Knives of cold cut through the soft flesh of the night and it
bled
rain
onto the muddy earth.
It was a good night, a happy one.
Their legs thundered on the wet ground, and their laughs were like
L i g h t n i n g
flashing in the night. They were free,
free as the storm that was devouring the night sky.
One of them tripped on a rock and their body
car
eened
into the earth,
splashing mud everywhere.
The other one stopped, but then the other one got up, covered in mud and laughing.
And the other one laughed too, for no real reason, and everything in the world seemed perfect. They were 14.
They had met in 3rd grade, when they both tried to prank a teacher at the same time. They had made a plan to sneak into the classroom during recess (while the teacher was at a meeting) and place a thumbtack in her chair. It was a particularly cruel prank, but they both felt that it was a fitting punishment, because they both hated the teacher
with a fiery passion.
The boy had walked into the room,
thumb tack in hand,
only to find the girl also there.
This greatly upset the boy, who proceeded to try to convince the girl that this was his prank, and that the girl should leave
only for the girl to tell him that she had got there first.
The boy then suggested that they both put thumb tacks down,
but the girl shot that down by saying that it would make it less painful.
This bickering took too long, however, and the
teacher caught both of them in the act.
They were then promptly sent to the principal's office.
They both had to wait sometime before seeing the principal, and it was there in that waiting room that they conversed. At first they were mad at each other for spoiling their schemes. However, they began to realize through their conversation how much they had in common. They both hated authority, and school, and their parents who seemed to not care for them.
They soon received their punishment, which was strict and savage, but the experience made them close friends, which they continued to be throughout the years. Eventually, they realized that they loved each other, as friends.
There's a myth that the love of friendship is somehow lesser than the love of romance, but that’s just plain wrong. Both shine just as bright and burn just as fierce. Friendship is just as important, if not more important than romance.
. . .
Shards of summer sun stabbed the air and
green plants loomed waiting for an embrace.
The two children were 13.
They grabbed peaches from a tree and devoured them like animals
and yellow juice
and joy d
r
i
p
p
e
d
down
their faces.
They were in a garden, one where green stems grew and
insects made their merry way through gardens as
giants ran across their world. It was a beautiful garden, one that they did not have permission to be in.
The two criminals consumed their spoils and gleefully
jumped over a fence.
They had done it.
The two children looked at each other and then
they laughed and ran, past trees and bushes until they found a bright spot of grass where they collapsed, gasping.
The mission had been successful and now their faces were stained with peach juice and their eyes were filled with childlike delight.
A whirlwind of joy
cascaded and
flew through the breeze
And heat
dripped and
splattered onto the ground
They were bad kids, kids who didn’t care about things like being a good member of society or getting good grades so that they could have a good life. They preferred the open, treating the world as a playground and grabbing any joy that they could with their hands.
They had been bad kids since before they met each other and they were both planning on being bad kids until the moment they
would become bad adults.
In fact, the term bad was a term that they had assigned to themselves and one that they wore like a badge.
They liked to think it was just the two of them against the world. They never sought the company of any one besides themselves.
Neither of them ever dated, or
sought comfort in the arms of any adult in their life. The adult probably wouldn’t even give them comfort in their arms anyway.
Both of them were each other's only friend,
and that’s how they liked it.
Everyone else was a mystery, someone
who might laugh at them or treat them poorly,
so why even bother trying to get to know anyone else?
He had a habit of talking very fast- making words
tumble from his
tongue like a water
f
a
l
l
and crash onto
the ears of anyone who would listen.
She had a habit of saying whatever came to her mind,
whether it was relevant to the conversation or not.
The truth was, the times when
they were together were the only times when
they felt free.
Their life that
they spent in their homes was one of misery and screaming, and school was filled with rules and authority.
They served each other as brief flashes of joy in a life filled mostly with darkness, a small island of caring in a sea of cold indifference.
. . .
They were 15, drinking stolen beer behind an abandoned building, laughing in front of broken windows covered in paper.
She was wearing a black jacket.
She always wore the same jacket, a black one. It was too big for
her and it smelled like mothballs, but
She didn’t care.
She wore it all of the time, even when it was warm.
Her ears were decorated with earrings that looked like skulls.
He was wearing a green shirt, bought from a thrift store with writing on it in an unfamiliar language.
He had red nail polish on his fingernails. It had originally been for her as a birthday gift, but she didn’t want it and gave it to him. And
There mind was
dulled and so messed up
And they entered a
fog of
delirium
And they laughed and laughed, and then they threw up
on the ground and laughed some more.
They both lay on the ground,
lost in a drunk stupor
“You know…” she slurred, “This really is the pickle of existence, stealing! Hah! Wait, not pickle… the other word, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said “The pinnacle…of existence” then his sunny delirium seemed to be infected by a storm and his smile began to melt slightly
“Well…. Don’t you… don’t… don’t, don’t you think, I mean, you don’t think that this is all to life, is there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...a-a-are we gonna do this f-f forever?”
His words were broken
and slurred
and chopped up
“I… sure. Why not?” she responded
“But… but someday we're going to grow up… and, what if… what if one of us goes away, huh? Then, well… you’re my only friend.”
There was a pause. The alcohol made it very difficult for her to comprehend what he was saying
She stammered out a response
“I-I mean… well, fuck the future, you know? The futures stupid. Let’s just have fun, here in the present. The future is full of shit, and I don’t know, society collapsing or something, but the future? That’s where we’re happy.”
“But what about when the present ends?”
“What? No, aren’t you listening to me? I’m saying… don’t think about it, jeeze, alcohol makes you weird. We should call it weird al-cohol…. Because it makes you weird, hah!” she threw up again.
The boy didn’t say anything.
She looked at him.
“I don’t think I like what alcohol does to me.” she said. “My thoughts feel weird.”
She casually threw the glass of alcohol at the building.
It casually collapsed
into glass
when it hit the
ground.
“We’re pathetic.” the boy said “We’re both so pathetic.”
. . .
A beam of light punched through the skin of a window and splattered through the space.
It had once been an ice cream shop, a long time ago.
Now, the ice cream machinery was covered in dust, bludgeoned unuseable by the hammer of time. It was an ominous place that smelled like old clay and reeked of dust, but they liked being there.
Neither of them liked being at home.
His Dad had been a drunk who had died in a car accident when he was 7, and his Mom was a nurse who seemed to silently despise him for his existence.
The girl's parents only got married because her mother was pregnant with her, and they never would let her forget it.
They were sitting under
a huge machine, one that was once used to make ice cream.
The girl had a dry pen, and was pretending like it was a sword, and she was a knight. Not a good knight, mind you, but an evil one, one who backstabbed the king and made herself become queen and performed an evil ritual (because she was also a sorceress) to make herself turn into a four headed bear monster.
The boy was sitting next to her, uncomfortable.
They were 12.
There was a box between them, and the boy knew that
the girl was pretending.
“Hey.” he said.
“If I was a sorceress,” she said, “Then I would turn them into spiders, and see how they like it.”
She tried to mold her expression into one of anger and defiance, but she was betrayed by the sad look in her eyes.
The boy didn’t understand what she said, but he tossed it aside.
“Look,” the boy said. He tried to sound calming, like a good friend would, but it was hard.
“Look, uhm… you know, uhmm… ah, look, you know adults are stupid… They live in this dark world where they’re never allowed to be free because th-they’re you know… tied to their jobs...a-and, they’ve let, you know the world get to them, and th-they let it turn them into boring you know, like robots. Not like us.”
He twirled his finger in a
circle
while he spoke. He saw
someone
do it in a movie once, and
had
subconsciously adopted it into
his
habits.
She said nothing.
“L-look,” the boy said “w-we’re never going to grow up, and we’re always going to stay this way… and we… we’re never going to hurt each other, ever.”
There was another pause before he spoke to her again.
“I...is it okay if I give you a hug?”
She didn’t like physical contact, so he made sure to ask first.
She nodded.
He hugged her.
It was awkward, and uncomfortable and
bizarrely
beautiful
Like a parade with just dogs.
. ..
Emerald green exploded and the jewels of a sour wind burned.
It was a Sunday in January, and they were 16 and both on a tree.
It was in their favorite spot, a secluded little grove that was near a river.
It was a place where
moss and
lichen smothered
rocks and
trees in the world of green that seemed their own.
It was a playground of earthly delights where
joy and
cattails bloomed seemingly
e t e r n a l l y.
It was their own private world, a world away from adults and authority. They would pretend that they were the only people alive, and there were
no rules or
anybody telling them what to do.
They had discovered this place back when
they were 8, and
they had claimed it for themselves by carving a dirty word into a tree.
The words were still there, on the tree and
Entire place
Was decorated with
Memories Like a mosaic of
moments
past
There were the remains of a metal contraption, now engulfed in moss. Back when they were 9, they had read a book about fae creatures and sprites and had decided to make a trap to catch one so that it could lead them to its treasure. They failed.
There was a shoe on a tree, left from an instance when they went there at night and they thought they heard a bear so they climbed a tree.
When they were younger they would often come out at night and they would look up at the stars.
They would make up new constellations like “the five headed robot dragon” and “the donkey assassin”, even though they did that a lot less,
and they were both
Very aware
of how they
had changed,
and they almost wished
that they hadn't,
but neither of them ever spoke of it.
They had stopped doing things like
write stories about Barney being killed,
or play with toys, where one would bring action toys and
the other dolls and they would
construct detailed stories about them doing things
like killing Barney (they really hated Barney).
They used to wander the woods, looking for snakes.
Then, when they would find them they would sneak them into their parents bed.
They didn’t do any of those anymore. They had stopped the snake prank, not because of pity for the victims, but because they realized that it must have sucked for the snake, and they didn’t want to cause any snakes any trouble.
Now, they stole alcohol and listened to loud music with sad lyrics from bands named “Electric Murder” and “Arson in Monkeyville”.
And the girl never said it, but she noticed that the boy was ranting
less
and
less.
Perhaps, the most interesting part of the grove was that in the center of it was a
door. This
door was an old
door, and it’s frame was not connected to anything.
It merely stood alone, and you could open it and go through it,
and pretend that you had just entered an alternate dimension.
The girl had a flower in her hand.
She looked at it, the simple symmetry,
the beautiful red color of the petals,
The way they were as soft as paper.
Then, she brought out a lighter and set the flower on fire. She watched as it burned, being devoured and consumed by the savagery of the fire. Flames flickered and and snarled in a chaotic dance as they crushed the beauty of the flower into ash. Fire was free, unbound by any laws, unchainable, always in a frenzy.
She blew on it, extinguishing the fire, then let it f
a
l
l
to the ground.
She looked at the ashes that had once been the flower and sighed as her untied shoelaces danced in the blast of the wind.
She looked down at the boy, who was hanging upside down from a tree branch.
And she was trying to think of something to say
But she didn’t know what and there was a
Distance between them and she didn’t know why
and she wanted to reach out to him and say something.
But she didn’t know what to say.
Finally she spoke,
“Whatcha thinking about?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Come on, talk to me.” she said. He tried to make it sound gentle and teasing, but it ended up sounding too harsh.
“You know, stuff.” he said.
“Come on, talk to me, what’s on your mind? What is-what is, what machinations of your mind are you currently machining?”
“It’s nothing… just… we’re sixteen.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Don’t you… don’t you. Aren’t you worried?”
“About what?”
“About what’s going to happen to us.”
“What, are we going to perform some sort of ritual?” she said, trying to be joking.
This conversation was awkward, which wasn’t good. Awkward conversations were reserved for things like parents, and people you didn’t really know who you were in a group project with. Awkward conversations weren’t for best friends.
The boy spoke “You know, we’re going to become adults, a-and… w-well… what are we going to do then?”
There was a quiet.
The girl tested out various words
on the base of her tongue, trying to find
ones that would work.
Finally, she found some ones to say “It-it… maybe, maybe we’ll like run away… I don’t know, maybe we’ll be… who cares? It-it’s the future, we… why are you acting like this?”
Finally, the boy spoke “Because it’s scary, the future, you know? Growing up, all that stuff.”
“Well, you'll be pleased to know that I have Peter Pan on speedial.”
“I’m serious.”
There was a quiet. Finally, the boy spoke. “Don’t you… don’t you think that, maybe, we’ve been… I don’t know, wasting our time? I-I just… I got my report card for the last semester… and…”
She snorted angrily, like a sarcastic dragon
“Your report card? Who cares! My parents certainly didn’t. I just threw it away when I got it, and they never even asked.”
“Yeah, well… my Mom was the same way… I don’t even know why I read it, it’s just… you know, what if we’re, what if we’re wasting our life?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, I don't know, if we keep going down this… this, this path then we’ll just probably end up dying, and no one will care about us, we’ll be failures… I mean, everyone probably already thinks we are.”
“Failures? At what, life? Lifes not a contest, wh-what's the problem with just doing things that you enjoy, and having fun until you die?”
The realization that the way she was speaking may have sounded a bit too harsh, and she tried to lower the intensity of her voice.
“Th-there’s… look, there’s no grand purpose to life, it’s all just, chaotic… so, why not do whatever you want?”
“I guess you're right.”
“Of course.”
There was another quiet. Finally, she spoke.
“Hey… you... you’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, of course. I…I don’t know, I guess I’m just feeling existential today, you know?”
“Okay.” she said.
“Everythings fine, I am completely fine. Just a bit… you know, you know right? Yeah.”
There was another quiet.
The boy did not tell her about how all of the joy of his childhood was fading. And everything seemed like a painting, losing its luster and color, and slowly becoming more and more dull.
He didn’t say the words that were hiding at the back of his throat:
You know, for all our life we’ve been free, flying over the surface of an ocean, but it’s like now a giant hand is sticking out of the water and dragging us below and I’m afraid that we’re going to grow up and spend the rest of our lives underwater, constantly choking, forced into an endless cycles of work and responsibilities and vacuuming and laundry and jobs…
Those words were jagged and prickly and would surely cut the roof of his mouth if he dared push them out of his throat.
Eventually, they both left the grove with the door and went back to their houses.
A night passed and the morning arrived.
The girl woke up, and for some reason she felt happy.
She wasn’t sure why, but things just felt right.
She got up from her bed and made her way to the bathroom and on her
way
she passed an empty glass cage. The cage used to be occupied by her pet tarantula named Smeagol, but her parents had gotten rid of it. Smeagol was named after the Lord of the Rings character. Now, she could have named it after the spider from The Lord of the Rings, Shelob. But every person with a pet tarantula who had also read Lord of the Rings had named their tarantula Shelob. Now, Smeagol? That was unique. And also, the way he used to scamper to and through reminded her of Smeagol. But, now he was gone. Ripped from her by the cruel hands of fate and her parents.
That had been 6 years ago, and she still had the glass cage. She supposed she kept it as a sort of a token of her memory. It wasn’t a great memory really. She used to not be able to pass it without thinking of how it happened.
How she had gotten into trouble in school, and how her parents had yelled at her and finally, her Dad got so mad that he stormed into her room. She had run behind him, begging not to use that hammer that he had grabbed from his toolbox.
He had stormed right over to the glass cage and then taken off the top.
Smeagol tried, but there was no escape from the blows that rang down.
Yellow blood shot out and his legs twitched till they twitched no longer and he was a squishy mess of yellow blood and hair and she had screamed and cried and her father had turned to her and said
“You see? That will teach you a lesson about acting this way.”
It had taught her a lesson, but not the intended one.
She supposed that maybe she kept the cage because the memory stung, a sort of way to rebel by being unkind to herself.
She remembered how she would always try to get the boy to read Lord of the Rings, but he never would. He was “too cool” for reading.
He just didn’t understand that you can be cool, and rebellious, and also read fantasy novels.
The thought that she should re-read the books crossed her mind. She hadn’t read a book in a while.
She showered and got dressed.
She was feeling good, so she wore her skull earrings.
She always wore her skull earrings when she felt good.
It was 11:00, and she decided to head over to his house. A good mood was always best shared. Also, she knew that his Mom wouldn’t be home.
A path was blazed down the stairs and out of her door.
As she walked, she started to whistle, but found her mouth unable to do so.
The walk was one through a
dirty
poor
Suburb.
There was a car,
A red one parked on someone's lawn
It was full of shopping bags and
It was surrounded by towering monoliths of weeds
And there was a house with a statue of a goat on it’s
Lawn made out of rusty metal
And a tendril of ivy ran on its surface
She walked on
through the streets
till she finally made her way to a dirty yellow house with a broken laundry machine in the front yard.
It was his house.
The skin of the house was peeling, and gore made of wood peaked out.
It was less a house and more like a carcass of one, really.
She walked through the yard and
She entered his house, sneaking in through the back door
and
she walked through his house
and
she made her way to his room
and
she opened the door and
She gasped when she saw him.
He was lying
On the
floor
And
There
Was a knife
in his
hand
And the skin of his wrists were cut open and
Blood
Was spilling out of them
And
Her entire body went numb
Her eyes were fixed on him
lying on the floor
And everything
Everything
Everything
Wasn’t
Couldn’t
Everything
Broke
She
Couldn’t
Didn’t understand
Like a dream
Didn’t make sense
A single word came from her lips
“No.” She took a step forward as the world
t
ilted
There was a note lying on the floor. It had two words written on it
“I’m sorry.”
And he wasn’t
Breath
ing
And she collapsed for the body that had once been her friend and cradled him in her arms as tears fell from her eyes.
It was
It was
It was all
wrong,
all of the world
was
wrong
and
brok
en
And a maw of misery
devoured her
And fangs of pain
pierced her
And she cried and cried and cried because her friend was dead and they would never laugh again or run through a field again because he was gone, gone forever
And the sobs poured out of her and it felt like
all of the joy in her had melted and
she felt as though
she would
never
be happy
again.
And time passed and leaves
fell
And all the world kept
spinning
And in the woods where they used to go
The door still stood
And the stoned by the river had
nothing better to do but to feel the touch of the river as it gently stroked them
And the trees,
Life that grows from the graves of its parents
And the bones of the dead are covered by moss
And lichen
And children grow up under the same sky that their
parents grew up under
And flowers wh
i
lt
And turn to brown
And death flows
through the cracks in stones
And wooden floors
And cracked windows covered in paper
And days fall to the ground and decay and decompose
And maggots feast on the flesh of all the time that was not spent
The girl with the white earrings was there when people came and sirens were called and questions were asked but it was just words and just a long stretch of
n o t h i n g
That mattered or would ever matter
And they took her home and she ran into her room and stayed there
And the smell of death sat on her skin and gripped her.
And she tried to grab her skin a
n
d rip
and
claw it off
and
tear her skin to shreds
but she was too weak to do anything but cry.
And she thought about the door that went to nowhere, and the garden with the peach tree, and the stories they made up for each other, and it felt like all of the happiness had been rinsed out and swept away and she
Choked
On her emotion
And the
Bile
In her stomach
And she was a l o n e
Well and truly a l o n e
A small speck of misery
And the world seemed like a hollow shell and
And
And
And
And
Time moved on.
She ate for the first time in two weeks.
Her parents had started to act nicer to her, partially out of pity.
She was 18, and it was June.
She was there in the grove with the door that led to nowhere.
Birds sang a song that might have been joyful, but sounded empty to her ears.
The same trees that had once seemed to shine in an explosion of emerald now seemed dull. It would be the last time she would be here for a while. Soon, she would go off to a community college trying to get a degree in education.
She opened the door and stepped through.
A sad sigh escaped from the corner of her throat.
She went over to the tree
and climbed it.
It was harder than she remembered, but she managed to make it.
She sat down on a branch. From her pocket she took out a scrap of paper.
On it, was written in messy handwriting were the words “It’s not your fault”
She took out the lighter, it was the same one from before.
She held the paper up to the lighter, it dangling above the flame.
Then she clicked the lighter off.
She got down off the tree.
And she walked through the door and out of the woods.
She was 28, and it was a sunny day.
She was wearing a white jacket as she stood in front of a grave.
On it she placed a parcel, just like she had every year.
It joined the others there, all of them placed by her.
After a while of staring at the grave she turned around, slowly fleeing the graveyard.
Her legs cut a trail to a red Prius. At the front seat was a woman, looking at her with sympathetic eyes.
Not a word was said between them when she opened the door. She sat down in the car and let out a heavy sigh.
The woman put her hand on her shoulder, comforting her. She accepted the embrace. The woman gently placed a kiss on top of her forehead.
Then they drove away from the graveyard, away from the graveyard where memories were buried.
She had gone through the door, into a better future. There were new memories, memories of a struggle between the past and future. It was a tug-of-war between an infinite regret and an eternal hope.
There was nothing else that she could do but live, chasing happiness in rainy nights and sunny fields, and crying in dark corners. She embraced all of it, the happy, the sad, and the mundane.
The car continued to drive. Above it, the day slowly healed, rays of sunshine tending the scars that had been left by the night.
bled
rain
onto the muddy earth.
It was a good night, a happy one.
Their legs thundered on the wet ground, and their laughs were like
L i g h t n i n g
flashing in the night. They were free,
free as the storm that was devouring the night sky.
One of them tripped on a rock and their body
car
eened
into the earth,
splashing mud everywhere.
The other one stopped, but then the other one got up, covered in mud and laughing.
And the other one laughed too, for no real reason, and everything in the world seemed perfect. They were 14.
They had met in 3rd grade, when they both tried to prank a teacher at the same time. They had made a plan to sneak into the classroom during recess (while the teacher was at a meeting) and place a thumbtack in her chair. It was a particularly cruel prank, but they both felt that it was a fitting punishment, because they both hated the teacher
with a fiery passion.
The boy had walked into the room,
thumb tack in hand,
only to find the girl also there.
This greatly upset the boy, who proceeded to try to convince the girl that this was his prank, and that the girl should leave
only for the girl to tell him that she had got there first.
The boy then suggested that they both put thumb tacks down,
but the girl shot that down by saying that it would make it less painful.
This bickering took too long, however, and the
teacher caught both of them in the act.
They were then promptly sent to the principal's office.
They both had to wait sometime before seeing the principal, and it was there in that waiting room that they conversed. At first they were mad at each other for spoiling their schemes. However, they began to realize through their conversation how much they had in common. They both hated authority, and school, and their parents who seemed to not care for them.
They soon received their punishment, which was strict and savage, but the experience made them close friends, which they continued to be throughout the years. Eventually, they realized that they loved each other, as friends.
There's a myth that the love of friendship is somehow lesser than the love of romance, but that’s just plain wrong. Both shine just as bright and burn just as fierce. Friendship is just as important, if not more important than romance.
. . .
Shards of summer sun stabbed the air and
green plants loomed waiting for an embrace.
The two children were 13.
They grabbed peaches from a tree and devoured them like animals
and yellow juice
and joy d
r
i
p
p
e
d
down
their faces.
They were in a garden, one where green stems grew and
insects made their merry way through gardens as
giants ran across their world. It was a beautiful garden, one that they did not have permission to be in.
The two criminals consumed their spoils and gleefully
jumped over a fence.
They had done it.
The two children looked at each other and then
they laughed and ran, past trees and bushes until they found a bright spot of grass where they collapsed, gasping.
The mission had been successful and now their faces were stained with peach juice and their eyes were filled with childlike delight.
A whirlwind of joy
cascaded and
flew through the breeze
And heat
dripped and
splattered onto the ground
They were bad kids, kids who didn’t care about things like being a good member of society or getting good grades so that they could have a good life. They preferred the open, treating the world as a playground and grabbing any joy that they could with their hands.
They had been bad kids since before they met each other and they were both planning on being bad kids until the moment they
would become bad adults.
In fact, the term bad was a term that they had assigned to themselves and one that they wore like a badge.
They liked to think it was just the two of them against the world. They never sought the company of any one besides themselves.
Neither of them ever dated, or
sought comfort in the arms of any adult in their life. The adult probably wouldn’t even give them comfort in their arms anyway.
Both of them were each other's only friend,
and that’s how they liked it.
Everyone else was a mystery, someone
who might laugh at them or treat them poorly,
so why even bother trying to get to know anyone else?
He had a habit of talking very fast- making words
tumble from his
tongue like a water
f
a
l
l
and crash onto
the ears of anyone who would listen.
She had a habit of saying whatever came to her mind,
whether it was relevant to the conversation or not.
The truth was, the times when
they were together were the only times when
they felt free.
Their life that
they spent in their homes was one of misery and screaming, and school was filled with rules and authority.
They served each other as brief flashes of joy in a life filled mostly with darkness, a small island of caring in a sea of cold indifference.
. . .
They were 15, drinking stolen beer behind an abandoned building, laughing in front of broken windows covered in paper.
She was wearing a black jacket.
She always wore the same jacket, a black one. It was too big for
her and it smelled like mothballs, but
She didn’t care.
She wore it all of the time, even when it was warm.
Her ears were decorated with earrings that looked like skulls.
He was wearing a green shirt, bought from a thrift store with writing on it in an unfamiliar language.
He had red nail polish on his fingernails. It had originally been for her as a birthday gift, but she didn’t want it and gave it to him. And
There mind was
dulled and so messed up
And they entered a
fog of
delirium
And they laughed and laughed, and then they threw up
on the ground and laughed some more.
They both lay on the ground,
lost in a drunk stupor
“You know…” she slurred, “This really is the pickle of existence, stealing! Hah! Wait, not pickle… the other word, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said “The pinnacle…of existence” then his sunny delirium seemed to be infected by a storm and his smile began to melt slightly
“Well…. Don’t you… don’t… don’t, don’t you think, I mean, you don’t think that this is all to life, is there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...a-a-are we gonna do this f-f forever?”
His words were broken
and slurred
and chopped up
“I… sure. Why not?” she responded
“But… but someday we're going to grow up… and, what if… what if one of us goes away, huh? Then, well… you’re my only friend.”
There was a pause. The alcohol made it very difficult for her to comprehend what he was saying
She stammered out a response
“I-I mean… well, fuck the future, you know? The futures stupid. Let’s just have fun, here in the present. The future is full of shit, and I don’t know, society collapsing or something, but the future? That’s where we’re happy.”
“But what about when the present ends?”
“What? No, aren’t you listening to me? I’m saying… don’t think about it, jeeze, alcohol makes you weird. We should call it weird al-cohol…. Because it makes you weird, hah!” she threw up again.
The boy didn’t say anything.
She looked at him.
“I don’t think I like what alcohol does to me.” she said. “My thoughts feel weird.”
She casually threw the glass of alcohol at the building.
It casually collapsed
into glass
when it hit the
ground.
“We’re pathetic.” the boy said “We’re both so pathetic.”
. . .
A beam of light punched through the skin of a window and splattered through the space.
It had once been an ice cream shop, a long time ago.
Now, the ice cream machinery was covered in dust, bludgeoned unuseable by the hammer of time. It was an ominous place that smelled like old clay and reeked of dust, but they liked being there.
Neither of them liked being at home.
His Dad had been a drunk who had died in a car accident when he was 7, and his Mom was a nurse who seemed to silently despise him for his existence.
The girl's parents only got married because her mother was pregnant with her, and they never would let her forget it.
They were sitting under
a huge machine, one that was once used to make ice cream.
The girl had a dry pen, and was pretending like it was a sword, and she was a knight. Not a good knight, mind you, but an evil one, one who backstabbed the king and made herself become queen and performed an evil ritual (because she was also a sorceress) to make herself turn into a four headed bear monster.
The boy was sitting next to her, uncomfortable.
They were 12.
There was a box between them, and the boy knew that
the girl was pretending.
“Hey.” he said.
“If I was a sorceress,” she said, “Then I would turn them into spiders, and see how they like it.”
She tried to mold her expression into one of anger and defiance, but she was betrayed by the sad look in her eyes.
The boy didn’t understand what she said, but he tossed it aside.
“Look,” the boy said. He tried to sound calming, like a good friend would, but it was hard.
“Look, uhm… you know, uhmm… ah, look, you know adults are stupid… They live in this dark world where they’re never allowed to be free because th-they’re you know… tied to their jobs...a-and, they’ve let, you know the world get to them, and th-they let it turn them into boring you know, like robots. Not like us.”
He twirled his finger in a
circle
while he spoke. He saw
someone
do it in a movie once, and
had
subconsciously adopted it into
his
habits.
She said nothing.
“L-look,” the boy said “w-we’re never going to grow up, and we’re always going to stay this way… and we… we’re never going to hurt each other, ever.”
There was another pause before he spoke to her again.
“I...is it okay if I give you a hug?”
She didn’t like physical contact, so he made sure to ask first.
She nodded.
He hugged her.
It was awkward, and uncomfortable and
bizarrely
beautiful
Like a parade with just dogs.
. ..
Emerald green exploded and the jewels of a sour wind burned.
It was a Sunday in January, and they were 16 and both on a tree.
It was in their favorite spot, a secluded little grove that was near a river.
It was a place where
moss and
lichen smothered
rocks and
trees in the world of green that seemed their own.
It was a playground of earthly delights where
joy and
cattails bloomed seemingly
e t e r n a l l y.
It was their own private world, a world away from adults and authority. They would pretend that they were the only people alive, and there were
no rules or
anybody telling them what to do.
They had discovered this place back when
they were 8, and
they had claimed it for themselves by carving a dirty word into a tree.
The words were still there, on the tree and
Entire place
Was decorated with
Memories Like a mosaic of
moments
past
There were the remains of a metal contraption, now engulfed in moss. Back when they were 9, they had read a book about fae creatures and sprites and had decided to make a trap to catch one so that it could lead them to its treasure. They failed.
There was a shoe on a tree, left from an instance when they went there at night and they thought they heard a bear so they climbed a tree.
When they were younger they would often come out at night and they would look up at the stars.
They would make up new constellations like “the five headed robot dragon” and “the donkey assassin”, even though they did that a lot less,
and they were both
Very aware
of how they
had changed,
and they almost wished
that they hadn't,
but neither of them ever spoke of it.
They had stopped doing things like
write stories about Barney being killed,
or play with toys, where one would bring action toys and
the other dolls and they would
construct detailed stories about them doing things
like killing Barney (they really hated Barney).
They used to wander the woods, looking for snakes.
Then, when they would find them they would sneak them into their parents bed.
They didn’t do any of those anymore. They had stopped the snake prank, not because of pity for the victims, but because they realized that it must have sucked for the snake, and they didn’t want to cause any snakes any trouble.
Now, they stole alcohol and listened to loud music with sad lyrics from bands named “Electric Murder” and “Arson in Monkeyville”.
And the girl never said it, but she noticed that the boy was ranting
less
and
less.
Perhaps, the most interesting part of the grove was that in the center of it was a
door. This
door was an old
door, and it’s frame was not connected to anything.
It merely stood alone, and you could open it and go through it,
and pretend that you had just entered an alternate dimension.
The girl had a flower in her hand.
She looked at it, the simple symmetry,
the beautiful red color of the petals,
The way they were as soft as paper.
Then, she brought out a lighter and set the flower on fire. She watched as it burned, being devoured and consumed by the savagery of the fire. Flames flickered and and snarled in a chaotic dance as they crushed the beauty of the flower into ash. Fire was free, unbound by any laws, unchainable, always in a frenzy.
She blew on it, extinguishing the fire, then let it f
a
l
l
to the ground.
She looked at the ashes that had once been the flower and sighed as her untied shoelaces danced in the blast of the wind.
She looked down at the boy, who was hanging upside down from a tree branch.
And she was trying to think of something to say
But she didn’t know what and there was a
Distance between them and she didn’t know why
and she wanted to reach out to him and say something.
But she didn’t know what to say.
Finally she spoke,
“Whatcha thinking about?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Come on, talk to me.” she said. He tried to make it sound gentle and teasing, but it ended up sounding too harsh.
“You know, stuff.” he said.
“Come on, talk to me, what’s on your mind? What is-what is, what machinations of your mind are you currently machining?”
“It’s nothing… just… we’re sixteen.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Don’t you… don’t you. Aren’t you worried?”
“About what?”
“About what’s going to happen to us.”
“What, are we going to perform some sort of ritual?” she said, trying to be joking.
This conversation was awkward, which wasn’t good. Awkward conversations were reserved for things like parents, and people you didn’t really know who you were in a group project with. Awkward conversations weren’t for best friends.
The boy spoke “You know, we’re going to become adults, a-and… w-well… what are we going to do then?”
There was a quiet.
The girl tested out various words
on the base of her tongue, trying to find
ones that would work.
Finally, she found some ones to say “It-it… maybe, maybe we’ll like run away… I don’t know, maybe we’ll be… who cares? It-it’s the future, we… why are you acting like this?”
Finally, the boy spoke “Because it’s scary, the future, you know? Growing up, all that stuff.”
“Well, you'll be pleased to know that I have Peter Pan on speedial.”
“I’m serious.”
There was a quiet. Finally, the boy spoke. “Don’t you… don’t you think that, maybe, we’ve been… I don’t know, wasting our time? I-I just… I got my report card for the last semester… and…”
She snorted angrily, like a sarcastic dragon
“Your report card? Who cares! My parents certainly didn’t. I just threw it away when I got it, and they never even asked.”
“Yeah, well… my Mom was the same way… I don’t even know why I read it, it’s just… you know, what if we’re, what if we’re wasting our life?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, I don't know, if we keep going down this… this, this path then we’ll just probably end up dying, and no one will care about us, we’ll be failures… I mean, everyone probably already thinks we are.”
“Failures? At what, life? Lifes not a contest, wh-what's the problem with just doing things that you enjoy, and having fun until you die?”
The realization that the way she was speaking may have sounded a bit too harsh, and she tried to lower the intensity of her voice.
“Th-there’s… look, there’s no grand purpose to life, it’s all just, chaotic… so, why not do whatever you want?”
“I guess you're right.”
“Of course.”
There was another quiet. Finally, she spoke.
“Hey… you... you’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, of course. I…I don’t know, I guess I’m just feeling existential today, you know?”
“Okay.” she said.
“Everythings fine, I am completely fine. Just a bit… you know, you know right? Yeah.”
There was another quiet.
The boy did not tell her about how all of the joy of his childhood was fading. And everything seemed like a painting, losing its luster and color, and slowly becoming more and more dull.
He didn’t say the words that were hiding at the back of his throat:
You know, for all our life we’ve been free, flying over the surface of an ocean, but it’s like now a giant hand is sticking out of the water and dragging us below and I’m afraid that we’re going to grow up and spend the rest of our lives underwater, constantly choking, forced into an endless cycles of work and responsibilities and vacuuming and laundry and jobs…
Those words were jagged and prickly and would surely cut the roof of his mouth if he dared push them out of his throat.
Eventually, they both left the grove with the door and went back to their houses.
A night passed and the morning arrived.
The girl woke up, and for some reason she felt happy.
She wasn’t sure why, but things just felt right.
She got up from her bed and made her way to the bathroom and on her
way
she passed an empty glass cage. The cage used to be occupied by her pet tarantula named Smeagol, but her parents had gotten rid of it. Smeagol was named after the Lord of the Rings character. Now, she could have named it after the spider from The Lord of the Rings, Shelob. But every person with a pet tarantula who had also read Lord of the Rings had named their tarantula Shelob. Now, Smeagol? That was unique. And also, the way he used to scamper to and through reminded her of Smeagol. But, now he was gone. Ripped from her by the cruel hands of fate and her parents.
That had been 6 years ago, and she still had the glass cage. She supposed she kept it as a sort of a token of her memory. It wasn’t a great memory really. She used to not be able to pass it without thinking of how it happened.
How she had gotten into trouble in school, and how her parents had yelled at her and finally, her Dad got so mad that he stormed into her room. She had run behind him, begging not to use that hammer that he had grabbed from his toolbox.
He had stormed right over to the glass cage and then taken off the top.
Smeagol tried, but there was no escape from the blows that rang down.
Yellow blood shot out and his legs twitched till they twitched no longer and he was a squishy mess of yellow blood and hair and she had screamed and cried and her father had turned to her and said
“You see? That will teach you a lesson about acting this way.”
It had taught her a lesson, but not the intended one.
She supposed that maybe she kept the cage because the memory stung, a sort of way to rebel by being unkind to herself.
She remembered how she would always try to get the boy to read Lord of the Rings, but he never would. He was “too cool” for reading.
He just didn’t understand that you can be cool, and rebellious, and also read fantasy novels.
The thought that she should re-read the books crossed her mind. She hadn’t read a book in a while.
She showered and got dressed.
She was feeling good, so she wore her skull earrings.
She always wore her skull earrings when she felt good.
It was 11:00, and she decided to head over to his house. A good mood was always best shared. Also, she knew that his Mom wouldn’t be home.
A path was blazed down the stairs and out of her door.
As she walked, she started to whistle, but found her mouth unable to do so.
The walk was one through a
dirty
poor
Suburb.
There was a car,
A red one parked on someone's lawn
It was full of shopping bags and
It was surrounded by towering monoliths of weeds
And there was a house with a statue of a goat on it’s
Lawn made out of rusty metal
And a tendril of ivy ran on its surface
She walked on
through the streets
till she finally made her way to a dirty yellow house with a broken laundry machine in the front yard.
It was his house.
The skin of the house was peeling, and gore made of wood peaked out.
It was less a house and more like a carcass of one, really.
She walked through the yard and
She entered his house, sneaking in through the back door
and
she walked through his house
and
she made her way to his room
and
she opened the door and
She gasped when she saw him.
He was lying
On the
floor
And
There
Was a knife
in his
hand
And the skin of his wrists were cut open and
Blood
Was spilling out of them
And
Her entire body went numb
Her eyes were fixed on him
lying on the floor
And everything
Everything
Everything
Wasn’t
Couldn’t
Everything
Broke
She
Couldn’t
Didn’t understand
Like a dream
Didn’t make sense
A single word came from her lips
“No.” She took a step forward as the world
t
ilted
There was a note lying on the floor. It had two words written on it
“I’m sorry.”
And he wasn’t
Breath
ing
And she collapsed for the body that had once been her friend and cradled him in her arms as tears fell from her eyes.
It was
It was
It was all
wrong,
all of the world
was
wrong
and
brok
en
And a maw of misery
devoured her
And fangs of pain
pierced her
And she cried and cried and cried because her friend was dead and they would never laugh again or run through a field again because he was gone, gone forever
And the sobs poured out of her and it felt like
all of the joy in her had melted and
she felt as though
she would
never
be happy
again.
And time passed and leaves
fell
And all the world kept
spinning
And in the woods where they used to go
The door still stood
And the stoned by the river had
nothing better to do but to feel the touch of the river as it gently stroked them
And the trees,
Life that grows from the graves of its parents
And the bones of the dead are covered by moss
And lichen
And children grow up under the same sky that their
parents grew up under
And flowers wh
i
lt
And turn to brown
And death flows
through the cracks in stones
And wooden floors
And cracked windows covered in paper
And days fall to the ground and decay and decompose
And maggots feast on the flesh of all the time that was not spent
The girl with the white earrings was there when people came and sirens were called and questions were asked but it was just words and just a long stretch of
n o t h i n g
That mattered or would ever matter
And they took her home and she ran into her room and stayed there
And the smell of death sat on her skin and gripped her.
And she tried to grab her skin a
n
d rip
and
claw it off
and
tear her skin to shreds
but she was too weak to do anything but cry.
And she thought about the door that went to nowhere, and the garden with the peach tree, and the stories they made up for each other, and it felt like all of the happiness had been rinsed out and swept away and she
Choked
On her emotion
And the
Bile
In her stomach
And she was a l o n e
Well and truly a l o n e
A small speck of misery
And the world seemed like a hollow shell and
And
And
And
And
Time moved on.
She ate for the first time in two weeks.
Her parents had started to act nicer to her, partially out of pity.
She was 18, and it was June.
She was there in the grove with the door that led to nowhere.
Birds sang a song that might have been joyful, but sounded empty to her ears.
The same trees that had once seemed to shine in an explosion of emerald now seemed dull. It would be the last time she would be here for a while. Soon, she would go off to a community college trying to get a degree in education.
She opened the door and stepped through.
A sad sigh escaped from the corner of her throat.
She went over to the tree
and climbed it.
It was harder than she remembered, but she managed to make it.
She sat down on a branch. From her pocket she took out a scrap of paper.
On it, was written in messy handwriting were the words “It’s not your fault”
She took out the lighter, it was the same one from before.
She held the paper up to the lighter, it dangling above the flame.
Then she clicked the lighter off.
She got down off the tree.
And she walked through the door and out of the woods.
She was 28, and it was a sunny day.
She was wearing a white jacket as she stood in front of a grave.
On it she placed a parcel, just like she had every year.
It joined the others there, all of them placed by her.
After a while of staring at the grave she turned around, slowly fleeing the graveyard.
Her legs cut a trail to a red Prius. At the front seat was a woman, looking at her with sympathetic eyes.
Not a word was said between them when she opened the door. She sat down in the car and let out a heavy sigh.
The woman put her hand on her shoulder, comforting her. She accepted the embrace. The woman gently placed a kiss on top of her forehead.
Then they drove away from the graveyard, away from the graveyard where memories were buried.
She had gone through the door, into a better future. There were new memories, memories of a struggle between the past and future. It was a tug-of-war between an infinite regret and an eternal hope.
There was nothing else that she could do but live, chasing happiness in rainy nights and sunny fields, and crying in dark corners. She embraced all of it, the happy, the sad, and the mundane.
The car continued to drive. Above it, the day slowly healed, rays of sunshine tending the scars that had been left by the night.
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