posted
Because we need somewhere to post it, and maybe the surrealist authors were valid after all.
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My submission, September 26:
I feel like I have such a long way to go to become a virtuous woman. But I long to. I want to be a domestic goddess, and so many of my contemporaries would scoff at that. But I want to spend my life as a joyful sprite in the kitchen. I want to connect with the karma of cuisine and feed myself to family members.
I feel sometimes like I'm slipping away so fast - I feel like I'm sliding down from my prime. Sometimes my eyes glitter with the prospect of the world and its hugeness and all my opportunities to go bathe in it all, but other times I just want to hold a baby and cover myself in a quilt of silence.
If I could fly, I would take off from my front porch on an almost-chilly evening and shake my hair of all the worries and shoot off of an elastic string straight upward into the starry expanse, and suddenly realize that there was no up and walk around upside down among the mountain valleys.
Sometimes when I'm curled up and almost asleep I feel like someone is picking me up in that bigger-than-a-baby grip and carrying me upstairs so I can wake up in the room with the pink shag carpet and the rosy beaded chandelier in the morning with the smell of rice and raisins on the stove for breakfast and the taste of honey powder in my mouth and nose.
Sometimes when I think I want to run away I realize that all I want to do is write down the dream I had in language so poignant that someone may almost cry when the soldier standing at attention realizes that the revolutionary making the heretical speech in the square is her brother. She's all bound up in grey wool and protocol and she feels for the first time in years the burning of tears behind her eyeballs. He looks at her and she feels her mother behind her.
But I'm the heretic and my brother's the soldier. But at times, I know we're standing in that cold red brick square and the wind is howling and the regiments are backdrops and someone is standing at attention and someone is sentenced to death.
And then I wake up and the reality of the textbooks on the foot of my bed settles in on my stomach and I stop writing poetry in my mind and start my overdue grammar homework.
But sometimes, on weekends, I just let myself keep dreaming.
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posted
Sorry to impugn your fine thread, Locke. I guess I just have a really selective memory these days.
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posted
this is some stuff i already posted. it's under my cool, from an ataris song name. i don't have anything new, but i wanted to contribute to the thread anyway.
Posts: 1658 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
OK, help me out here folks. This is for a contest. You're supposed to write something about someone who's been in a cryogenic sleep for 22 years. So I wrote this. It's ridiculously depressing compared to what I wanted to write, but this is what came out. I might rewrite it, but I want some feedback before I submit anything. Thanks folks...
Shattered Sleep
I’m tired. Sleep… Yes, I liked sleep. Back then, that is. Sleep was a place to float silently in a wash of restful darkness; sleep was a place where no one could hurt me. But now sleep is a prison, a dark place with walls and bars and no windows. I don’t remember if I tried to get out or not, I don’t remember anything. Nothing except that when I went to sleep, everything was familiar, and now that I’ve woken up, it’s all wrong.
Sliding through the dark tunnels, a flash of light envelops me every few seconds. That’s familiar, though. Tunnels have light to mark distance, to mark the passage of time. I know I’m going fast, this train is taking me somewhere, the place I used to belong. Raia tells me it’s in terrible disrepair, that I shouldn’t be too shocked when I see it. I guess I expected that… Sort of. I mean, 22 years isn’t so long. My home should have been fine, should have withstood the passage of time, but I guess fate’s not kind, especially not to me.
The tunnel flies behind us, we shed it like a scarf on a warm evening. It’s then that I almost realized how fast we were really going. But I close my eyes and stop paying attention to the window. The other people on the train are still looking at me. Maybe they recognize me, maybe they don’t. Maybe they think that I look out of place. I certainly feel out of place, for all that Raia has done to help me. These clothes that she’s given me… They’re wrong somehow. They’re a little too smooth, a little too clean. They don’t smell like detergent or anything. I don’t like that… I feel naked. The fact that the others inside are looking at me makes me feel even more naked.
But now the pitch blackness of the night outside is no longer broken up by flashes of light, so instead of looking out, I look in. Reminds me of a book I read long ago, but not really long ago. It’s long since out of print now, which makes me sad that I didn’t buy a copy. But the scene reminds me of a book. If the windows of the train (if you could call it that) were fogged up, I believe that I’d wipe away a stripe of fog and see an illusion of the people inside the train with me. It’s easier to turn around and lose the etherealness of that idea. Ethereal bothers me now. Solid and real. That’s where I have to be from now on, or I start to feel like I’m losing control again.
The train starts its slide to a halt. I guess it’s programmed to minimize inertia, but the gradual slowing bothers me. It’s like you’re trying to feel something but you can’t. Like you’ve stopped being in contact with the real world. I hate it when the train slows down. I close my eyes, willing myself to ignore it.
Raia puts a hand on mine, nodding. I guess the train has stopped. It was a short stop, or maybe I fell asleep for a minute. I glance at my watch. No, I didn’t sleep.
When I woke up, I could hear music. A slow song, softly sung by a kind woman… But I don’t know who it was. It faded away when I awoke. Sometimes I feel like I can almost hear it again… Like now. I step off the train and there’s a breeze that almost sings to me like that music that I heard in that place between death and life. I shake my head and will it away. Solid. Real. I concentrate on the feel of the air on my skin.
Outside it’s warm. Room temperature. I still don’t understand exactly what happened back then, while I slept. Perhaps in my deepest dreams I heard something that could cause… What I look at right now.
Buildings blackened with ash, they look as if they haven’t been touched by mortal hand or eye since whatever happened all those years ago. To me it looks just as if a sea of ash was caught by a fearsome wind, plastered all over the buildings and trees and whatever else managed to be left standing.
Flashes come to me as I walk along, trying hard to keep up with Raia. She walks a lot faster than me. Flashes of memory, images of bright light and steam and a heat that made me wonder what cool ever felt like. Raia’s looking at me, concerned.
I wave my hand at her, trying to concentrate on remembering what these blighted buildings looked like once upon a time. Trying to find my way back to my home. Raia must think I’m wondering why I survived out of all people. Why me? But I’m not. Well, I wasn’t.
But why did I survive? I was no more righteous or kindly or neat or useful than all the other people of my town. Maybe I was the worst person in town. I guess I spent most of my time networking, thinking, hiding in my basement, and reading; I wouldn’t know much about the other people.
Road passes onto road and then again, and I find myself staring up at the home I left behind, the home that left me behind. It’s as gray as any of the other buildings, nothing to show why I of all people lived, even if it was by falling into a killing sleep. I leave footprints on the stairs as I go up to the porch. It won’t be too long before they’re covered again. Applying a shoulder force to the door-I’m not so weak as I used to be-I open it.
A deep breath… and everything is the same. Nothing moved or destroyed or stolen. Nothing touched, it’s all as I left it that evening. Laundry still piled, I was in the middle of doing it; Clocks still on; VCR still flashing 12:00, endlessly; and in the far room, my computer screen’s still flickering valiantly.
That gives me pause… Why didn’t I turn it off? Wouldn’t I have at least put it into sleep mode? (Sleep mode. The idea still gives me chills. Perhaps that twenty-two years was God putting me into sleep mode, and forgetting about me?) I put that thought out of my head and sidle around the table piled with papers and books, seating myself in that same way I always did before. Everything is so familiar, it makes my heart ache to see it and know that it’s to stay here forever.
A document window is open. The words on it impact my eyes with the force of small hammers. I don’t remember writing this, but who else could have? The words themselves seem familiar, like the faraway discourse of a dream.
“I couldn’t tell you why it’s happening, but I know what’s happening. I’m falling asleep and I’ll never wake up. Its cold, I’ll never wake up I can feel it in my bones and it scares me. It was the men that wanted to quiet this town, that wanted to quiet me. The men came to my home and told me if I wanted to live id take this God damn medicine. id forget and wake up in a while and be alive I don’t want to forget! I don’t want to sleep! They did it, they killed this town and I cant let them get away with it whoever reads this tell them that I’ll wake up and I’ll remember this and I’ll get rid of them no matter how hard it is. I cant give up when I wake up Ill take them down I will I swear and Ill remember this its done I cant stay awake any longer goodbye”
A presence at my shoulder wakes me up from my horrified reverie. But I wasn’t paying attention to Raia. I do remember. I remember the faces of the people that did this to me. I hear Raia gasp and take a step back, and I turn.
Her eyes are wide, and then they snap to me and harden. I recognize her now.
She lifts the strange implement that they now call a gun, “Time to rest.” she says harshly. She pulls the trigger.
A crack, and I fall. It’s a sharp pain for a second, like lightning lancing through my head. The ground hits me more than I hit the ground. It comes on me again, the cold, the darkness. This time for good. It’s a shattered sleep this time, a poison sleep. The world around me fades… I can hear that song again, this time it’s very clear…
posted
Ryuko, that story is wonderful! but i like depressing stories. i've never been able to write a happy story in my life. my only problem with your story is that i wish it was longer. i want to find out more about what happened.
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posted
Ooh, I loved that one Moose. Thanks for posting again. Great thread.
Annie, it's thrilling. *coughtwinscough* Not that I can write like that, but often I have a desire to put down into words the ambitious, dreamy, sometimes melancholy thoughts I have. That's why I read I guess, because someone else has always said it better than I could and it makes me feel better so see that so many people think similar things. Thanks!!
Ryuko, I'm still reading. I'll be back.
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First of all, love the font. Uber cool. You should go into graphic design... no wait, you're already funnier than me and cooler than me, so you cannot become better at art than me or I would cease to exist.
I am very vexed, though, that I clicked on "LDSMailorderbrides.com" and a blank page came up. Please remedy this as soon as possible. Your "Shiny Sappy People" was well-written, but it made me bitter and hate-encrusted.
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posted
I very nearly majored in art. I still have occasional fantasies about double-majoring and getting a bachelor's of fine arts in drawing and painting. But I wouldn't want you to cease to exist, so I guess I won't.
And the link should be working now. If you experience any further vexation, please let me know.
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posted
Very creepy, Ryuko... but well-written. I like when he sheds the tunnel like a scarf. Classy.
And love yours, Pop. I love the voice. I've read it before, but I enjoyed it again.
quote:“The area is literally teeming with unmarried girls who are desperate to settle down and get married before they become an old maid. LDSmailorderbrides.com gives them the opportunity for a celestial marriage that they might not have gotten otherwise.”
Thanks to your fine writing, Jon Boy, I am now quivering and hiding in a corner.
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posted
O_o I'm SOOO glad I posted this.... My compie died and this would've died with it, had I not finished it.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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This one's a bit long. And a bit strange. Just so you're forwarned.
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I am a disgrace to everything that is virtous about the virtuous female every so often when I slip and I laugh at violence committed against cats. Violence isn't funny, and I consider myself a pacifist. Ah, but then Scott picks up the kitty pillow from its perch on the papasan chair and strokes it gently, imitating a perfect purr, and proceeds to unleash a couple punches on the poor helpless kitty pillow, punctuating his violent melodrama with miaous and screams of kitty horror. I try to keep my demeanor, but really can't restrain the reflexive laugh creeping at the corners of my mouth. Something cavewomanish in me tickles my propriety strings and I'm soon howling with laughter.
My conscience doesn't prickle a bit at the day's earlier cat violence as I step off of my landing into a misty deciduous evening and see the phantom white cat curled about the feet of my cosmopolitan garden gnome. It sits up and looks at me. It knows I'm a cat snob. It is fully aware of my ill-bent sense of amusement and it is passing judgement, though its face is cold plastic and does nothing to portray it.
"OK, you know me," I address the white cat. "I'm the one." It answers with a spritely dash into the lilac bush. But it's still there. It's listening. I loosen a button on my pea coat and sit at the foot of the concrete stairs.
"It's so funny. My grandmother made me the kitty pillow for my twentieth birthday. She knows I love kitties," I tell the felinest of the under-bush shadows. "But then again, she still thinks I wear size 14 in girls'. The pillow took a long time for her to embroider, I'm sure, and it looks just like my old cat Judy Brown, the straggly siamese mutt I got when I turned six."
The bush answers with an impudent prickle.
"Judy Brown was patient. I drug her about by the hind feet often enough that she got used to it and started to humor me. I brought home adopted kittens and snubbed her more than a few times. I ignored her completely after my eleventh birthday. When we moved away, I must have been thirteen. We gave the cats to a friend across town and packed up in the horse trailer and put 700 miles between us and the kitties before we got the news that they'd escaped the new house and been lost to the ethers or the mountain lions somewhere in Evergreen. I don't think I even cared. She was old."
The white cat sticks a paw out tentatively as I reach the critical moment for lack of movement. It turns some inverted circles around its own tail and bats at a dandelion green, eyeing me mentally the entire time. It calls for the black phantom cat, who trots down the buckled alley sidewalk and up the side of the house.
The black cat questions me immediately and I answer by fishing through the pockets of the pea coat. It sits and begin to flick the tip of its tail like the tip of a whisker.
"I would have thought that being fourteen and a habitual cat abandoner I could resist the kitten charm that smites the little girls so easily," I explain to the black cat's tail. The black cat's head is lost beneath a paw and a pink tongue. "But the new house was a farm house and the experimental farmers my parents were becoming wanted mousers. Oustide cats; cats with claws and no vet bills. So I picked a particularly charming calico kitten out of the down-the-road farm box and gave it the name of a Star Trek character and posed for smug kitty pictures. The lieutenant and I founded a feline dynasty on our five acre estate that soon blossomed into generations of outside cats with claws and twisted pedigrees and more mouse flesh than purina."
The white cat is sitting upside-down on the edge of the step somehow. The black cat has stretched its full length and glares at me with eyes that are sharper than they should be.
"I ran over two kittens in my first car. I was shaken up, but morbidly intrigued when the third-generation calico mother sniffed the remains of the little orange striped kitten for signs of life. I drove off, too confused and perturbed by it to clean up the carcass. The second kitten I ran over stuck its head under my wheel after jumping out of the arms of my little sister as she waved good-bye to me with five-year-old fingers. She cried for two weeks and she looked a lot like me and I climbed up in the barn loft and buried my head with straw until I was sure I was going to keep my composure. I dug out an old kitty, a stuffed toy named Mr. Whiskers and I gave it to the sister who still looks like me. Her eyes were still puffy and her thank you sounded like a sob."
The white cat looks a lot like Mr. Whiskers. My eyes itch like I have straw in them.
"I'm not going to cry about a cat anymore. When Kathleen promised me she'd go dancing at the Warehouse with me last summer, she cancelled because their family cat was dead. I spent the evening in my new blouse reading old science fiction books by the streetlamp, listening to techno thumps from the Warehouse and throwing rocks at dead cats who walked by," the white cat listens intently, arches past my back, rubbing its bony little head on me.
"They buried the stupid old cat in the backyard and had an evening together as a family. The stupid cat had a Christmas stocking. The last evening I had together as a family was spent lying on an air mattress in my Dad's apartment in California, listening to my Mom trying to stifle her sobs in the mattress next to mine. My little sisters dreamed peacefully of Disneyland and clutched their stuffed kitties as I bit my own fist in rage."
The cats disappear momentarily into the dappled light beneath the bush. When they re-appear, there are three or four of them in various shades of grey. I get the urge to stand up suddenly and scare them all away, but I just lean my head back. They walk past my arm in that way they do, serpentining their spines so I pet them without meaning to. The black cat's head appears at my knee, and I put my hand on it. My hand is heavy, but the cat doesn't move.
"I can't do it. I can't hold a kitty and see any innocence in it. There's so much hidden. I can't even trust it. It's a ball of sqirming fluff and I can't even trust it to care when I run over its baby. It just sniffs at the kitten pieces and trots away. How can I expect that it's even in there?"
The white cat walks over my outstretched legs, its feet are heavy and press down satisfyingly as it wanders momentarily over my lap, looks at me, and then turns to leave.
I get up without much effort, and go back up the concrete stairs and inside, scooping the kitty pillow off of the papasan chair and throwing it across the room. It hits the wall without much complaint and lands on the orange couch.
I stop for a minute, then go to retrieve it. Running my hand over the top, I can feel the little embroidered knots in the center of Judy Brown's blue eyes.
I take off my pea coat and drape it over myself like a blanket. I lay down on the kitty pillow and slowly fade out my thoughts, turning them down one by one until not much is left but the sensation of my cheek against the soft whiskers of the linen pillow.
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posted
Here?s some freewriting from a bad day. I won?t vouch for the truth of it. I just thought it was interesting. I vaguely remember what I was getting at.
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You either adapt to the emotional ups and downs or you become more hardened and crusty. Those are the two ways to deal with your wife?s personality. You become part of it or you distance yourself from it. You can?t keep fighting it. It will wear you threadbare. It is not for you to understand how she copes with such sweeping and exhausting change on a day to day basis. But once you have lived with her long enough you will see that it is not killing her. She must thrive on it. And so you must learn to thrive on it too, or never be affected by it at all. That is the choice.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
I really like the avant-garde use of the question mark as an apostrophe. Very hip - hope it catches on.
Plus, I think you?ve hit upon some very vital truths about the female psyche. Is everyone taking notes?
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I've never been too knowledgeable about music. I've envied those who could sit down and listen to a good piece of jazz or an opera and understand the complexity of it all. To be able to appreciate the chords and the structure and to feel the emotion that someone as pop-numbed as me can only barely perceive.
But I think, if I listen long enough, I can almost feel it, and for a flash I see it moving like so many waves of perfect symmetry crashing against a coast in a beautiful rhythm.
And then I say goodbye as many times as I can and I ride home and the night whips past me in puffs of cold air and turns liquid and blue on the rough road in front of me. And for a moment the whistling of the wind on the deserted street as I pass through the streetlights like sound through a candle flame merges into a pure note in which I can almost pick out a distant descant being sung by the second sopranos.
And for just those moments I can see the chaos of the quantum fluctuations rise and fall in their constant cacophany and a finger of light reaches out and and voice sounds, "Peace, be still." And for just that instantaneous bit, I see the strings flow harmoniously together and the quantum fabric softens into a sheet of smooth lavender satin.
And I wrap myself in it and I look up, past my handlebars, past the rickety pavement of this side road and its darting cats, and I raise my head briefly to the heavens and I watch the stars swim in their indigo depths. They occasionally come up for breath and I realize that the huge incoprehensible vaccuum that surrounds us is actually full of the most incomprehensible force of them all. The chaos of flaming stars and seething nebulae hurtling through space is held in check by some immense steadying regularity and I feel it so thick and so poignant that I realize it can only be the love of God.
And my head swims with the madness of it all. And the questions in my head swell like a heaving sea, and no defense my propriety throws up is tall enough to obscure my view - if only for a moment, a shake - of the obscene order that is the madness of this force of love.
And I sink back below the trees and back onto my handlebars and the quantum fabric resumes its mad fury and my thoughts resume their mad censoring, but I realize the full import of the madness. If this is madness, I cannot help but see the order in it. If this is madness, commit me.
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