending it flying. I fell. It took awhile.
My mother’s smile the way that girl’s perfume wafted by me in 4thperiod the way the sun reflected off the windows on my grandpa’s old house the surreptitious smile of my secretly amused father the clanging in my ears after cacophonic concerts the way my sister found God the way God never found me muttering vox populi vox dei and making friends out of enemies I was never a friend to me God I hope I had a friend at some point so down and acting up and becoming this and losing it for something else and missing something that might never have happened but whose pale shadow felt so good cast across the doorstep of a dying dawn and paled into invisibility and ignominy like luminescent smiles on willowy girls who never ever convinced themselves of their own fleeting physical beauty no matter how often they tried or how desperately they needed to believe in it I could see it in their hair whipping in the nascent spring’s winds that swept the parkway of wintered leaves beneath the tree I nearly drove into the night I realized that this body was a loaner and the fight a foregone-conclusion that got more and more confusing and convoluted as the quickly dwindling days added more and more weight on our broad and broken shoulders and I never really succeeded in it I always seemed to fail but I kept at it I kept at it for so goddamn long how long did they expect me to accept failure this same bitter taste this same acid brew of refutations devoid of affirmations free of definition I don’t know how we will ever know if we have nothing to base anything off of and it terrifies the living shit out of me every pound of living shit out of me was it simple biological chemistry more than synapses and neurotransmitters and an endocrine response and something made so profound by its simplicity God I miss her and I hope it made sense to her when I told her I’d traded in my pheromones for a crooked smile and cockeyed teeth and a scathing sense of self-sacrifice and I think she intuited my desperation when I’d looked her straight in her stormy eyes tossing tempestuously and said so seriously so seriously she could hardly believe it so seriously I could barely rally the words to my cause and I knew as I let them slip out of me and into her that it was a mistake that I was ruining something made so holy by its ease and ability to comfort but I needed something more at that second something to make sense and if not make sense at least quell this abrasion in my mouth hemorrhaging so many words I needed a mouth to stop the words I needed a mouth to take the words from me take the words keep the words I don’t want the words words words language in words in concinnity in thought fuck the words jealously guard the words and deny those lies and never give them back and stockpile them in a sonnet or a book or a short essay and desert them there just three ideas long with a birth, life, and death that oncoming ending that imminent demise that continued to root itself in a personality that slowly but surely bloomed into a blossom that fell off well before the winter beneath the flowers I’d planted in the hope something beautiful might come from me and not just the same old bullshit confusion the same old making money to make lovers of women in the hope we might pass on our genetics the same old making friends to remind ourselves of our own likeability and nothing more to convince ourselves we’re still people we’re still capable of higher thought we’re still capable of generosity and love and compassion and smiles in the face of grief and disaster and confusion and death and we might not sense it when we say it but I sensed when others said it I looked through the retaining walls of worldly thought and saw in them a resplendent immortality the idea that we continue to propagate the cycle of immortal confusion we keep the immortal confliction alive and when it dies we revive it again
our children will revive what our fathers killed with their deaths and all the fear and angst and uncertainty gathered into just a few moments in the pitch black of midnight that we found unconsciously when we laid in our bedrooms in the early morning and watched headlights scan across the interior walls and stopped and how hard we cried with the crash we peered through the blinds and gasped in horror the bent bodies the screaming relatives they never saw it coming the pitch black because they chose to never look they knew it they forgot it they chose to and even now they regret it pictures on the wall all those ghosts they’re still haunting us I thought I might break shatter across the floor the pallbearer glanced this way and I looked in her and saw the deep well of sadness we feel when we think ourselves numb it’s so black in the blackness but against the sun it’s red-specked brown and she follows me still making me smile in the face of grief and disaster and confusion and death and I don’t really want to deal with it anymore I could never get my mind to rest I just needed a sabbatical from this constant inner dichotomy this constant feud I don’t know if this makes sense I know this doesn’t make sense I want it all to make some sense so incredibly bad how did so many other people do it this same old bullshit confusion but I’ll miss them but not enough to stop can’t stop now I’ll miss it I’ll miss it I’ll miss it and I hate it I’m losing it and I never found it I never even figured out what the hell it was what is it I’m losing do I even want it well too late now I’ve chosen congratulations on a resolution strongly worded firmly enacted and totally accepted–but this last bit didn’t make sense. None of this made sense.
A mile above me, I heard a thick fir plank snap under years of laboring.
Oh my God, how familiar.
Hours later, well after when darkness had painted the interior of the barn a uniform ebony, I came to consciousness. A terrible pain racked my ribs, making it unbelievably hard to breathe. Each shallow attempt brought tears to my eyes, and those tears seemed so relieving to me even as I shed them. I was alive.
The sound of hurried steps found me in my predicament. Two irises slipped into my narrow field of vision, a beautiful collage of life, reds, and browns. “Oh, you didn’t. You think I like having to saw grooves in barn rafters after I find stools in the strangest places?” Salt water splashed on my dirty cheeks even as a salty kiss found my cracked and starving lips. I was starving. “I couldn’t just let you, you know. I mean too much to you, and that means everything to me. Let’s go to bed—it’s early, you know. Probably about three or so.”
Am I the only one that can see that none of this makes any sense?
Turn. Tumble. Translate.
In fierce shades of infernal reds, oranges, and yellows, I sprinted across the roiling, molten street. The hollow shells of burned out houses blurred past me as I reached inhuman speeds, my legs propelling evenly and steadily like hydraulic pumps in the bilges of warships.
She once asked me, her eyes like cinnamon in chocolate, “Why the obsession with nautical imagery?” I explained that I considered myself an old windblown ship, foundered on a rocky cliff and skeleton hull abandoned to dry land. It goes nowhere and serves no purpose. The holds are empty and patient, waiting for someone or something to come occupy that vacant space—to become the reason for ships.
He never saw me coming. He should’ve seen this coming. We went careening into the scorched brick façade as if ballistic missiles, and I sensed rather than heard a pane of glass shatter.
I’d overshot resentment and fallen short of hatred, living in limbo in a place that can only be called fatal confusion. One of us had to die.
He gasped in surprise, and I felt him in my arms try to spin about to confront me and defend himself. I pulled him in the same direction, allowing his momentum to carry him off-balanced into my waiting fist. I started beating him. I couldn’t stop.
<p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%”>What did I ever do to you wasn’t I a good man wasn’t I friendly didn’t I try why wasn’t that good enough why wasn’t I good enough couldn’t return a smile couldn’t say hi couldn’t shake a hand couldn’t force a laugh couldn’t at least pretend like I wasn’t a good man trying so hard to be good to a man who didn’t seem to care if I was good or not so this isn’t my fault this had to happen you made it happen this is justice this is jurisprudence this is life this is faith this is love is love this fair? Why couldn’t you just be happy what’s wrong with being happy what’s so hard about being happy? this is fair this is fair is this fair is this fair is this fair this is fair is this fair this will never be…this can never be…breathe.
I don’t know what broke my concentration. Perhaps the screaming ache in my broken fingers, or, maybe, the gasping sobs stealing breath from my lungs. More likely, I sensed that the man braced between my legs in the now non-substantive, ethereal street had ceased breathing, and probably hadn’t been for sometime. I took hold of my left leg with both hands, pulling to free my leg of the blacktop vapors. I repeated for my right leg. I immediately began to plot my escape.
Perhaps I wasn’t as good as I thought.
It had to happen. We’d had it coming for some time now. I took off at a dead run, wide-eyes blazing, as a ghost on fire and lost in the violent, rollicking light show. The undulating ground shook with arrhythmic shockwaves, splashing the swirling shades of senseless passion pell-mell. Ephemeral, I plunged forwards. Astral, a supernova, I threatened to paint the sky a combustive flash of frightening light. My old body disappeared in the distance, and I felt myself more and more as that expanse increased. I was new and only partially dead, a phantom folded into a phantasmagoria.
My embers scattered to the four winds, a dirty red cloud dispersing into the golden sky. The heralds trumpeted my passing as the denouement of a grand masquerade. They prognosticated my return, narrated my cremation, and saluted the corona of fiery hope around my visage.
Scatter. Separate. Coalesce and dissipate.
The failing spring still coughed up water now and again, and with some particularly massive thunderheads fast approaching, I knew I shouldn’t want for it. It had been high time to leave, you know, and I’ll be damned if everyone else hadn’t seen it coming. They should’ve looked deep into my muddled green eyes and seen it coming. It had been imminent for awhile, now.
The seeding grass swayed lazily in the meandering July breeze, and the dirty water-table pond glittered something fierce in the smiling sunlight. A welkin chasm stared down at me, an endless conduit of goodwill and sapphire-encrusted gold. The world revealed itself in shades of verdant green, and I brimmed with gratitude that I’d arrived in time for the unveiling.
I stepped carefully through the shoe-hungry mud on the outskirts of the small body of water, and satin cattails brushed by on both sides of me. Ducks through the screens of wild rice objected vociferously to my intrusion, but I hadn’t the manners to leave quite yet. Emerald Mallard heads turned to me, and I sensed in their evergreen eyes something other than outrage. Maybe melancholia? Maybe fear? They startled off in a perfect circle.
The faint beeping of my watch caught my attention; three beeps—three o’clock.
The shallow murky water rejuvenated my bare feet. Even at thigh-depth, I knew that I was swimming. I blinked; was I drowning? My mind quailed as that fearsome stream of consciousness tossed me about, while the sea of sea green slowly filled my vision and my lungs. Goodbye.
Divide and collide. Imitate, then immolate.
Like phalanxes of commercial warriors, the towering banks and firms in the downtown district stood as sentinels until the exchange rang its bell. Almost as if the buildings were Trojan Horses, the revolving doors of those behemoths belched out a stream of clean-cut men in expensive suits into the innocent streets of new Troy—a place destined to fall.
They scurry over lavender sidewalks. They never glance at their fellow soldiers floating by in measured strides, and I don’t know if they knew they weren’t alone. A kind of seraphic affirmation followed their footsteps, the reassurance of a higher power app