literature

Stage Five of Ground Zero [K 6.26.14]

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Literature Text

We have lived, we two together, since that September fall. Since that fall in September, when wreckage was created so we could stare out of darkness into day, and feed on silence that encapsulates these two spots alone in the city. Two giant footprints sunk into the earth. And us.

My friend, she greets me today with a touch and a hug, wrapping her long black arms around me so I can count every one of her twelve fingers. She tends to me with a tenderness I have missed, and I share my yellow-toothed smile with her.
“Today you are like thunder,” I tell her, and so for the moment that is her name.
My friend giggles and wiggles her fingers at me, making rumbling noises, and I think today I have chosen right. We curl up together beneath the marble as the people outside drag fingertips along our lengths, whispering prayers.
I watch the moon rise in the sky, white coin in blue afternoon, and try to remember what I’ve been forgetting. The man in the moon tells me something, and I’m sad, but my friends twines closer around me until I can feel her heartbeat in my chest. It’s nice not to be alone.
The people drift away now, and lightning crackles in my friend’s throat. Her eyes are obsidian, and I am afraid. With a twist, I untangle myself from her, some nudge of instinct raising the hairs on my neck.
She strikes in a bright flash that leaves me breathless, her poison racing through my veins and muddying my clear-water mind. I cry, craving her venom, crawling toward her, wishing for pain from her cloud-covered hands.
But I survive, in darkness, and when I wake she is gone.

My friend, he greets me today with a secret and a lie. His eyes are the color of a leaf when the grass has made it a little less green, and his voice is a whisper.
“Breeze?” I ask, and he nods. I think of once when he was Wind, and she was terrible. I am happy to let him tousle my  hair, and do not even wail with jealousy when he caresses the faces of the people that watch our darkness, missing us completely as we huddle at the bottom, beneath the water. He tells each of them the same secret, and I understand him.
At times today, when certain people arrive at our dual footprints, he is Wind too, all at once, tearing people’s hats and umbrellas from them, and she tells them the secret and he spins away, laughing. I grumble, and he murmurs once more in my ear, and I sleep.
In the night, my friend’s eyes are emeralds, and he pulls the air toward him as I stir, startled. I gasp for my breath, but he takes that too, and they are all the Air that ever was as they tell me the biggest secret of all, that all secrets are lies and nobody tells the truth anymore.
“And you?” I want to ask, but they have already left me, taking speech with them. They are the one body and I am the one blood.
What is it I am supposed to remember?

My friend, she greets me today with a bite and a kiss. Crimson stains her mouth but I kiss her anyway, my lips bleeding, and she tastes like heartbreak. I touch the edges of her, and she fills me with pleasure, a being for which I do not have a name.
I open my mouth and breathe into her instead, and she joins with me, pinning me down as far above people back away, finding each other. Man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, and her and me. I see no difference. Everything is in the way I lose myself, dissolving into her to forget my pain – though where it came from I don’t know. She is fire and sweetness. She is life.
I can tell, this time, for the first and the thousandth, that she is not meant to last, but telling is not the same as knowing. The people don’t know either. They don’t want to. I don’t want to. I just want.
My friend takes all I am, and leaves herself inside me in a spray of white and red, and I receive it, wishing for salvation. She is a prayer, stealing my life, and it feels like everything to allow it.
My mind is a fire that burns up thought until there is nothing to think of.

My friend, it greets me today with a farewell. It holds up ten fingers, like I supposed to read its name on its palms, but I never learned to turn black on white into meaning. The people gathered around the footprints do it every day. It is why they are here, for etchings on marble that will box them off from each other. I can do that too, but I don’t need the etchings – and I don’t want to, anyway. I want my friend with me instead. I touch its hands, and it tells me my ending.
Today is a day of mourning, but that is every day, and it can’t be remembrance because there have been no days before this. My friend holds me in my sadness, because that is the gift it has brought me.
There were trumpets this morning from the sky, and a cloth in three colors that reminded me of the little cloths the people all carry around here. A voice spoke in the people’s language. Ten years, the voice said. My friend touched me then as I looked up through the water, so I called it Ten.
Tonight it has only itself left to give. I consume it slowly, wondering if it were ever only just a part of me, only a piece of my mind that existed outside me, comforting my deepest fear of being one, one person only. It is not comforting now as it slides down my throat. It is cold, and tastes like tears.
The only thing I hated was being left behind, and now it has left me. Has this happened before? As Grief settles in my stomach and wraps its coils around my heart, I understand.
I have always been alone.
Current state of mind: Really frustrated and angry with this piece.

It was supposed to have an underlying metaphor, but I was told -- as with every single one of my pieces -- that it wasn't clear at all, that I'd need to explicitly state my meaning before it would make sense. At this point I feel like I should give up on anything with subtlety, because every time I try and fail. (Think "Rise," "Untangled," etc.)

The two points I initially tried to have as subtext:
1. Location of piece.
2. Identity of accompanying creature.

I just gave up and more or less stated them, only to be told they still weren't clear. I'm done.

Does it need a mature content label?
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Comments13
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Crystal-Magic13's avatar
Isn't the friend solitude?
And is the person below the water, having drowned?
I like it a lot!