Forceful writing

They say one of the best times to write is when you feel horrible inside. It’s then that your words can have depth unimaginable. In ways, this is true. In ways, however, I feel empty. I fantacize aoout death because I want to stop hurting, and death would eliminate the hurt. I can write about that, but there isn’t much more I can elaborate on, at the moment.

I can try, and here goes. I wanted to read a book, a book about fairies. IN fact, the book is called ‘faireies’. I looked through the first couple pages, gazing at the illustrations and reading a little bit about the Cornish beliefs. The boundaries kept by the fairy folk, elf folk alike fascinated me. It was just past the boundaries of human properties that you would find the fairies and elves. There, you could be tricked by all sorts of fancies-intelligent vegetation, living and material tunes, even whispers and you could even be fooled by another human. Of course, it wasn’t a real human in origin.

I like this book. I think I will continue reading for a while, It reminds me of the past, when I would wander through the forests listening to music, reading poetry and turning into something else. I miss the forests, and I wonder now, if that is why I think about committing suicide. I cannot go home. Home, in so many ways, does not exist.

I want to write and yet, I want to stop writing. This feeling is so complex that I couldn’t be explained in its entirety.

I feel horrible inside, but I think I will try to sleep. Sometimes, sleep is how I stay alive.

The Morbid Ghost, Shared Interests

“I’m going to tell you what the sun feels like to a dead man. “

I spoke to nothing because nothing was all that was left when the end didn’t come. It’s like the universe in a bottle, confined with no end. The sun would be merciful if only I could fly that far.

 The sun is a ball of fire, when far away from humans, it burns the top layer of their skin. I was human once, and I can vaguely remember strolling along the Sicilian coast basking in the sunlight. I think that happened, just as I think I remember the taste of fresh bread and fruit. These things are distant, but the sun to a dead man is something I can relate to. At the moment, the sun is digging its fingers into my flesh and sending tingling sensations from top to bottom. My head hurts, it’s filled with thousands of buzzing insects throbbing beneath my scalp and my fingers, they are growing, stretching outward expanding the bed of my nails. The vast network of my circulatory system is alive with burning blood. I feel it and it’s as if I am human, but not quite. My objective is to let the sun finish burning me. I have high hopes, although I’ve lost count of my suicidal attempts.

So why will it work this time? It won’t.

I open my eyes and they are alive with fire as well. My left eyelid sticks open, but I peel it free. There is little moisture and it is pink with my damned blood. I wipe the pale red splotches from beneath my eyes.

“It hurts. Good.”

“Why is it good for you to hurt?”

The voice is smooth and sweet, and It encases me in its loveliness. It sounds like a woman, and because I love to look at women so much, I have to see this one as well.  I turn to see something moving against the backdrop of the treeline.  It is thin, a momentary smudge in the green landscape. I watch the thing grow bigger, painting a gray smudge against my surroundings. This is no ordinary woman, this one is a phantom.

“Hi there.”

The gray soup boils in the air. It turns and swirls creating knots of solid looking pieces. The pieces meld together and pull into portions. Two portions form hands and one large ball of smoke forms a mass high and center. A head and face, surrounded by red billowy hair frames the image making an expression. It smiles.

“hi”

She was beautiful, or rather her own memory of herself was comely. I know a bit about phantoms and that’s how it works. When you see a ghost, you are only seeing an image of how the dead saw themselves in life. Of course, they could be projecting the most attractive rendering of themselves to date, but either way, a ghost was only a memory incarnate. I’ve seen only a few ghosts before. My brother was a phantom, he came to me long after his death. His apparition was the only one I had encountered until I moved to the New World. Here, I saw things that weren’t ghosts, they were something else.

“Seems as though you’re deep in thought, sir.”

“yes, I was thinking of…phantoms, to be exact, demons rather. Are you friend or foe?”

She looked confused by my question. The features contorted sending tendrils of gray spinning away from her face.

“Friend or foe? I came to say hi. It’s not that serious, you know.”

I saw a scowl form on her lips and even though she was dead, she was adorable. I thought she might enjoy a little teasing.

“Well, I believe you’ve come for me soul. I am damned and God has sent you to fetch me, right?”

Her scowl deepened. “I guess you are going to be a pain in the arse. This was a mistake.”

The beautiful girl’s form began to fade. Her face faded back into the gray mist that birthed her. I immediately felt regret.

“Wait, I’m sorry. Won’t you please come back and speak with me.”

“No”

But that phantom lady lied. She swirled around me and hovered just above my head. I looked up to see her pretty face. She gasped and pulled back into the cloud.

“I saw you there.” I pointed while looking up.  “So Come out and speak with me. I promise I will behave this time.”

It was silent. The sun of high noon was dampened somehow, and all around me, the air grew cold.

“Is that better?”

Her voice was sweet and filled with pain.

“Is what better, my dear?”

“The sun was hurting you, burning your eyes. I thought about shielding you and there you have it. It worked.”

I laughed, for I realized what she had done. IF heaven had come down to protect me, it would be something like this. Too bad I didn’t want protecting. She seemed amused by her feat, I heard her tinkling laughter on the wind.

“I did good, right?”

“Not really. Why do you think a vampire is out in the noonday sun? Why do you think I’m not burnt to a crisp?”

She gasped. “So, you are a vampire then. Wow, how do you stay alive? Is the sunlight thing just a fantasy story?”

“Well, partially. Besides, I’ve been coming out here for quite some time now.”

“Why? Do you like the sunlight, then?”

“I have no preference. The sunlight brings back memories, no doubt, but I am angered by the sun.”

“Then why do you come out here?”

I wasn’t sure of the reason myself. I only wished she could read my mind and be done with it. How could I explain the complexities of the whole thing?

Her face formed right in front of mine. She was grieved by what I was saying.

“Yes?”

“Would you like to read a book which never ended?”

She didn’t speak. Her gray mist didn’t attempt to help her form words this time, at least not for a moment. I saw something in her face, something familiar. Her countanence hardened then and I knew she was about to lay on me, what Jim always referred to as, “a revelation.” She wasn’t just a spectator here.

“You understand, don’t you?”

Her expression softened and melancholy took the place of her anger.

“I know how it feels to never have an ending.”

“How can you know what it feels like to never die? You’re dead.”

Her face changed somehow, the mist grew darker around her eyes. She laughed, and as she did, birds erupted from the pines on the border of the field. Her laughter was human and it sounded throughout the forest, making echoes. The silence and the creaking trees replaced her maddening laughter.

I felt a tickling sensation near my right ear. Words, silken and sad pressed into my ear. Although there were no biological mechanics in which she could form speech, and there were no fleshly lips in which to utter the words, she spoke regardless.

“Who says death is the end? You can stay out here until your flesh crisps to nothing and your bones dissolve, but…it doesn’t always end.”

I stood still letting her words move their way down into my being. I understood what she meant.

“So, why are you here? Why did you choose to speak to me? You cannot move on, can you? You’re trapped.”

She was gone, just as suddenly as she appeared. It wasn’t enough. I wanted to know why she was here in this time and this place.

“Why did you speak to me?”

But it was too late. She was gone, melted into the shadows that formed at the edge of the field. The sun dropped behind the clouds and drops of rain pelted my face.

Another day was ending but my end was nowhere in sight.

Corvus

Piscis Austrinus

More

It's all about doors, and if Jim were here, he would tell you about them and how they work. This is something I cannot describe, myself.

He waited until it was time and then he went through, you know. He transferred his spirit into another realm, metamorphosized into a new state of being. He's here, ya know. I feel him in the curl of my tongue against the roof of my mouth. That tingling sensation takes me back into his book of poetry and how I was too young to understand.

The words were so delicious and I might have uttered them aloud if not for kids from school that hated me.

He's coming again. I hear his black shroud whisper against the concrete of the city sidewalks. He's coming again. I can hear the leaves crackle beneath the bones of his feet. He's coming again. The waters slap the shore beneath a star filled sky. The moon sees him too.

I hear the earth move under my feet.
I'm on the outside, I'm looking in.

Every step you take, I hear you.

You have so much more to teach me.

I will go get Jim.

Just a story

Yuo remind me of my grandfather.

There are worse things than death, believe me. Sometimes, during moments of nothing,

He barked Monday, and I crept around the corner at the end of the hallway-nothing. On Wednesday, he was barking, standing at the foot of the bed with hair on end. I thought he might have heard something that time, and so I grabbed the gun and crept down the hallway once more.  He walked in front, occasionally looking back to see if I was following the edge of the living room door, he paused. He started growling as if something truly horrible was just beyond that doorway, and this turned my body to ice. I was afraid, again. I had to make a move and so I swung into the opening and stuck out the gun. There was nobody there, only my cat.

“Oh for christ’s sake, Chip, there’s no one in there but Prissy.”

My work makes me jumpy. It makes me believe that maybe, just maybe, there is something at the end of that hallway.

I’m a writer. Like the starving artist, I work hard for very little. From sun up till sun down, I browse the markets and update my blogs. Life outside my home is alien to me. I hardly ever leave, and so gradually, I think the world is disappearing entirely. Someday, it may just fade away. I don’t think I’ll miss it, because I am a writer. I write from sun up till sun down. I work hard for very little.

I had a story somewhere in my head. In the back where the files are kept. It was a horrifying story that will keep you up at night. I started to write, creating the characters and building the personalities, but then I stopped. A wall shot up in my mind and blocked the rest of what I needed to know.

I got tired of trying after several hours. The sun sank into the horizon and nightfall told me it was time to rest. Many times, I ignored that moment and kept writing into the night. Thing is, I couldn’t do it. My fingers hovered over the keyboard and nothing came out. I was frozen.

“Shit!”

I retired to my room and turned off the light. Because my mind was so empty, in moments I was asleep

Then, like the other nights before, he was barking and that’s what woke me. Unlike my previous routine, I lay back down and went to sleep.

This time, I wasn’t going to bother. It was just Prissy jumping on things or trees scraping against the window. There was nothing to be afraid of. I turned over and stared at the wall. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go to sleep. Chip stopped barking and growled for good measure.

“Would you please shut up!”

When I turned to yell at him, I was something else in the room A figure stood in the doorway-tall and thick. I saw no details, just the outline of its shape. My first reaction was shock, then I fumbled between the mattress and wall, searching with my fingers to find my gun. I heard my heart in my ears, sweat erupted on my chest and my breath came in sudden gasps. When my hand curled around the gun, I turned toward the figure. It was gone. I released my grip on the Judge’s handle.

Chip sat on the edge of the bed and whimpered. In a moment, he crawled over to me and lay down. I couldn’t sleep, he may have been soothed by the simple fact that the intruder was gone, but I wasn’t satisfied. I held the gun and waited. After an unknown length of time, I woke to morning light filtering through the windows. Chip was not in bed.

“Chip, come here boy!”

I sat at the computer for an hour before I could find any words. The assignment was vague and that’s the worse kind. Write a short story, he says. Make is fun and yet horrifying. The words didn’t come and that seemed horrifying enough to me. My mind was blank. I had written every short story you could think of. I thought about demon coffee cups that made you drink coffee until you were filled with the spirit, the dark spirit of the porcelain king. I stared at my cup and realized that I still hadn’t poured a cup of coffee yet. I was lost, and so I decided to sit down and start putting words onto the screen. Maybe the story would create itself, If I tried.

I poured the hot coffee into my cup and thought about the demons that could be living in the coffee beans. After all, coffee was addictive, it had to be created in hell.

I walked back to the computer, rubbed Chip between the ears, and started to write. It was lunch before I realized I had filled five pages of something. It was disjointed and mad, but somehow the story grew larger. I toyed with the hallucination from the night before and decided not to include the villain. As suddenly as the idea erupted in my head, I was frightened. AT my feet, Chip started to growl.

“Hey, it’s okay, buddy. We’re safe.”

My words were confident but my thoughts were iffy. I was still not convinced that the intruder was a sleepy halucinations. Those who doubt my tale about the intruder would probably call him a lump of clothes piled atop a chair, or a trick of the light. I knew better. I didn’t leave piles on clothes in chairs and I didn’t sleep with the light on. Rubbish!

I sleep well most of the night, until Chip began to back again. He was insistent, just as before, staring at the open doorway to my bedroom. His hair stood on end and his lips curled  over his canines. He was angry. It was hatred which fueled his discontent. Immediately I reached between the mattress and the wall. This time, I would shoot it. I didn’t care what it was, it was trespassing and I had every right to protect myself. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to steady my nerves. When I opened my eyes, it was there. The same dark outline from the night before, but this time, it spoke.

“Let me help you.”

I didn’t understand what the words meant, but I thought I heard the voice correctly.

“Don’t come any closer, or I will put a hole in you!”

“Let me in…”

It spoke again, but it didn’t come closer. In fact, it didn’t even waver. Chip growled softly perched on the matress.

“Who are you?”

Then the figure moved forward, and the light of the moon, filtering through my window, shone the truth of the thing. It was a man. For a while, I didn’t recognize him. He wore a uniform with symbols I recognized all too well. His hair was dark and a square bit of hair sat atop his upper lip. I guess you could have called the thing a mustache. He was pale with the bluest eyes and I knew who he was. Shivers passed through my body when realization hit me.

“How is this possible? How are you in my room? Of all people on the face of this earth, why you and why me?”

“I’m an artist and so are you. I admire your work and would love for you to join me.”

“Join you where?”

“Oh, just a place where the muse never leaves. I always have inspiration there, and my roses have never looked better.”

All the while the figure stood before me, it didn’t move its’ lips. I heard the sound from deep within the thing, reverberating and smothering out the low growls from my dog.

“ Why me?”

For a moment, there was no sound and then the voice spoke softly.

“You are an artist, just like me. I knew at the moment of your birth that you would have the talent to create things, things so vivid that it was if life was in your work and fantasy was the world you perceive outside your window. I knew you, and you knew nothing of me.”

I was confused. “What do you mean?”

“Your mother didn’t have it, but you do.”

“Have what?”

He smiled, the figure smiled. I saw the capsule between his teeth. He reached and took the little pill, placing it in his other hand.

“You see this?”

“Yes, what is it.”

“A gift.’

Forever

In forests
In dreams
Drifting upon the ocean
Reading poetry
Writing poetry
Tearing words apart
Far away
But not so far
Raven

Spirit's in the sky
Stars n other worlds

I will not let her sleep
She will not let me sleep