I put my hand to my heart
When it surges, and say
Oh, now…
No you don’t.
We both remember last time.
Cut that out.
Excerpts of Nothing – 8
This was home, to me. I knew every rock, every tree, every cave. Every person was my friend, even the ones that I fought against. I watched the seasons change, power shift, and watched the sun rise and set over the docks of the hunter’s lodge. Every step seeped in memory, now lost.
Excerpts of Nothing – 7
You come for me now? Now- when I am old and grey? What use is it to me now? Why didn’t you come for me when I was a young girl- when my lungs could draw air on their own… when I could stand? I would have followed you to the ends of every world. I would have died a million times over, glad that I died where I felt I was meant to be, but you have relegated me to here- to this bed- to this old body. I lived my life waiting for a sign of something else… Of lives beyond our own, of magic and science. I never felt at home on this world, in this dimension, and that hollowed me, from the inside out, year by suffering year. Waiting.
I read so many stories of heroic endeavors, of inspired destiny and grand adventures. Life’s not like that here, though, and you don’t understand that. Here it’s bills and paperwork, and the grey fog of daily monotony.
I can barely remember stars. Here we only get a spare few, and most that we can see aren’t proper stars at all.
And you’ve seen them all, in this dimension and the next… and you left me here to wither.
You dare come back for me now?
Take me.
Let me die where I feel at home.
Let me die surrounded in the strange and wondrous.
Do at least that much for me.
Excerpts of Nothing – 6 (content warning)
Nancy boy with sweetest lips
I’m leaving bruises on his hips
Kneeling now to take his place
I break my hand across his face
Sweet androgyny, here’s to thee
Grab him by his collar’s ring
Now the night is just starting
Kiss him so hard he might bruise
Freely given, mine to use
Sweet androgyny, here’s to thee
Push him down, now sprawled and waiting
Lips part, breath, anticipating
He’s in control but never leads
With rapt attention to my needs
Sweet androgyny, here’s to thee
He is naked, I am bare
I hurt him with the greatest care
He shivers underneath my fingers
Writhing where my touch just lingers
Sweet androgyny, here’s to thee
Rake my nails across his skin
Bite his neck till teeth sink in
Put my fingers in his mouth
As my other hand moves south
Sweet androgyny, here’s to thee
But it’s all imagination
His body- my mental vacation
That nancy boy with sweetest lips
I’d leave bruises on his hips
Sweet androgyny, here’s to thee
Excerpts of Nothing – 5
We sat in the back of the ambulance, jostled around as it traveled down the remote road. I held my sister’s hand as I looked around. It was not what I had expected. The levels of disorganization were nearly parallel to my own. The ambulance pulled to a stop, and the attendant that had been sitting opposite me threw the back doors open and leapt out.
“What the hell, get back here!’ I shouted after him, having swung out, as my chair was attached to the door. I clung to the seat with my feet dangling. I looked back to my sister, unfastened myself from my seat belt and climbed over to her to let her out of her restraints. I looked up to see that the driver had also left. She sat up, rubbing where the straps had been, looking annoyed.
“Well this went from bad to worse,” she grumbled, then peered out at the landscape. We were in a valley, two large mountains on either side of us. There was an outpost not far from where we were, where people seemed to be gathering. I took her hand and we began to make our way towards it.
We were barely out of the van when we heard someone clear their throat behind us. I turned to look at the rakish man, a mask covering his face like he was the phantom of the opera. Looking at him made me feel inexplicably queasy. He almost seemed to be vibrating. He stared at my sister in a way that made me feel intensely uncomfortable, his eyes glinting in the setting sun.
“You know it’s coming,” he said, his voice distorted.
“What the hell?” She looked between him and myself, her nose wrinkled in disgust.
“That’s why you had that seizure,” he continued. She turned to look at me, frowning, her eyes wide.
“Seriously, what the hell?” she asked, taking a half-step back.
“Ok, that’s enough,” I said, and turned my back on him, putting myself between him and her. I ushered her away towards the growing crowd of people at the outpost some distance away. Sound swelled behind me- a buzzing, thrumming sound, and I turned to look. He had removed his mask, and where his mask had been was covered in writhing, crawling wasps. We watched in horror as wasps crawled over his eyes and lit up.
“The Secret,” he hissed in a flutter of tiny wings, as his body dissolved into a cloud of wasps, and flew up, disappearing into the red sky. I looked back to my sister, and she looked over to me. After a silent moment, we both bolted towards the outpost. My chubby legs were no match for her long slender ones.
The group of people turned as we approached, all of them looking anxious and paranoid. As I walked through the ten or so of them, I came across a familiar face. He looked up from what looked to have been deep contemplation and grinned and enveloped me in a hug. We broke apart, but before we could utter another word, a piercing scream broke the hum of quiet conversation. The crowd quickly drew back from the source of the sound to reveal a young girl. Glowing, golden waves of plasmic fire rippling across her skin. She clutched at herself, trying to contain whatever was going on. In an instant, a disk-like ray of heat exploded from her body in all directions, knocking us over. The girl that had been nearest to her began uncontrollably growing porcupine-like spikes all over her skin. Others began to mutate and everyone who was able ran. I looked around, trying to spot my sister and my friend. I spotted them both easily, as they were both standing and staring down at me. My sister looked like a god-damned Disney princess, golden curls hanging over her shoulders, her grubby jeans and tee transformed to a modest bodice and circle skirt. My friend seemed to have grown hair… all over his face. He looked like he was stuck mid-transformation into a wolf. He still had mostly his own facial shape, but the tip of his nose was black and shiny, and the fur on his face was patterned like that of a wolf. They continued to stare down at me.
“What?” I squawked, my voice entirely not coming out as my own. They shared a look.
“She’s a bird,” my sister stated succinctly.
“I think she’s a peregrine falcon- like her LARP character. You know, the vampire,” he added. They nodded.
Oh.
I concentrated, willing my flesh to resume its natural state. In an instant I was laying on my back, back to normal. They both sighed with relief.
“Well that was weird,” he chuckled, and held a hand out to help me up. I took it, and he pulled me to his feet.
“Yeah,” I grinned shakily.
A deep rumble shook the earth, and we all looked to the source. A giant set of wheels and axle loomed up over the mountains to the west. The setting sun back-lit the strange contraption ominously. When it began rolling towards us, we could see that it was made of flesh, one giant eye bulging from the center of the twisted axle. The flesh was green, and in places almost glassy. Everything about it was unsettling and alien. Its colours and shape hurt my brain just trying to process. It was not a simple set of wheels and axle, but my mind seemed to have simplified it, to deal with it. It hurtled towards us, hundreds of feet tall, and rolling with what seemed to be a vengeance. It passed over us and around us, the eye glaring down at us as it passed. It paused at the peak of the eastern mountains, much like a skateboarder at the edge of a pipe, now illuminated in the red light. It hurtled down the mountain to pass over us again, and stopped dead upon reaching the base of the mountains opposite us.
“What the hell was that?” I asked in a fervent whisper. My sister and friend shrugged.
“The secret, I think,” he replied. My sister and I shared a wide-eyed look.
Immediately it began transforming. Wheels and pipes and rails, balls, flip switches, poles, all grew out of the device, its flesh changing colour and texture depending on the part. The pipes shifted to glass, rods to metal, or some close flesh-semblance of each. There was a loud click as it seemed to settle into completion, and the eye on the now-vertical axle swivelled to pierce us with its gaze.
“I am the voice of God,” it stated in a booming voice that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
“God’s voice is a Rube-Goldberg machine?” I quipped sarcastically. My friend dug me in the ribs with his elbow and tutted at me shaking his head. ‘What’ I mouthed at him, and motioned at the crazy alien machine. It started moving, a silver ball began rolling along rails to hit a switch. I lost track of what happened next, but suddenly there was a gigantic hamster in a running wheel with a video screen playing a clip of the tour de France from the point of view of the back of one of the lead bikes. The hamster looked over his shoulder and began frantically running away from the seemingly oncoming rubber wheeled death.
Fiery golden plasma filled the pipe, and began slowly, sludgily seeping its way down through the complex twists and turns.
“God is not happy with your Atheism! You are an abomination!” the machine bellowed. My friend’s face contorted furiously.
“This is bullshit.” He strode forward, fists clenched, teeth bared. I followed him, taking my sister by her hand, and pulling her and her annoyingly willowy frame with me. My face burned, frustrated and angry. As we approached the structure, it seemed to shrink relative to its surroundings, yet remaining the same size visually.
“Look,” he began, pointing an accusatory finger, “You don’t get to tell us what we can and cannot believe. You’re just a psychopath that got hit with this same shit. You’re not the god-damned voice of God!”
The machine screeched.
“Then how do you explain this?” it seemed to motion around to those gathered. We all watched the plasma make its way closer to us, to spill out into almost certain death upon us, knowing full well that we should run but far too curious about how this would end.
“We can’t but we’re not going to just chalk it up to random acts of divinity- there is an explanation, we just don’t know it,” I retorted. It screeched again.
“You’re all abominations!” it screamed again. The three of us rolled our eyes simultaneously.
“Yeah, whatever,” my sister said, waving her hand dismissively. The plasma oozed towards the hamster. The hamster stopped running, suddenly unconcerned by the approaching bicyclists. It gripped the bars of the wheel in paralysing fear, bending the whole wheel until it was too misshapen to function. A moment before the plasma touched him, he leapt from the wheel and scampered into the night, reverting to its natural size mid-arc. The plasma blackened and began to harden in the pipes, and another frustrated scream rumbled up from the machine.
“So what?” my friend continued, turning away from watching the hamster, “We’ll deal. Look- I get it. Who here hasn’t wanted to thoroughly destroy the earth and all of its inhabitants at one point or another?” He looked over his shoulder at the group of us standing, clustered behind him. Most of us shrugged and smiled awkwardly in a ‘guilty as charged’ kind of way. The machine rumbled, and seemed to be thinking.
“You do know you’re not the voice of God, right?” he pushed. The machine said nothing, continuing it’s thrumming rumble. In what seemed to be an act of acquiescence, it began disassembling, breaking apart, and shrinking down to human-size. Before it fully formed into its original shape, he hauled back and clocked the figure squarely in the face, sending it skidding limply back. I couldn’t help but look at him, shocked. He looked at me and shrugged, looking guilty.
“What, like any of us want to deal with it any more…” he frowned, pulling his mouth to the side like an irritated, scolded puppy. I shrugged.
“Fair.”
———————-
Author’s note: This is actually my dream from last night, to the best of my best recollection.
Excerpts of Nothing – 4
She lay on her back hands dug into the soil.
Let the earth take me, she thought. For all the difference it would make. Let it turn my heart to stone, my eyes to lakes, my breasts to hills, my legs to mountains, or let it swallow me whole. Let it envelop me in the rich darkness.
Her heart ached. No lover had crossed her, no death, no betrayal… It was simply this unrelenting sick, sore feeling deep in her heart. She felt like the bitten apple. This was supposed to be her happily ever after. Her life was supposed to now be ideal. Idyllic. Her prince was as he should be. Kind, gentle, understanding- but that only went so far when he didn’t really understand. The animals were worse than useless. The more they tried to cheer her up, the more they tried to help, the more bitter she felt.
She’d gone to countless wizards, sages and sorcerers, to check her for hexes, curses and spells. Countless wizards, sages and sorcerers told her that there was nothing wrong with her.
“Then why do I feel like my heart is breaking?” she screamed frustratedly at every one of them. They all merely shrugged and kindly but somewhat urgently asked her to leave.
She closed her eyes and wrapped her hands around fistfuls of sharp rocks. She squeezed until she felt one bite into her flesh. She lifted her dirty, bleeding hand and gazed at it. I am not my stepmother, she thought, staring at the ruby droplet. This is not her blood. My life is supposed to be perfect. My life is perfect. What is wrong with me?
A starling hopped over to her, chirping amicably, and perched on her bleeding finger. She quashed the sudden urge to break its neck, to wrap her hand around it and squeeze until its little heart stopped, and feel its life go out of it. She flicked her hand irritatedly and it flew off.
The only man who had ever shown her any real consideration had been the one who had been sent out to kill her. He had died for that- given his life for hers. Her husband… She hadn’t truly known him before waking. He’d kissed her back to life, and while nice, all things considered, it was kind of weird.
Excerpts of Nothing – 3
Every leaf blossomed in her heart.
The bark was her skin, the rings told her age as her wrinkles did.
Her weathered skin was earthen at the tips from days of tender care.
She danced beneath its branches in the dappled moonlight.
Oh, what a love it was.
They grew old together, her and her Tree- grew up and out, and weathered the seasons.
When she died, she was buried below, her bones forever in the Tree’s sweet, silent embrace.
