Bit 8

I kicked at the floorboards, staring at that ridiculous metal chair.
I was thinking of some sort of asshole comment I could make, but then I realized how much I didn't actually want to do that. What I want is to feel an entire emotion. Have the whole length of it run through me all at once, like these people. As much as she fucking annoys me, I'm jealous of Freida. And the only thing standing in my way is my damn pride.
Tears pricked at the corners of my eyelids.

"You... you took everything from me. I trusted you to take away the pain, and you slowly dug under my skin, got into my brain. I fucking trusted you. And now I've lost my life. My love. My goddamn baby."
The whole class sat perfectly still, watching my every movement. I guess I was sobbing, but I couldn't hear it.
I've never talked about them taking my daughter before.

"Those people came and all you had for me was your high. And my kid can't eat that. She can't sleep on it. So - so - so I don't get to have her. August was mine, she was all of my love, all of my hope and my heart and my bones and my blood. She was completely mine, and YOU TOOK HER AWAY!" I spat at that fucking chair. That god damn chair.


"And that's not enough. You've gotta destroy me, too. But there's nothing left of me, so I guess you can just have my skin. Take the blown veins in my arm, take the shitty clothes I have, take the emptiness that I feel all of the fucking time. See what good it does you."

Bit 7

Everyone has some sort of tick here. Freida, the overweight girl with terrible shoes, always twirls one of her dirty blonde curls around her pointer finger. Gina only eats celery and she's always twisting one hand around the other like they're never warm enough, which is pretty likely. The bald guy with a German name constantly taps his foot. Tri-pull-et tri-pull-et tri-pull-et.
It'd all be really fucking distracting if I actually wanted to listen.
There's about a dozen people here today, and all of them keep crying. I hate it when they get all emotional, I mean come on. We're all messed up. "Oh Jesus, my parents hate me, my wife left me, I'm soo pathetic." Yeah. You're right, bald German guy. You are pathetic.

"Katie?"
Oh goddamnit.

"Katie, why don't you get up here and talk with your Shadow?"

"Why don't you go die in a fire?"
She smiled. Our director used to be an addict too. From the way she's always so twitchy and full of energy, I think she's a liar. I think she still snorts and just tells us all she quit so we'll get sober. She's one of those ridiculous people that like you the meaner you are to them.

"Just give it a try, for me?" They'd all started clapping which is 'group' for 'Haha, bitch, you've got no choice.'

I walked to the front of my class, and stood across from an empty metal folding chair, staring at the space around it. The air's cranked up too high in here.

"Good, good. Now really talk to your Shadow, Katie. Tell it just what it's done to you, and that you won't stand for it anymore. Don't be afraid... everyone's supporting you here."
Always with the support bullshit.

I gave a dramatic sigh and shoved my hands in the pockets of my dirty jeans. Fuck this place.

---continued tomorrowwww--- :)

Bit 6.1
Alright, so I can't get off that easily, I re-decided.
Did this last semester - 35 poetic lines about an inanimate object
----------------------------------------------------------------------


I am comprised almost entirely of water.

I am broken.

I am the color
of ripe pumpkins and
navels and
sweet potatoes and
poppies and
excitement.

Nestled
in cardboard,
clothed
in plastic packaging,

I am
warm
in my frozen
manmade bed.

I am cloaked in crystal negligee.

I am fragile,
filled with amusement.

A fruitless backbone.
A fruity center.

I am tasty.

I am halfway eaten and

dripping,
sticking,
slipping,
sweating.

The Sun's sultry breath trickling down my spine.
Her vicious blaze robbing me of my composure.

Slip
Drip
Dropsicle.

I am burning refreshment.
I am the good kind of pain.
I am cool, audacious -
glistening serenely under
her smoldering scowl.


With each bite
I am made more whole.

The bone of your teeth ripping,
tearing through my tendons and
my artificial flavors.
Caressing vital organs.

I am falling, and I
have
hit
the ground.

I am fractured.
Bleeding.

The jealous sun seeks her revenge,
searing my torso with her envious glare.

I am seeping,
salivating.

I am running
from my own body
and I
am utterly free.

I am
tyrannous, constant and
cascading over a forest of
beetles and grass and anthills.

Swirling and slicing and merciless.

I am both worshipped and feared.

I am burrowing deep inside the earth.

I am carried home to feed
millions of children.

I am dragged below
to comfort the afflicted.
I am sustenance.

I have found my faith.

Bullshit Bit 6

This writing every day business is a lot harder than I thought it'd be. I'm not articulate every day, and some days I just don't ever want to even read again. God damn I'm dramatic. lol
I want something cohesive, though. I want to have a finished product. This 365 project should help, I think. I'll be a lot lighter on my toes when it comes to on-the-spot work, and I'll have much more faith in myself and my writing abilities.
I'm gonna let this count as today's piece, even though it isn't fiction.

Bit 5
The sun gleamed off the ocean water, and with one sultry glare she turned the sands raspy texture to that of glossy plastic.
I planted my toes deep within the shore, trying to force myself beneath the earth.
The breeze wrapped around my shoulders, and I leaned my weight into it.
This place makes me think of everything all at once.
About broken childhood toys, my brother's coin collection, raccoons digging through our rubbish bins, my loose teeth. Time struggles to continue here, I think, just like when you're young and you try to run underwater.
It makes me, obligates me, to remember that first time she'd gotten sick. I'd held the loose frame of my mother in my arms, whispering frantically that'd she be okay, she'd be okay. My mother nodded weakly in agreeance but even then I could see the color leaving her blouse.
This beach, this goddamn beach. We'd spent so many summers vacationing her, and now it's a tomb. Bits of her teeth and her legs and her hair all mixed in with the sand, the dog piss, the beer bottles.
I'd had a mother. One that hugs you and smells like clean linens and makes the best scrambled eggs. Then I had a room in a hospital, and then a box, and then charcoal sand. And now I've got broken sea shells and this grey-scale green water and it isn't a fair trade at all.

Itty Bit 4
She sang, and I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to breathe again.
Her voice sounded like curly haired kittens and balsa wood - structured but gentle, nourishing.

"This song," she whispered, "is about bones and the sympathy we must carry for them. For you see, no bone is ever given. They are taken, stolen. And therefore everyone of them is haunted."

She sang, and I wasn't sure, but I think she glanced at me. Intentionally. And when I saw her eyes I really saw her. All of her memories, the stories behind her scars, the loves she'd lost, the loves she'd purposefully let go of, and the strength she carried in her soul.

Fictions.

Bit 3
His name's Edmund.
Edmund Thillwhistle.
Edmund lives deep in the gunkiest mud, where all five of his hearts ache with terrible, powerful thuds.
All the other earthworms are perfectly happy with their lives, eating their body weight in food and slinking through the slippery silt that collects under tangles of roots.
But Edmund was stuck on his childhood memories, his very first one at that. When he was in a little glass cocoon, no bigger or smaller than a grain of rice. Where he grew and grew and grew and tranformed into something absolutely new.
Edmund had been sneaking. He'd sneaked and creeped to the tippy top of the earth, where he poked the edge of his eye to see something he'd never seen but had always felt in at least three of his five hearts.
It's great orange and onyx wings floated so gently across the emptiness, and he writhed and wriggled about in his sticky home, trying to jump up to join The Butterfly. All of his effort went without success.
Determined, Edmund dug and twisted and winded and wrenched himself into his own concrete cocoon. He sat for twenty-eight and three-quarter days, waiting to feel some sort of newness in his segments. Once he felt a slight itch on his left side, but it wasn't enough, he knew, to make him grow as he once grew.
Frustrated, disheartened, and brimming with mal-contempt, He spun himself tighter into his swaddling, wiggling and waggling so powerfully that he began to work himself up above the earth.
With little to no warning, thick, greedy fingers snatched him from his earthy encasement, pulling him higher and higher still until he was smooshed into the coarse denim of a seven-year-old's pocket.
He squirmed and swiveled and spiraled about, desperately searching for any way out.
The harder he fought, the more tightly he fit, entangled and encircled in blue pocket lint.
Harsh chubby hands pulled Edmund further up, he tossed and he flounder 'til he was abruptly pierced through the gut.
He looked at himself, at his blue stringy skin, his seeping, sweeping ooze, his bright metal pin, and everything about Edmund was absolutely new.
The hook yanked and it clanked as the fishing reel drew, and the fear deep inside of him grew and grew and grew.
He was tossed violently back as the little boy threw
his fishing line high up through,
the emptiness and, for the very first time,
Edmund Thillwhistle flew.

Something "Inappropriate"

Bit 2

"I'm thinking about all of the great sex we've had, after he'd sneak me in the back door in the middle of the night, and it just doesn't fit."
My dog Lord Barkington (known more colloquially as "LB") wagged his tail with a boundless amount of sloppy joy.

"Oh, now, be serious LB. I need to pick out both a decent dress and a decent mind frame."
I held up something short in yellow and something shorter in red, and LB just gave me that same sappy smile.

"Yes yes yes, definitely the red. Great choice."

I slipped the dress over my head, setting it snuggly around my hips. How could we? I mean... there's just two separate lives the way I see it. The one where everyone can see me during the day, and the one where I'm sneaking about in the shadows at night. Mixing the two together would just be thoughtless. I laughed aloud.

"I can see myself now, LB, trying to small talk about local politics and grocery stores and then all of a sudden ripping him from his seat, taking him to a secluded location to engage in some adult activity."
LB gave me a look of disapproval.

"Oh, hush you. I just don't know what to do." I join LB on the floor, scratching at his favorite ear.

I sighed dramatically into his fur.
"I can't combine sex and love. Actually, I think I CAN, I just don't want to. What's that make me?"

LB was silent. He knows I'm the one that feeds him and allows him into the cozy confines of my bed, so he really should stay silent when it comes to these sort of questions.

"Oh you might as well say it anyways, I can see it in your little beady eyes. I'd be the Tramp, 'cus you're much more of a Lady than I am."

A Piece of Mel's Story

Bit 1
If I do write a book, I think I'm going to take my character Melanie Stone (featured in Mel's Story Pt I & II) and write her, well, story. Here's a bit of something after Ezra's born.
-----------------------

I looked into her small sticky eyes for the first time, felt her tight, tiny hand around just my ring finger, and my heart exploded. The bits of my heart floated up my chest and then out of my eyes, heavy tears of happiness convincing me that she was all I'd ever fucking need.
Her skin was a painful reddish purple but I could already see her tan and smiling into the sun, a wealth of brown curls falling down the back of her cotton sundress as we plant tomatoes and cucumbers and bell peppers. She'd smile into the sky, absolutely joyful just to be living, to be. I'll teach her all about how the seeds grow and why we have to wait for them to be ready to eat. I'll tell her lots of fairy-tales instead of the specifics. Like how when a Borrower takes something of yours you have to write an itty bitty note asking for it back, otherwise they'll be insulted if you use human sized paper.
I'll tell her all of the vegetables are just shy when they're seeds. That she'll have to sing to them and tell them all of her deepest, gooiest secrets and dreams. Only then will their little ears reach up, up, up out of the ground to hear her songs even better.
That's what I'll tell her.