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My novella is now officially part of the October 2009 issue of Reflection's Edge. You can find it here: http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/2009/10/changes.
*grins* |
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My novella, Changes, was just accepted for publication in Reflection's Edge. I'm so excited! *bounces* |
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Winter
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Jul. 1st, 2009 @ 10:02 am
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Winter
There is a presence in completely dark rooms – even rooms in ordinary houses – a sense of certainty that someone else is there. It fills all the space where you are not. It wraps long arms around you and whispers in your ear. It lets you know without a doubt that this house in the dark is not yours. I know this house is not mine. This story is not mine. Winter has come and three days ago all the mirrors in the house stopped reflecting my face. The snow is falling. Frost draws illusory cracks on the windows and reflects the glow of candles. I can feel the house’s hunger growing in my belly, sharp as the corners of the sickle moon.
Winter is the hungry season. Nothing grows in the village on the far side of the forest. All the animals have already been slaughtered. I know the village, though I do not remember why. I know the mothers with their large red hands and the embroidery around the edges of their aprons. I know the fathers with dirt beneath their fingernails and teeth ground down to powder.
I can see two of their children reflected in the mirrors outside the room where I sleep. They repeat endlessly, passed back and forth between facing mirrors – two small dark lines walking across a field of snow, beneath a blinding white sky. Sometimes I imagine that they are two tally marks on a perfectly white sheet of paper and I know I have been here too long.
The children will be cold and scared. They will not have eaten in days. They will not know why their parents have taken them into the woods and left them alone. The dark presence wraps its arms around my shoulders and guides me down the long spiral of stairs. Every winter the house rearranges itself. But always the kitchen is right beside the main room. It will be warm and welcoming with a fire for the children to warm their hands over and thick stew simmering on the hearth stones.
I flinch and the dark presence wraps me tighter. It places my hand on the door at the base of the stairs. I open the door and there are the children, hands frozen to the bone, skin hanging off of them where they should be plump. The presence knows I cannot leave them in the cold. So, I take them into the kitchen and let them sit in front of the fire and watch the hearthstones drink greedily the ice crystals that melt out of the weave of their sweaters. I ladle stew into earthenware bowls – chunks of lamb, whole onions and carrots, and bones at the bottom.
They eat crouched together without leaving the sheltering warmth of the fireplace. When they are finished, the girl stands and her brother follows, his hand pulling on the sleeve of her sweater. He is small and pale, blonde hair lifting from his scalp to float around his head as it dries. Glints of red catch in his hair from the firelight and reflect in his eyes. For a moment, I see him burning, his head wreathed in flames, his shy smile transforming into a scream. I shake my head and the boy as he is now returns to me, hiding in the shadow of his tall, dark sister. She turns to him, pulling smooth flat rocks from inside the pockets of her apron, and hands them to him. The boy plays with the rocks in the corner of the fireplace, stacking them and laughing when they fall loudly on the hearthstones.
His sister looks once back at him before walking up to me.
I open my mouth to speak, to say, “Run while you still can. It’s better to die outside in the snow than to stay in here where it’s warm.”
But I feel the darkness coiling in my throat and instead I hear my own voice say, “My name is Anna. What’s yours?”
“I’m Claire,” says the girl, “My brother’s name is Jack.” She pauses, considering her words. “People don’t just take children in and feed them stew. Not in the winter.” She holds up her hand as if expecting protest. “I understand. You want something. That’s okay. Whatever it is you want, ask me. I’ll do it. Just let my brother be. He’s small and not strong like me. But he’s smart and sometimes he sees things no one else does. So, you see, I have to protect him.”
“I understand. I had a brother once too, a long time ago.” As I say it, I realize it is true, though I remember nothing about him. “I don’t want you to do anything too hard. I’m all alone out here and I’m not as young as I was, so I could use a bit of help around the house.”
“I can do that. I took care of everything after Mama died.”
I nod, wanting to put my hands around her and hold her, but fearing that the dark presence would put its arms around her too.
“Anna?” she says after a moment of silence.
“Yes, dear?”
“Jack doesn’t know why Da and Step-Ma left us in the woods. I told him we just got lost. Please…don’t say anything.”
“Jack is lucky to have a sister like you watching out for him.”
I smile, closing my lips over teeth growing gradually sharper. My hands shake and I clench them together behind me, fingernails digging into skin, creating crescent moons of whitened skin all along the edge of my palm.
“Claire, let’s start doing the dishes,” I say, “You wash and I’ll dry.”
The wash basin is full, as it has always been since I came to the house, and the water is warm against Claire’s skin, pulling some of the deep chill out of her bones. Her shoulders begin to relax, but her eyes remain hard and unreadable.
I look back to see the boy, Jack, asleep, his head resting in his hands and stones scattered at his feet. I pick him up and carry him to bed, the dark presence guiding my feet to where the children will sleep this winter. There is a candle by the boy’s bedside, spreading a small pool of golden light across the heaped covers, lumpy with down. The light catches in the eyes of the wood rabbit carved into the headboard and for a moment it looks knowingly at me. As I tuck her brother in, the girl begins to yawn, but stands still at the door.
“Come in,” I say. “Don’t you want to go to bed?”
“You sure you don’t have something else you want me to do?” Her eyes do not waver as she begins to unbutton her dress. She lets the dress fall and walks to me naked. Her nipples look violet in the half-darkness and her skin seems to glisten, as though touched with ice.
She reaches up to touch my cheek. The laughter of the dark presence echoes in my head as I catch her hand and shake my head.
“That’s not what I want, Claire. I just want to keep you and your brother safe and out of the cold.”
I pull back the covers on her bed and let her climb in and huddle among them.
“There is only one rule here,” I say, “Only one thing I really need from you. Promise me you won’t go down into the cellar under the house. It’s full of old rusting things and isn’t safe. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to keep your brother out of there too.”
She nods, but the animal wariness does not leave her eyes. Perhaps this one would disobey. Perhaps she would find the room. Perhaps she would take her brother and run before it is too late. If the house had not stolen the words to all my prayers, I would get down on my knees and pray God make it so. But, even still, I can feel the hunger and the cold twisting in my belly, and my teeth growing long and sharp enough to cut the inside of my lips.
The house is different every winter. Its rooms find new arrangements, its stairs new twists and turns. But, always there is a thin door in the kitchen, almost hidden between the stove and the washbasin. Behind it there are always stairs, leading down into the basement. Every winter, when I walk this way – as I do now – the basement is different. But, I do not need a candle to find my way. The house guides my feet, softly across the cold stone floor, until my hands find the door to the brick room.
I open the door, but do not enter. The toes of my socks just reach across the divide between stone and brick to touch the barest edge of the room beyond the open door. The floor is warm, like a child sick with fever, and the mortar feels soft as flesh. I raise my eyes to the far wall of the room and, though it is dark, the house forces me to see them. The children are bloodless shadows against the wall, glowing faintly where their skin merges with the brick. Some are almost whole; hands and feet still free, and they flutter against wall like moths – others are nothing but eyes trapped in the mortar between two bricks.
Their pain comes to me in the air of the room, an animal scent of wet fur and piss, and for a moment I hate them. I bare my teeth. They have grown long and sharp even behind my straining-closed lips, but now I feel them, thin and prickly as needles, meeting above and below my lips like perfect white sutures. They cut my skin, but draw no blood.
I do not hate the children that have come to me winter after winter. I do not hate them when the dark presence wraps its arms around me and I take them by the hand and lead them down the stairs and into the basement. I do not hate them when I take them to this room and hold them against the wall, feeling the brick slide under their skin, pulling them into the house. But, I feel hunger sharp as the teeth of the winter wind. My belly is empty and soon it will be full. And I do hate. I hate myself for my weakness, for bringing the children here. I sing to my trapped, dying children. I sing them a lullaby that I do not remember learning. I tell them of a mother who so loved her son that she pulled the moon down from the sky for her baby boy to play with. I sing of love and feel the hooks of the house burn cold under my skin.
My mouth is dry and I walk up the stairs and close the door. I find my bed and lie eyes open. I dream of wolves, fur white against white snow, almost invisible except for the jeweled red of their bloody mouths. I dream of bats, wheeling cold and sharp against the night sky – so black against the darkness that they cannot be seen except for when a flapping wing hides for a moment the stars. I dream of a field in winter, the snow half-hiding broken granite teeth. There were names here in the stones, but time and winter’s ice have washed them clean.
I wake to sunlight glittering in the snow that covers the windows. It is morning, but my room is full of twilight. I close my eyes and let my mind slip out through the cracks of my skull. I see the boy, Jack, still wrapped in covers in his bed. He sucks his thumb, eyelashes casting long shadows across his face. Claire’s bed is made. She is in the kitchen, stirring a pot of oatmeal over the stove. The candles in their wall sconces have dripped wax on the floor and dust gathers in the corners of the room, new-grown cobwebs span the corners of dark hallways. The house has changed again while I slept. Claire will work and she will feel that she earns her keep. She will stay. I know that now. I cannot hope for her to take her brother and run out into the snow, away from a house where no dust gathers, where plates clean themselves while your eyes are turned, and fresh candles grow from the stumps of those that burn themselves to ash.
Claire curtsies when she sees me in the doorway to the kitchen. I smile, my teeth no longer quite so sharp, and wish her good morning. I move to take a turn stirring the pot of oatmeal, but Claire is reluctant to let go of the wooden spoon. Her hands are dry and chapped from her time out in the snow.
The smell of oatmeal wakes her brother and we both hear the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. He comes into the room and Claire abandons the oatmeal to my stirring. Jack attaches a hand to the ties of her apron and says nothing. I serve them oatmeal and pretend to eat my own. Claire waits until she has finished her bowl before she speaks.
“Anna?”
I nod. The dark presence hangs in the room, but I do not feel its tightness in my throat.
“I’ve done some cleaning up around the house already, but there is a lot more I can do. I can sweep and wash the floors and polish the silverware and heat up some water to wash clothes and—“
“You’re a smart girl,” I say, “I know you’ll take care of my poor old house. It’s just nice to have children in the house again. I get lonely out here in the forest.”
Almost without my noticing, the darkness has crept into my mouth and speaks through me to the children. Claire nods, pleased, but Jack just piles his stones on the table in front of him and does not look at me. His knuckles are white where they clutch at his sister’s dress.
Claire and I clean the dishes as we did the night before and I do not tell her that the house will clean them whatever we do. Afterward she trails close behind me as I find this winter’s location for the broom closet and hand her one of the brooms. She is eager to be useful, her eyes finding every dirty footprint and dusty corner the house has made for her. Jack walks behind her with his pocketful of stones, thumb back in his mouth. His eyes glow yellow with the reflected flame of a candle, but there are none lit. I think again of my visions, the brother burning and the sister under ice.
I call after them as they walk to the kitchen – Claire to sweep and Jack to watch – “Remember. Clean any part of the house on this level and upstairs, but don’t go down into the basement. It’s not safe down there – and Claire?”
She turns to look at me.
“The door to the basement is through the kitchen. Try to keep Jack out of there.”
She nods and takes Jack’s hand. “I’ll keep him close to me.” I do not see a flicker of curiosity in her dark eyes, only relief at having found a safe place for her brother. The dark presence laughs at me out of the door frames and the corners of rooms. It does not matter what I say. Claire will not go into the basement and find my secret until I take her there myself.
Claire is down on her knees in the kitchen with a wet rag, scrubbing the stone floor. Jack sits next to her, building a tower out of his stones, carefully placing the biggest stone on a level part of the floor, then putting the next largest on top of it until he has the smallest stone balanced precariously on the top. Laughing, he knocks the tower over, scattering stones across the floor. Claire looks at him sharply and he gathers them up and brings them to her.
“Tell me a story,” says Jack.
Claire smiles and dips the rag into the bucket by her side. “Once upon a time there was a girl and a boy—“
“Is that us?” asks Jack.
“Who’s telling the story here?”
“You.”
“The boy and the girl got lost in a dark forest in wintertime and they were very scared—“
“You are talking about us. I bet they find a house next, with a nice old lady and oatmeal.”
“Alright. They find a house. If you’re so smart, tell me what the house was made out of?”
Jack looks around the kitchen, eyes fastening on a tin of cookies high up on one of the shelves. “Gingerbread!”
“Don’t be silly, Jack. You can’t make a house out of gingerbread.” She wipes her dirty hands off on her apron before ruffling his hair to take the sting out of her words.
“You told me I could say.”
She smiles. “The boy and the girl, after wandering for a long time in the dark forest come across a house made out of gingerbread, with windows made of—“ this time Claire looks up at the shelf, “maple candy, and the roof is covered in strawberry preserves.”
“What about the door?”
“The door is a giant oatmeal cookie and the knob is made out of a raisin.”
“Is the nice lady a baker?”
“Yes, and she lets the boy and girl stay with her all winter and help her bake. She has barrels full of sugar and others full of flour, jars and jars of preserves, and shelves full of maple syrup bottles.”
“Where does she keep it all?” asks Jack, eyes round and wide.
“In the basement,” says Claire, glancing over at the door. “But, the boy and his sister weren’t allowed down there, so they wouldn’t make a mess of things. And they were good children and very obedient and never made any trouble and so the nice old lady let them stay.”
“What about their parents?”
Claire’s eyes look dark and far too old. Tears sparkle in them, but do not fall; as if she is so cold inside that she has frozen them there in her eyes. I could see her for a moment, near, but somehow impossible to touch – suspended beneath ice that slowly clouds with frost and obscures her from view. I shake my head to clear it, my own eyes stinging, but unable to cry. I turn away and begin to walk up the stairs before I can hear her answer.
That night I dream again of the white wolves and their red, red mouths and I feel my teeth – even through my sleep – grow sharp and cut the inside of my lips. There are two children in this dream and they are lost in a forest of white, snow-covered, trees. The wolves are so white against the snow and the trees that the watchful girl does not see them. The boy is not looking, every few steps he drops behind him a stone that sinks into the snow and is gone. They vanish and I dream of the field of broken granite teeth and the dark, blue heart of the flame.
When I wake, the snow has fallen so thickly against the windows that it is night-dark inside the house. I light a candle and stare for a moment into its blue center before walking down the stairs to bring light to the children I hear beginning to stir below. Along the way, I light the candles in the wall sconces and watch the little flames dance in the snowy whiteness of the mirrors that do not reflect my face.
I open the door of the children’s room and the glow of my candle catches Claire awake and standing over the shadow of her brother’s bed. Her face is a pale circle, her eyes wide and dark with fear.
“What is it?”
She gestures to the bed and I look again. The bulge beneath the covers is too still. I lift the blankets and see, in place of Jack, a pair of goose down pillows.
“I don’t know where he is,” she says, but her eyes are wide and I know that she does. I see in her eyes very clearly the gingerbread house of her story with its basement full of sugar and maple syrup. She is afraid I will think that she was planning to steal from me. She is afraid I will cast them out into the cold and the dark.
I close my eyes and let my mind float away from my body, where the dark presence twines around it and purrs like a cat. My mind dives down through the stone floor and into the basement. It flies to the brick room where Jack is standing with the stub of lit candle dripping white wax in streaks across his hand.
He is looking at the children in the wall. Their eyes glow yellow in the light of his candle. There mouths form silent warnings as they struggle and writhe against the bricks. The places where flesh becomes stone stretch and distend, pulling their skin across their faces, closing their eyes and working their jaws. Pain rolls off of them in waves, smelling sick-sweet, like too much sugar.
Jack screams and drops the candle. The only light comes from the faint glow of the dying children’s bodies as they sink deeper and deeper into the brick and mortar of the wall. Jack turns and runs, stumbling against walls and the edges of doorframes, tripping over tree roots and the stones spilling from his ripped pocket. His mouth is a perfect O of fear and rage.
Claire follows me down stairs and I feel the dark presence hovering between us. I gesture to reassure her, but do not trust myself to speak with the darkness floating so close to my mouth. My teeth are long and sharp and they struggle to free themselves from behind my lips. I keep my mouth closed and walk to the kitchen. I light the fire beneath the stove. There are a tray of cookies on the table, gooey-white uncooked dough in the shapes of boys and girls – two arms, two legs, and a round circle for a head. I try to slow my breathing, but I see it clouding before me even near the heat of the oven.
I open the oven and put the cookie sheet inside. I have forgotten to wrap my hands in my apron, but my hands are like ice and the fire cannot touch them. I lean in as far as I can go. The heat is not unbearable. My tears thaw inside of my eyes and begin to flow down my cheeks.
I hear Jack ascending the stairs, his footfalls heavy. He pushes past Claire and comes straight for me. I lean further in. I search for the blue part of the flame, only it will be hot enough to melt away the ice. The dark presence does not wrap its arms around me and drag me from the oven. It does not coil in my throat and force me to explain, to make the children love and trust me again. I wait for the darkness and I pray with whatever small part of me it has not conquered that it will be fooled.
I hear the door burst open. Jack stands in the kitchen behind me. I can hear his heart pounding. I can feel the tickle of the flames against my frozen face.
“You were going to hurt my sister.” I hear Jack say. His breath too labored to let him scream. “You were going to hurt me.”
I hold my breath, waiting for what, I pray, must come next. Claire gasps and I hear her footsteps coming closer.
“Da said I was the man of the house when he wasn’t around and I had to look out for my sister, even if she is bigger than me. So, I can’t let you hurt her.”
I feel his hands on my back, pushing. I fall into the fire. The fire is yellow and bright, hiding its cold blue heart. I hear the oven door slam shut and look up, finally allowing my mouth to open in a smile of triumph. Jack is screaming. His hair is wreathed in flames. His eyes glow with yellow reflected light. He flails against me, pushing at the door, trying to open it. But the fire has swallowed us and we cannot return. Past Jack, I see Claire standing perfectly still. She does not move to open the door and free her brother. The window in the oven door begins to fog with steam and for a second it is ice frosting over and Claire hangs suspended at the bottom of a frozen lake. Then I see the dark presence coil itself around her. Its arms enfold her, its darkness fills her mouth and her eyes. Her lips are violet and her skin glistens as though touched with ice.
I look at my hands and see blackened claws. I feel no pain, but I am burning, burning to death. My prayers have been answered, I think, and then I understand. This is my reward, this painless death in the blue heart of the fire. This is my reward for giving the house a new guardian. The darkness whispers to Claire, and though I cannot hear it, I know what it says, for it said the same thing to me once long ago – “This is your home. You will never again have to wander hungry and cold through the woods. I will never turn you away.” Claire looks away from her brother’s screaming face and walks deeper into her house. I hold her brother to my breast as we burn. |
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Changes
The camera looks out on white – white walls, white tile floor, white sheets on the bed. The man is the only trace of color. The bulge in the bed sheets is his wife. He turns to the camera for a moment and it captures his face, an empty room devoid of any life. His fingers move independently of him, clutching convulsively at the guardrail of the bed. A microphone records the irregular ting-ting of his wedding ring colliding with metal. The man opens his mouth to speak once or twice, but his words choke him and he is silent. After a few minutes he stands up and begins pacing the room, looking always away from the shape in the bed. Now he speaks and the microphone records his words. On the other side of the wall, unseen, someone listens.
Do you know what they said to me one time when I was waiting for you? One of the doctors said, “Think of a balloon with many dots drawn on its surface. Now inflate the balloon. The dots aren’t moving away from each other, are they? Their world is just expanding.” His voice was flat coming out of one of those metal boxes they wear around their necks, and I swear, Charlotte, if you hadn’t come out right then with that smile on your face, I would have hit him right there. For his flat face and flat voice and the way he spoke like he was reading everything out of some book on comforting the bereaved.
They want me to leave. Your doctor keeps telling me that you can’t hear me. You’re too deeply asleep now – like a “caterpillar in a chrysalis, waiting to become a butterfly,” he says. I don’t really care. I need to tell you a story. Our story. The story of Jonathon and Charlotte Callahan and how everything changed.
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( Read more... ) |
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The book I worked on over the summer, Religion in America, is listed on Amazon.com. Its coming out in April. I was the section editor for "Other Faiths" and wrote the section on Atheism, Agnosticism and Humanism. I also did a lot of editing and writing for other chapters. So, I'm really excited that this book that I worked on all summer is going to become not just an idea but a real book that real people will read!
Click here to see its Amazon.com page. |
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My courses for next year:
Japanimation and Culture (Yuka Suzuki)
History of Science Before Newton (Peter Skiff)
Reading and Writing the Novella (Mona Simpson)
Virgil and Tolkien Tutorial (Carloyn DeWald)
...and I'm in the process of dropping Romance Literature in English (Cole Heinowitz).
I'm really looking forward to next semester. My courses look interesting, I'm actually taking a writing class (*gasp*) and I don't have class on either Wednesday or Friday. Admittedly, I have a couple back-to-back classes, a class that meets twice in oen day and a movie screening that goes to 9:00pm...but, it wouldn't be Bard if my schedule weren't bizarre. So, yay! |
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White Wolf has my story, "You Can't Go Home Again" in their latest eQuarterly. There is a note about it on the cover and then there it is inside, on page forty. They even illustrated it. I'm so excited! *happydances* |
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My plan for the summer is to live in New York City. Hopefully, I will be able to split an apartment with the lovely Senia. All of this is because, I got an internship I'm really excited about working for The Reference Works -- a publishing house based in Midtown Manhattan. So, for those of you in and around NYC, I look forward to hanging out with you all summer and being crazies (i.e. hiding-from-the-scary-new-place-please-don't-let-it-get-me) and for those of you in Chicago, I will be home at some point over the summer and I want to see all of you. ALL OF YOU. So, everything is good and not completely explode-y, but I am a Jess-shaped ball of excited stress. In a good way, though. |
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White Wolf is going to publish my story You Can't Go Home Again in their spring quarterly. It should be out sometime in March or April. I'm so excited!!!! I entered a contest over winter break and I just heard back yesterday that I won, so I am jumping around in a state of extreme happy-Jess-ness. |
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If the Marquis Du Sade were alive today he'd just write really bad internet fanfiction and no one would care. He wouldn't even be the wierdest thing out there. |
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I wrote this in an airport, because I'd spent the previous hour staring out a window and thinking about alchemy, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That has pretty much become my default mental state.
The Alchemist
He sought to separate his darkness from his light
Forgetting they define each other
And like all coins he had
Two faces on one head
So he drank lightning from a glass
Like one long ago who stole
Fire from the gods when they were young
And kind enough to chain him to a rock
Now they make men half of clay
And half of fire, suspended
Unable to fall or rise
Dreaming of distilling from their doubled souls
Pure good or pure wickedness
But remember, you who seek to rise
That it is angels who fly high enough to fall
Clutching a glass of lightning in one hand
For demons are content with small transgressions
To trample one man upon the road
And rest replete without the pride that is the angel’s fate
But in men these two are joined almost
Without a seem visible to naked eye
And so the fire-bringer’s vultures beat
Inside the breasts of those who seek
To make men of fire, men of clay
Seamed to show their purity |
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The Little Mermaid is totally goth.
The Cold Embrace of Down Below
I float through the gills of my sisters now
And know the rhythm of their breath
Down here in the lightless sea
Where the water is cold and cruel as death
Oh, my sisters who have never felt
The glass-sharp sand beneath their feet
Who’ve never heard a voice in song
And know the world from the taste of meat
My sister’s mouths are bright as angry knives
Their eyes as sharp as broken glass
Their arms are cold and white and cruel
As each sailor breathes his last
I flow through my sisters now
I am ice water in their veins
Each death is a vengeance now
For the surface world and all its pains
Once I was young and thought I could
Find love above the tossing waves
Be free from the prison of my scales
And my sister’s cruel dark caves
But the world above is crueler still
I did not know, I had no choice
I wanted my sister’s cold embrace
But I had lost my singing voice
The salt water stung my bleeding feet
And bit down to the bone
As I dissolved into the sea
And now I am sea foam
I am my sister’s breath beneath
In the cold and darkened places
I ride upon the tops of waves
And look into sailor’s faces
I have not seen my prince above
And if I did he would not know
That I wait for him within the waves
The cold embrace of down below |
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I wrote another poem/song/thingy that I'd love (*coughcough*) for one of my musician friends to help me with. :)
The World to You
I fell in love with a sunflower
Whose face turned to follow the heavenly light
But he would not look upon me, no
For I was dark where it was bright
Oh, I came to love the sea
Though she tossed back all my gifts
My dreams, my words, my golden hair
Upon her heaving body drifts
Oh, I want to mean the world to you
And suffer for your pride
Oh, I would bury my burning heart
Between your branches, deep inside
Oh, I would hang upon your words
For nine nights and for nine days
I would bleed for all the world
To learn the changing of your ways
I fell in love with a flock of birds
As they cut patterns in the sky
And though I raised my arms above
They would not carry me on high
Oh, I came to love the time of day
When the sun sets behind the mountains
But her time passed and came not again
And the stars were silver fountains
Oh, I want to mean the world to you
And suffer for your pride
Oh, I would bury my burning heart
Between your branches, deep inside
Oh, I would hang upon your words
For nine nights and for nine days
I would bleed for all the world
To learn the changing of your ways
I fell in love with a shadow on your cheek
That cut a swath right through your eye
But when you turned out the lights
I saw him fade away and die
Oh, I came to love the sound of your voice
Though you would not speak to me
So I wove you out of bird song
And branches from my cherry tree
Oh, I want to mean the world to you
And suffer for your pride
Oh, I would bury my burning heart
Between your branches, deep inside
Oh, I would hang upon your words
For nine nights and for nine days
I would bleed for all the world
To learn the changing of your ways
Oh, I came to hate the sun, my love
For I saw you in his arms
And I came to hate the moon
For all your grace and all your charms
So, whisper in my ear, my love
Then take your world away
I cannot bear to share you, love
So in the dream we cannot stay
Oh, I want to mean the world to you
And suffer for your pride
Oh, I would bury my burning heart
If you would just let me inside
Oh, I would hang upon your words
For nine nights and for nine days
And I would never learn, my love
The secrets of your changing ways |
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I have an interview with the editor of Conscious Choice Magazine for a summer internship. I really hope this works out. They seem like they'd be an awesome magazine to work for and I think I have a good chance of getting the job, but I'm still nervous. Mainly excited, but a little bit nervous. Wish me luck! |
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Click here for the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" adapted into comic book format in the style of Edward Gorey.
I thought it was necessary that you all see this. |
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Monday
3:30-4:30 The Stars my Destination (Ben Stevens)
Tuesday
9-10:20am Earth and Life through Time (Katherine O'Reilly)
4-6:20 Dante (Nina Cannizzaro)
Wednesday
1:30-4:30 Earth and Life through Time Lab (Katherine O'Reilly)
Thursday
9-10:20am Earth and Life through Time (Katherine O'Reilly)
Friday
1:30-3:50 The Danger of Romance (Karen Sullivan) |
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Last Friday, I moderated into literature and creative writing. I am now a member of the upper college. There is something about the phrase "upper college" that makes me feel super-pretentious, but in a good way. I don't really have time to talk about it more because I have a million and one things I need to do that I keep putting off. But, yeah, the Jess is happy. |
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Something weird I wrote over the summer because I have a mild obsession with hive minds.
Ordinary People
He was neither stupid nor smart, neither handsome nor ugly, neither thin nor fat. His features were average and forgettable, his hair and eyes colors that hair and eyes commonly are. He was the sort of person you pass a thousand times on the street every day, and while you may nod to him, you will not be able to place his name.
Even if you had worked in the same office as him for many years – as many had – it was easy to forget him. He worked as middle management at an ordinary company where he was paid the average wage for a person in his position. He ate the same thing for lunch every day and never distinguished himself at meetings. When engaged in conversation, he spoke of the weather and local sports teams – the kind of platitudes that start and end conversations.
His name was something ordinary and forgettable. For the purpose of this story, we will call him John, but his name could just as easily have been Ahmed or Lee or any one of the other names that were popular all over the world.
When he was nearing his middle years, when other men bought cars or began affairs, his mind was elevated to a higher plane of consciousness and touched the minds of millions all around the world. He felt the dreams of a shopgirl in Tokyo and they were just like his dreams. He heard the thoughts of a farmer outside of Johannesburg and they were his thoughts. All around the world, he felt the minds of other ordinary people with ordinary lives. He saw that they all thought the same thoughts across their different oceans and dreamed the same dreams in different countries and even spoke the same words each day in their million different languages. They were all one and they breathed together and spoke together and were of one mind. They were all born of normal parents from normal towns and villages and cities. They had normal childhoods and grew up to be normal adults who worked at normal jobs and lived in normal houses. There were millions of them, all uninteresting, all forgettable. None of them distinguished themselves in any way. None of them had won an award. None of them had acted in a movie. None of them had been in a newspaper. They were invisible.
When John went to work the next day, he greeted his coworkers as cheerfully and unremarkably as ever. He said the same uninteresting things at meetings. He ate the same ordinary sandwich. He signed every paper that crossed his desk and chatted about the weather with his secretary. He thought it might rain and she hoped it wouldn’t. But inside of him, he felt all of the others just like him doing the same things all over the world and was filled with terrible purpose. |
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I wrote this story at the end of last year and I just came back to take a look at it. Definitely still a work in progress.
White as Snow, Red as Blood
You have to believe me. I am not a bad woman. I would never hurt a child. Before you wed her and make me dance at the wedding in shoes of burning iron, listen to my story:
When I married her father, he told me his last wife had died in child birth. But, in the country where I grew up, it is dark much of the year and we know the signs. The child was too pale and too cold and her nails were sharp enough to draw blood when I held her. So, I spoke to the physician. He told me the queen had been dead for an hour before he had thought to cut the child from her womb to give it a separate burial. She was blue and unbreathing when he held her for the first time, between her mother’s body and the bloody knife. He remembered her face, wrinkled as an old woman’s, and her eyes, the pale gray of a winter morning that chills you to the bone.
She never cried and he never heard her take a breath. It was only when he was stitching her mother’s belly shut again that he saw her move. She turned her head slowly to face him and blinked once and smiled. He said he stifled a scream and clenched his scalpel until his fingers turned white. He said he even thought for a moment of killing her. The king would never know. But then he remembered that he was a scientist, trained at the academy and that he lived in a country that had done away with its superstitions. Science has not traveled as far north as my father’s kingdom, so there we still remember the old ways.
I asked, if she had not died in childbirth, why did he think she had died? And he replied that she had a wasting disease, one he, with all his modern science, could not cure. She had grown pale and tired, refusing to leave her room during the day and wandering restless during the night. She thrashed in the grip of terrible nightmares and insisted that we close all of the windows in the castle. It was too cold, always too cold. When he bled her, her blood was the bright pink of a woman who ate no meat, yet he heard her every day asking the cook for steak, raw and bloody as he could make it.
I knew then what the child was. Abomination. In my country, she would have been killed and buried at the crossroads. But here, where I was foreign and the child was the last of the flesh of the king’s dead wife, I knew I would never be believed. No sooner had she learned to walk, then the cook’s cat took sick and all of the dogs in their kennels and the servant’s children. When she was eight, her maid died. I was the one who found her body, pale as a ghost with a bruise on her throat shaped like two little teeth.
I did nothing when I found the cat’s body crumpled at the foot of the stairs. I did nothing when I found the maid lying dead in the hallway. But, I couldn’t stand by when my husband began to sicken. He was not a young man when we married, but he was strong and his hair was still mostly brown. But, soon his cheeks grew hollow and his beard began to come in gray. He struggled each day to get up from his throne and his crown became heavy and began to leave a bruise on his forehead. My husband the king died when she was ten.
I will not lie to you. I did not love my husband. I was a second wife, taken from my home while still a child myself. But, whatever she told you, that does not mean I wanted him to die and it does not mean that I wanted to kill her because she was his daughter. I wanted to kill her because I knew what she was. If you don’t believe me, go with her to the mirror over there. Have her take a look. You will see nothing, but your own face. Her kind have no souls and do not reflect in mirrors.
She told you it was enchanted? Those are lies. If I were a witch, do you think I would be pleading for my lifelike this? No, I would have already turned into a bird and flown away, or ensorcelled your mind to make you believe me. I am just a woman. You have to believe me.
I will not lie to you. I sent the huntsman to kill her, to take her heart, because that is the only way to kill her kind. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the strength. She may have been young, but she was uncannily fast and strong. I should have known it would not have worked. She had grown beautiful, with skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood and eyes that could make a man do anything, even betray his queen.
So, I was not surprised when I heard tell months later of a pale and beautiful woman who lived in the forest, attended by strange servants. I knew who it was and I knew this time I must go myself. I disguised myself as an old woman of the village, selling apples, and came to her cottage door. Her servants were away and she was foolish and let me in. I offered her an apple, with skin as red as blood. She turned away from me to take a bite and I drove a wooden steak through her heart with all my might. I may be an old woman now, but then I was young and strong and she was weak from her isolation in the woods. I killed her and I cut out her heart with a knife and I ate it so that she could never return. Then I looked at her and my own heart melted. She was so beautiful lying there on the floor, her hair spread around her like a cloak, even in her rags. I bent down and combed her hair like the mother I never was and I dressed her in my clothes and laced her into my corset. Then I took her in my arms and she was light as a child. I buried her at the crossroads that night.
Her servants must have come for her and built her that glass coffin where you found her. She must have waited there for years for some foolish man to come and give her his life’s blood so that she could return to the world of the living. She will kill you slowly, like she killed your father. You are feeling weaker already. I see how heavy the crown sits on your brow. I see the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes. You are growing old before your time. You must feel it. You have to believe me.
Listen to me before it is too late. I will dance in shoes of burning iron at your wedding and I will die. But you are dying already, my prince, and your beautiful bride is already dead. |
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Fetch
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Sep. 28th, 2007 @ 11:45 am
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This story was inspired by a conversation with Anna and Em, and I know Em is also writing a story around the same concept. I'm probably going to use this for moderation into creative writing.
Fetch
I.
The morning after the first dream, the coffee Darla made him tasted exactly like Daniel Hartford imagined ashes would taste. He didn’t have the heart to tell her, so he choked it down and kissed her, tasting the ashes on her lips, before he left for work. On the train, he stared out the window, watching the familiar contours of the town where he’d lived for the past ten years bleed into the city, and the dream came back to him.
He was walking in the woods on the edge of the property surrounding the old farm house where he grew up. Though his mother had forbidden it, the forest had been Daniel’s favorite place as a child and he often snuck out there to play. Something about the way the light looked, filtered through the tree branches, had comforted him. But in the dream, the woods were dark and full of menace with only anemic moonlight to show the way between trees that leaned hungrily into his path, rustling their thin branches like faint, sarcastic applause.
Something was behind him, something terrible and beautiful and without mercy, always just at his heals. But Daniel did not run, he walked swiftly, but made not a sound as his feet slid over the detritus of the forest. In real life, Daniel remembered trying to walk this way through the woods, but he had always stepped on every twig and branch, a host of rattles and cracks following his every move and keeping the squirrels and birds forever out of sight.
The dream-Daniel longed for the feel of sunlight against his skin. He had been a long time in the dark and he knew that was where he would return if he was not swift and sure. There was some place he had to go, something he had to see and then everything would be all right. He just had to get there and he would be free.
The alarm clock woke Daniel then and he’d struggled impatiently with morning-stiff joints to reach to turn it off. It took longer than usual to get his blood flowing, but eventually he was able to get up and stumble downstairs to get his morning coffee from Darla, who woke up at six a.m. sharp no matter how late she stayed awake.
Daniel had thought he did not dream until he had met Darla. He’d mentioned it to her once and she’d told him that everyone dreams, it’s just that he didn’t remember his. His REM cycle was probably just too early in the night. She would know, because she studied psychology in college. Daniel stared at his face reflected in the window, a ghost image against high rise apartments, and decided to tell Darla that he had, at last, remembered one of his dreams. He knew she’d smile that special smile with her whole mouth that she saved just for him. No one else was allowed to know about her crooked teeth; she had told him a long time ago. So, it was with the thought of his wife’s smile that he got off the train and entered the office.
Daniel had a picture of the two of them on his desk. It was taken on their honeymoon in the Florida Keys, the sunset catching in her hair, smiling just for him, not even noticing the camera. He wished he could put pictures of his children up on the walls, like most of his friends did, but he and Darla couldn’t have kids. So he had a couple of art prints he didn’t really like up on the wall instead and he tried not to think too much about how if Darla had married someone else, she could have had the large family she’d dreamed of ever since she was a little girl. But she loved him and she said she didn’t mind so long as she was with him and smiled that special smile, so everything was okay.
The phone on his desk began to ring and he was just about to answer it, when he felt something strange in his mouth. He spat it into his hand. A single red maple leaf, crumpled on the edges and beginning to brown. He didn’t have time to wonder how that had come to be in his mouth, because it was a client on the phone and he needed to take this call. So, he tossed the leaf into the garbage can under his desk and didn’t think about it until much later.
At the end of the day, Daniel followed the scent of spaghetti bolognaise back home. Darla had gotten home early that evening and made it for both of them. Daniel got out the dishes and tossed a salad and then they sat across from each other at the table.
“I finally remembered a dream,” he said to her, pouring two glasses of cranberry juice.
“See, just like I told you.” She smiled her real smile. “Your REM cycle is probably changing as you get older—“
“I’ll have you know I’m only two years older than you, hardly old!”
“I didn’t say you were old, old man.”
“Love you.”
“Love you more.”
“Impossible.”
Another smile. “Anyway, what I was trying to say before we got so mushy was that you’ll probably start remembering your dreams more frequently now.”
“I hope not. This one was weird.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Now you have to tell me.”
So he did. When he’d finished, she thought for a few seconds, chewing absently on a fingernail, before answering.
“So, it took place around where you grew up?”
He nodded.
“So, it’s probably about something from your past, your childhood. Whatever was chasing you was probably something from when you still lived in the old farmhouse.”
“So, what you’re saying, oh wise and all-knowing fortune-teller, is that something from my past is coming back to haunt me.”
She laughed and Daniel left her to take his plate to the sink and run the garbage disposal. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he hadn’t eaten anything. He’d tried, but it had all tasted like ashes, or worse, like nothing at all.
II.
Daniel had the next dream that night. In the dream, he’d left the forest behind him and was walking through the town where, in waking life, he had grown up. But, in the eyes of his dream-self, it was a new and dangerous place. Daniel stalked silently around the corner of the building where he had gone to school, hand gliding along the crumbling red brick and coming up dusted with old chalk and the empty places where memories should have been. This place was one of the things he was cheated out of when they took him away. He could have studied math or geography or some other arcane subject here. He could have played football or capture-the-flag with the other boys.
The dream-Daniel did not have the soft hands of the man who would grow from a boy who lived this life. His hands were striped with calluses and old scars. That life had been stolen from him, and so he walked in the light with confidence, but also with fear. The merciless and beautiful were always near him. Their eyes might watch him from the shaded crook of the old evergreen beside the post office; the sound of blowing leaves might be their laughter as they watched him from around the corner of that house or the next. They would come for him. If they were not here already, they were fast on his heels. He had to get there first. There was something he must do, some place he must be and then all would be put right. Then he would be free.
Daniel woke that morning with something over his face. He tried to brush it away and sit up to shut off the alarm, but his joints were too stiff and all of his muscles were clenched tight. He struggled desperately against his body, finally succeeding in turning his head just enough to dislodge whatever was covering his face. After that, he felt his muscles slowly unwind and, joints protesting, he sat up, turned off the alarm and began preparing for his day. He was sitting on his bed, pulling on his socks, when he remembered the thing that had been on his face when he woke up and reached over to pick it up. It was a maple leaf, raggedy-red, veined with brown.
He decided that as soon as the weekend came, he was going to fix the window. This was getting to be too much. Just last night, he’d slept with his mouth open and a leaf had actually blown in and now there was this one. He walked over to the window and ran his fingertips over the screen, looking out over the front lawn that needed mowing and their car parked in the drive way. He couldn’t feel any breaks in the mesh.
Daniel listened to the sound of the birds outside his window and took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and smelled nothing at all.
At work, Daniel’s mind returned again and again to the dream. He was distracted, and one by one his colleagues came up to ask him if everything was alright at home. Sometimes he remembered to answer them. His coffee had no smell and the lunch Darla had lovingly packed him turned to ashes and dust as soon as it reached his tongue. He spent most of the day staring at the picture of the two of them on their honeymoon, tracing the curve of her shoulder and the wave of her long brown hair. It felt like the only thing holding him together.
That was the second day.
III.
In the third dream, Daniel was only a couple of towns away from home. He’d left a winged woman with too many knees and elbows dead in the last village and he’d had to leave fast. It was only a matter of time before someone discovered the body wrapped in plastic bags in the alley behind the supermarket. And if she had found him, others could as well. Her brothers would not be far behind. The younger had been something like a friend, so he had sparred against him before and thought he could probably win. But the older was cold and cruel and he knew would simply take him down from a distance with magic and elfshot. Daniel was not one of the People and so would have no defense.
Daniel gave the shadows between houses and under trees wide berth, walking silently on bare, blistered feet down the center of the blacktop, sun shining in his eyes. Still, despite all the care he took, the younger brother reached him that evening, dropping down on him from the upper branches of an overhanging fir tree. Daniel had his sword drawn before the green-skinned boy had his feet on the ground. He ducked the first thrust and parried the second, but his riposte came too late and the boy was behind him, sword whistling centimeters from Daniel’s right ear. He stumbled forward and the second cut nicked his shoulder and drew a line of blood.
Daniel swung his sword up as the green-skinned boy leapt over his head, grazing the boy’s calf, and spilling half-congealed droplets of sap. The boy only grinned with row upon row of sharp teeth, as the wound puckered and closed.
Daniel parried the next strike, but was driven backward, out of the way of the speeding truck which descended on the green-skinned boy and snapped his body like so many twigs. Daniel knew the older brother would not fall for the same trick, but for now he was alive and free. And he was close to his destination. All that was stolen from him would be returned. It would be as though he had never left. All he had to do was get there before the older brother found him. Then he would be safe.
It was Saturday, so Daniel woke naturally, without the shrill ring of the alarm. His soft uncalloused hands felt alien to him and there was something prickling around his head and neck, something scratching under his shirt. His joints were too stiff to move at all, but he was eventually able to roll over enough to see what it was. There were hundreds of leaves, red, yellow and brown, filling his pillow and making mounds around the imprint of his body. More leaves spilled from the bottom of his shirt and the cuffs of his pants like a poorly stuffed scarecrow.
He stumbled from the bed, arms and legs protesting with a series of loud pops and shooting pain. He still couldn’t feel any holes in the screen over the window, but he couldn’t think of any other way for the leaves to get in, so he figured he’d have to replace it later today, like he’d said. He just had to get his joints warmed up and his blood pumping first.
Daniel had always had a hard time getting up, like his body struggled to remain stiff as sleep. But it had never been this bad before. He supposed it was another one of those things that happened as you reached middle age. Like dreams and coffee that tastes like ashes.
Darla had made pancakes for the two of them while she was waiting for him to get up and she left them on the kitchen table when she went out to work in the garden. They tasted like chalk dust, even when Daniel poured enough maple syrup over them that it began to spill over the edges of the plate and spread in puddles across the table. He made himself eat them and clean off the table and his own sticky hands before he went outside to tell Darla about the last two dreams.
He found her kneeling in the rose beds, pressing green sticks of fertilizer into the soil. Her hair was windblown and tangled and the hem of her dress was filthy from dragging in the mud. She was beautiful. He watched her for a few moments, drinking in the sight of her, before she turned around and smiled her real smile up at him.
He sat down next to her and picked up the trowel and began digging holes for some new petunias, their shoulders rubbing gently against each other, their knees occasionally bumping, sending a jolt of warmth through his whole body. When she finished, she wiped her hands off on her skirt and turned to look at him, concern drawing sharp creases between her eyebrows.
She said something to him in a voice as hollow and empty as the wind. He could barely catch the words. “Thin” and “sick” and “Daniel.” He turned them around in his mind, trying to piece together what they meant. Meanwhile, she said more – “okay,” “not,” “speak” and “understand.” Slowly, like through a thick fog, the meanings came clear. He told her he had a head cold and the phlegm had built up and was blocking his ears. He could hardly hear anything.
Then she said something he thought was something about how thin he looked, so he went inside to look in the mirror. His clothes hung off him like a scarecrow’s rags. Each of his joints stood out in relief against his wasted limbs, his hollow bird-boned chest. He remembered the leaves falling out from under his clothes and scattering across the bed and the unripped screen on the window. He felt like he was falling apart, but shook his head. He didn’t even feel that sick. Just strange dreams and a head cold, and he probably wasn’t eating enough, since nothing tasted good to him anymore.
Daniel explained to Darla about all of the leaves in the bed, and so the two of them went to the hardware store to get a new screen. She drove, glancing worriedly over at him often enough that she ran two red lights. Still, they made it to the store relatively intact and together browsed through aisles of windows and window screens. Daniel started every time he caught a glimpse of himself reflected, fingers like twigs and his skin drawn taut against his skull. They did not speak, but Darla’s hand wrapped protectively around his arm.
When they got home, he got the ladder out of the garage and climbed up to their second story bedroom window, while she climbed the stairs to reach the opposite side. Together they took out the old screen, their hands touching around its edges, and replaced it with the new.
IV.
On the fourth night, Daniel dreamed he had reached his own town, his feet raw and bloody and a sword loose across his back. The green-skinned boy’s older brother couldn’t be far behind him, but he was so close to his goal, it would be unthinkable to have it snatched from him now. This was the town where it lived – the imposter. This was the town where it lived, clad in the stolen pieces of his life. It had driven on this street, talked to these neighbors, bought food in this restaurant. It was so close he could smell its scent of rotting leaves. Soon everything would be set right.
The faeries had stolen him when he was six months old, and the only world he knew was the one under the hill, where he had been their plaything and servant. While in the world of light, they had left a doll of sticks and leaves, a fetch, in his place. It had held his life for him, but soon he would take it back and all the fair folk had done to him would be undone. He would take back his life, and it would all be as if it never happened.
Daniel gracefully leaped over the hedge between two properties. The fetch was only a few more miles away. He would reach it tomorrow morning and then he would be safe. He would take back his life from the fetch and he would be free.
The fetch woke up. It had not really been asleep, merely seeing what the real Daniel Hartford was seeing. It understood that now. It was not Daniel Hartford. It had never really been Daniel Hartford. It had never really been human. It never would be. It was a place holder, nothing more, and now the real Daniel Hartford was back and it was no longer needed.
The world blurred around it, like looking through a heavy cloth. It glimpsed what it guessed was the sleeping form of the woman who was Daniel Hartford’s wife and it felt stabbing pain in the place where its heart should have been. It couldn’t see her or hear her, smell her or taste her, but it could still feel her warmth and her pulse under the bundle of twigs that it could no longer mistake for hands.
The real Daniel Hartford had never met her. Darla had never smiled her special, real smile for him. They had not gone on their honeymoon together or weeded in the garden or made dinner or love. She was its wife. Not his. Darla had loved it for its gentleness. How could she love a man with sword-calloused palms? She loved it. Not him. What could he give her that it could not? The answer came to him unbidden – children – the large family she had always wanted.
It stumbled upright, able to move freely now that it had ceased trying to move its joints like a man’s, and walked to the mirror. Everything but its own image in the mirror wavered like the world seen from underwater, but it could still see itself. Its body was made up of sticks lashed together with twists of dried grass and covered with tattered and falling leaves. Its face was a mass of brambles, its eyes round pebbles and its teeth two rows of acorns. It stared at itself and did not breathe and had no heart to beat. It was dead, always had been, and made from dead things – dead wood, dead leaves, acorns that never grew to be oaks.
It climbed back in bed and curled up next to Daniel Hartford’s wife. It had one last night with her. That was all that mattered.
V.
The bundle of sticks that had once believed itself Daniel Hartford rose before six o’clock. It had no dreams that night because it had not slept. It never really had. Only living things dream and it was not alive. It reached out a limb to touch Daniel Hartford’s wife one last time – to take the feel of her warmth with it to the oblivion of never being. But it felt nothing. That too had been taken from it.
So it kissed her as best it could with lips made of grass and teeth of acorns and walked down the stairs to wait in the kitchen for the man it had once thought it was. Daniel Hartford was walking into the backyard. The only thing standing between them was the unmowed yard and the screen door.
The fetch met Daniel Hartford’s eyes evenly and crumpled to a mound of shriveled autumn leaves and loose twigs on the floor, as if it had never been. Daniel heard the sound of his wife’s step on the stairs and watched her walk into view, seeing her for the first time. She smiled her special, real smile and crossed the kitchen to him. The pile of leaves that used to think it was a man scattered as Daniel Hartford opened the screen door and stepped into his house and the waiting arms of his wife. They could clean up the mess later. |
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