I wear an identity of glass like it was some sort of designer bag. All my ideas splatter like paint balls against the fluorescent spaces of my spiced up brain. The light lingers lovingly over my porcelain, ghostly skin. I match whatever environment I need to camouflage in by being transparent and thereby concealing the truest, bluest parts of me. In truth I hate it, but everyone tells me glass will be rare and valuable soon, so I better keep the cracking coat of clear concealer.
Tag: writer
Short Horror – Mandy
Meghan drags her worn body down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom again. Another night of no sleep and post partum psychosis has led to her being able to see and hear the demons that lived in the walls. The new baby remained back in the nursery, somehow sleeping through his sister’s screaming. Her husband was sleeping through it all, as usual. Still, he had to get up early for work, so he needed the sleep, and she tried not to be angry. But night after night of her daughter’s meltdowns had her on a knife’s edge.
“
Mandy! It’s time to sleep! Please baby, I just need one night of sleep.”
Mandy continued screaming. Meghan wondered if it was another nightmare.
“Eeeeeeeeeee” her daughter screamed louder.
Something snapped. It completely broke. Not a toy or the lego Meghan was stepping on. Meghan’s sanity. She grabbed her daughter by the shoulders and shook her vehemently.
“Stop screaming!” she begged, screaming herself.
And she did. Mandy stopped screaming. Her head lolled sideways and she fell silent. Instantly, Meghan came to and realized what she’d done. She held her daughter to her chest, willing her to wake up. But she didn’t. Meghan remembered her old lifeguard training and checked her daughter’s pulse. It was ebbing.
“Baby, please, come back,” she sobbed. And with one last breath her daughter was gone. Meghan collapsed into a puddle. She killed her daughter. Her little girl was gone, and she did it. Gently she laid her daughter down on the bed. She ran for her husband and her phone. They needed to call emergency services. She needed help. She’d go to prison and never see her husband or either child again. She thought of the gun in her husband’s desk. She would use it on herself before the cops arrived.
Sobbing incoherently, she dragged her half asleep husband down the hall, bleary eyed and trying to figure out what was wrong.
“Hi Mommy!” They entered their daughter’s bedroom, and she was playing with dolls in her bed. Meghan froze, shocked, overwhelmed, grateful. But Mandy’s heart had stopped!
“Baby you’re ok!” Meghan ran to her little girl’s side.
“Yes Mama!”
“What’s going on Meghan? Why are you crying? And why did you wake me up? You know I have to get up at 4.” Her husband, tripping over his tiredness, asked and kissed his wife’s forehead. “I’m going back to bed. Mandy, it’s time to sleep. Listen to your mother.”
He stumbled down the hall and the master bedroom door closed. Meghan turned once more to her daughter.
Her breath caught. Her daughter’s eyes were slits, like a snake’s, and the normally blue eyes looked somehow green.
“Mandy?”
“I’m not Mandy,” she chirped, chipper. “You killed her. I’m your new daughter. And I don’t need to tell anyone what you did. If you don’t tell anyone I’m not her.” The eyes glowed, then the slits widened and the color went back to blue. Meghan fell backward. Her diaphragm froze.
“I’ll be the best daughter you ever had. I won’t cry or have nightmares or talk back. You just have to give me what I want.”
“Who are you? What do you want?” Meghan sobbed. Her daughter, her precious girl…gone..and this thing had her body.
“I think you know who, or at least what, I am. As for what I want, a body and a background. That’s all I need. A vessel to act in the world.”
“And if I go get my husband right now and tell him you aren’t Mandy?”
“Well, either he’ll think you’re crazy and have you locked up, or he’ll believe it and I’ll leave and you’ll be left with a dead daughter and some splaining to do.”
Meghan crab walked backward away from the bed and struggled to her feet.
“What will it be?” her daughter’s sweet voice asked. The crushing, agonizing weight of what she’d done split her open and she wept bitterly.
Her daughter, the husk of her, came over and hugged her waist.
“There there Mommy. You better stop crying and go back to bed. You can’t have anyone thinking you’re mourning or something. Neither of us want people asking questions. Sweet dreams Mommy.”
Meghan stepped backward from the shell of her former child and crept back to her bed, weeping silently.
Liquid Rainbows
Patron saint of leprosy and lepidoptera, please pray for me. Your prayers are perfumed prettiness in the heavenly atelier of our most brilliant Lord and Savor. Who made the colors that coat our lives? Who inscribed code into our flesh and blood? None but Him, His hands soaked in liquid rainbows. My skin is getting old. My face is going viral. My face is a virus, a label I wear to hide my soul shivering in her thin blue shift, nipples cutting against the cold like diamonds. Faces are a contoured means to a flattened end in the catalog of human memory.
Woolen Fortress of January
In the woolen fortress of January, gunmetal skies and home chilled on the rocks, bathed by the sea. I was born to granite and snow. The birch trees lining the lanes of my memories have a thousand eyes peering out of them. All of them look into me, red eyed windows to the abyss staring at my soul and counting the wrinkles. January is an old, brittle friend whose joints croak in chorus with mine along the craggy coast. Though January leaves me every year, I can never seem to disentangle myself from his cold, lingering fingers.
Prayer of Tearing
Splitting wood, splitting atoms, splitting hairs. The world is falling apart from the bumbling, malevolent force of stupidity. I drank my dreams and burned my ambitions like a sweet incense. Mother Mary, help me to be more like you. Soon my sins will hollow me from the inside, and my name will be torn asunder.
Smellevision
I sniff my smellevision 4 days in the future, and God embroiders my backbone for me. The future is all geometry and piss poor planning. My cotton hands are soaked with sunsweat. The leaves of grass drip with it. I know I have to survive tetris as a sphere and it won’t be easy. Two demons play jenga in my front yard, and no matter how they play, I lose.
Failure to Grow
Clandestine stars twinkle guiltily. Here even light feels accused. In my old house, a ghost reading Kant. God is in my garden lamenting the lack of roses. Spiteful space radiates cold. I carry a 50 pound sack of flowers everywhere I go as punishment for failure to grow. A ballerina dances to the sweet music of the moon that only she can hear. Black velvet night cradles our secrets to sleep.
The Chasm
What lies between the roiling world and the cool white light of heaven but the chasm in my gray heart? Sunshine knocked on my door once. I bit him. I trudge across a wounded woods twice daily hauling water for the perturbed ghosts that bathe in my yard. Nothing is ever enough. Somewhere is a heart shaped key with my name emblazoned in gold, and an idiot is shoving it into the wrong lock until it breaks. Heaven is like a squirrel feeding me nuts on the porch. It’s amazing but I’m probably dreaming. My soul struggles for resuscitation, and my man puts his lips on my broken person and breathes.
Modernism and Post Modernism
I make love to Modernism in the back of a black cat museum. Then I dump him and deflower post modernism, which is a whore in rayon. After that the clouds follow me back and forth from home to the store. My clonopin can breathe on its own and has 20/20 vision I can only envy. I am sick to death of navel gazing and semi autonomous whispers. What comes after contemporary art? Is it fudge or shit? We put visionaries eyes out and toast to the promising future of the ambitious dark.
The Claire’s to Victoria’s Secret Pipeline
Tart tulle. A world of black and pink. Girlhood is a vivid hot pink stain in the local psyche of ravens. A lipsticked maven sells beauty to the hungry future ghosts of beauty. They sell you your youth while you’re young and have it anyway. They sell you beauty when you’re gorgeous already. The stars shine like the bright eyes of my younger self before I shook off extraneous need for approval. The Claire’s to Victoria’s Secret Pipeline is the first real graduation a woman has (after she gets her life giving flow). The travel from the land of glitter to the land of fishnets is brutally short. The ghost of a blighted field is scintillating and sinister in the lacy snow. After graduation, I lived according to the laws and regulations of my new hyper sex bunny land, but I loathed it because I felt like a rock where I used to be a diamond. At the core of the softness of woman is always the sparkling of gems. So I came to the valley between my mountainous breasts, and my heart erupted into a quiet, silk thing. No longer a fetish of myself but a real woman of flesh and gentleness. Snow fills my bones, my memories. Soft, pristine, clean.
Miniature Moon 