This Cloud Above Me

Horror movies don't scare me. They used to. They used to give me awful nightmares. Cold, sweaty, jerky nightmares. I never screamed though. I woke up silently, so no one came to comfort me. It was sick irony. Like a flower that can only thrive in the Winter. Or a miscarriage.

But now I sleep. I realize that each artificial Hollywood sequence is devised within a set of uniquely bullshit circumstances, and my own life is too fucked to accommodate them, so there's nothing to fear. It's a hollow reality I exist in, not one of wet and exciting plot lines. It only scares the viewer, never the character.


Her face rises to show eyes squinting. Ink black hair whipping around her head in the wind. Fat drops of sweat wander down her skin like rats leaving a sinking ship. They mix with the rain. Tongue slips out between chapped lips and jaw expands, clenches, releases. She imagines her teeth shattering into a million pieces and getting stuck in her throat. Somehow that would be better than going on. She sinks back into the grass, glistening in the dark moonlight. The rain is over now. Sweat becomes one with the dew and she is entangled in her own despair, guitar solo echoing around her addled brains. Nothing compares with the amped snow. And the Stardust.

Page Break

I don't think one can be driven crazy. You cannot get in your car and drive to crazy. The street you're driving is the crazy itself. One who is crazy has always been crazy. Insanity only lies dormant in the brain. Insanity can be awoken, not driven to. And another thing: everyone is crazy. You see flickers of when crazy awakes, as if it is a child who has been roused for half a moment before turning back over into slumber. One split second of unhinged rage. Assured: "You're not crazy; you're just oddly specific in your intentions."

"Tell me you love me," Crazy says. "Give me the world that is already mine and I'll go away," Crazy says. But such cancers of the brain are never truly satisfied.

Ugh I have such a gummie bear craving right now.

The Indoor Girls

Dear Indoor Girls,

Your mother claims twins, smugness hiding under her dark circles. I wonder about insemination. I wonder about the validity of twins even; you could not be more different. Well, actually, you both like pretzels. That's a start.

But even I like pretzels, and there's no one like me. No one like me anywhere in the world.

The toddlers scream at the sudden realization of mom's disappearance. Of course she comes sprinting back. This repeats, every time she gets a little farther - like suicide drills in gym class. "Not my problem. Not my problem until she leaves," I think.

Ignored her warning about getting them mixed up. "She gets the purple cup, and she gets the pink." Short, brief, as if labeling boxes. I wonder if they would grow to detest being assigned these colors. How could anyone make such an oblivious mistake and confuse these girls. Splash of red hair on one, dominance, crude innocence is one tiny tongue poking out as eighteen months of motor skills reach for a sticky picture book. Only one sock. I'd love to be back at the point in my life where I wouldn't notice if I had only one foot socked.

Angelic is the other. Beautiful wispy blonde hair frames blue eyes. No distraction is required. She sits and just watches. Everything. I swear, her eyes got bigger every minute. She is perfectly symmetrical. She walks gently, tentatively, as if the polished wooden floor will break like ice bergs if her feet make a sound. I imagine she is so quiet because she's afraid of not being able to hear the sound of her own breathing.

Mom titters about home improvement. Lesson one in white suburban mother chatter. I think the only way to improve her home is paying more attention to her children. Hell, I've been with them for four hours and they've shown me more of a personality then she ever will.

I still like boys better.

The River

We are struck, we recover. Our injuries are only broken strings. Snapped, the chords are corrupt and wavering. Replaced, they sing. But the strings are big, almost 5 and a half feet tall and big enough to fit my shoes.

Your strings play off beat and the melodious nonconformity dances and plucks. A twang: that broken, fractured, slice. That bitch of a 4 count. When one person is over-glorified so much and so many times in my mind that if they get too close my heartbeat goes through my chest and my river of blood overflows its banks. So far deserved, I reassure, but am blind to any flaw.

I have to post this before it starts sounding stupid when flowed back through my own eyes.

What Showers are For

Because God knows we all do our best thinking in the shower, letting the droplets wash away any satanic thoughts that have compounded themselves in our brain stems. Hair is rooted to our heads so it doesn't fall down into the drain with the rest of our dead inhibitions, tucked into the pipes with all other wickedness. I wonder if that's why rats are so evil - because they lurk in the pipes and catch all our awful fascinations. They grow fat with perversion, with lust and rage and sticky heat.

Some are hung onto more than others

"Why do I always think of the best comeback after the argument is over?"
"He deserved what he got."

Rats are only misunderstood. Judged too harshly. So are cancer cells and the end of summer and stepping out of comfort zones. Perhaps rats are our gods.

Future Improvement

She gave me these really bright white shoes for my birthday. She said "Avery, I'll let you figure out the colors in your life." It stuck out in my mind because my family hadn't even remembered my birthday that year. They didn't notice that I continued to wear the white shoes for a few years after that either. Every summer the sneakers would get smaller and I would get high with my cousin out by the cemetery. By the third August he could blow perfect smoke rings and they would float round the necks of the spirits who came out of their beds to watch our veiny red eyes. Adam's cutoffs and relaxed fingers suggested he had forgotten about his dad but the shadows under his eyebrows told otherwise. Still I didn't say a word about it. Things were better when Adam wasn't angry.

Once during July, I could swear his hair was blonder than usual - or maybe it was just the back lighting from the sun - he got real mad about something that I said. I don't even remember what I had been talking about but his head ducked into his chest, as if he was trying to dislodge the weight of shame from his skull. His mom told him not to slouch so much but he did it on purpose anyway. He said it "allowed for future improvement", but I'm pretty sure he just read that on a middle school report card or something. A lot of people didn't know how to wrap their heads around how to help Adam out. Sometimes it seemed like Adam and I were the only people who knew that he didn't need their help. But if I really thought about it I guess he was afraid of both success and failure. He liked being mediocre because nobody had anything to say about it. Making his own mind up about the past kept him from getting stuck in an endless slump of untwisting the knots in his stomach, tied there by what some prick in a brown suit and a notepad had to say.

I never talked about the past with Adam, never, ever the past. Not even what I had for lunch an hour ago. We always discussed what was happening right in front of us. He was the first one to see the car speeding around the corner. Later he said it was me who pointed, but I know it was him.

Swallowed in the Sea

The only thing I've learned through blogging was that there are thoughts that exist which just cannot be expressed through words. No matter how many times one tries.

I always played with the boys as a kid. I don't know why but at that time I got a long better than with girls. A muddy shirt felt better than a clean dress, the bruises and scrapes felt good because they speak volumes about how they were born. The scar on my hand spanning a whole 3 millimeters tells the tale of two reckless children and a blue ceramic plate. Running through the woods and pretending to shoot other kids was much more interesting to me than Barbies or sidewalk chalk. It still is. But I can play a role.

Spencer cruised up the street grinning. No anticipation of the repercussions that came with repeatedly teasing the sleeping dragon of adolescent masculinity. The wolf pack of high school boys prepared to chase him but one shot a question at me first. He wanted to know Spencer's name and barked as much in my direction. Wanting to protect his identity, I shuffled my feet and said "...Phil Collins". It was the first name that popped into my head. The boy's eyes rolled around in his skull confusedly. His expression suggested that he had heard the name before but couldn't put his finger on where or when. He shrugged and they tore up the street after Spencer: "Hey Phil!" Spencer was already long out of sight.

"Swing"

"Sheets"