Stairs.
“If you keep walking up those stairs backwards you’ll trip and break your head.”
Eudora spat on the concrete step which she had just passed. It flopped stringily over her lip and plopped and glistened upon the cracked cement.
“I’d rather see what awfulness I’m leaving behind and let tomorrow’s terrible surprises stay surprising. Fuck you,” she quipped with a sad smirk.
Before the giver of the reprimand could offer a repartee, she had hopped over the last step, turned the corner, and skipped backwards up onto the next flight. Every hop was exactly calculated; never did she falter even on the most decrepit of the stair-steps. Clearly she was used to watching carefully what awfulness she was escaping. Six, seven, eight, and ten–on this floor Eudora always remembered never to take the ninth step, for that’s where Chernie, her patchy, diseased kitten had lain down and died four weeks ago. Step eight was a quick hop, and she was up and over the growing kitten-based mass of maggots.
Four of her eleven years had been spent here, in the ever-increasingly shitty apartment complex of Sunny Overland Suites. The streaks of blood and booze across the walls of the stairwell were familiar sights to her, as familiar as the spidery veins across Mr. Fitzwilliam’s (for that was the name of the previous critic of Eudora’s self-transportation) forehead.
She glanced down at the fourth and third steps of the sixth flight of stairs as she hopped to her left. Still there indeed, and still apparently twenty-one inches. That very morning Eudora had measured the projection of Trist’s vomit after she had (presumably) stumbled up to her room, inebriated beyond any sound medical counsel or legal standard of driving, at any of the various single-digit morning hours. Twenty-one inches!
{to be continued.}
Back to what I know..
Yarp, a lingustic painting of HUMAN SUFFERING and pain and gore.
I have long since grown accustomed to the nails in the soles of my feet. Piercing me indifferently like a bitter seamstress into an unthanked pincushion–except these pins are long as my fingers, glowing orange with heat, barbed, and of the perfect sharpness to puncture, but not so sharp that the penetration is painless.
When my feet are so perforated that there is no more bare skin to be stabbed, I inevitably fall. Onto my hands, my knees, where the torment might continue. With each shuffling, wavering step forward, four, six, nine more spikes drive upward through my palms, and stretch the skin off of my knuckles before punching through with a sparkle of blood and the soft tearing of paper–or flesh. On my knees, though, I never feel them exit my skin, but instead stab at the cartilage and the joint with the grinding of a hell-wrought wrench in these living gears.
On my first days, for perhaps a week, or a decade, I would shriek! with horror and agony, turn my wet face to the utterly silent black sky and sob and scream to raise the hackles of angels infinitely far beyond my sight. The sobs would inevitably catch in my throat, when I would choke and continue to crawl on..
No stars, never have there been stars, clouds, or moon.
In our mortal lives on earth, so oft-unappreciated, we begin our temporal journey on hands and knees, and eventually rise to our feet. We who rise too high, stand too straight with the defiant raised chin and rifle-straight spine, begin our eternal regret on our feet, and eventually we collapse onto knees and hands.
I’m not sure where this will go, or if it has any plot at all. It may end up some kind of “prose painting”, kind of like the crucifixion piece but with even less plot.
A creative exercise.
My writing is so typically about human suffering and teenage angst, so I’m going to use bits of my dreams to piece together a totally stereotypical and silly spy story. I guess. Maybe. I don’t know if I like it yet, but here’s the first part.
His boot-clad feet smashed through the skylight and slammed onto the ballroom floor amidst a tinkling snowfall of glass. The partygoers, of the social stratosphere, gaped in horror of his quite uninvited entrance–and even worse, what attire!
“Shit, shit!” he shouted, pointing his rifle skyward as he galloped up to the unlocked main doors–and delivered a devastating kick to open them to the bitingly cold night.
I’ve been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut lately, so his influence might become apparent. We’ll see where it goes.
BAH
So, for once, I suppose I’ll (ab)use my blag for its most intended purpose: venting about my problems so internet strangers can read about them.
Bah, or not. This is stupid. Text editor, here I come.
Save the changes to document “Unsaved Document 1″ before closing?
Close without saving.
Revised
Here it is revised. The intended audience never knew the purpose behind it. I realized it was entirely visual, and added some aural description to go with.
He seized the edges of his flesh, fingers woven into the skin of his chest, and wrenched his naked arms away from each other with all the majestic, raging force of his body. His voice never screamed, but his skin shrieked, as fabric wrought in two against its hems. This ragged, grating cacophony, a symphonic tearing of paper and steel, pierced the sky.
For Zeena and Mattie both–Frome knelt on the icy Corbury road.
And the silent, kneeling Ezra Tull resolutely shredded himself to rags–Sibyl smiled at him daintily, that smile perfected in the theatre; Miss Francon stepped forward to help him, to tear at his liver and kidneys and spill them out onto Room 101’s chilling floor. O’Brien watched. He stroked the restless rats.
Drink me, eat me–and Alice did gladly. She ravenously watched Roderigo claw at the flesh of his throat and waited on–curiouser, and curiouser!
His throat bared, the Savage began to mangle at his chin, where the white bone shone through ruby-red; and over his lips, where the tearing skin gradually revealed a skeletal smile. He was ceaseless, and his eyebrows stretched back in ecstasy when finally his hands were upon his face. With ten fingers, Delilah seized his hair and lovingly tore the scalp down behind him with the wet crunch of bloody bone and cartilage, fortissimo, until his shapeless face and hair touched his back. Unmasked, he smiled back at her, and held her gaze, never blinking.
Lucie observed him–silent, silent, she let him peel long strips of fresh hide from his legs, and arms, and back, and carefully she took these and cut them and sewed them together again…Stitching, stitching, the tapestry grew and took shape, but its throbbing was constant. A royally fringed blanket of humanity, lovely enough for the highest queen, and she wore it with entitlement.
So the nails could pierce the bare muscle of his wrists, and Elias presented the hammer to Grace, and her husband Fernand joined his friend Tom Buchanan in the gathering crowd, jeering and shouting at the cross.
With hammer in delicately gloved hand, the little red-haired girl did not weep when she had finished. And she–all of them, Alice Delilah Vane, that little red-haired Grace Zeena Dominique Silver-Mondego Manette–shouldered the cross, and raised it upright to the sky.
She gathered the regal woven blanket of his fresh skin, still warm and twitching with his pulsing veins, and wrapped it round her shoulders.
The wind, magnified by his altitude, scraped like the teeth of a jagged saw-blade upon his body. Never did he blink against it, but stared resolutely forward. The air chilled, and she trembled; the blanket shivered with her, and she pulled it tighter round herself.
He turned his grinning skull-face to his chest, to watch a lung slither out from his ribcage, and a serpentine intestine crawl down the dark red meat of his legs, onto the knotted wood, leaving a trail of slime and blood behind it. It joined the rest of his innards in a mound at the foot of his crucifix, quivering. All the while she watched, wordless, and turned her head upward that she might feel the warmth of his hide, writhing against the back of her neck.
And he, blood flowing in rivulets down his cross, dripping and streaming from the dangling fingers, the outstretched angelic arms, the torso most raw and beautiful, called down to her:
“Please, take this heart–for I’ve no use for it now!”
Immolate
This piece is a catharsis. It has been a long time simmering in the back of my mind, and suddenly rushed out like a literary diarrhea. What follows is a second draft, possibly the final draft. Mostly, it’s a macabre collage of literary allusions. I’d like to write more about the blanket, but it’s somewhat hazy in my imagination. Having never made or seen a blanket like it, I’m not quite sure what it looks like.
Enjoy.
He seized the edges of his flesh, fingers woven into the skin of his chest, and wrenched his naked arms away from each other with all the majestic, raging force of his body.
For Zeena and Mattie both–Frome knelt on the cold Corbury road.
And the silent, kneeling Ezra Tull ripped himself to rags–Sibyl smiled at him daintily, that smile perfected in the theatre; Miss Francon stepped forward to help him, to tear at his liver and kidneys and spill them out onto Room 101’s cold floor. O’Brien watched. He stroked the twitching rats.
Drink me, eat me–Alice did gladly. She ravenously watched Roderigo claw at the flesh of his throat and waited on–curiouser, and curiouser!
His throat bared, the Savage began to mangle at his chin, where the white bone shone through ruby-red; and over his lips, where the tearing skin gradually revealed a skeletal smile. He was ceaseless, and his eyebrows stretched back in ecstasy when finally his hands were upon his face. With ten fingers, Delilah seized his hair and lovingly tore his scalp down behind him, until his shapeless face and hair touched his back. Unmasked, he smiled back at her, and held her gaze, never blinking.
Lucie observed him–silent, silent, she let him peel long strips of fresh hide from his legs, and arms, and back, and she carefully took them and cut them and sewed them back together again…Stitching, stitching, the tapestry grew and took shape, but its pulsing was constant. A majestic, fringed blanket of humanity, and she wore it with entitlement, never gratitude.
So the nails could pierce the bare muscle of his wrists, and Elias presented the hammer to Grace, and her husband Fernand joined his friend Tom Buchanan in the gathering crowd, jeering and shouting at the cross.
With hammer in delicately gloved hand, the little red-haired girl did not weep when she had finished. And she–all of them, Alice Delilah Vane, that little red-haired Grace Zeena Dominique Silver-Manette Mondego–shouldered the cross, and raised it upright to the sky.
She gathered the woven blanket of his fresh skin, still warm and twitching with his pulsing veins, and wrapped it round her shoulders.
The wind, magnified by his altitude, scraped like the teeth of a jagged saw-blade upon his body. But he never blinked against the wind, and instead stared resolutely. The air chilled, and she trembled; the blanket shivered with her, and she pulled it tighter round herself.
He turned his grinning skull-face to his chest, to watch a lung slither out from his ribcage, and a snake-like intestine crawl down the dark red meat of his legs, onto the knotted wood, leaving a trail of slime and blood behind it. It joined the rest of his innards in a mound at the foot of his crucifix, quivering. All the while she watched, wordless, and turned her head upward that she might feel the warmth of his hide, writhing against the back of her neck.
And he, blood flowing in rivulets down his cross, streaming from his lovely exposed muscles, called down to her:
“Please, take this heart–for I’ve no use for it now!”
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