Author. Reader. Mother.
There is nothing more torturous than an agitated mind.
It’s like a treasure chest of unspoken riches
Selfishly guarded, every jewel meticulously analyzed
Accumulating over a short time–
Epiphanies, suspicions, fears, schemes–
Until it overflows
And the tortured realizes too late
That it was easier to open than shut.
Written in response to Patrick Jenning’s Pic and a Word Challenge: Experience ~ Pic and a World Challenge #313
There was nothing like it. Their first kiss. The way they’d fallen in love. The loneliness that existed before and the salvation he brought. She could see a life with him: a house, a little dog, and maybe a child.
She dragged her knife against rigid metal, grating its edge to a sharp point. Well, she thought, turning to her victim subdued in the kitchen chair. His new girlfriend is welcomed to my leftovers.
Continue reading “Leftovers”
She was here.
Physically.
But not really.
Mentally.
She’s in limbo.
Like between sleeping and awake.
Like between breathing and not.
An elaborate veneer of external liveliness.
Question, why does joy
Feel temporary?
As if an intermission
Between tribulations?
A ragged, painful breath
Post marathon?
As if being broken
Is natural?
I play a sick game with my Unconscious
I hand it my woes—
The ones that prevent me from functioning—
And plead, “Don’t let me remember this.”
But the bastard always reminds me
When it senses it did its job too well.
I use to dwell in Light
Where the angels sing.
Then you happened.
Now I stare at
Dark’s maw, predicting
What evil emerges next.
Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash
“Sorry, but we don’t deliver out there,” the woman on the other end said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” she stammered. “The neighborhood.”
Our call crackled with silence.
The neighborhood.
I stared out the tattered screen mesh that shielded my doorway from the neighborhood. My eyes met an abandoned home, probably housing squatters, across the way. An old air conditioning unit oozed black goop and white spray paint adorned the sunbaked fence out front.
Why would anyone want to come here? Not even the neighborhood’s inhabitants wanted to be here.
“I see,” I said and ended the call.
Picture: Abstract Surface by Anna Guerrero via Pexels
Credits
The sun boiled his sweat. Air was like a thick mass in his lungs and if it weren’t for its necessity, he would’ve expelled it like a lump of mucus. Tendrils of heat wafted from the ground and tickled his exposed, cut legs. Everything around him was alight except for a distinct shadow.
He focused on the clank of his pickaxe as he drove it into stone.
The shadow shifted as if aware that he’d taken notice. “Have you thought of my preposition? I can give you whatever you desire,” it said as it had for the last twenty years.
Has it really been twenty years?
The pickaxe droned on–clank clank clank–pieces of sediments tumbling to the ground.
“Warm bed, not the rock,” it continued. “Your enemies to take your place. All you need do is say you’re mine and I’ll free you from here.”
The pickaxe stopped mid swing. Twenty years toiling. Twenty listening to the shadow’s promises.
Twenty…
And it was all beginning to sound more promising.
Picture: Pickaxe by Samer Daboul via Pexels
Credits
“We’re in paradise,” they said. “Unhappiness doesn’t exist here.”
As they smiled and ruffled my hair,
I felt darkness overtake
The last bastions of light
In my soul.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re in paradise.”
Picture by: Gerald Friedrich