Her joints screamed as the winter chill ran through her veins and iced her skin. It was so cold out and this blizzard was never-ending.
Julia huddled around the oven pumping heat into the 500 square-foot apartment, something her mother said to never do but it's not like the heat worked.
"Why the hell did I go out there?" Julia said aloud to the appliances.
She threw Ryan out for a reason but months of anticipation made the actual act much harder. She wasn't even sure if it was going to be today, but in the end it was. He...
Thou wanted to enjoy his iced latte
Thou wanted to bring the mood down in this joint
Thou wanted these tourists to be gone
Be gone tourists!
Thou forsakes thee!
Tourists
Poseurs
Wanna bees
Beardos
Thou is the grumbly heart of your demise
Thou is real
Really real
So frightening
So fucking real
Thou is not on tourist maps
Pamphlets
Brochures
Thou will burn away all this fake tourist bullshit
Thou will bring the mood down
in
this
joint
Iridescent, the water moved silently over her head as her toes grazed the soft sand beneath her. In an equilibrium, almost floating but almost standing, she let the water raise her arms. This was limbo.
People always said it was best to keep your feet on the ground, so to speak. When the mind wanders, ideas get lost. Was that the way it really worked, the woman wondered, exhaling and releasing small bubbles of her life-breath into the water. The bubbles traveled upward to the surface, releasing her breath for her over her head. It was true, water made you...
We are made of fluff and light.
We are made for a continuing struggle to come together in our floating.
When I fell in the garden and you laughed I knew it was not from cruelty, I knew because we are the same you and I. Unable to keep out the beauty that is the terrible world.
We whisper the standing wave form that is the one true light.
We will collapse back upon ourselves and drift into the unrecognizable dawn.
But today
My love
We will kiss with muddy knees and full laughing hearts, and God will smile.
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
As he wandered through the countryside, he couldn't quite believe he'd done it. He'd done it. Gene Black had actually done it. Finally. And although it had been something he had been planning for months, years, maybe his whole life, he didn't feel quite as good as he thought he would.
He had dreamed of being a murderer for as long as he could remember. He had wanted to feel life draining away in his hands, to watch as the soul departed the body. If it did. It was all about experimentation and, perhaps understandably, there was nothing he could...
"Wait, so he hit you?"
We had been over the story several times by now, as Carl sat down bringing a fresh round of amber colored liquid in pint glasses.
I ignored his question as I tried to figure out if this was another IPA or something different.
"Yes," I said, snapping back to reality.
"Damn dude, that fucking sucks," Carl said taking a sip of his beer.
I shook my head in agreement. Took a sip. It was the IPA. Damn that is a good beer.
"Yeah, he just snapped after I told him he was being an asshole...
She heard it calling out to her. Her clearing in Yellowstone -- it was whispering that it longed for her presence. And on this day, when she felt like the world was collapsing around her -- its edges bent and frayed and its fringes burning up in smoke -- she dragged herself there up winding paths and wild trees.
While most people saw Yellowstone as a national park, she saw it as her backyard, her sanctuary, her refuge. She had a clearing there, all her own, that bears in the hundreds of years they'd been there hadn't even found. But...
The conversation lasted two words:
"Get out."
Get out of my car. Get out of my heart. Get out of my head.
Get out of my life.
He left after that. I think he heard all of the things I didn't say. I was angry with him, and rightly so. He never told me that he was already seeing someone when we started dating. He made me the Other Woman and I had no idea.
His sweater is still under the passenger seat of my car. His handwritten notes are still in the glove box. His voice is still in...
"Wow, that was a fun."
"Yeah, it was."
Water dripped on the floor as they ran through the house and out onto the deck watching the lightning. It scared her at first but then it was like she had never seen anything so beautiful and menacing. Except perhaps her 8th grade Science teacher, Mr. Hanson. He was an odd man, with a thick black unibrow and wrinkles that resembled an old cartographer's first attempt at the East Coast of South America. He had a sinister laugh, not unlike the thunder shaking the ground under her feet.
She remembers thinking he...