Colour

Colour was the food she sought. In all her journeys, in all her delicate steps and in all her brash boundings, she only wanted that one course, so delectable, so intriguing was it. The reds of remorse mingled with the reds of passion and those of anger, a sweet cadence that made her feel as if the blood within her sang its melody. The greens of illness dripped uneasily onto the green of naivety, spoiling it as surely as the green of money spoils the green of Mother Earth. Blue were her tears as in blue twilight she witnessed the soft croon of a blues bard, cranking from her lungs those feelings seasoned bittersweet. Black were her thoughts as, stepping through the deep unknown of her own mind, she never thought she’d find a soul outside the black again. White were her most tenuous fleeting thoughts, innocence upon the white snow and sky, fleeing outward like a band of fledglings or the words typed upon the white of this page. But still her journey continued. She scoffed at the unwholesome majesty of violet, she reeled at the orange of perverseness and warning. And still onward she flew. She mixed her colours, she found grey. She found many years of doldrums, shifting through warm greys, and cold ones, ones with some life and ones which could only ever stay dead. And she despaired for there was nothing to sate her and she grew hungry. Wasting away, she saw brown grow around her, saw its maw wide and ready to swallow her and make her the earth. This was a carnivorous colour, one which she could not pursue but which pursued her. And the ground pulled her further in and smothered her breath. All she knew in those last moments before death was brown. Not the bright light of love or accomplishment. She had grown bored of that long ago. Not the utter black shadow of fear… that was also behind her. But this brown. This colour of worms and ordure and soot. This was her defeat. She closed her eyes and died. And somewhere inside her, a consciousness was let loose from this world of things with names, of light with hues, of increments and of textures. It became all things and no things as it became incorporeal. And in this transition perhaps her new colour, the one which, all along, was inside her, was born.

RED - Thoughts Spilling

As I sat there, so melancholy at my writing desk, my hand all of its own grasped a single red crayon and began to scrawl across the paper. I could feel every subtle rippling as it ran its smooth point over the blood-staining white. Flecks of dust below the surface of the paper became deeper red snow set upon lines of scarlet water. A small curving ribbon of crayon ran astray and fell into a groove in the table, began to colour it too that hated red. Began to fill every wooden wrinkle set across what once must have been a mighty oak standing tall in green. Now red. All red. And the crayon colour spilled so sensuously off my table, pooling in the fibers of my white carpet. Now red. All red. And it kept spreading, this pool deepening around my ankles. All the while my hand continued its lattice work upon that page, and an image first abstruse began to grow from nothing. The red was filling my world. It grew up around my waist and my legs once cream now red all red and it wasn’t a cold red, it was a lust red, it was a rage red, and it was eating my flesh and it was climbing up my chest. And the red of that crayon colour was digging into the small red of my heart and it became one red and then grasped my neck and still my hand was scrawling its suicide serenade and the image on the page was becoming a reality. And as it poured from my eyes the red became my tears and as it filled my mind the red became all my thoughts. And I dissolved in the red, and I who once was human now was red. All red. And my hand was somehow still moving through the deep to finish its image. All that existed now were the spreading lines, my curiosity, and red. A stabbing feeling exploded in my consciousness as, although my eyes were long since gone, the lines joined and sang their image loud. In that red consumption in that red cacophony in that red melodrama anger ire fleeing despair in that red that sour red that bitter red I found what my hand and that red were so ready to bring to life… it was you. Poured from my soul it was your likeness. But I have nothing more to give since I am red and you are red but we are not.

The Albatross - A Poem

The albatross is screaming
As it writhes across the patterned
Guilt of my shoulders
Bear nothing but its soft suffering
Said the keeper of the cards
As he became the shadow
Of a sour intention
And as I became enfolded
In the fabric
Of morning.

Lantern Light

My hand waved good bye to them all as I set forth at sun’s first light. My heart was not waving, it was wavering, it was awash with the dark which I thought must surely fade with the night, but did not. My footfalls were heavy, so heavy. They were iron and blood and guilt. With every discernible knot of my being I lifted my legs onward, into the bright, away from their figures, still waving in their frozen recollection. I mounted a first hill and I was bleeding profusely, exsanguinated by the light and my distance and my grief. Was it me who was moving my body into the unknown? Was it me who was launching my flesh into the smoldering new day? …Thoughts which when answered would only increase my suffering. I felt an empty vessel now, mounting hill and delving vale. I felt that my contents were littering my path, still held captive by where I’ve been and who I knew. And what did the ‘where-I’m-going’ contain but emptiness? My eyes became frosted and glass, my brow precipitous. I trudged onward with a fool’s strength, the strength one borrows from the dead. The smallness of self overtook me; I was slipping forward now, moving disembodied yet swiftly into the fading light, but one. A torch glowed on the horizon and with strength unknown to neither flesh nor spirit I became the path back to that terrestrial star. I joined myself into its luminous tendrils and for one second had a faint memory that I was the very lantern light shone at my back when that morning I set forth. When, still and quiet, the waving them-figures held the sconce aloft.

Play Time - A Horror Story

A chime overhead was followed by an annoyed voice: “Attention, customers, the store is closing in five minutes. The store is closing in five minutes.” Tyler heard the half-warning, half-reprimand, but he weighed it against the large pile of jeans he had yet to try on, and decided to ignore it. He had never found such promising and aesthetically pleasing bargains, and it would be a shame to leave them here. Plus, they have to wait for everyone to leave, right?

While he was undoing the clasp on his fourth pair of jeans (which fit him perfectly! Success!), the lights dimmed and there was a metallic grating sound from somewhere in the distance. Maybe his comforting thought was wrong. Maybe the bitch running the counter really was that stiff, just didn’t care. He ran from the dressing rooms, clumsily trying to latch his belt at the same time, and was met only with the security lighting, pouring down in isolated spires over the faceless mannequins littering the store, the gargoyles of the fashion age.

The registers were all off. The metal sound must have been the iron gates now in place across the store entrance and front windows. The only sound now was the steady hum of the air handlers… actually, the humming had just cut out. Tyler could only imagine that the cheapskates running the store had decided to cut the power at night to conserve power. Which sucked for him, because now he was amidst dead silence in a sea of cotton and polyester.

Tyler’s first instinct was to yell for someone to open the store, a guard or something had to be patrolling the mall. He walked up to the gates, and to his dismay, found that there was nothing but complete blackness on the other side of the chain links. “Hey! Hey, is anyone out there?” he yelled, at first a bit cautiously, then with growing vigor. It wasn’t working. In fact, it seemed like the more he yelled, the less… the less he could stand to yell again. What was going on? He tried to put his arm through a hole in the gate, and his hand fell upon something warm and solid. The shape wasn’t describable. It felt like a tree that was full of hot water. But it was so black beyond the gate that he couldn’t tell.

The shape writhed and slid past his hand. It was alive? Or at least it was moving? What the hell was this? He pulled back his arm as fast as he could. He couldn’t see out there, but something inside him told him that whatever was out there… could see him.

There was a crash in the back of the store. Tyler again recoiled, this time back into the fence, then jumped again, remembering what his hand had just lit upon out there. His mind was racing with thoughts? A joke? Some sick joke? Was that what this was? Shouldn’t my eyes be adjusted by now? Why is my heart racing so fast? Why can’t I catch my breath…

The thought hit him like a brick. The air handlers. Somehow his breathable air was being cut out. He was nervously sucking in all of the last of his breathable air. But how? This place is huge.. unless someone was purposely trying to pump out the air… or unless something very big was gulping it in…. no, that’s stupid. That’s stupid.

He was pacing in the front of the store, too scared to try the gate again, too scared to venture to the back door of the store. He reached for his cell… Shit, he realized. The pants he had worn in to the store are still in the dressing rooms. No way… He had to do it. If he wanted to get out… He was starting to get dizzy. All of the mannequins were watching him, like some sinister hand had come from the darkness and pushed their eye-less faces down to observe his fear.

The crashing in the back of the store was louder now. He saw some rustling among the shirts displayed along the side walls. The rustling was coming to the front of the store. Something was crawling under the clothes. Something was coming toward him. He wished he wasn’t breathing so damn loud, he wished his legs didn’t feel like lead. He needed to think clearly. He needed to think at all. Move, he thought. Move…. “Move!” He yelled to himself, and he ran to the opposite wall of the store.

He began making his way along the far wall back to the dressing rooms. He was going to reach that phone and call whoever he could to make this better. Who would he call? Who did he know? What the hell? He thought. His mind was muddy water. Swirling between his ears. He wasn’t seeing properly now. The air was becoming intoxicatingly weak. He stumbled into one of the accessory racks and a bunch of studded belts fell to the floor, their clattering filling his head like it was the only sound in the world. He had to keep going. He had to keep running.

He emerged from the retail area and fell onto the floor of the changing room hallway. The cold tiles greeted his skin like some farce of a bed, tempting him to rest there forever as his breath continued to weaken. He was crawling now, he was opening the door to his dressing room. He was rooting through the pockets of any clothes he could find. He was pulling a cell phone from the folds. He was staring at its illuminated screen. He was staring at a text message that had just arrived. The words were all in double… no, his vision was all in double… fading. His mind was interpreting it far too slow. As he fell unconscious and the crashing met him and ripped through him, the phone slid across the tile and its screen was reflected on the marble wall… it read, “Play time is over.” The store become one avalanche of clothes, and flooring, and counters, and mannequins. All coming to a stop in a stack on some plane strewn with the litter of so many more stores, of pools, of cars, of homes. An enormous arm lifted up a handful of figurines from one of the stacks, up until it was even with a gleaming pair of young eyes and a crooked smile half-filled with teeth. “Play time is over,” it crooned. And it let go off all of the plastic bodies, of all of the lifeless forms, like a crane machine at the arcade, and they fell surely back into the earth, some breaking as they hit, one twisted figure, a boy in new clothes with a look of horror painted across his visage, atop them all.

Toward

And there I was, staring intently at the word on the page. Of course, there were many other words, it was a periodical. There were many other pages. But this was THE word. This was THE page. For some reason, I knew it. I could taste this word. I could swim in its sans serif depths, catapult from the ledge of its t into the pool of its o. Why was I looking so harshly into its character?  I was interrogating the word. 'Toward,' I read aloud. And now it was real. Now its ink had been translated through the electrical highway of my central nervous system into a combination of air and muscle, reverberating from my throat like some twanging banjo in a forest clearing, tweaked by fingers both earth-grubby and delicate. Now it not only existed by virtue of some sweeping printer fingers, it existed in my body and around my head. It had been multiplied into the chords of a different perception. I was walking into it like it was a pathway into truth. I was moving toward toward. To ward? To fend off? This was a breakage, this wasn't its rightful mien. Tow ard? To move away from the arbor? I am shuffling the letters one by one like I am playing Rummikub. I am moving its cells like a biotechnologist, trying to rearrange a cat into a fish. To Draw... an infinitive. Toward contains many a line, emanating from it like spokes, but no matter how many, I continue to move toward toward. When I reach the sudden curl of its final d, I will be facing up into the heavens, I will be marching up its backbone like the shivers I get when I read to the dead. For, perhaps, when toward ends and it becomes destination, that will be where I am. Who I am. But I am stuck. I am entrenched in w, and I try to read it again and all I can say is tow. Two. To. Wot? I wager that this is it. I have dwelt on toward for far too long. I am now past toward. If I turn back I will once again move toward toward. But this is a siren's song mistake. I will be eaten by its intensity if I go back to that word. I move on. I fall off d. There is no heaven here. There is nothing but the white space of the page. And the sudden realization that the author of this periodical is also moving toward toward. I look up at the spire ahead. It is another t, falling surely into another o. I am moving away from toward by moving toward toward. And now I know it won't end. The white space will yield to this repetition. I am stuck once again staring intently at this word. At word. Toward. It is the always of this place. It is a movement that will never stop. It is time's arrow. It is entropy. It is dissolution. But it is toward. And it is a lilting reminder of continuance.

Static - A Horror Story

It was a cold night, the kind where, unless you looked real hard, the Michigan countryside could have been frozen in time, frozen like the realist dream of some painter of old. The hills spelled out the coming winter with their greens transitioning to browns, to the colour of repose, of death. Across the mottled plains lay just a few specks of light, the homes of those brave souls living far enough from the cities to see the stars. One such home, nestled snugly inside a picket fence-line, bore the shimmering colours of red and gold, and greens, flashing from one to next in the main story windows. These colours bore forth the story of the movie Evan had just clicked on using the game controller now-remote.

His parents away for the evening, the house felt even colder and more artificial than usual. Evan had always felt a bit disconnected from this place, even though he had lived there his entire life. He spent many hours in front of the TV, hoping that the oasis of light and sound it projected would somehow insulate him from the reality living outside. The true and striking cold. The deep blacks of the night sky. The harsh words of children. The stirring tales of broken hearts. He wanted to live in this falsehood forever. Because to disregard pain meant to embrace happiness, in front of this screen.
 
The image flickered.  A few flecks of static crept across the face of the main actor in the romance flick, just as he was about to give the kiss of true love to his daring counterpart. Evan felt uneasy. The static, creeping across his face, was ruining the illusion he wanted for this lazy night. Why couldn’t he spend one more hour in the bliss of forgetting. He felt like the actor, looking for love, finding only static on every channel. He switched to a different movie, this one a comedy. The Pixar teddy bear, in its childlike bearings, was walking toward a grocery store. Evan had seen this one many times; it always made him smile. As he watched, and the teddy bear was about to push the lever on carousel horse in front of the store, a line of white noise crept across its furry arm. Interfered with the fun. Broke, once again, the illusion of childhood sending forth colour and noise to blot out Evan’s worry.
 
What was going on? This had never happened before. The images on his movies had always been crisp and believable. He had always swam in their lies so faultlessly. He switched again, this time to a horror movie. Static ruined the tension. He switched to a documentary, and static ate away at the lion eating away at her prey. A cartoon. Static disintegrated the transformation scene of the main character. A game show. Static fell across the survey questions.

Frustrated, Evan got up from his futon, and drug his feet into the kitchen. The cold harshened, and he hugged his sweater even closer to him, like the arms of a loved one. He wished it could have been. He wished he could be losing himself inside the bright and flawless eyes of his perfect mate, just like the screen of a television. Those lover’s eyes would the pool of warmth he could swim in, could be an endless sun so that he would never have to pull so close into his winter clothes again.
 
He was daydreaming. Not watching where he was going, filled with the image of his perfect man, he had stumbled across the kitchen toward where the cupboard should have been. Popcorn would make this cold a bit more bearable. Maybe it would even be enough of a distraction so that he could overlook the static. Static? Am I hearing static? He thought to himself, still in a half daze, dreaming of the man that would take him to warmth.

He lifted his arm, and his head, out of that mirage, to reach for the cupboard door, and he ran into something soft and warm… and still. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the dark, but he was certain of the shape of it… certain it was….

He jumped backward, alarmed, and let out a yell. There was a man standing there, looking sullenly into the empty cabinet. The man, tall, had dark, medium length hair that fell in half ringlets around his head. As Evan tried to catch his breath, tried to think calmly about calling the police, trying to fight him, trying to run, the man slowly craned his head around, still in the half dark of the kitchen, and stared. Not even at him, really. This man was staring into Evan. He was the image of pale beauty, he was a specimen from the land of dreams, he was everything Evan had just been hoping for. The smile that crept onto the man’s face was one of a sweet innocence, was a beckoning one. The man’s close-fitting shirt and jeans showed that he had some physique, some strength with which to fuel the heat of the embrace Evan was now, illogically, unwaveringly, moving to give him.

His heart was beating so fast, he was in a trance, he was swept into this by the night, his hands and arms were thrown forward, his eyes softened by the thought of an ally in this cold… And then he heard it. The static, creeping into, filling his ears. And then gone. And the man was still there in all of his quiet beauty. Smiling. Inviting.
 
Evan was burning with the desire to enter his embrace. He took another step forward, looking into his eyes. Static. Static burst across the man’s face, and the sweet smile fizzled quickly into the most horrid snarling countenance that Evan had ever seen, teeth sharp as canine razors laying over lips now putrescent and dripping, eyes red and hollow set back in the sockets of a dark and spoiling skull. Fizzled back, and the beautiful, sex-filled, luscious face reappeared. Fizzled, and death, and the snarling smile crawling up the side of his hollow face, producing rows of jagged teeth. Fizzle, and beauty. Fizzle, and the corpse’s tongue was slithering out of the hole where a cheek should have been, glistening with black blood. It still stood there, menacing and then brilliant, dead and then alive, red flaming coals of eyes giving way to clear and spotless blue. Still stood there staring. Then, slowly, it lifted one arm to beckon to Evan, one arm fizzling with static between slender moon-made skin and the rotten flesh of hell. Choked up, horrified, feeling sick at what he could have been holding right now, Evan ran out of the kitchen, not thinking, just fleeing, ran to the door and opened it, and stepped into the plains of cold and leaves and pumpkins which he… no. There were none of those things here.

There were only long waving lines of tall grass. The savannah sun was beating down upon Evan’s head as he moved a bit farther into the fields. Foreign birds dotted the sky, which was flashing between a warm blue and a cold gray, sputtering with static, filling his whole mind with static. The wind was static as it blew through the rushes. The ground was a static that flowed under his feet, the vegetation shimmering between tropical flowers and dead earth. What was going on here?

A new static filled his ears. This… no, this wasn’t static. It was a low growl. It was coming from right behind him. He spun around quickly, to see the grass waving unnaturally, to see the glint of sun across two sharp-as-knives eyes. The static ripped through the grass, which gave way to both night and sun, which, in its layers, uncovered the claws and slender body of a huge cat, a beast of prey, a house of destruction, its fangs for killing, its tail whipping in excitement. It leapt forward and with claw outstretched went for Evan’s throat. He was slammed back and down into the ground, he was under such a weight as he had never known. The claws were stuck firmly into his chest, deep under his skin. He thought he could hear his heart beating. He knew it to be, instead, the ragged putrid breath of the beast, now craning its head to the sky, now releasing a blood-curdling scream of victory as it pressed down more firmly into Evan’s tender skin. He squirmed, he yelled, and screamed, and cried, he tried everything he could do, to roll away, to tear away, and just as his strength was failing and the beast raised his other claw for the killing blow, a wave of static ran across the hillside, ran through the feline monstrosity, and broke its hold on Evan, shimmering like the endless blue sky above, its weight fading just enough that he could escape its grasp. He pounded his feet into the ground like hammers on anvils, praying for the door of his house, to be back in that place cold yet inviting.
 
He was there, he opened the door, never remembering it to be so light, his fear and anxiety giving him the strength of desperation.  As he slammed the door shut, a thud on the other side followed by a scream of bestial fury told Evan that he must have been mere inches away from death in his scramble back.
 
He couldn’t go back to the kitchen. He couldn’t go outside. He ran back to where it all started. The family room, with its television still blaring static, noise, breaching reality, giving him such a headache that he thought his skull would split. He didn’t know what to do. Waves of static were pouring from the screen, the walls were moving under the weight of illusion. The line of teddy bears lined up on the shelf to one side was starting to move robotically under the weight of the static. The mirrors were filled with faces too mangled to call human. The couch’s legs were flickering between wood and jointed, crawling, insect legs, its cushions becoming  a pool of snickering maggots. All Evan could do was give up, or… try. Try to beat this. Try to cut off the source of this nightmare. He hoisted the heavy reading lamp up and poised it to strike at the television, even as it flickered between shaft and python, even as its fanged head spit and struck at Evan’s legs. He hoisted it higher, over his head, and brought it crashing down into the white noise, the rectangle of light. It cracked, and let burst an intense wave of light and noise, a roaring like the abyss of hell itself had been blown open. It through Evan back into the wall and, as the light from the now destroyed television faded, so too did his consciousness…

“Evan! Evan! Wake up, honey, we’re home.” The voice sounded so far away, but got closer every second, with every vibration of the dark, of the hand gently nudging his shoulder. “Evan!” He opened his eyes, and he was greeted by the gentle gaze of his mother, shopping bags in one hand, and her other lightly set upon him. “You must have fallen asleep! Look, your movie has been long since over.” She gestured toward the television, stuck on a screen of steady white noise. Evan turned off the television immediately. “Sorry, Mom, yeah, I must be tired. I’m going to bed.”

He mounted the stairs, passed his dad and said good night to him, too. Brushed his teeth. Washed his face. Stared at himself in the mirror for a moment. Ran his hand along his clean skin. Brought his gaze, tiredly, toward his own eyes. Looked at their gentle and exhausted irises, looked at the fine details of their pigment, rushing out from his pupils like so many fine flowers. Looked into the darkness of his pupils. Looked closer, and closer, stirring in them, so tired. A flicker of white static ran quickly across their depths.