Last time I saw her

I can remember the last time I saw her. I’d closed my eyes, turned around, and opened my eyes to the world and walked away. I kept on walking until I was wrapped in the cool blanket of night, its flecked white pattern shimmering about me. I never looked back, not once.

She’d been under tall pine trees that bordered a strip of dirt track beyond the olives groves, but before the thick, never to heal,scab of rock rose out of the ground. The thick brown branches of the trees were like skeletons supporting and encased by sinewy twigs and fleshy needles. The air was lit by the golden glow of sunset, insects and swallows gliding through the molten air.

She was deathly pale and her face was pointed to the springy red ground that sheathed the lifeless bedrock.

I can’t remember her face now, I can only remember parts of her as though her memory had been dismembered. I remember her china blue eyes that had gazed into me. I remember her sweet soft lips too that parted whenever they touched mine. I remember how she felt too, her soft thighs clutching at my back, slipping with our sweat. And the sound of her gasps as her lungs pulled at air. The sound of those last gasps that I will carry to my grave.

Currently playing: Trunk by Kings Of Leon

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creative-writing, fiction

protectionism

The second morning I spent at his flat, wearing only his heavy jumper and old slippers over my underwear, he beckoned me into the kitchen. after a breakfast of coffee and each other I thought he was offering me something more solid for my stomach. His cat was rolling in the slab of winter sunlight that crashed across the kitchen from the window, gently massaging the feline’s body with its weak fingers.

He kneeled down by the sink and opened the cupboard underneath the sink. I kneeled down too, my bare legs jutting out from under the jumper. The cupboard smelt of washing up liquid and other caustic liquids. He moved aside a bottle of bleach, its neck crusted with an unnatural green of dried bleach and pulled from the very back an old jam jar. The yellowing sticker on the side showed that it had once rested in direct sunlight, not stashed away as it was now. The once black, but now golden brown calligraphed word read “Goosegogs” and there was a square piece of red Gingham bound tightly to the neck of the jar with an old rubber band, sealing it. It looked completely empty, but when we stood up and the sun hit it something seemed to stir within and glint like the shimmer of a lizard moving off a rock. I stood up to get a better look and he said, ‘This is where I keep my feelings,’ holding the jar protectively in two hands. ‘you can hold it if you like.’

He pushed it towards me, it squeezed between his two palms, his fingers spread out from it like the bristles of a Venus Flytrap. ‘That’s only if you promise not to be careful not to break or never open it.’

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fiction, creative-writing

Monkey on your back

My right hand rubbed saliva into the tiny triangle of pain that sat dead centre of the web of my left hand. My aching mind imagined the particles of coffee and saliva mixing in the swollen wound, my massaging pushing out the germs with the blood. ‘It’s not their fault they’re thieves,’ Lucy said.

I painfully raised my head, feeling the back of my t-shirt tug on the sweat on my back to see the end of her gesture toward the speck of black that glided toward the horizon before she turned back to the sandwich on her plate. My eyes had moved into the lunchtime sunlight that beamed from the sky and slipped past the edges of the street’s roofs . The white light drove a wedge behind my eyes and did nothing to thaw my ice cold bones that ground against each other. She looked up again, peering over her bug eye glasses and said ‘it’s in their nature.’

That was easy for her to say as it wasn’t her last glinting shard of crystal meth that the crow had stolen.

Snow

What is it about snow that can send shivers of excitement through the body, make the mundane spiritual, the earthly heavenly and the ugly exquisite? How is it able to convince the photographer to walk just one more corner further from home and respite for a glimpse? Turn coach potatoes into red faced, out of breath, snowballers?

It certainly is the the cold. This can numb your digits until they feel like another’s, Shatter soft, plump lips like a rock thrown through a frozen pond. Leaving nought but shards.

It’s as though the contrast has been turned up on the senses. pushing everything into either the black or white, plesure or pain, cold or hot.

The dark hues of naked branches become jet-black against the pure, white snow. Those animals unfortunate enough to have to venture out into it show up like spots of blood on white bed sheets. I’ve followed foxes across kilometres of snow covered countryside, their red hair like a siren on a rock. Your sense of smell is stabbed by cold air and soothed by the moisture that sheaths it.

Red shell like ears throb and have trouble hearing the sounds that cannot escape the sticky clutches of the fallen snow, dying a sickly sweet, and cold Brownian death. Other sounds seemed clipped, but strengthened by the cold; travelling further in the crisp, still air. A strength it needs to be overheard over the rich crunch of snow underfoot.

Its effects on your sense of taste are delayed and can’t be felt until until you’re safe and sound at home once more, your gloves steaming on the radiator and your shoes turning from rugged to bedraggled as the snow melts. There food will explode and sugar will hit your blood stream like intravenous heroine

Here be dragons

I tempt dragons. I push my luck with offerings and sacrifices of animal flesh, meat and virgins, hoping their hot breath will bellow down upon me, consume me and seal my fate, but they never come.

Cat & Mouse

A place a I stayed in last summer overlooked the sea and old fisherman’s house. It had begun to fall in on itself, as is the way of all things that get the opportunity to age. Its front garden was a concrete semicircle that may never have been flat, but now looked like the cooled peel of a lava flow frozen in the throws of chaotic brownian motion. It was upon this landscape of paused bubble and cracks, ravine and crevice that I watched a cat dance about effortlessly as it chased the quicksilver movement of a mouse. With the ease of a heavy water drop winding down a pane of glass the mouse slid trying to make good its escape. That cat dove upon and bounced the mouse, hitting it with the pads of its paws. Scooping throwing it in the air. Sometimes the mouse stayed still, its tiny chest clutching at slippery air. If it was stunned, exhausted, or just resigned I couldn't say. Every turn the mouse made the cat anticipated, blocking its routes to freedom.

The cat rested on it, pressing heavily on the mouse like a heavy, dark mist. I stopped watching when the cat began pinning it to the tombstone-grey concrete, its claws ripping at the flesh, not by the cat itself, but as the mouse struggled to free itself.

I forget sometimes that I am living like this mouse stalked by a predator, that I’m living in the good times, presumably bookended by the bad. With a wrong decision here or not enough sleep for a few weeks there, I could be pressed against the rock by depression. After a long day, or a hard day I can feel it stalking me, watching me, ready to consume me. Intense sadness one day is a claw in the flesh, it’s attempt to pin you down, the more you struggle, the more it hurts, tears at you but you must free yourself. Because you have to stay in the good time

How often are you the wrong side of the fence? Fingers curled around railing and barb, cheek pressed against a cold pane, glass pressed on ear and plasterboard?

I do what the voices tell me. Don't laugh, so do you

drunkard

The intoxicating power of words that slowly drip from my fingers key stroke by keystroke leave me tired, gutted and hollow. With every true word that is extracted from me to take residence upon the screen, a piece of me goes with it too.
My grey eyes glisten with relief too as the greasy tumours of thoughts are expelled.

My dreams were crushed under his feet with every step he took toward the door