Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ The 'me' you knew is gone for good.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDead and scattered like ashes.
in which Elex starts to pull the strings taut between him and his dear brother.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ Me as the kidnapping victim,xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the abuse victim, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe self-inflicted runaway.
in which Sinope spins a new tale with Elex and Erol's conversations.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ What are you so worried about, Sinope?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Why are you the one gulping down your insecurities?
Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:05 am
and indeed there will be time the ides of october
As Elex waited, he counted the obstinate cuticles on his fingers. Two on his index, one on his ring finger. One on his little finger. Another two on his thumb. He knew that if he tore at them, more would spring in their wake. A spreading problem -- one caused by too much doing and not enough idleness. His life knew no idleness anymore. Would it spring cuticles too? Would whole swaths of his life rip away in subtle motions just by moving forward, by staying active? Would the Negaverse pick and pick and pick until they whittled him down to a dullard youma? Restless fingernails picked at his lips instead.
The door behind him slammed open, and an exhausted blonde emerged. His too-short hair and his too-greasy fingers collided with one another sloppily. Erol carved the grease over his face unwittingly, then wiped his fingers on a much-abused apron that cried for an incinerator. He took a seat next to his brother, smelling of fat fryers and overcooked burgers. Smelling of a life far beneath his birth.
"You smell awful," Elex stated as he looked over his obstinate cuticles.
"That's the point." Erol disrobed his apron and tossed it in a heap next to him. It bathed in rainwater, in gravel and spilled ketchup. He even rubbed a hand on it for good measure. "******** you, mom. ******** you, dad. I don't need their money. I can make it on my own. I can make it on my ******** own with no help from nobody. Sound familiar?" He glanced to elex, with his too-bright eyes and his too-wide grin.
In a way, his expression reminded Elex of Sinope. He gave a pausing glance, then turned his attention back to cuticles. Belligerent is the new obedient. Poor is the new rich. Unkempt is the new immaculate.
An elbow jabbed Elex in the side. "Well?" His brother cocked a brow.
Impatience hung its sword between the pair.
Elex sighed through his nose. Greasewater reflections stared up at him between his legs. He looked to his-not-his face, to the white sclera around mute black eyes. He stared like a lost boy now, like a shellshocked soldier from days of old. Briefly he kicked at the puddle until the reflection was no more -- until he couldn't see his brother's sideline antics in the edges of it. "You're trying to say I left to stick it to our parents." He looked to Erol, his own expression carefully placid. "That I meant to hurt them."
"Ding ding ding!" Erol sported a look of overwrought glee, then flicked his brother's forehead. He found a measure of delight in Elex's grunted surprise. "Winner winner chicken dinner. You got it El, you're being a big, fat, whopping a*****e about this. You think mom and dad would care that you're gay? No, of course not. And since that wasn't a big enough shock to them, you had to put up both middle fingers by turning around and disappearing with Mister Fox-Ears, whatever the ******** his name is.
"Look, I get it. Life sucks. We're rich, and all this s**t is expected of us. We can't be us because us isn't what people want. And it blows. But guess what Elex, we don't get to pick a different life. You running off like a little p***k only ******** people over."
Elex smiled faintly. His Mona Lisa gesture faded against the pallor of his face, against the dull-bright overcast sky. He felt its steely resonance in his bones. "Is that what you think?"
Erol scoffed. He pulled from the apron a pipe -- small, delicate, glassy and lurid -- and a cheap corner store lighter. Pack, squeeze, flick, and he was sucking down the heady smoke rolling from the bowl. "It's what I know, El. I saw it written all over your face. Hell, you aren't even into the guy. You were dead as a doornail when you looked at him. No ********' lights on upstairs. Checked the ******** out. And then you just kissed him for no ********' reason. Right after he threatened me with that… Mirror s**t." He shivered, took another toke. Its unmistakeable scent spread like a pall over the dumpster-ridden alley.
"Can you put that out?" Elex shot his brother a withering look. Fingers knit in fingers with knuckles against knuckle, bone grinding against bone. Ever working, never ceasing.
"And you know what else? I think he was serious about that mirror s**t. Like he would've really put me through a mirror and… Done whatever the ******** he said he was gonna do. I really think he would. And you would've stood there and watched, all doe-eyed and vacant. Like you were possessed. I think you really would've let him do that to me." His voice dropped, speaking calm murder to the evening air. "And you know what? ******** you."
Elex nodded along silently. "He wouldn't --"
"What the ******** was that s**t, anyway? Seriously. Tell me. Because I've never heard such crazy s**t before in my life. Not even from you, back when you were all obsessed with godmen in the back alleys of Calcutta."
"Kolkata," Elex corrected wearily.
"Doesn't matter."
Not to you. Elex sighed through his nose and watched his breath ward away more coiling smoke. How can I even tolerate my own? "... I don't know a lot about it. The Dark Mirror Court -- that's what they're called -- can pull people through mirrors. Hold them there. Drain them of their energy. He said it eventually corrupts people into wraiths. These… Hiroshima shadows that dart through the living, clawing away energy with every pass. These Nagasaki memories with no name, no face, no future. That's what he threatened with you."
"What the ******** s**t," Erol stated in his vacant voice. Another toke, another long silence, another pungent breath into the darkening evening. "And you would've let him do that to me." He stared straight ahead, toward the back wall where layers of missed dumpster splatters accumulated into a black sludge. A reminder of good times had between coworkers, a tradition cemented in collective defiance.
"No. He was just trying to scare you."
"Why? I'm not afraid of some nobody like him. I'm not afraid of his mirror s**t either."
Elex spared a long glance at his brother, took in his goosebumps, his hands clasped tight to ripped jeans. Goodwill jeans, he noted, by the sticker still lodged on the hip. "I know."
The older brother's hand shifted, still locked in position with fingers over the pipe holes, and gestured toward Elex. A wordless exchange. A mind-altering olive branch. "You're with him because he can do that s**t, aren't you? Like he's… Manipulating you or something. Like he tried to manipulate me. You don't like him, so why are you with him? Why'd you leave us behind for that… That ********' furry?"
Elex closed his eyes to the dull throb of his brother's bigoted voice. He took the proffered pipe, admired the curvature of its glass. Traced all the sweeping waves of pigment as it traveled through the sculpture. His brother reached over him then, tangling their wrists together sibling-close, and maneuvered Elex's delicate fingers into position. Erol's calloused thumb struck the lighter. On instruction, Elex put lips to pipe and drew breath.
He coughed, sputtered, and hacked afterward. The smoke clung deep, wormed itself into pockets along his lungs. He hacked again, this time into his arm. A third time. A fourth. He tried to draw breath to have it snatched from him in racking coughs. And by the time he recovered, as long-winded as it was, he looked to Erol with bloodshot eyes. "Why do you --" he coughed, twice, thrice. "That's awful." Another cough. He waved the smoke from his face.
"You should've seen the look on Mom's face when she busted me in the bathroom." He chuckled, a raspy affair that bloomed into a full laugh.
Elex wanted to laugh himself. The sound came raspy, anaemic, and died on his lips. "I missed you."
Erol threw an arm around his brother's narrow shoulders. The gesture closed the gap between them for the few short seconds of silence. Erol smiled, his gaze on the pockmarked ground, then his brother's boyish face, then the pipe in those nimble fingers. He remembered the days when wood splinters covered Elex's hands perpetually, when his father started carrying tweezers on his person. "You still haven't answered my question."
Elex stewed in the silence for a time. He drew on the feel of the warm arm about him, of the familial closeness he only yearned for. He sighed, and with his breath, banished the dream. "I know."
"He doesn't make you happy, Elex. Why are you with him?" Fingers tightened over the duffel coat.
Elex smiled, a quiet gesture devoid of mirth. "You don't know what my happiness looks like." He slipped from the retaining wall, from his brother's grasp, and started for the edge of the receiving area. his brother yelled after him, his voice wan and meager against the burgeoning sound of an incoming truck, and Elex paid him no heed. He walked on past the muck-stricken walls and into Destiny City's widespread anonymity.
You don't know what your happiness looks like either.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ These Hiroshima shadows that dart through the living.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx These Nagasaki memories with no name.
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Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:08 am
for the yellow smoke that slides along the street late october
The anchor drove
down, xxxxx down, xxxxxxxxxx down
. . .
deep into the muck. The darkness. The divide.
. . .
Into a trepid lie.
Elex's bare feet brushed the surface of the water. The boat dredged its ennui ripples from the heart of the sea in tiny, useless pirouettes. It floated and listed and floated and listed and floated and listed while the ocean drew its current about itself, a demure move for a dull day. The sun blistered on his too-pale skin, on his too-thin back with its knobby vertebra. His shirt fit unwell. Sunscreen meant nothing when the number on the bottle dipped below 80. When he scratched his back and felt a peel of skin, he panicked, and tugged his button-up closer about himself -- like a modest girl, like a frozen beggar.
He looked down, down, down, deep into the opaque waves.
"I'm just glad to see you again, kiddo." The voice came steady as the sea. A smile crinkled in his words, sure in their age and wisdom. Elex used to like that voice. He used to miss it before the late hour, when his mother sent him to bed. "It's been…" A trembling breath failed him. "It's been a trip without you. I'm sure you've seen it. Your brother hasn't taken it very well. Neither has your mom. Or me, for that matter. Nobody's really… Got on the same since you left." Sandals shuffled their bleary beats against the smooth deck. "And I'm not saying that to make you feel bad. Shoot, I'm sure you had your reasons for leaving. I think we all did when we were your age."
Ice danced in a glass, its chime clarion against the ocean waves. Another rattle and clink and a slide of feet and the boat dipped with Elon's slow seating. He breathed a sigh that belied his age. "Let me tell you a story, son. I think it might help the both of us." His bejeweled, gnarled hand found its way around thin shoulders. Elex bent under the weight of that sympathy.
He bent into that deep, deep, deep divide.
"When I was your age, I was a lot like your brother. Driven, smart, capable, and ambitious. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise -- that's a dangerous combo. That spells trouble for everyone around you if you don't have the head for it. And I sure didn't." He paused, laughed a whiskey laugh with an undertone of scotch. "My dad wanted me to run the business for him. Back then, people were just getting into computers. They were the big new thing as they started to downsize into desk-sized jobs about this big." He demonstrated with his free hand, and the ice in his glass danced and danced and danced.
Elex didn't look up. His too-long hair caught on the sea breeze and wrenched from his face. It whorled, twirled, and dashed against his cheek. Then it laid low in its twisted tangle, down near his chin.
"My dad was so convinced that computers were the way to go. That they'd be the shining star of the new era. Goddamn was he right." Elon snorted, eyes a marvel upon the distant evening stars. "But back then, I didn't care. All I cared about was showing him that I didn't need his money or his guidance. That I could make it on my own without a helping hand from anybody. It's a lot like your brother now.
"And I did just the same as him. I walked right on out the door one day, with my mom hollering at me from the living room window, and I just got in my car and drove. Didn't care where I was going. I was so white-knuckle livid that it didn't matter as long as I was moving away from the house. I must've driven eighty miles that night before I finally ran out of gas. I coasted on empty straight into a gas station, filled her up with the money I had in my pocket, and asked the clerk about a job. He nicknamed me Lucky and handed me one of their vests after a fifteen-minute interview.
"I didn't really know what to expect. Or what I was doing. I just shacked up on the guy's couch that night, and he told me about a cheap motel about three blocks away. I mean I was way, way out in Northumberland," he continued, pawing at the horizon with a gnarled hand, "and I didn't know my a** from a hole in the ground. No clue where I was or how I was supposed to go forward from there. So I just… worked the job. Paid my rent. Had a date sometimes.
"Took me three months to come crying home to dad. Three whole months. At the end of it, I couldn't take it anymore. Sitting in front of that register all day, rearranging the condoms and chapstick display, watching those nasty hotdogs roll and roll and roll on their cooker… I thought I was gonna kill someone. It felt like my life was just being wasted. So I came right back. Showed up on their doorstep still wearing my greasy uniform, with my hair all long like yours and all the fight gone right out of me.
"And you know what my dad said to me? He said, 'welcome home, son'. Just like that. Just like I came home from a school day. He never said another word to me about it." A sad smile cut wrinkles into his face.
"You see, son, he knew I was having trouble. He knew I needed my space. He saw that chip on my shoulder every damn day and he let it be. And when I got tired of spoiling for a fight and struck out on my own, he dealt with it in his own way. So did mom. They weren't happy when I left, just like your mom and I. But they knew I needed to do it, so they never called the cops. They just waited, knowing I'd come back. And I don't want you to think that things went back to normal after I came back -- they were always different from then on -- but it was like… A coming of age for me. It helped me find myself and realize that my dad wasn't too far off from the mark for me. I just didn't want him to think that. A little cocky, I know. If you look close, you'll find a lot of that in Erol too."
Elon drew a deep sigh. "The moral of that story is this: family's not going to hate you for who you are, Elex. They'll wait for you when you need to leave. They'll be there for you when you come back. But you don't need to be ashamed of yourself around us. You don't need to hide yourself. You be you, Elex. And I'll love you no matter who that 'you' is. I'll always be your father." He gave Elex's shoulder a firm squeeze, the bones jutting defiance into his palm.
But Elex was lost down, down, down, deep in the sea where mirror memories swam and a first life ceased to be.
"I know," he muttered quietly. The wind swept away his words before they reached his father's ears. The lapping water licked his toes, traced its salt lines up his ankle. His foot felt numb, his opposite leg sore from sitting on it. He clasped his arms and leaned them against the metal rail, prayer knuckles aimed at heaven, and pressed his forehead to bony thumbs. I know I shouldn't begrudge you. That you and Mother and Erol are each dealing with my disappearance in your own ways. You look for answers at the bottom of the bottle while Erol hocks weed at the local pizza shop, each whittling away your miseries with a favorite family vice. I know Mother diets under stress. Thin is the new In. Thinspiration. Put the 'thin' in 'think'. She buys into fads and magazines and covets Jada Chamberlyn a thousand times over for the physique she could never have.
I've seen how it eats you. I've seen the blood veins eating away your sclera. The way your nose changed from alcohol abuse. Erol said you're taking black cherry extract now to calm your gout flare-ups. It's all steak and champagne from here, my dear father.
But you're looking a little too rough around the edges to be serving up fatherly advice.
Still, his split-half mourned. A part of him pined for what once was, for what would never twice be. He missed the idle hours spent smelling the sea and watching his dad work his tireless shifts in the boat. He missed the scent of rum mixed with the sea breeze, the motor oil on his dad's hands. He missed all those minutes spent carving into sand dollars while the sun cooked patterns into his back. While he looked around the sandy bar for his brother and his friends, who darted around like endless fonts of energy.
He missed the taste of ice cream on summer days. Of brain freezes wrinkling his features. Of his brother taking his hand and towing him out to sea with his too-fast gait. He missed tuscan chocolates and sand between his toes and the soreness in his calves after loping across the dunes. He missed connection. He missed joie de vivre. He missed happiness.
Elex's shoulders rolled with the waves. Their quaking grew, steady, subtle, soundless. Finally a choke broke from his throat as his lips pulled away in a grimace, his sorrow rising to meet the tide. His hands unlaced and gripped the bar. His tendons stood on edge, bending against skin, yearning to escape. He loosed a raw cry at the indifferent ocean, at the bloodied vening looming overhead. His shoulders broke their line in racking sobs. Tears carved their runnels down too-sharp cheeks. And he cringed against his agony, strained against it, twisted the bar in his hand with all the might he could muster in his meager form. All his stunted sorrows burnt their ire through him, their long lives a trail of gasoline through his brittle bones. He felt each at once -- the fury, the dolor, the agony.
Strong arms pried him from the bar and Elex capitulated his too-hot body to his father's firm chest. Fingers clawed at Elon's windbreaker, desperate for sorrow-cursed transference. He dug his regrets out of the deep blue material as his tears stained their wordless tales. Elex's raspy voice broke in each desperate cry, unable to find words. Unable to form them. He wrenched at his pities and his remorse. He cried raw his voice and his throat. But the pit of his tribulations knew no bottom; he could dig deep, deep, deep, into their sodden depths but to drown himself alone.
Alone. The word wrenched at him further, dissected him, transected him. He knew his twilight-caught life stood on the outskirts of understanding. Solitary in the Negaverse and in his meager whisper of a life, no one could relate to him. No one would. No one would visit him. No one would attend his birthday parties. No one would visit the funeral of the beast that was once Elex Yorke.
And just the same, he could tell no one.
His fingers balled into fists against his father's jacket as he strangled on another ravaged cry. The youma in him sparked livewire across his senses. Each slight felt blisteringly acute, searing skin and flesh and bone down to the marrow. He was dying. Here, in his father's arms, dying. Dissolving away in his own wretched wasteland of regrets. He couldn't breath -- each desperate sound wrenched from his throat met racking coughs. His lungs loathed to function. They starved him of oxygen. His fate was to drown, deep in the middle of the sea.
Down, down, down, into the darkness.
His father tightened a firm grip around the brittle boy. "Shh," he cooed gently. His stolen mantra from Elex's burgeoning months. The sound matched the sea. Slowly his work-calloused hands found a rhythm in rubbing the youth's back, chasing away the thousand sorrows that collected in the dips between his ribs. "You're okay. I've got you." The words were only meant to carry what his voice would portray. His hands smoothed the rest in steady rhythms, in the ocean's tides.
Elex only managed staccato breaths. His grimace frozen on his face, his lips peeled back from tear-stricken teeth, he shuddered a few sighs against his father's drenched shirt. Weary-weak and agonized, he slowly sunk against his father. His head split itself in half. His eyes bored their way back into his skull. His throat felt dry and hoarse. All energy ebbed from him at once, leaving him as little more than a lukewarm shell.
His father breathed a trembling sigh. His hands never left Elex's back. "Come home, son. Just come home."
Elex's face tightened against the jacket, his breathing stopped. He bit back another wailing moan, holding it inside, drowning it in a cavernous self-loathing. A thin click of stuffed nostrils belied his breath. And with sorrow still sticking to his ribs, he loosed a careful exhale. I can't. The words lodged their glass in his throat.
For a time, they waited. They listened to the sea as it rolled its lilting rhythm against the boat, as the tides danced their sinusoidal ebb and flow under the gaze of the distant moon. Sometimes the boat groaned in its old age, sometimes the father groaned in his old age. Sometimes Elex spared a few more broken sobs. Sometimes silence prevailed. An hour passed in frozen eventualities, in words left unsaid. They spoke reams to each other without a single aired thought, their language ensconced in touch and tenderness. Finally, Elon released his beleaguered son, his firm hands pressed to skinny shoulders, and stood up.
At last, he broke the silence. "Sit tight, Elex. I'll get us some beers." The old man wobbled on weary legs before he found his gait again, and disappeared into the shadows under the deck.
Elex was left mired in his numbness. His mind drifted deep, deep, deep into the horizon. He checked his still-wound pocket watch. Ten to three, it read, and not a second later. The cover closed with a clasp and he pulled himself absently, automatically, from the edge of the deck. He peeled off the skin on his hands with dextrous fingers. He picked and picked and picked and picked and picked until bone showed through, until the black of bitter deeds faced him down.
A canvas-ripping wrench confirmed the rest. Smoke now drifted around him with every inhalation. With another shaken breath, he turned his back to the sea.
By the time his father returned, two beers proudly in hand and newly deprived of their caps, he found no sign of his son. Only the foreign scent of copper and moondust lingered on the air.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ I've seen the blood veins eating away your sclera. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The way your nose changed from alcohol abuse.
Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2017 6:53 pm
rubbing its back upon the window-panes early november
This feels like a lukewarm spy movie scene, Elex observed to himself as he walked through the frosted french doors. Wearing his finest, he felt out of place -- his shoulders too drawn, his hair too long, his coat too tight. Borrowed clothes fed back to him preserved the illusion, but only to the uninformed public. He wondered, then: were there agents amidst this place? Would they know him on sight?
"Ah, Mr. Yorke!" A gracious smile met the boy first, followed by jet-black caterpillar brows and a greaser hairstyle. Walter oft looked well-kept and impeccably dressed, with manners sharp enough to cut teeth. "So glad to have you joining us again! Your father reserved a seat for you; right this way." A menu was passed from greeter to waiter and Walter waived Elex on through the depths of the happy hour din. The pair wove through lacquered chairs, lace tablecloths, patterned art, modern mood lighting, and decorative wood moulding as they approached the very back of the lengthy restaurant.
"You've been all over the news," the waiter cast over his shoulder. "We're quite happy to have you back. Here we are." With each seating came a listing off of seasonal appetizers, chef's specials and ubiquitous recommendations.
Elex thanked him curtly and seated himself next to his father. He looked to Erol, expression unreadable, then diverted his attention to the parchment-printed menu. Erol flashed a tight grin in response. His father missed all of it and yet none of it, as tension slowly coiled beneath the smoke-ridden atmosphere.
His father was first to break their silence. "Good to see you, kid." His strong, sun-warmed arm found Elex's narrow shoulders with ease. A few thumps and his hand rested heavy on Elex's avian spine. Elex curled under the weight. "It's been lonely without you. Rolli and I've been rattling around on our own. Keeping your mother crazy. She misses you too, you know. She wanted to come with us tonight, but she's been feeling under the weather. Got a cold a while back from one of her girlfriends.
"Oh, and Erol joined up with the college baseball team. He's making a name for himself already. Why don't you tell your brother about it?" He finished, looking to Erol to pick up the conversation.
Yet his expression remained tight, his fingers pursed in death grip around his slowly burning cigarette. His ire and guilt fell in ashen clumps into the tray sitting by his elbow, though he never paid it any heed. He pressed the cigarette to mouth, drew long and heady on its filter, and shot its smoky remains through his nose. "It's great," he answered tersely. His head bobbed comically as his gaze slowly tracked to their father. "Really great. Can't ask for more. Just. Great."
Heaving a contented sigh, Elon shifted back against the booth leather and wrapped arms around both his sons. Knuckles drummed on shoulders either too narrow or too wide for his hands. He looked to each -- to brown eyes and to black -- and breathed the satisfaction straight out of the air. "How long's it been boys? Six months now?" He paused, smiled into the strain of his voice. "We missed you, Elex. You can still come home with us anytime. Don't feel like you have to stay wherever you're staying. We'll take you back when you change your mind. Isn't that right, Erol?"
"Right. Always." He kept nodding, his neck a stick wedged into an obnoxious bobblehead.
Elex only snorted. Dark eyes found the menu of more import than the hand boring down on his back, or his brother's thinly-stretched restraint. A sardonic smirk broke his placid visage.
Broke his brother's politik. "Hey. Hey!" He shifted forward, all bladed sharpness and grandeur in his looming figure. "Wipe that ******** smirk off your face. You listening to me? Stop ******** smiling." Erol lurched forward until his father pressed a hand to his shoulder and urged him back against the seat.
"Calm down, Erol. We're here to have a nice, relaxing dinner with your brother. We're here to enjoy each other's company, okay? Can you do that?" Elon communicated a sharp Disappointed Father look to the older of the Yorke sons, which received its own Wilted Child stare in return. Elon understood his son's mischief, his rage, his consternation. He saw the tension railing through strong shoulders. And with volumes left unsaid between them, with stories left unresolved, Elon knew their dinner together would know only strain and fatigue. He sighed, then, and lit his own cigarette in a silent funeral.
Elex heaved a breathless sigh, his smirk still indelible on his face. Slowly it abated as he looked between the two. His father's aged green eyes, his brother's too-bright brown. Neither spoke a word to him. The silence formed his stage. "I have something to say. It's about why I disappeared."
Erol cut in promptly. "You mean it's about your boyfriend?"
"No. He's no boyfriend of mine. Just a coasting troublemaker looking for a mark." Hesitation drew out another subservient silence. The whole of the smoking lounge grew louder, as waiters sang with aplomb for a newly-minted centenarian. People from tables over cheered and laughed, and partook in the bleeding atmosphere. They rejoiced in the joy crinkling a wrinkled face, invigorating trembling hands. Yet the Yorke table sat at a distance from that sunny ambience, even only two tables away.
"I became something else. That's why I left. I had to -- I can only look like this now for a few hours in a day. And it feels… Unpleasant. Like someone wrapped cellophane over your body to make you more presentable. You would understand," he shot to Erol specifically. He swapped to Elon. "But you're too used to it." He felt his father's hand tighten.
"Son, it doesn't matter who or what you are."
Cheers rang out. Glasses sang together as they touched. "You think that doesn't vex me? That it doesn't matter who or what I am? You already overwrote my individuality. Made your own stories about me. Now I'm giving you the truth, and you wash it all away with these pointless blanket statements. 'It doesn't matter who or what I am'..." Elex scoffed. "Think about it, dear Father. Would you still love a murderer? A cannibal? A monster? Would you hold your arms open to me if I wasn't human anymore?"
Erol's voice quaked under its own tension, bound by quietude. "So ******** help me Elex --"
"Shhh," his father hissed. The room quieted as the oldest member of the room began to speak. Erol's heart thudded at an impossible clip. He felt his fingers tingle, his head betray him with splotches staining his vision. "I didn't mean it like that. I'll always be interested in who you are. Just the same, you'll always be my son and I'll always love you --"
Elex rapped the table with his palm as he spoke. "That is the problem. I'll never be me. I'll always be your son. You've never seen me for who I am. Even if my hands went black and the whites of my eyes disappeared, I'll always be your son." He snorted, smiled, looked to his fuming brother.
"I stopped being human before I turned sixteen. It isn't a metaphor. It's not a lapse in sanity. I traded school for militarism. I spent my time looking for people to hurt. I've tasted human souls. I know where they live inside each of us," he finished, delicate fingers touching his sternum. Another round of applause broke out, louder than the last. Louder than the rush of blood through his father's ears or the rage internalized by his brother or Elex's own introspective conflict. The applause crescendoed with an assisted bow by the birthday man. Orders of scotch rang out like corn in the midst of popping.
Elex looked from one face to the next, and found both his family members silent in word. Pain and pity wrote plainly into the pits and valleys of his father's features, yet ire creased Erol's youth into a mask. He knew, then, that he hit the bittersweet point of contention. The melodic breakage of another heartstring. He felt it himself -- a too-tight tuning in his own heart until the irrevocably sharp, saccharine pain rang through his chest. Tears threatened his eyes and he smiled, half in satisfaction and half in mourning. I wasn't lying to you, Sinope. It's no different than being pulled in half. Always set in opposition to yourself. Always divided.
Erol was first to speak. "Alright." Impatient fingers drummed the table, danced with their own strung nervousness. "Well. Good talk. I think everyone can agree that we're done here. I'm gonna say none of us have an appetite after that one. Bravo, Elex. You ruined another family moment." Erol huffed, and his whole body bristled with the need to move. Finally he sprung out of his seat and beckoned for his father to follow. Elon's pallor was duly noted.
"Dad, I'll meet you in the car. Elex and I need to talk." Erol stabbed him with an aggressive glare.
Elon nodded, his free hand coming up to massage his left arm as he slipped from the booth. With no food to pay for, the patriarch loped toward the double doors where the car waited -- where he might regain a sense of normalcy outside of Elex's sick words.
Erol wasted no time. He caught his brother's wrist in a punishing grasp and dragged him toward the the opposite exit, where only the austere alley awaited them.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ I stopped being human before I turned sixteen.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxIt isn't a metaphor. It's not a lapse in sanity.
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Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 8:50 am
there will be time, there will be time five minutes later
Elex opened paths
to thoughts Erol never wanted.
He followed, all sturm und drang
and Erol asked his burning questions.
Were you serious? Are you a monster? Why are you doing this?
And Elex balked. His mind churned all the summer storms never had that year.
But Erol took silence as fury. His tears ran out down down down his face, he never stopped them or tried. He just looked so puppy dog miserable.
I just want to know. Will you answer me?
"It's all true. It's all beautifully, terribly true. But I don't know why. It's my impulse. My drive. I need this more than I need a family."
And Erol stared the way only the hurt can stare. The way only the suffering can crumple up their faces in cloudy grief.
Elex said nothing. He only watched
while his brother fell apart in a no-name alleyway.
He turned away toward the darkness, toward the gristle and grunge, and his skin, once so clear and white, peeled off in thin, smoky ravels.
And Erol watched in his grief-stricken way while his brother evaporated.
A horn sounded, their father's horn,
but only Erol turned back toward the street.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ It's my impulse.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMy drive.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI need this more than I need a family.
Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2017 9:30 pm
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet the ides of november
How long has it been? The youngest Yorke stared at the shut double-doors to the tea room, their mahogany surfaces wrought with rich wood grain patterns and inlaid golds. An arched window high above them traced its stained glass patterns into the afternoon light. Part of it fell over his pale skin, illuminating him to the otherwise lifeless room. Motes of dust cast their dance about while he waited. On the other side, he heard the faint shuffle of voices. How many years since I last waited in front of her tea room door?
Three years? Four years? No, longer -- I was a child then.
The latch sounded down the hallway, sparse as it was. Only a runner rug paired with pottery on built-in alcoves decorated the space. A bench further down sat perpetually empty. Marsala-and-citron checked cushions added negligible comfort (the colors of the season, his mother would say). Another twitch of the lock, another echo, and the doors opened out like a petty secret.
Elex looked expectantly to their maid. She nodded him in as she excused herself, as two ships passing in the night. Behind him, the pair of doors closed with the echo sounding forlorn in the hall. Another latch. Another sigh.
Heavy fabrics cloyed the space. Deep burgundy rugs etched with intricate, victorian patterns covered the walnut hardwoods. Her tea table sat ever fore the window, the metal tray loaded with biscuits and accoutrements, and each chair sat primly apart for expected company. She often staged the room, he knew, which explained the perfectly partitioned parlours with well-placed privacy screens. Elex's hand lit on one of the Medici-patterned screens as he waited, still moored near the edge of the room, breath still bated and eyes still settled on his mother.
But she would not look at him at first. She wore an ermine scarf around her shoulders half in need of heat, and half in modesty awareness, for her neat white pencil dress sat off the shoulders just so. Lace traced the outsides of her arms on nearly every occasion. Fingers too like his hostaged a teacup. It was full, by the look of her dainty sip. She did not look up. Heavy lashes directed her gaze toward a crossword that sat folded on the table. She retired her teacup to its saucer and motioned, laconically, for Elex to seat himself.
And he did so; the memory of his meekness weighed so freshly upon him that he sat with that very same caution. His back straightened, his posture stiffened, and he folded one leg atop the other in a manner so rehearsed that it may well have been second nature.
Elex knew all parts of the role. "Mother." The word sounded like a transgression across the room's quietude. And for how his mother's brow arched, it was.
"Have you satisfied yourself, Elex?" She paid her attentions more to the crossword than her son, who found her neglect half a blessing.
Elex didn't respond.
"I imagine you learned how to serve yourself by now." A prim nod of her head was his sole invitation to tea. "Your brother informed me that you've been staying with another boy. Such is the way of adolescents, I suppose. Your brother wanted to go the same way with it when he was your age. A shame that it turned out this way. We often thought you'd turn out the smarter. Well." Drawing a short breath, she straightened. "Lesson learned.
"Children are gifts, with all their growths and shortcomings. We can't take responsibility for it, now can we?" She flashed a smile, precise and digging.
Elex knew the rules. He reached for the teapot, heavy with threat, and he poured into the sole upturned cup. Next came the cube of sugar, the cream. A light mixing with a tea spoon. The utensil clinked too loud, indicative of his lacking practice. His mother weaponized her flinch at the noise.
"Miss Hawthorne is engaged again. It's only been three weeks since her last boy left her at the altar. If only you were there -- you could've seen the look on his mother's face. She was positively mortified. Rightly so, I would say. Her boy never mentioned one whit of discomfort to Miss Hawthorne, and really, I don't see why he would find her so objectionable. Women would do anything for a figure like that, and have you seen her at the table? She has absolutely impeccable manners. Now, that being said…" His mother reclined in her seat, and hands clasped each other delicately. "You understand why I use the term 'boy', don't you dear?"
"Because boys aren't men until they've faced their problems." He sipped the tea, hot as it was, and tasted bitterness on his burnt tongue. It wasn't her normal blend, he knew.
"Precisely. Boys these days are so reticent to become men. Why, I could find a dozen examples across a single dinner party. Boys retreating from their betrothed to play their parlor games, boys shirking their duties to their parents, boys dodging their social obligations to play detective in someone else's study." He fell under her eye then, and she smiled once more. "Boys running away from their families to be with other boys. Boys retreating from the rest of their lives… It's become quite a phenomenon."
Retreat is always the cardinal sin, isn't it? It's always the first assumption. Elex Yorke ran away from home. He was never taken. He was never turned into a creature against his will.
It's easier to tell a story when you can victimize someone. When you can trawl their reputation over the rocks. Isn't that your specialty, Mother? Miss Hawthorne was left at the altar for a reputation you gave her. The hussie, the whore, the unmarriageable harlot. Pity for her soon-to-be-husband. How difficult it must be to know that he's marrying a sullied girl. But I can't mention that, can I? It's a point of pride for you.
A point in favor of your power.
"Please be out with it, Mother." He held his teacup tightly, skin taut over bone. He kept his gaze trained on her, daring her lurid blue eyes to meet his.
"Brazen, aren't we?" A trim brow arched. She gathered her teacup to herself, blew on the surface, then took a sip herself. A napkin pressed to lipstick-stricken lips before she retired the ritual. "Now why should I answer to you, my dear? Let's look at your accomplishments, shall we? You've managed a handful of awards over the course of your short life. Little trinkets, sweet nothings given out by teachers looking for a raise. I'm sure you're quite familiar with those types.
"But let's look upon the more… Substantial things. You're well into your sixteenth year by now. Have you graduated high school? Gotten your GED? What about learning to drive -- have you managed a license yet? Or a job, since ostensibly you're living on your own? Have you gotten acceptance letters from an ivy league university? Or even a regular university, really. Are you looking for community college? Is even that too much for you?" She smiled, and again sipped her tea.
"Don't feel pressured to answer, my dear. It's written all over your bank statements. There hasn't been a single charge for test prep, or driving school, or graduation gowns, or college application fees. In fact, you seem to be spending all your money on tea and clothing. All the while, you've been shirking your duties to your devoted family. We must be feeling quite brazen lately."
Elex bristled. He looked to the tea in his hands, to the room surrounding them, to the endless yards of heavy fabric dressing up a barebones room. He looked to her too-white, too-tight dress. He looked to the way her hands navigated the space with a doll's too-fine movements. Botox froze her face over a year ago, now. The room swam with misdirection. It lurched beneath its own exhausting lies -- its hints of a close family, its stuffy grandeur, its purposefulness. It retched its own pompous ridiculousness in burgundies and citrons.
She leaned forward, a hand out, a mother's touch brandished against him. "You haven't even cut your hair --"
"I know, Mother," he shot back with a raised hand. He watched her hesitate. He watched her smile curl coyly, expectantly. So much of their standoff felt uncannily familiar. "I'm the disappointment. The prodigal son. The do-nothing. The boy," he enunciated with a snarl. "I'm everything you want to pin on me and nothing you understand. I played to your wants but the air's gone out of those sails. The tides dried up. I'm not your second life anymore."
"Oh," she cooed, interested. "Did your boyfriend teach you how to use your tongue? How delightful." She sat back with an arm propped laissez-faire on the back of her lounge. "Tell me more, Elex. Tell me what a pitiable boy you are."
He donned a mirthless smile. You would say that, wouldn't you. Is that what we've become? Competitors for the quickest wit? Where would that fight take us? "You withdrew from all your social circles after I left. A daring move, Mother. One that ensconced you in the sympathies of people you never even knew. How much did that do for the Yorke family name, I wonder? A strong matriarch suddenly crippled by the loss of her youngest son. Her darling. The one that always stood at her side. How alone she must feel. How devastated she must be. How sorry she must sound.
"I never asked for pity. I just disappeared."
Her smile never faltered. Her voice drew low, quiet, threatening. "You must think you're so terribly smart, dear boy. Here you have me all figured out. I'm simply preying on the circumstances to the best of my ability. Go ahead, disappear again. Show the world that Elex Yorke's magical reappearance was a figment of the imagination. A fevered wish. The Yorkes recovered their son only for him to slip back out of their lives again.
"Go on, walk out that door. That's what you want, isn't it?" Her head cocked, and manicured nails tapped against lacquered wood.
Elex stood at once, and she paused him with an index finger.
"But there's a catch. If you leave, you walk out on your bank account. All that money you're used to evaporates." She snapped her fingers. "Just. Like. That." Painted lips smiled at him. "If you stay, you keep the money. We'll all go back to how things were. Your disappearance becomes a fit of youth. You can spin it how you wish. Heaven knows you will."
Elex looked to her a long minute, still standing, with his hands frozen at his sides. He took in her smugness. Her reclined posture. The way her hair fell perfectly over shoulders, in loose rivulets, and usurped parts of her ermine scarf. She looked so preposterously pleased with herself. Her self-satisfaction alone burned a hole through his restraint so dangerously fast. Fear gripped him then, a foreign chill, and he kept devious hands hidden in the pockets of his slacks. He turned from her without another word. He started across the impossibly lengthy room with a purposeful stride, with a purpose in mind, with every reason to put distance between himself and Anna. But the room grew ever longer with each step, and his fear cursed his brow with perspiration. If he stayed, what would come of it? If he looked to her once more, in her awful majesty, would he kill her then? Could he?
The mahogany doors lingered perilously far. They taunted him with their distance. They beckoned him with simple gold handles, with a single push and he might free himself of the stuffy space. Here was the dragon's lair, his mother's den, where she lashed all she saw with her terrible tongue. Here he was victimized. Here he could not draw on power without losing control of himself.
But as his hands finally, gratefully, touched the double doors, he felt the handles stiffen in his grasp. He pulled but once to find them locked. Loosing a low laugh, he pressed his forehead to the crack between the doors.
You're just like her. You two are one in the same. You both mock with false choice to teach me my place. You're both callous and cruel and incorrigible. You both see other people as playthings to manipulate.
But I've had enough.
"I admire your conviction, Elex. Most people wouldn't care to walk out on their own fortunes." She took another sip of tea before she retired her cup, and herself stood. Thin hands smoothed down the front of her dress to perfection, and she stepped carefully in matching white stilettos. The sound of her every step alone cut through his thoughts. "Did you forget your age, Elex? Let me remind you. You're sixteen. You're a minor. Your tawdry little forays into life on your own mean nothing. Your choice to leave… Means nothing. Until you're an adult, you live with us and you abide by our rules. Not yours."
She encroached on him, reached arms out to him. Fingers quite like his captured his shoulders, slid over his collar and caught him in an unwanted embrace from behind. "You're staying here, my dear." She pressed a kiss to his cheek. "And you're grounded until you're eighteen."
When her arms slipped from his shoulders, he opened his eyes. "I need you to open this door."
"Did your boyfriend plant cotton between your ears? You don't have say in this house.
"Come, sit. We have much to discuss." She beckoned him as she retreated to her favored chaise. A light groan punctuated her delicate stretch, and she combed fingers through her hair. "Really, Elex, we are glad to have you back. You couldn't have made a bigger mess of things, however. It'll be quite a while before you've made amends. Best to start now, while there's vigor in your bones. Well, dear?"
Elex checked his watch, counted the minutes. He watched the sun's tired rays reflect off the crystal surface. "Did my brother tell you why I disappeared?"
Anna scoffed. "He mentioned a boy. Then he said you mentioned turning into a monster. My dear, you have quite the imagination."
And you'll have quite the shock. Wordlessly he let hands slip from the handles, turned, and approached his seat once more. Tea awaited him. Conversation awaited him, one-sided as it would be. His mother likely had rules and regulations planned out in her head, already twice rehearsed in her excitement to reiterate them. Then she would foist upon him a list of burdens, send him to his room without dinner, and expect the day to end.
With malicious interest, he reminded himself: he had but fifteen minutes to humor her.
And once fifteen minutes were spent listening to her harsh laugh, her expositions, her dramatics, the time came for his own. It started with a split in his finger -- a hairline fracture, really - and spread out in a tantalizingly slow fashion. His mother never noticed it. He barely noticed it, but for the perceptible lack of pressure in that area. Soon the split grew, crawling from the tip of his finger to his hand, from his hand to his elbow, and further up clothing to unseen depths. He felt similar cracks over his face, his legs. They joined together in their journeys until the separated flecks of skin began to smolder, flicker and burn. They lifted upwards like billowing paper. Whole swaths of skin sloughed off his body to simmer and smoke. He sat forward as metal pipes formed out of the ether. And with every subsequent breath, smoke rose from his back.
His pupils welled outward like ink in water, absconding with his eyes. He still looked upon her, however, and waited for her shock.
And her shock came. It came forthright, unbidden, absent all restraint. Her skin paled quickly and her hands shot to her mouth, veritably clawing out her scream from a stuck throat. Her eyes shot open. He could nearly hear her heartbeat between them. Finally, her scream found voice -- she screamed again and again as she struggled out of her seat. She dashed with all the speed she could muster for the double doors, her key having been swiped out of her clutch.
"I can't stay with you, Mother. It isn't your choice to make." Faustite watched her form retreat, fear-stricken and desperate. He couldn't deny the delight of seeing her laid so low. Terror becomes you. "I have someone in my life who's just like you. She knows far more power and nothing of fear. You would like her, but she would find you wanting." He stood then, free of leaning so far forward on his seat. He drained the last dregs of his tea before he set the cup aside, directly on the delicate wood of the tea table.
"Goodbye for now. I'm sure we'll see each other again soon." She did not hear him, he knew, nor would she. Too busied she was between her terror and her denial, between knowing the monster and forgetting it. He waited not; the maid would come around soon, sensing Anna's turmoil, and spread the mess of his affairs. So Faustite stepped back, into the comfort of his own smoke, and vanished altogether.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ It's easier to tell a story when you can victimize someone. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWhen you can trawl their reputation over the rocks.
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Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 12:31 am
there will be time to murder and create late november
Smoke coiled and unfurled at the top of the narrow room, convulsing and pacing, burning out lungs and searing through eyes. It haunted this place as a perpetual reminder that Faustite could not walk among humans anymore, that he must wear a foreign skin to glean passage. The bitter, boiling adolescent sat with his shoulder binned against the narrow wall, unable to lean fully against it for the pipes that protruded from his back. A single shirt laid across dagger-nailed hands. Citrus, jasmine, rose each fought their desperate battles against the cloying scent of copper and moondust. Each breath taken against soft cotton beleaguered them further. Soon, they would smell like him -- the present-him, not the past-him. Not the him he used to want to be.
Another breath into the shirt and he tasted memory on his tongue. He felt the rare memory of newly-laundered blankets around his shoulders, of a fresh clothing basket taken to his room by the maid. He smiled into the shirt, hidden and secret, careful and protected from the clutches of his general. She would not see his impulses here. She could not see his paltry dealings with his mother.
She could not know.
But the indelible line between mother and matron washed ever thinner. His mother, austrian-born and american-raised, was a severe woman. A cold one, by most accounts. A woman who governed her children with the belief that unmet standards were a necessity in their upbringing. Faustite recalled the many days spent dreading his return to the household, for the letter grade held in hand didn't match her expectation. He merely accepted it later for how she described it -- that she sought to teach failure was surmountable, despite the sting -- and learned to disappoint with a level of grace. But lately, his mother became less the woman of wisdom.
She mourned a life unlived in her subtle, silent way. The stars in her eyes danced their sullen tune when she watched someone like Jada cross a runway. She graced her company with a wistful smile when meeting a lover once had, perhaps ages in the past now, where still memories lingered. Sometimes she would spread her attention across a book she read, a little too engrossed, because the conditions of life pained her just so. And sometimes more her weight dipped and she went on spending sprees for clothing that clung tightly to thinner wrists and smaller thighs. She never spoke of it -- not to him, not to her friends, not to the maid. She never trusted weakness unless it granted her power and opportunity. So she wasted -- slowly, carefully, perceptibly. She wasted until she became the woman she was now.
A woman not altogether different from Stroud Marinus. The pair shared a certain voracious appetite for the world. They devoured its secrets, its fruits of experiences. They each knew their way around a liquor cabinet with unnerving ease. They navigated social circles invited and coerced, with an ear for gossip and an eye for the unusual and a taste for the decadent. High social life treated them well, often to great advantage. His mother was as much a contributing factor to the Yorke name as his grandfather's groundbreaking inventions, whereas Stroud was a self-made woman beyond the depths of her ancient lineage. They each wore opulence like a bared snarl, a proper pair to their weaponized grace. And they each found it better that the world bend knee to them.
But their similarities ended there. Stroud Marinus knew no weakness. She fed off the world like a vulture on a carcass, picking clean every ounce of excitement and energy and euphoria left exposed to her. She so often cracked his marrow for the last dregs of his youth and innocence. She gorged herself on pipe tobacco and coffee and all the sins of mankind at once. And when her belly was fat and sated, she turned to him with greedy eyes. She could force her will upon anyone, and was clever enough to do so without so much as touching them. Her talents were minted in the torture trade -- and she expected him to learn it just the same. Stroud Marinus, a miserable woman not from her own misfortunes, but from those she inflicted on others.
Was it all from the taint of the Negaverse? Was that the general's curse manifest? Faustite wondered it since he first knew her -- since he first spotted the brokenness of their upper echelons. Was this the same Stroud Marinus that joined the Negaverse however many years ago? Or was she closer to his mother now, with a few cracks cleverly hidden from view?
It wouldn't matter, he realized, as he retired the shirt to subspace. Its texture flickered out of his hands, leaving them bare and wanting. Leaving them silhouetted in the thickness of his own smog. She smells the weakness in me. She'll have me how she wants me. She'll burn out all the parts she never needed with the help of this monster -- this youma. But she's done that for some time now. She wasn't idle in all these months I spent under her. Something is changing in me. I can't be unaffected by wartime strategy and Machiavellism and lessons on how to break ribs. She's affected me in ways I couldn't see. She's touched me in places I can't forget.
And it wasn't personal. It's never personal. All the broken minds and battered bodies and shattered souls she left behind weren't born of any grudge. She never cared for hostilities -- she only finds them amusing. No, this is all barebones obligation.
No wonder Chrysocolla follows her relentless. If she treats her nobodies like this, then what does it mean for her somebodies? She aims for Schörl's graces out of desperation. Pity for her; she'll never get them.
She'll only know the distant politeness of disappointment.
Faustite shifted to lay prostrate on his stomach, with only the thin, wan light of crystals creeping over his pale face. He knew Schörl changed him irrevocably when he could not find the wherewithal to hate her anymore. He once held stores of it captive in his frail scrawny frame, and she stole it out from beneath his watch little by little, so carefully and imperceptibly, until he sat amongst a surplus of nothing. He never once knew the difference. He never caught her, even between all the quips and wiles and wry smiles with which she'd pepper him unendingly.
Was Schörl a catalyst? Faustite guessed as much; she sped up the inevitable in her own garish way. It wasn't her that would finally break his empathy. It wasn't her that would pare skin from bones. It wasn't her that would finalized his rebirthed, afterbirthed image. No, that honor and travesty was his to hold. And even as he shuddered against the thought now, stricken as he was on his stale cot, that day approached inevitably. His experiences promised it.
Hopeite already showed him the pain of dehumanization. The knight, Schörl, and Leucite each confirmed it. While the rest of the Negaverse huddled into their meager niceties, their banal choices to avoid his youmafication, they each stepped forward and spat their derision back at him. He was nothing — less than nothing — for the creature that clouded his eyes. He was youma. He was monster. He was the creature meant to hunt the night.
He was the creature cursed to lose wealth and lifestyle and friends and future and family. He was the abomination reviled by his own mother. A slow understanding crept over him as he turned his misfortunes in his mind. Youmafication cost him the almost-sixteen years pent as Elex Yorke. It pared him away from a future of higher learning. Cost him his relationships. Forever altered his ability to trust. Demeaned him in the eyes of others. Damned him to the status of an abomination. Confiscated him from making connections with other officers. Doomed him to example status. Sentenced him to being a warning to all who considered starseeds too closely. Pinned him as lacking self-control. Identified him as imperfect, unwhole, sullied.
But it gave him perspective.
Even for all his bemoaning of the past, Faustite did not miss it as he expected. Sherpa rugs and fluted champagne glasses and trips to the French Riviera each brought their own unique and illustrious experiences. Each rang hollow — reeking of a life lived in a bell jar. Elex Yorke stagnated long before Stroud Marinus caught him in her hooks. Elex Yorke learned with enough ferocity that he then coasted on his own wit and faced few challenges in life. He needed no hardship of a job, nor did he face difficulties in his schooling. He was here nor there about friends, enemies, lovers. He lived the same empty life that youma endure, complete with lacking joie de vivre.
Fingertips spread for the edges of the room, finding the cut corners easily. Pieces of hewn rock jutted out at him, daring him to catch his pipes on their unyielding surface. He'd done it twice now. But that pain taught me, didn't it? Don't lean on the wall.
Is that all this is? Pavlovian training? How trite. All it takes to change a man is impulse manipulation. Purchases through pain. The hot stove teaches better than the carrot, doesn't it? It shouldn't surprise me. I can't put myself above basic human conditioning.
Human. I'm closer to it now than I've ever been, thanks to her.
But there's an ocean of progress left to cross. She passed me the chart. Showed me how to read the stars. Led me as a captain and a Captain. I suppose I should thank her now. Pity that. A wry grin met the darkness. His darkness.
Every day spent here is a day away from the life I never wanted to lead. From social decadence. From character assassinations. From soirees and souffles and parquets. This is the break I always wanted -- the one I paid for with my humanity. What a waste it would be if I chose not to use it.
I sound like her already.
Sleep ensconced him alongside his smoke. He counted the faint whorls caused by his breath with every exhalation. They coiled and turned, danced and rippled until they teased out the crack in the door. The crack in the world. It wasn't the fluted champagne glasses that made me into who I am. No, my life was made from pain and deprivation. From Schörl's uninvited interventions and Umber's snap decisions. Why stop it here? There's so much more ground left to cover. So much of me left unchanged.
The rest of my old life still has meaning. There's more changes to make. I have to finish with my family while their names can still hurt me. Otherwise it's wasted potential.
It's inefficient.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ This is the break I always wanted.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe one I paid for with my humanity.
Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2017 8:18 pm
and time for all the works and days of hands thanksgiving day
He dressed to impress. The silk ribbon of a tie wrapped around his neck like a noose. Polished shoes reflected the world in darkness. His coat, still black, was mismatched to the summer months when heat pressed into their bones. Dusts of cold wrapped around him chokingly once he stepped outside, orbiting like a resentful mother.
He knew one of those.
He saw her in passing houses sometimes, yawning out at the world with her cruel indifference. He saw her in the faces of women pushing carriages, women at the opera house, women crossing the forever betweens to move from one obligation to the next. Sometimes he put her there. Sometimes he felt guilty about it. Sometimes she was a car crash victim, or a starseed victim, or a soon-to-be victim with wild eyes and a knife in hand. Sometimes she was the one to push the energy into his palms, to grow fat, prickly orbs out of her own life force. Sometimes he thought of her when he swallowed a starseed.
But his mother made an art out of not-there. Those houses he passed showed him an empty darkness in their windows. The few people around were unrecognizable to him, huddling away like they were with their faces drawn tight. He passed empty cars. Empty shops. Empty lives.
No mother. Not here, not there, not anywhere.
He knew where she was, of course. There could only be one place for her today, one tradition, one expectation that she could never bring herself to miss. He mounted the steps to the old house with heat and cheer burning out of his windows. The wooden stairs creaked familiarly. The banister always felt so smooth to the touch. He reached the door, tried the handle, found it locked. Tried his key. The door promised him entry, but the deadbolt was locked. Another key, then. Finally it slid open and allowed him inside.
The house was dim with candle warmth. No maid met him to take his coat. He shirked it all the same and left it hung over the top of the rak, obscuring it like a hiding child. A few steps across the tile pushed their echoes back into his ears. He passed old pottery collected from too many journeys, once displayed proudly and now painted into the background in so many mental strokes. He passed pictures of the sea, of a happy family, of lives long gone to time. He passed doors to rooms he never cared for. Finally dinner plates and voices clashed like mismatched patterns. Another pair of doors, another hallway. To the dining room at the cusp of the hour, she always said. Be on time or you won't get your dinner. A promise in his early years, a warning in his later years.
Wooden double doors with their hyaline arch stood in his path. He pressed into them and found the dining room waiting, lit with candle and sconce, bare in its perpetual remodel, pregnant with its hearty spread of food. Honey cinnamon sweet potatoes, bacon and cheddar green bean casserole, balsamic-roasted brussels sprouts, rosemary and cream cheese mashed potatoes, spiced wine, mulled cider, succulent turkey cuts, honey roasted carrots and parsnips, tangy whole-cranberry sauce, warm cornbread and more sat on plates aplenty. The meager family count of three far outmatched the decadent display. He cleared his throat and his family looked upon him in food-muted absence.
His brother was the first to speak. "Dad?" The word glittered with fear. "Call the cops?" His eyes lit on Faustite like a hummingbird -- too keen, too energetic.
His father snapped into reality next. "Elex?" His face fell into fat-laden wrinkles when he saw the dark eyes, the dark hands, the pluming smoke. "Is this your idea of a joke?"
"Sit down. Please." His mother motioned with a too-perfect hand to one of three empty chairs.
"Mom, you can't be --"
"We are going to have a nice, quiet Thanksgiving dinner. Elex, you're joining us, aren't you dear?" She flashed her perfect pearl smile with her dagger-shadowed eyes.
Faustite made no sound of assent, but his feet carried him to the table. He drew one back and sat on it in the way a violinist does -- at the edge of the seat with back straight. Every time he started to slacken, his pipes pressed their pressure-fingers into his ribs. "You didn't invite me, Mother." He reached unbidden for the bowl of cream corn, ladled out his portion, retired the dish. "Will you pass the carrots?"
She did so with no intention of letting their hands overlap. "Heaven knows where you're staying now, honey." Her nose wrinkled perceptibly, but she smiled past it with a weaponized grace. "You smell like you haven't been taking care of yourself. Tell me, sweetheart. Are you actually staying with that boy? Or did you dump him and move to a sewer?"
Dry-mouthed, Erol spoke up. "We don't have to talk about this."
"Don't we?" Anna froze her smile in place. She tilted her head toward her son just so, eyes gleaming. "Your little brother crawled out of his moldering hole to pay us a housecall. A proper host never turns down her guest's conversation even if he's simply inflicting himself on her. Consider this a lesson in hosting etiquette."
Faustite looked askance at his brother, though Erol wouldn't know it for the holes that were his eyes. "You won't talk about me like that, Mother."
"Oh?" She looked to him at once, eyes burning like bright coals in her head. She looked at him with all the force of her will concentrated down into a pinprick between his dead eyes.
"It's bad hosting etiquette."
She laughed, and the sound rang out like broken champagne flutes. "What would you know of hosting etiquette? You invited yourself in and sat down with such obvious entitlement. You wear those atrocious-looking pipes in my house with your garish contacts and your passé outfit like it's still Halloween. Who are you trying to fool, Elex? Yourself? My dear, you'll never have an ounce of social power with the way you're going about this." Her small fingers absconded with a fork and set into her mashed potatoes daintily. Every movement made was prim and controlled, well-measured and accounted for. She never made mistakes, only deliberate missteps.
The stuffy fear that settled over the table like a blanket slowly began to lift. His father turned his sagging, flagging attention to his food once more, the queer supernaturalism to his youngest son's appearance finally dissolving away. Erol could move once again, and his overbright eyes kindled with a familiar anger. His lips pursed, and Faustite knew his foot started to bob under the table. Wickedness boiled within each of them. Food was swallowed down to buy time, to measure words against their outcomes.
Faustite only added more food to his plate. As he chewed, a faint smile threatened his placid features. Go ahead, Mother. Flaunt your fabled superiority. Keep trying for that bitter end to your evening. He placed his fork by his plate with a telling delicacy. "You mistake me. Wanting social power means wanting leverage. Wanting gifts or favors or gossip. It assumes that I want something from you. But you don't have anything to offer, do you? It's why you're always clamoring up every interpersonal ladder you can find, reaching for fruits you don't deserve. It's why you're always befriending and defacing all the right people at all the right times. You need to fake your own worth until no one second guesses you. You have to steal pittances for your valueless words.
"Real social power doesn't require caricatures and dramatics. Threat isn't necessary when people know what to expect from their betters. Why do you think the Beauregardes sit at the top of their social circle? It isn't for their parties, or their fundraisers, or their speeches. It isn't for buying all the best champagnes." He reached for a glass of spiced wine and raised it to his lips.
"You will not lecture me." Her lips pursed into a fine line, the one crease in her face. Soon it smoothed into yet another smile. "Erol, please escort your brother to the door. He's overstayed his welcome."
Wood scraped over travertine tile. Erol stood, tossed his silk napkin to the table, and strode around his mother's place at the head of it. His squared fingertips danced over the back of her chair as wordless reassurance. "Come on," he muttered, and caught hold of his brother's collar. Smoke furled from his back, not from a toy or a clever contraption, but his back, the older Yorke realized --
Faustite pressed a hand to his chest -- through his chest. The emptiness of it sunk into his fingers. They felt artlessly annoyed when they touched his brother's starseed, when they plucked it like a rotten fruit from the cage of his ribs and his too-tight skin. Faustite brought it away, out into the light where it sparkled like a star pulled from the sky. Erol's body struck the ground. Faustite rested the starseed next to his hors d'oeuvres fork.
His father gaped and gaped and gaped until words fluttered into his mouth. "Erol?" He rose, but his legs wouldn't hold. He sat back down. "Are you okay? Erol? Son?" His meager words barely reached the other side of the room.
Erol never stirred.
His mother tightened her grip on the table. "Do something," she hissed out, her gaze stuck fast on her husband. Seconds later, she wrenched it to her black-eyed son. "Do something."
"Have you figured it out yet?"
"Fix him."
"Do I need to tell you why the Beauregardes sit where they are?"
"Elex --"
"I'm disappointed in you, Mother."
She breathed a shaken sigh. Her voice dropped low, barely above a breath. "Because they're shareholders in each and every business."
"That's right." Faustite sawed into a piece of turkey, the meat flaying into strips as he cut against the grain. "I'm going to finish my dinner. If he isn't dead by then, I'll consider putting it back."
His father spoke in a husky voice. "What is it?"
"It's his soul." Faustite bit into the piece of turkey and found it wanting. The rock at his side hummed its demands for attention. "If he goes too long without it, he'll die."
"What do you want?" She asked with a perceptible tremor. She looked longingly to her prostrate son, but her hands were chained to the table. Tears collected like shining coins in mascara-laden eyes.
Faustite drew a deep breath, though he could not stifle his smile. Smoke coiled out to paint the ceiling. "I'm already getting what I want." Paired with his satisfaction was a familiar, keening hurt that played its solemn tune while he ate. Silence bullied its way into the room but for the tireless shuffle of silverware. As they toiled, he grew fat on the day's stolen desserts.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ You need to fake your own worth until no one second guesses you.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxYou have to steal pittances for your valueless words.
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Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2017 7:53 am
that lift and drop a question on your plate early december
Elex called out
to a beleaguered boy who never answered.
He listened well
as footsteps raced as heartbeats raced in tandem down a broken alley.
The name on his tongue tasted gunmetal sweet. He voiced it to the nothing. The nothing answered back.
"Erol."
His brother never said a word. All his voice trampled down down down into macadam. Into cobblestone.
He wanted to smile, teeth dagger-sharp, with wit as a whitener. But he knew (in pain aplenty)
that he would not see a second sight. That he would not see a second fight.
In the breadth of a minute of a thought misspent of a breath expelled Erol melted into the dying roses and the melted yellows in the sunset.
Loss planted its wicked claws into his resolution. His voice touched the sky, thin as glass.
"You'll miss me."
Winter's breath bore that rotten promise to the clouds.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ He voiced it to the nothing.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe nothing answered back.
Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 9:16 am
time for you and time for me mid-december
Faustite felt his lungs heave the old, dead dust from the Citadel. Smoke coils curled their fingers across the floor. A last buzz announced his phone's death rattle, and he seized it with hands too black to see in the dark. The lock screen glowered. His father left him messages again.
Faustite felt his dull blackness slip away to a feeble afterimage. Trees rose up around him in the evening's dim awareness as the cold, blue day faltered. His father was somewhere in this sea of naked trunks, but Faustite was the shark in these cloudless waters -- he passed among the trees unseen, even where he cut stark lines into the snow with his profile. The nature path ran on and on and on, with so few footprints to betray its use. Nothing stirred in its borders but for the canadian geese and the introverts. Occasional leaves dotted the floor and crunched underfoot like broken teeth. Like unswept debris on the seafloor. Later, in the deluge of messages, he saw his father warned him to bring a coat. Autumn's turn had ended; jackets were out of season. His father cautioned against hypothermia.
But Faustite couldn't feel the cold that day, nor any other day.
Benches sat empty. Branches sat empty. Paths meandered on for blocks without a person in sight. He approached the near-center of the park, where lamps cast their lights out like murky globes. There, on the lip of an old monument, sat a familiar figure. Slouched under the weight of his age and sex and success, his father looked sunken into himself. He looked wilted like a plant watered too many times. Like his life was overspent on opulence.
He never doubted that truth.
Faustite chanced his words on the still air. "Father."
The returning voice was cordial, almost happy. Old whiskey-tinted tones flowed back to him on the winter crispness, alongside a bone-warming smile. "Your brother calls me 'Dad' now. I kind of like it." Elon looked up at last, his face collapsing into a crinkled smile. His busied hands finished toying with his iPhone. "It's good to see you again, kid. No matter what you look like."
Faustite stayed at the edge of the clearing where branches cast their waning shadows over his face. He did not speak. Smoke flowed from him intermittently, with every rise of his chest. Swallowing, he looked expectantly toward Elon.
His father's tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth as he drew in a breath. His head nodded like a bobblehead, and his face froze in a perpetual half-sneeze -- Faustite recognized the expression as one he never understood. It only came when Elex injured himself, or cried, or took home a poor grade with no particular interest in the outcome. But he suspected his father enjoyed being an enigma at times; he once warned Elex that people love a mystery.
But when Elon spoke, such thoughts wove out into the sky. "I'm worried about you. Hell, anyone would be. I've never seen anyone turn out like…" Trailing off, a board-straight hand measured the captain top to bottom to top again. "That. Nobody I know's ever stopped having eyes. And you don't find anything like what's coming out of your back. Not even in those botched surgery shows that you and your brother used to watch. Those damn things still give me the creeps," he finished with a comical shudder.
Faustite remained in his silence.
"The point is, I need to know you're okay. I don't…" He paused, and framed his beard in a trembling hand. His eyes lit up like lantern lights, and Faustite nearly broke his own silence. "I don't think I can help you anymore, son. This is all so damn far from what I'm used to. I want to help you, I really do. I want to do right by my kid. Come on, just give me something to go off of. It's not asking for much." He breathed a slow sigh.
The branches trembled anticipatorily as Faustite finally stepped from the treeline. With black hands folded over his chest, he approached the old monument. Someone old and white and forgotten, he wagered. I never realized how hard it was to be forgotten. I disappeared at sixteen years old. I disappeared with no accolades to my name, no real friends, and no great history. But my parents carried my name so stubbornly that I'm more famous now than I ever was.
It must be the hardest trick in the world to disappear. Even Houdini is found in books and newspapers and memories.
Faustite halted, turned, and sat next to his father on the wide, stony lip. When he spoke, he did so slowly and deliberately, as if tasting every word for its proper flavor. "I don't know much about what happened to me. No one does. Maybe no one will. But we turn into monsters when we make poor decisions. Someone forced those decisions on me. Being branded with these choices... It was a price I never asked to pay for deeds I never asked to commit."
Long, needlepoint fingernails traced their pale paths down black fingers. "Now that person is missing. Now I look like this. Now the world turns with all its benign indifference. I lead a different life now -- one regimented and sterile and old like the rocks this city was built on. I'm not rich anymore. I'm not sheltered anymore. I don't even answer to my own name.
"But I don't regret it."
They were divided, then, by the long, calculating minutes. They dragged their bodies by the two men, one old and one stuck in the crashing deluge of youth. One human and one not. But the seconds marched on under their cover of silence, and no one spoke.
No one spoke until they heard a child's distant laughter.
At last, Elon sucked in a breath and spat out a response. "I want to give you advice, Elex. Hell, I want to give you the whole world. You're my son -- nothing will change that. Not even these… What are they, exhaust pipes?" The man frowned as gnarled fingers found their lopsided rims. Smoke laced intimately with his hands. "I think you're beyond that now. There's been this rift between us, and it just gets bigger every time we meet. It scares me, you know? It scares me to think that… That my son is drifting away from me. That our relationship is starting to fall apart.
"But it isn't just us. I don't know if Erol told you or not. The whole family's having problems now. Your mother, she's a strong woman, but what you did during Thanksgiving really did a number on her. It hit Erol pretty hard, too. That whole thing about the gem… He looked all shook up afterward, and didn't want to say much about it. He spent the rest of that day in his bedroom and didn't come out, not even for Chelsea. And your mom just put on the same brave face she always uses and just never bothered talking about it. You know how she gets. If something's bothering her, she'll avoid the damned thing until the world's coming apart all around her. Usually she does a pretty good job pretending that nothing's going on, but this time? This time she had tears in her eyes. For days. She even cried some last week. She misses you, Elex. We all do.
"We miss the way things were, but we can't have it back. Much as it pains me to say it, money can't buy that back for us." Elon loosed a long sigh. "Feels like a good time for a drink."
Faustite snorted, then laughed with a low irony. The clutch in his stomach tightened and tightened and tightened. He felt the way it churned with a marked helplessness, a hopelessness, like a fate to which he was sentenced. At last, he found common ground with the ineffectual protagonists in Lovecraft's many stories -- the intelligent, emotional, wholly pointless men who stood first to be devoured by the god. But was he the man or was he the god? The question caught him in its jaws.
Should he regret this widening pit? Teeth churned on the flesh of his lip. He searched the ground for answers and came up empty.
"... Elex?"
The creature's gaze snapped up, refocused on the deltas beside his father's eyes.
"I think I lost you for a second there." A brief laugh marked his lack of mirth. With deliberate care, Elon reached out to clap his prodigal son on the shoulder. "Did you catch any of that?"
"No." Fingers steepled between his knees, then formed their knit of bone. They itched for work.
Elon readied a long sigh, yet one never came. "Your mother and I think it's time to… Maybe take a break. Now I don't want you to panic -- it's not the end of the world -- but we could both use the time to collect our thoughts. And don't go on assuming you're the root cause of this. You're not. Your brother tried to blame… Nevermind, that's not important. What is important is that you know we both still love you, just like we both still love your brother, and that you know we're all going to work through this however we can. I'll always be here for you, okay? I'll always love you. That'll never disappear, no matter what your mother and I decide.
"Heh, that came out a little better the second time around." He smiled forlornly.
Faustite sat silently, his lashes heavy over sightless eyes. He felt detached, then -- foreign and cacophonous.
Rancorous.
Wholly unbelonging to this earth and all its meager memories.
He licked his lips for the taste of meat -- for a corpse's pantomime. When did he --
Nevermind, that's not important. The irony burned like an agony. Were the two really so congruous? Faustite snorted, and his focus exploded in a searing, messy brilliance of lines. They struck through his father, through the dozen relationships carefully cultivated, through his foreign self, through his familiar self, through the taste of bitter grapefruit, through the incomprehensible geometry of a sphere, through worlds lost, through books read and churning seas and epiphanies and epitaphs and epiphoria and compulsions and the lurid color of violence and the sun cooking his back --
Faustite dug his nails into blood, and he reeled back to their tepid conversation. Divorce. His father was talking divorce. The word felt so…
Anticlimactic.
"So who's leaving the house?" The words came automatically. A typewriter hammered out his lines in his head.
"Well… We're still figuring that out. Your brother came up with a great idea, though, and we're going with that first. He suggested we should all take a vacation, you know. Go somewhere special. Take some time off from each other. It's been a long time coming since I've had any vacation from the job, and your brother's got all of winter break ahead of him, so we're taking off for a month. He'll visit Florence with me for at least a week, then he said he wanted to backpack across Europe with his best friend. Your mother said she'd probably go back to Austria to stay with her grandparents. I'd offer for you to come with us, but…" He gave a solemn nod toward Faustite's pipes.
"I don't want you to feel left out, kiddo. I know it isn't much, but you can have the house to yourself while we're gone. Chelsea can still stop by to clean the place, or we can tell her to take the month off. It's your choice, and you don't have to make it now.
"I just want you to know that… That we still care about you. Whoever you decide to be. Whatever you look like. And we still want to look out for you, Elex. Even if your mother and I have trouble seeing eye to eye about other things. So if there's anything you need, let us know. We'll make it happen. Okay?"
"Okay." Faustite nodded vaguely.
Elon issued another clap on the shoulder, then drew his sun-stained arm around his son's narrow breadth. Pipes framed him with such a thorny declaration that he could not pull his youngest son into a hug. With the way Elex felt so surreal and austere in that moment, Elon questioned himself. Even past the unmistakable quietude and mannerisms, was this the same Elex from a year ago? Could he still be considered Elex?
He had to hold onto that trust. "Love you, kid."
Faustite remained silent under the weighted bend of his father's arm. "When are you leaving?"
"Monday. I know that only gives you the weekend to think about this. I should've told you sooner --"
"No." Faustite raised a hand between them, then excused himself from their closeness. He felt hot -- too hot against the snowscape with its naked trees. "Enjoy your vacation." He felt his feet pull him from his father's purview, and the forest wrapped its wicked solitude about his narrow shoulders. He swallowed down the numbness that pushed its way inside and festered in his heart.
I know I shouldn't begrudge you. But I do.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ I'm not rich anymore.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI'm not sheltered anymore.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI don't even answer to my own name.
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Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 9:18 am
and time yet for a hundred indecisions ten minutes later
and for a hundred visions and revisions christmas eve
The birch tree by Elex Yorke
Mother, you're so brutal in your execution. It's gauche.
Your legs frame crooked splinters to a lopsided picture. A picture hung three inches too short that makes a mess of your home.
You draw the eye up the swell of its trunk. A single perfect stroke. The hot jugular burning the life out of your canvas.
But you missed the rule of thirds: your strokes are too tight too short un finished
You choke the canvas with your dry irreverence (you never listened to your sons) (or your husband, but what good was he) and it chokes you in return.
Your self-portrait is a tree too narrow, too precise. You rendered too much. You rendered until you couldn't paint another bark chip with your unsteady brush. At the bottom, swollen and knotty. At the top, parched and withered. Your birch is so lifeless. Have you ever seen a tree before?
Sometimes they're covered with tire swings (like how we're covered with veins)
But you are you, you always brag. You are you, so aggressive and repressive and disrespectful and deceitful and haughty and gruesome and gauche and garish and cowardly and neglectful and hateful and vague and flighty and destructive and swallowed and bloated and cold and prone and so ******** disappointing since you left us all hanging three inches too short.
You forgot your viewer again. What were they supposed to see in your bent boughs, your broken bushel of leaves? Your legs frame crooked splinters to a lopsided picture.
I will never take my place under your shade, for I call a hack a hack, and you, mother mine fashioned your crown out of paint-thick leaves
but I'll keep your shoes (they're divine)
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ You choke the canvas with your dry irreverencexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxand it chokes you in return.
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Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2017 11:48 am
before the taking of a toast and tea christmas day
Faustite's mother always warned him never to wrap a gift with white paper, so he did, and found that she wasn't always wrong. He knew she kept the boxes and bags and baskets for all her pretty things, and easily found the box to fit her too-expensive shoes. It still smelled of too many months spent in storage, for cruel summer was a line best worn sparingly. A line best worn without blood, perhaps, or those sticky flecks of skin that pried off her feet. But those were what marked shoes as used, and what promised a story to prospective users. Faustite wasn't ignorant to that.
People wore stories when they lacked their own. No one ever heard from the collectors of murderabilia, connoisseurs of Nazi teacups or curators of spent bullets from John Dillinger shootouts. No one asked about their fascinating lives -- they only cared to hear of the tattooed skin framed into the coffee table. The locket of hair trimmed and mounted on the wall. The bloodstained shoes on their feet.
Faustite long since learned that these stories chipped away at him in a thousand imperceptible ways, until they left behind a landscape of scars. They touched him with fingernails too sharp, and he too eagerly reciprocated that touch. He was the unsocialized animal at the table. The otherworld's monster sitting in on a normal Thanksgiving. Those stories shaped his identity at the price of a hundred aches, large and small, spaced all over the too-delicate too-white of his body.
He cut two large squares of paper, placed them one atop the other. They spooned into each other perfectly, and crowning them was the prodigal. Careful cuts left the papers just overlapping on the bottom of the box. Lined with parallel strips of tape and creases cut ruler-sharp, Faustite rehearsed his way through gift wrapping. It felt so mundane to black fingers. Too benign, perhaps.
Much more benign than an ear in the fridge.
Stroud read into action with a librarian's wit. She would have her gift for all it meant -- for its would-haves written into its use, for the spatter of story still stuck to its soles. She could feel all the ways that he would've worn such stories in the life he forthrightly abandoned. Perhaps she'd wear his loss well, too.
She must for the part she was to play. Dinner still loomed and plans still laid half-finished, even as rope choked his heart. He couldn't falter. Couldn't dally. Men made time for grieving with their funerals and their bereavement days, but he could find no solace in the three short hours given to him each day. Loss was the new gain. Destitution was the new prosperity. He wrapped with ribbon white and gold, pulled so taut that it threatened to cut into the perfect paper. Everything cut these days.
His name signed like a knife point. The card found its festive red envelope and the pair disguised well against one another. Weighted down with all their sober intention, they drained Faustite of all his restless energy by the time he reached their destination. He didn't falter; the gifts were placed on Stroud's boring workbench, next to all her clever tools for making facsimiles of the genuine. There they would wait for the curator's eye. She wouldn't miss them.
You exhaust me, Stroud. I want to hate you for it. The thought came unbidden as he cast a last glance over the place before its seamless fade into the gnawing Citadel. He wanted to sleep for a week.
┈┈┈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┈┈┈ You exhaust me, Stroud.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI want to hate you for it..
