She curls in on herself because there’s a sense of helplessness in the air and it’s choking her. She tries to breathe in, to breathe out, but it’s no use- she slowly inhales the feeling and before she knows it, everything becomes despair. It seeped through her bones until she is despair.
She thinks of the happiness that lived in her for a short time and she feels the tears on her cheeks. Her hand finds its way to her stomach and a choked sob escapes her.
There was nothing she could do then.
There’s nothing she could do now.
sometimes her shoulders are wishbones and her hips are number two pencils
her ankles are barcodes are birches are barcodes.
cheekbones watermelon rinds
elbows the dulled tip of used eyeliner
fingers are cigarettes
paper thin
her ribs the melancholy strings of
bluegrass guitar strumming out something slow and feel good that tastes like sunscreen and fruity shampoo instead of cheap perfume.
cigarettes count the guitar strings
one
(tick, tick - the first string is high like a sparrow)
two
her life falls to straight lines everything is in very straight lines
she makes a list. words do not frolic and
play they do not leap or jump or twist
into the margins. sentences end with periods. Letters Are Capitalized.
three
when the edges are soft and flow into one another milky when pinkies dip into soup pots to taste for salt or pepper or cumin (my mother’s secret ingredient) when girls where drawstring pants and shirts that leave room from hands inside them and laughs and screams come fast and easy like thunderstorms and orgasms
and everything is far out of her control
she inks it into the pages of a coloring book and puts it inside a box where she can watch it grow
and grow
and grow
(like a mouse or a rat or a hamster that they study in labs with toys that look like surgical equipment and walls so white they smell like hospitals)
and she can micromanage it so that every glass of water has
one slice of lemon
every glass of water
glass of water
only
water. four. four is low and potbellied and rich it vibrates
and whispers all around the room slow and steady like pouring liquid coffee syrup into a medicine cup or honey into tea
her cigarette fingers yearn to make music
lighting
sparking
sputtering. the flame lasts only a moment the warmth is gone
five
she is made of a mirror.
she is cut from glass carved from stone oh how she longs to be a statue how she longs to stand tall and perfect the marble jagged pretty on her
wishbone shoulders. does she break it?
six.
can you hear the crack? eyes closed. (her eyes are the windows of somebody else’s car seen from through the windows of your car.)
she is thin and beautiful thin and beautiful thin and beautiful the dagger of her voice is thin and beautiful the wake of her trembling smile thin and beautiful thin and beautiful
l-l-l-lemon in her water
her world arranged so pretty so accessible in the painted black lines of barcodes the cigarettes grazing nylon strings
making clockwork music.
In a bookstore in Camden Market.
He doesn’t think. He just jumps.
The water is freezing, but it wakes him up. The cold bites his skin and his imagination jumps to blood weeping from the open cuts. He keeps his eyes open, watching as bubbles start to leave from his mouth. Suddenly, he thrashes because it’s too cold and too dark and his guts twist as he realizes what he’s done, what he’s doing. He keeps sinking and he screams in his head, trying to untie the knot on his foot. His fingers are too numb.
He realizes too late that he doesn’t want to die.
If you managed to get your feet a few yards in, you might be able to see that the door is bright red and newly painted. If you’re brave enough to ring the doorbell, you might realize that it actually works, and if you listen really closely, you might be able to hear the hollow melody ringing inside the house. If you’re feeling adventurous, then you might turn the doorknob and find it unlocked. You might go upstairs. You might notice a shadow moving into one of the rooms.
But you’re not brave- you don’t notice the house at all.
words fall from her mouth
softly, like snow. but does she
know what they mean? they
reach me, like kisses.
gently caress me, and i
just can’t help, but smile.
Something delicate
clung to our lips in a
silent symphony that never
had been composed. I’m sure
we’ve somehow written the
notes (without knowing it)
but a sense of yearning was
the only taste against my tongue
that evening. We never kissed.
We simply waited and waited,
and that is why our mouths
only felt light.
We were being butchered. The thief crudely cut out our noses, necks, and added it in his house. Eyes eerily watched without being back in its sockets. Tongues thrown carelessly, carpets completely coated with warm blood. Blood, blood, blood. Maybe Mary’s, maybe mine.
This is what I wrote for the writing workshop with John Marsden (!!!) He was really nice and funny!
Anyway, the task was to write something with two pairs of words starting in the same letter
eg. we were (w) being butchered (butchered)It was fun! I thought he said we had to write a ‘horror’ one, but I misheard
(typical). I edited it a little bit, but this was pretty much what I wrote :)What do you guys think?
A villain without a moustache is like a sandwich without a filling. Don’t make your bad guy a piece of bread when he deserves to be a BLT.
Well, I’ve hit a slump. Everything that I seem to write is rubbish- I can’t possibly post anything here. It’s either ridiculous or just wishy-washy words. ARGH.
I guess this is what people call a writer’s block? ahaha
(Please ignore the last line- it’s late and everything is funny to me.)
Anyway…How do you guys cope with writer’s block? How do you get rid of it? Can you get rid of it?
If you need to write a sad scene, but, like myself, are distracted by being full of the joys of spring all day every day, put a plate of cookies in front of you. For each cookie eaten, a single tear will roll down your character’s cheek. Therefore, you satisfy your need for cookies as well as building up the melancholy mood of the paragraph.
Multi-tasking revelations of joy.
It’s so crazy it just might work.
This is a blog about 100 words of almost moments.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
