ninety-nine : dust on the ground
Late in the evening, Lorena finds herself staring out through the living room window into the shifting shadows of the garden. She feels the presence of something beyond what she can see. She is certain that the others must feel it too, and as she turns an ear to the hallway she hears a soft murmur roll through the house, as though each sleeping soul had at once drifted to the furthest edges of reality to find some place between the physical world and the dreamscape, to some place unreachable by the light of day, some place more real than waking life allowed them to see. She closes her eyes and touches her fingertips to the cool window, willing herself to find it, willing herself to see, to know. Moonlight climbs the wall behind her, lifting with it the sweet, heady smell of flowering jasmine that weaves its way into the house through tiny cracks around the window. She lowers her hand, exhaling slowly as her fingers run over the glass.
There is a shift in the atmosphere. She opens her eyes to find that the shadows have become more dense, somehow solid.
Behind her, the dust rises as if disturbed by some unseen footstep, motes spiralling upward into slanting beams of moonlight which guide them through the air to a new resting place atop an open book, a glass, a white piano key.
ninety-eight : to dream of rising water
She awoke in the night with an aching need to see the ocean. Her heart quavered with the need for it. She felt it calling her, and somehow, suddenly, it was all there was, all there ever could be.
She felt as though she would burst into flame unless she saw it, and so, beneath the pale orange dome of the city’s night sky, Hannah ran until her lungs burned, then with wild eyes and jelly legs she climbed aboard a rattling tram. It shook and lurched, and her heart pounded as she felt panic bubbling deep within her chest.
At last she stood on the damp planks of an ancient pier, with salt spray clinging to the loose fibres of her coat. Boats on the horizon blinked in and out of sight. She watched them through stinging eyes as the smell of rotting seaweed grew strong.
‘It’s okay,’ she whispered, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’
fifty-four : dark shines
The change in road surface is audible as she takes the off ramp to the airport. Cold air blows in through the vents, though she is certain she closed them, and she wonders why his hand isn’t in its usual place, resting on her knee. She glances at him from the corner of her eye and adjusts her grip on the steering wheel. He is staring out the window.
At the airport, she opens the back door as he lifts out the luggage. She walks beside him through the terminal, suddenly aware of the finality of the word. She shakes it off. At the news stand he turns to her and asks if she has any change. They are the second last words she hears from him. The last are a few minutes later. A simple bye. No words to suggest he is coming back, though on the drive over she felt sure of that anyway. She didn’t know what she was expecting. Not an admission, of course not, but something. He gives her nothing. Not even a kiss. He walks away, through the gates, away.
By the time his plane takes off, she is sitting back in the drivers seat. Music blares, drowning out the sounds of traffic and aircraft but not of her thoughts.
Tonight I wrote while being painfully aware of the fact that I need to get up at 5:30 tomorrow morning, and listening to my favourite Muse album, Origin of Symmetry. I would write more, but as I said, early day tomorrow. Oh, how I look forward to the day when I no longer have to have a day job. A girl can dream.
forty-five : i’ll be brave
Her footsteps echo in the empty street. Beside her, he walks silently. Now and then she glances at him to make sure he hasn’t stopped or turned down an alley. Each time, he looks back at her, and his expression tells her nothing. She thinks, Well, he’s here isn’t he?
They walk on and on, passing through streetlight beams that throw their shadows like ghosts on the pavement. She looks up at him again, trying to think of something to say. Instead she is distracted by the expression she still can’t read. After a while he asks her a question, but it’s nothing she is ready to answer.
‘What are you thinking?’
Her mouth curves up at the edges and she bites down on her lip, trying to disguise the involuntary smile as she turns away.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ he sounds amused, and she wonders why she doesn’t just tell him, I’m thinking about how much I want you.
‘Mm.’
She glances back in the half-light, at his eyes, lips, fingertips. Contact seems impossible. Her hands ache to reach out, to try, to touch. She fights it. Be brave, she thinks. Do something. She is still thinking it when they get to the car. When she starts the engine. When they drive through the city. When they stop at traffic lights. When he is climbing out of the passenger seat and saying goodbye. When he closes the door, her heart is in her throat. She drives home with the stereo blaring, hating herself for being so afraid.
Later, she lays in her bed and stares at the ceiling, her stomach in knots. Next time, she thinks, I’ll be brave next time.
Tonights piece was written while listening to Radiohead. I may or may not have drawn on my own crippling shyness to write this, though the story is fictitious. Sorry to have to backdate, but as you probably noticed, tumblr was down for maintenance for a few hours tonight.
twenty-six : because it aches
it was in the shadows of his eyes that she felt it. in the crack of light under the door. the gap between his lips when he concentrated. the sound of stairs creaking. the cool kiss of water from a dusty glass. in the spaces, the things she sensed but were never said. she knew the word for what she felt, but not the reason. words came easy. easier than the feelings that necessitated them by far, but the reason—that was evasive.
she started leaving him letters. notes. poems. she wrote them in code. spelled out in stones she picked from the stairs. if i love you, will you tell me how to leave? she knew the answer, and though she craved the sun and the thrill of grass between her toes, she didn’t think she would leave even if he let her. she was safe.
today i wrote while listening to stockholm syndrome by muse. very literal take on the title. i’m still feeling the weight of a metric ton of writers blocks, and these posts are suffering. hopefully it’ll pass soon.
twenty : monster
A name was called, and all the faces turned in unison. Paul pressed his hands to his knees and stood with the slow focus of arthritic bones, his nostrils flaring. He looked back at the faces, all of them, and moved heavily through the crowd. They parted, peeling back, a wall of wide-eyed silence. Pauls jaw tensed. A single vein throbbed on his temple. He kept his eyes down, but could still see him, the monster, their captor, grinning from the platform. He would have seen him with his eyes closed. At the front of the platform he stopped and stared at the ground. A dark boot slammed down on the boards, sending dust and dead bugs into the air.
‘MOVE.’
‘I can’t get up there,’ his voice was weak, and he kept his unsteady gaze on the dirty floorboards.
‘Speak up.’ The dark boots were right in front of him.
‘I can’t get up. My arth—’
Rough hands gripped him by the hair and twisted his face up. His face was inches away, all shark teeth and burnt skin and cold eyes. He gripped Paul’s chin, digging sharp nails into the flesh, and snapped his neck.
‘That’s the last of your problems.’
seventeen : mud
they fall together, sound and lights, dropping till the air is heavy. the crowd is dark, electric. they crackle. over their heads, black sneakers appear. arms shoot up, shifting forward. dark legs, a t-shirt, hair. so light he could be an apparition. he is carried on the tide of hands and spit out like seaweed. an orange vest stands tall and sprays water through the sky, stinging cold on sunburnt skin. the people beg for more. dust in the air turns to sludge on the ground, and the people move over it in waves, their feet thick with mud. you can tell the first-timers—their bloodied toes are bare, thongs and sandals forever lost in a sea of people. when the sound finally comes again, it grows from the belly of the crowd. a murmur, a roar. light explodes. it begins.
sixteen : the boiler room
they work with their hands. steam bursts in hot billows, mingling with the sweat on their faces and running down their necks, staining each dirty shirtback with a damp rorschach inkblot. they shovel and stoke. the oily coal smell encases them. they grit their teeth and squint into the glowing furnace, some wiping their arms across their foreheads, leaving dark streaks of coal dust on their skin. hours pass, and the burning in the air becomes a burning in their limbs. they keep shovelling. the ship moves forward, each ton of coal they lift shifting it further across the water.
people above lounge on the deck, watching the constant clouds flow from the smokestacks and into the sky.
fourteen : isolation
she sits by the window, watching. her breath fogs the glass in a semicircle, obscuring all but her mouth in an opaque haze. people pass. she has her favourites. at six fifteen, the jogger stops on the corner and waits for the lights to change, bouncing on the balls of her feet and rolling her neck from side to side. sometimes alone, sometimes with a less enthusiastic man wheezing along a few feet behind her. she wonders what the jogger does when she gets home. if she goes straight to work, or relaxes with a hot mug of tea. if she still has the dog—the glitter-eyed husky that used to bound ahead of her and wait at the corner, tongue lolling, even without a leash.
a few pedestrians glance in at her from under their hoods and umbrellas. it’s too early.
at half-past eight, the school kids slouch past. the youngest one, now the tallest, no longer hangs back from the group. he towers over the others, speaking in a quiet voice that somehow demands respect. they listen and laugh and shove each other around. one of the boys slips on a pile of wet leaves and stumbles onto the road, and she lurches forward in panic, hitting her head hard against the glass. the thud is loud, and the kids all turn to look at her. a pale fuzzy forehead haphazardly placed over a narrow jaw, the lips curving down slightly at the edges. she tries to lift her eyes and smile at them, but her head spins. the kids run down the road, some looking back at the stranger with her distorted face pressed to the glass. she worries that they will change their walking route.
it’s still too early. time drags on.
finally—ten minutes late—at nine-forty, the mailman arrives on his bike. he slows, and her heart races. by the mailbox he stoops and waves at her through the window, then pushes forward without leaving anything. a rush of leaves tumbles over the damp pavement.
she rolls back from the window.
not today.
thirteen : newborn
As far as she could tell, he was nothing before he was Michael.
Just a cell divided. Two. Ten thousand. Six million. Replicating, expanding, shooting out arms and legs, but still nothing. He was a concept. Something unseen. In those first few months she would stand in the bathroom, wiping steam from the mirror and watching, waiting for some sign that he was there. Some sign that the tiny bump she saw was more than the result of a few too many rich desserts in recent weeks. Even later, when she saw the fuzzy grey outline of him on the ultrasound screen, when her stomach bulged out low and heavy, stretching the skin so tight it changed color. Even when the tremors within it grew strong enough to wake her at 4am and send her running to the bathroom—he was a nothing.
Until she had screamed him out into existence, he was a ghost. A whisper no more real than an organ she didn’t know the name for. Until that moment, when the howling pink-faced bundle was handed to her by a bright eyed nurse and she heard her own voice say Michael as if she had known all along, he was nothing.
But now—now he was everything.
twelve : a place where nothing moves
When I slipped, my thoughts fell with me. They crashed down like rocks in an avalanche, growing from a stutter to a roar at such a speed that I was more overwhelmed by the deluge of words than the sudden lack of ground beneath my feet.
This is it.
I knew it. I knew it.
I knew this would happen.
This is what you’ve been expecting. I know. I know.
I knew this was coming. You shouldn’t have come here. God, why did I come here?
Cold air whipped over my face as I fell. It reminded me of riding on electric swings at the carnival, how I was always afraid that the chains would buckle with my weight and I would be flung across the fairgrounds. I would sit on the swing as it spun around and around, and imagine the sound of metal breaking. I would picture the way I would look as I soared over trees in my paint-chipped chair, only to slam headfirst into the ground before coming to rest in some sickening shape.
Like a human pretzel.
That snapped me back to reality, that pretzel thought.
Oh, God… I’m going to… I’m actually going to die.
The words felt jarring and unnatural in my mind, but my imagination accepted the realization without pause. I involuntarily pictured all the gruesome ways I could land on the rocks. Speared through the chest by driftwood. Face first on wet black jags that would rip through me like teeth. Bones splintered, legs buckled, spine snapped and twisted as the white capped water crashed down over me. I suddenly felt grateful that I was alone.
What if he had been here? He couldn’t have caught me, I slipped too fast. He would have watched. He would have watched me die. I’m going to die.
It wasn’t difficult to think it this time. I thought it again, testing the words in my mind.
I’m going to die.
It was simply a matter of fact. Somehow, I had acknowledged and accepted the fact that I would probably not survive, and I realized with a strange sense of pride that I was unafraid of death. I was greeting him with open arms.
What I was afraid of was the way that people would look at my broken, lifeless frame when they found it washed up on the rocks, the screams and the slap of sneakers on stone as they rushed to save me. The futile attempts to revive someone who had no hope or intention of coming back.
Somehow, the only thing that scared me about my own death was what it would do to everyone else.
Does that make me selfless, or just stupid?
I pictured the eyes of my family and friends, muddled with tears and sadness and horror, lips puckered in defiance. The look on Ethan’s face, how he would stand terrified and powerless on the beach while they tried to revive me. He was going to blame himself for not being here on time. Even worse, I imagined the conclusions they would all come to. I hadn’t exactly been the picture of good mental health when I left the house.
Will this look like anything but suicide?
I doubted it.
Does it matter? Isn’t it better that they think I chose this for myself, compared with the alternatives?
But what were the alternatives? I began to ponder the many possibilities, the kaleidoscope of deaths that were waiting to take me if this one had failed. And then, right in the split second before the air surrendered my body to the stone, was my last thought as a human being.
I cant believe I’m still daydreaming.
ten : childhood
disguised by a soft fawn blanket beneath my parents bedroom window was a wide pine chest. on rainy days at the tail-end of seemingly infinite school holidays, it would burst open and fill the room with the cool, musty smell of hidden treasures; feathers and glitter and sequins that caught the morning light and smashed it into thousands of brilliant colours. old jam jars—their labels long since soaked and scrubbed off by pruned fingers in a sink full of warm soapy water—sat along one side, full of spare buttons. some still glossy and new in their plastic wrapping, some salvaged from the care-tags of new shirts, others given to me in rattling rainbow handfuls in my grandmothers front room. stained, bristly brushes stuck out between the jars, and before i knew it, my day would disappear in a wave of velvet scraps, popsicle sticks and poster paint.
eight : writing
the writer sits, pen poised, at the end of the jetty.
warmth melts through the thin cotton of her shirt and she feels the back of her neck beginning to burn. later she will regret not moving into the shade, but for now she stays, soaking in the unfamiliar sun and watching seagulls squabble and squawk over a surrendered bag of chips. her mind wanders. hitchcock films her first thought, and from there they flow to petrol stations, the burning smell of her old car, her first car, probably a pile of scrap in a junkyard. a metal cube. rubix cubes and sudoku puzzles, never-ending shifts in empty stores. she wonders how she got here.
she tries to write but nothing comes. the ink stays stubbornly in the pen, refusing to flow to the blank page. the more she looks at her notebook the more it seems to scream I’M EMPTY! it terrifies her. more than waves or planes or being forgotten. more than the fact that nothing has changed. she feels immobile, emotionless. the static fills her chest so that she can’t feel anything. she is white noise.
perhaps, she thinks, this is why nothing appears on my page; im trying to write nothing onto nothing.
she smiles. a secret smile. a sharp breeze blows salty spray from the water, and the tiny drops land and dissolve through the paper of her notebook like the fleeting thoughts that evaporate before she can write them down. she wonders how much longer she will have to wait, how much further she will have to go before she can see things clearly. how much longer before she can stop talking in metaphor and start being honest with herself. it must be soon.
she waits, hoping for clarity to set in before the clocks advancing hands get any further. but the sun still sinks. it rolls down behind the high hills and a thin veil of pale orange hangs over the water and the jetty.
the writer gives up.
six : silence
time was, this street would be crowded with kids running home from school. there would be a constant stream of noise; first of cars, stopping and starting and groaning over the speed-bump, then of the schoolkids, some laughing, some yelling, some complaining. their parents, scolding, congratulating, gossiping. the noise of life was inescapable. the crossing-guards whistle would set off the neighbourhood dogs, one by one like a crowd of arms at a football game, until excited barking echoed from every backyard. the old croatian man across the road would stand in his front yard, talking to passers-by while his wife called out to tell him his coffee was going cold. a plane overhead, trucks on the bypass, magpies and crows and noisy miners.
now, there are no such sounds.
the streets are empty. all of them. now, there is only silence, save for the low buzz of flies that rises and falls with every breath of wind.
five : poison
First thing you feel is a bee sting. A needle or a thumbtack. Something sharp puncturing the skin on the back of your neck, then hot poison burrowing through the flesh and into your veins. Only it doesn’t just follow your veins. That one little drop replicates until it fills you like boiling water bubbling under your skin, spreading first down your neck, then your throat and out to your arms. Your fingers clench. Your jaw locks. Your heart thrums like a hummingbird while bright lights flash inside your head. You will hear the water now, not just boiling but churning. An ocean of noise. Blood vessels might burst in your eyes. If you’re lucky, you’ll go blind. They have no use for you if you’re blind. If you’re not so lucky, they’ll leave you in the room with the poison flooding until you die. At least, the Lucy, Michael, Sarah, Steven part of you will die. The part that has a name and a nicotine addiction and a favourite colour. Your body, the bone and tissue part of you, that will go right on living. Walking and talking and sleeping in your bed like nothing has changed. If you had been an interesting enough person, your friends, your family, your colleagues, they will be able to tell right away that something is different. There have been stories though, of Walkers who have been around for weeks before anyone noticed. Those are the people you feel worst for, the ones who led such dull lives before that being devoid of a soul makes no difference at all.
