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Karma: 1 |  | Do You Love or Slay the Lion?
« Thread Started on Sept 5, 2011, 7:07pm » | |
The wind was picking up the leaves of coming autumn and he found himself, picking up and collecting the colors of crayons left in Penny's imaginative wake. Colorful carnage in her creation, the pages of discovery telling him a story that he didn't know.
On this page is a man, scribbled in green as he stands behind the outline of a house on a sunny day. The man is far away, waving at her with a smile.
Why is he always so far away in her drawings? Like with Madi, he wasn't the dark man. He was green.
This other was of her going to sleep in bed with her stuffed bunny hugged tight to her chest.
He could not hang them all up, he selected the ones she showed extra love for and replaced the older ones. Older ones were folded and put away. He imagined it would not be long that he would look at them as a means to turn her back into a child, if even for a moment. Perhaps on her wedding day he would want to imagine her as a little girl again, giving her a strange immortality. Folded away, the memory inserted into a chest of other ones as they progressed into more mature images. Did every parent think their child would be an artist and illustrate their years of thought up to total maturity? That the parent could see the full illustration of adulthood unveil and through it, find an understanding?
She was asleep on the swinging bench he installed on the porch. The wind caught the strands of her hair into the wind and tried to scatter it like the dandelion seeds parachuting around the meadow. Slowly from the creaking chains of the bench he lifted up up and laid her to bed in her room, one foot dangling out from other the sheets as she moaned in protest but fell quickly back to bed.
This was the soft conclusion that lead up to the next story. Outside, the wind was picking up leaves and scattering them.
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FadedVelvet
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« Reply #1 on Sept 5, 2011, 8:02pm » | |
Every sunrise delivers opportunities. Every sunset asks what we did with the opportunities...
The singer waltzed down the night roads, through the bone-crunch of fallen leaves, remembering how her Mother used to say “The leaves fall and so do we. It’s the season it all comes out”, brushing Madison’s thick, long hair into a braid, always trying to tame her in one way or another, while Madison’s little heart had beat with wanting to run and her mind had tried to unknot her mother’s meaning. What came out and why? But she never got her answer, and let her hair down and she the young girl turned ran and ran and ran straight from adolescence into womanhood, to end up with empty hands, an empty home, an empty womb and wondering if all that running had done any good. She’d countered her mother’s argument about her wild heart, saying she wasn’t running from anything but towards, always towards, because the horizon was always there, holding her transfixed.
The roads were darker this time of year and even though she should probably fear something she didn’t anymore. As far as she did figure, the worst had happened, and she was still some kind of widow, still childless, still walking some edge of some life, and that was her lot. To dig her hands into the ground, because the horizon had forsaken her and now her gaze was not lifted high to the blue, but below. Where things yearned into being, and where we all went back. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Her Father had said in every bit of dirt was the trace of one of the stars up there. Between dust and sky, we came from fallen things. We were not so different to the leaves, she thought, her whistle turning a corner with her feet, becoming a song, lyrics belted in a clearwater voice, notes that fell like rain.
Boots loose on her feet, the rest of her summer-skin and cotton, Madison Rye strolled into Tag’s yard and up to the porch and paused... There was a swing now, it was still, ensconced in quiet, somewhere inside the house a turn of sheets. Lightly, she snuck across towards the door, almost to knock, stopped. No, don't do that. The wind blew, the wind changed, Madison was seated on the swing, ankles acrossed. She took in the night sky without sorrow, or regret, but an idea that her Father may have been wrong. Blessed as she might have been, blue moon baby, she didn’t feel nor see anything shining within. If the stars were far distant cousins, Madison couldn’t believe it. Would Tag? Would he even be awake? Why was she here?
A turn of her head, she looked up towards the door as she sank back against the seat, and took out from her jacket a letter he’d written her, the one she had avoided for days, and finally confronted alone at the Penny Moon. She feared her friend’s ink more than she feared the shadows. It was how she could be, and what he meant to her. Why the evening had washed her up at his door.
The letter asked, "do you love or slay the lion?", and she had thought she knew the answer to that to but she did not. The paper rattled in her hand with the disconsolate breeze. The stars witnessed and the stars were silent.
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« Reply #2 on Sept 7, 2011, 6:35pm » | |
Some toys were picked up from the ground quietly and put back into their bins. Penny was the chaos in the house, the creature that multiplied the items, gave them life and let them walk into all the rooms. In a way the house lost its being when she was asleep, it was like to go to sleep itself when left with just Tag, moving through the rooms and reassembling what was the original order. Dishes off the low table in the living room and pillows put back into order. There was always a crayon he found later in some corner or odd place that had been too clever for him on his first searching of it. Sixteen, there were a total of sixteen.
At night like this he sometimes prepared a shallow glass of brandy and went outside. The porch swing had been a good idea but he was nearly startled to find Madison there. His breath sucked in quickly and was held. His smile was sheepish, as if she had been planning on surprising him all along and his reaction was one too earnest to hide that she had won. He hadn't shut the door completely,o he took the final step and shut it behind him, careful of the door lock so it wouldn't make too loud a click. His eyes went back as if to check if Penny were there before he looked back at her. She was weird, sometimes she could sleep through a thunderstorm and other times it took only putting a toy back in a bin to disturb her.
"I wasn't expecting to see you so soon." He took a swallow of his drink and noticed that there was something about her. Concern was in his voice but did not read well on his face, "Are you picking up the pieces?" Sometimes, he wondered if he was one of those pieces. She came to him at moments like these, as if he fueled her up for her next adventure. There were times he didn't like that about their relationship, he felt excluded from the adventure itself and only knew the build up and aftermath. Except, perhaps, for last time.
Taking a step forward he picked up the small, red outdoor pillow that went on the bench and tossed it to Madison for her to catch. No doubt the wind or his daughter had blown it there. He found she was often rearranging the world to inform him, in that both of them were alike. He did not sit on the bench swing next to her but looked at her from where he was standing. There were times he thought she was solemn because though the adventure had been a tragedy, it was a direction she knew and understood well. Her face read like a woman's now, he did not know what conclusions she drew about him now. If those drawings, those resolutions were around him or part of him, sloppy or neatly resolved.
"Sometimes... it is hard to enjoy peace. There is the feeling that you should but also the uneasiness of it being there." It was how he felt when he looked upon his own house. That its existence only marked the sure uprising of a flood. Another swallow of his brandy flavored the evening with a smoked wood.
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FadedVelvet
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« Reply #3 on Sept 13, 2011, 7:33pm » | |
A hand out brought the pillow home, against her chest, where she buried her chin in its side. “There’s nothing left to pick up”, on the cusp of a laugh that didn’t arrive but glittered somewhere in her gaze. It leveled on him as he neared but did not sit, her head angled so to look up at him. Even now, with less years between them, she was still looking up at him and it occurred to her, through the lapses of memory and their ghosts, that he would always be stronger and taller and wiser than her.
“Peace is its own guilt, Tag. I never did wear it well.” She pulls the pillow onto her lap and closes her hands upon it, twining them. “But we’re allowed to have it.”
The night gusts picked up, threw the stars between branches of the closest trees, obscured Trebor, offered only glimpses of that wild blue up there. It was as though the night picked itself up and moved around the world like a great veil, and with it her soul settled easier against her bones, and she recognised the lack of indulgence she felt towards it – once, the night had done something to her, made her hungry and volatile and desperate, but now, with no pieces to pick up and empty hands, the night and days had a whole lot of space she could fill but Madison no longer felt obliged to it.
She leans in his shade and sanctuary, enjoying the stillness. “We’re allowed to have it, though it’s ours to love or slay.” Shuffling over, she patted the place beside her. “But....", eyes like forever sang across to the dark one that stood rooted into the porch and time and her life. "I don’t think that’s what you were asking about.”
The night gusts stole the paper out of her hand, whisked it across the grass and into the roads. Madison gasped and looked on as if stunned by a pain.
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Tag
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« Reply #4 on Sept 15, 2011, 11:59am » | |
There would have been no inclination on his part to fetch the paper for her, if not for the way she looked when it separated from her hands. He set his glass down on the floor, at the post at the two of the two steps and then went down, picking it up from the ground like a dead moth and returning to her. When he opened the wings he was surprised to find it was the note he wrote her though it should have been clear to him based on how she spoke, that it was.
Folded back into wings, he held it out to her, "I have been thinking." The small breath of air made its wings bat in a lax motion, as if cooling from the summer heat, "There is something that has been left undone."
Now he sat beside her, swaying the bench with his weight and motion. His eyes were dark but at night, like this, so were her's. When they looked at each other they were just dark mirrors reflecting eternally. His shoulder brushing her's, feet giving the bench swing a small rock, "That place we were... it has burned, but not its spirit. Do you not think it will come to rise again?"
Tag wet his lips and looked across the road, "I feel that there has been no resolution but also," his attention adjusted to her as if wanting her reaction, "that there should be."
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FadedVelvet
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« Reply #5 on Sept 15, 2011, 10:52pm » | |
Words.... they can make or break a world, Acony. Remember a good word spent is as good as a dollar, and one ruined hits like a bullet.
Billerton Rye
“Would you have me do it all again?” cinder breaths and smoke eyed, her corrupted and pale china hands strangling the cushion she gripped with the vibration of his meaning. Mingled expressions vividly crossed her face. “Andy isn't dead, he's walking evil, but I know there is never an end to any of this, not without it causing trouble elsewhere.” And the point that had her wonder if another attempt was not fruitless. The entire scenario had made her life a particularly vicious cycle.
The mirrors that held Tag in them move between the road and his features, contemplating her friend's inceptive danger. It moved the singer and it compelled her right to the guts, despite her reservations. Therein was the desert in the woman that still blazed without cease and colored her world strangely. The color red would always hold her like a debt. Tag had burned with her, seen the orange lights and her deaths. Madison would always have those scars, three degrees deep and he had visited every single one.
“What else are you supposin' there to do? I don’t want to be hopeless to you, but his kingdom has come undone, twice now, and I’m not picking up the gun for a third. Not even for him. Not even because you think so.”
Refolding the wings, she settled back into the breadth of the swing and rocked with its idle gait, tucking the note into the jacket slung over the armrest. “If that's what you're saying...and coming from you, it scares me more than I'd like to be saying here.” Her words were fat and full with indecision.
Pressed as the ink on that paper, Madison reaches out and carefully replaces his hand around that brandy glass, taking a sip for herself of incandescence, plight and oak. "I don't want to bring a war to your doorstep, Tag."
Stretching high, the bare boned branches scraped at heaven and the leaves changed their faces.
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Tag
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« Reply #6 on Sept 18, 2011, 8:13am » | |
"I think you are better for it." But doing it all over again? His head tilted to the side as he thought about it. No, he supposed, doing what had been done in his past repeatedly was exactly as she said. It fed into some cycle that ate its own tail, continuing on infinitely.
Was that the answer, though? That there was no point in making strides in any direction because always and forever there would be new Andy Jacobs and different opinions rising from the ground, recreating this strife? Tag had to believe that that wasn't the case, he had seen society make different moral shifts and if the morality of a nation could differ so from one people to another, it surely meant that there was a means to overcome and progress. The night air was starting to get a cold to it, he could feel Summer nights turning their hands over to Autumn.
This wasn't Heaven, he wasn't expecting a gleaming finale. It just felt that something was undone and that he was expected to accept that. Madison was right, the Orpheum had rebuilt itself over and over but perhaps the point of it had been missed.
"Did you ever see bamboo?" He said, indicating a stalk in the air with his fingertips, "You can chop off the whole of it, round as a small tree, but it will come back, it will always come back."
His hands dropped to circle around the edge of the seat of the swinging bench they lounged in while she strangled the pillow. His eyebrows lowered and he spoke softly, "You must dig and uproot it for it to ever be gone but once you have," his eyes returned to her, "it is gone."
His face tightened in that more thoughtful expression before he turned his attention onto her, "My worries are different now. I think about what the world is, what I let it be. What choice does a father have when something with such determination knows his face? When something like that is within traveling distance? Organizations, not individuals, concern me."
"I do not think all people need to be constructed of the same fiber, but that when people come together to form a creature that that creature has a certain nature. It can makes those who would not have done something more active in their purpose, it creates a group mentality that no one has to enforce... the people just do it because they feel it." After all, it had been his organization, the feudal system of Japan, that had driven the war to the point it had become. If anyone could have intervened and changed just a few things, yes, there would have still be disagreements. The magnitude of the war, however, would have been the stuff of dreams.
"It is not enough to cut off the head, the feet must be removed as well and then... there needs to be a new skeleton. That way, when the creature grows again, it can be different. It could... be your's."
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FadedVelvet
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« Reply #7 on Sept 28, 2011, 5:21am » | |
Madison listened with the grave patience of someone who had looked at the sky her whole life for her answers; constellations wielded secrets and possibilities she had been starved of. There came a time when the fight left and you had to find another solution. For years, what Madison had known, too well, was dirt and blood, sweat and fire, and it had worn her, not the other way around. Self assured as far as a bullet could take her but only that far, and when it had all been stripped off she was just a stalk, just a scare crow, a lean woman with muddy heels and vengeance hot in her pale, cold hands. She had been got, had, sold, ground down. Her own feet had been cut off.
"I don't know where I can take it, if I am better for it, I feel pathetic for being so stricken. I don't want to let Andy have it all, but I feel he'll have it anyway. It's a beast I can't slay, and I am.. I am ashamed."
But at least, she reckoned, with a slight smirk, she was alive. Her gaze neared the cobalt sky and its rude clouds with a muted resign. "You helped me more than you know in Lofton, bringing Michael back. Bringing me back from my deaths."
Her gaze slung at him like a sudden rain. Barreling down with the grateful knock in her chest. "When you first met me, I was done for. But you've always been there, dragging me back onto the right path. Once I would have told you to slay your lions, Tag..." A sip of burning wood, the drink tasted better this time, more like potential. Not as sweet, but memorable. "Now, I say you should love them. Laughter is a wonderful weapon." A wrinkling of her nose, her shoulder nudged his and she lowered her eyes. "I owe you a few drinks."
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Tag
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« Reply #8 on Sept 28, 2011, 2:03pm » | |
"My struggle has been a quiet one." He admitted after she spoke of Micahel, of Lofton. There was conflict on his face, it played out in a small harmony of tensed muscles about his eyes. It gave itself away because it was night and he had no need to squint, "I wish sometimes that I had shared it with you sooner."
There had been the feeling that recently they had come to know each other. Or, had become different people all over again and were stopping here, once more to say hello. My name is Madison, I've been through the Fire. I'm Tag and my heart isn't broken anymore. He did not press her about Andy Jacob, his mind would work on that and when she mentioned the lion he felt an agreement resonate in him, crawling out his throat in a humm loud enough for her to hear.
The tender nudge of her shoulder reels him back in with a strength greater than the impression it left on his skin. When she mentioned buying him a drink his lips parted in a relaxed smile. It wasn't too often that they relaxed like that around each other. The paternal part of him broke away and left a younger man there who looked like he enjoyed spending much of his day laughing. He always fractured like that, became different versions of himself at odd times and always so seamlessly that that the change was obvious.
"I don't think you've ever had a drink with me. Not just us." He'd seen her at the inn with company, but it was never the two of them, drinking and talking. Sometimes they nodded to each other. Other times there were short moments on a bench swing. Their friendship had been a badly kept secret through her many faces.
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FadedVelvet
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« Reply #9 on Nov 14, 2011, 7:50pm » | |
"I don't think you're wrong about that. And isn't that a shame? We never get our chance to laugh?" Not together. She watches the light change on his face, from one man to the next and back again, all the comedy and tragedy, all of it. It made her smile easily. There was nothing broken, nothing to break. The drink is handed back. "I wish you had shared it sooner, too." Rocking the swing and biding her time. There was nowhere left to run. Her feet ached for the stillness possessing them and her head sometimes hurt with the desire to start more fires, but there had to be an end or some semblance of it. She didn't want to just be bones and rags left for the dogs.
"But it is what it is, ain't it, Tag?" A glint in her eyes. "We should do something about it. See if we can't build up all that got thrown away. There are reasons we are sitting here like this."
It wasn't ironic the way her hand went for the coin in her pocket. She clutched it tight. "I'm not ready for dead yet."
In a crude two-story clinic on the West of the town, Andy Jacob sat himself down and scratched at his knees for his name to be called. No one gets out of fire alive, not the way he did, he had an angel, the kid, that kid, that girl, and you don't look an angel in the eye and walk away not without something turned in your soul. He was here because he didn't want to be a monster anymore. He was tired of smashing mirrors to avoid his own reflection. Of being the lesser man. Why be ruined?
"Mr Jacob?", the nurse walked out, dressed casual, peach lipstick and a heart pendant on her collarbone. "Mr Jacob?" Her name tag said Tricia. Andy nodded at her briskly and stood like someone being restrained. Tension ebbed off his whippet frame. He hadn't shaved in a week.
"Mr Jacob, come this way. Doctor Leiber will help you." Her smile made him want to believe. He didn't yet, but maybe. Maybe? Maybe sounded good.
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Tag
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« Reply #10 on Nov 22, 2011, 9:03am » | |
"No, there wasn't laughing. But I am happier for you being in my life. It was good." He admitted with a distant smile to her. His eyes shifted away towards the door, which he now was aware had cracked open and the eyes of a young, little girl were watching them both. Even in the dark, he could see how the light from the moon that caught the bottom edge of the door spliced and crawled upward differently now that it had been moved. Like he were sharing the spotting an a zebra on the savannah he nudged Madi and then pointed at the doorway. "We have an audience."
The attention on his daughter caused her to back away from the doorway. The crack in the door trembled and grew smaller as if to deny that she were there. This was the heartbeat-thrill of being caught snooping for her. When she heard that Tag's tone was not a harsh one she stuck her head out of the doorway, looking at them both and speaking with some hesitancy, "What are you doing out here? Whose's that?" Asking about Madison as if she were not there directly to address.
"We're having a play date." Tag said simply, making a hand motion that she should step further towards them, "The same as when you spend time with the babysitter and bake. This is the person I spend time with. She had come to visit the other day, remember?"
"Oh..." The little girl stepped forward. There was something exciting to her about being up later than her dad usually allowed. It seemed to call for something special to happen. Her hands grabbed at the ends of her night shirt. It looked as though she had a great deal to say to both of them but wasn't sure she wanted to talk at all.
"Penny, this is Madi." Tag cleared his throat. It wasn't clear if Penny would dart back inside the house or stick her hand out to the woman in greeting. The little girl did neither. She stared at Madison, squeezing the ends of her shirt tighter in her hands while she judged the stranger woman that was in her home. The woman that had been in her home one time before, when she was gone. So this was what a play date for dad was like? It looked boring to her, they hadn't any toys or games. They were just talking? No one was even drawing? When did talking get to be so fun?
"Hi." But Penny didn't step up to Madison. Instead, she ran to Tag and crawled up on his lap, putting her head on his shoulder. His arms dropped around her, fingers interlocking underneath her as he formed a human sling to hold her. When she saw Madison look at her she would periodically bury her face in his shoulder as if to hide.
"Don't let her fool you," Tag said to Madison with a small smile, "She gets quite brazen given a little time."
Far away from Rhydin, in the Widow's spoon, a Brother was looking over some news about the Orpheum. His eyebrows lowered as he read the newspaper heading over and over. The building had burned down. They were lucky that in their downfall a fire had never ravaged the Hive. Was that really an accident? Accidents like that just didn't happen, not when you had your hands into so many nefarious business dealings. Could the Orpheum really be done with?
"Brother?" He could see his identical twin stir from the shadowy chair, looking at him but not speaking. His smile appeared slowly, "I think we may have some remnants of the Orpheum we can pick up." The climb uphill had been infuriatingly slow... if Andy Jacob was still around, there just might be a chance to give them a wider range, a greater vitality.
Could the ashes of the Orpheum fertilize their grounds?
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FadedVelvet
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« Reply #11 on Nov 22, 2011, 5:33pm » | |
Madison was visibly moved by his soft-edged words. The hardness in her chest blistered and cracked away. Some times you just needed a little sunshine on your face. The delicacy of their friendship was a thing of many safe knots carefully wound but smooth and strong with their age. It was a friendship you could settle in with comfort. One you return to and find it still in the same shape you left it. Her eyes were silent fields and said enough that she needn't speak. Any words were stolen by the visitor in the door. Madison would have gasped, but there was only more profound silence.
The girl. The girl. Yes, she knew who this was. The artist. Cute as a button and shiny as a new dollar. Her face had not been touched by any trial and her eyes were wise in the way a child is; perceptive and candid. There was a brief, harsh strangle of jealousy as she looked from Father to Daughter. She'd wanted to be a mama for a long time. The emptiness of her womb was one of the reasons she'd walked out of lonely white house on a grey sky day to find another life with a gun on her hip. But the feeling subsided, scrunched up and blown away, leaving only a shame at her selfish thought and a wink to the child. This was Tag's joy. Be happy for him. A pale hand turned the tiny silver moon fallen in her palm upwards to Penny, like magic. "Ever seen a coin trick?"
A sidelong glance to the dark man, and she smiled broadly. "Your daddy does them best."
---
"Mr. Jacob, I'd like for you to see me more often than a seasonal basis. I am requesting your visit, to begin with, fortnightly, and after a few months, having monitored your progress, we can look into spreading those visits out." Dr. Leibers' eyes narrowed as he folded his hands together on the slab of a tabletop, wide and long and as imposing as the doctor behind it. He did not like Andy, if he was pushed into any subjective corner, and he did not like the idea of a man like him walking on the street with the emotions he had hanging off him like livewires. But, it was what it was, and perhaps there was some redemption for the man yet. Some chance for healing.
"Mr. Jacob, I don't know the extent of the ... the damage you have incited, but I would like for you to be honest as you can be, for the sake of your own self, your integrity" or what was left of it, he thought, "and I'd like you to have a hard think abo..'
Dr Leiber's face was a portrait of surprise, as if he'd had an epiphany. There was only a bullet in his forehead and few drops of blood running off the tip of his nose.
Andy swore and shook his head. "How's that for a think, Doc."
He turned and sauntered out the door, bad attitute, bad seed. Tricia stood shaking at the door, her hand over her mouth.
"Fuck you later."
And out Andy went into the drizzling afternoon.
Just.Like.That.
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Tag
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« Reply #12 on Nov 23, 2011, 6:52pm » | |
There was a similarity, like a whisper, between them. The reason Penny had come into Tag's life had been because of a great fire, it had engulfed her parents and perhaps her siblings. He didn't know the details, he didn't press the little girl to tell him. Madison had come to him, again, after a great fire. Neither female had had to tell him what happened, he took their eyes to be the explanation. There were scuff marks of ash on their shoes and sometimes on their lips when they spoke.
Penny, buried against him still, did not seem to know how to respond to her at first. Pretending that she hadn't heard anything this strange woman said and then risking a peek at her. One of Tag's hands unlaced from the other to pat her on the back to reassure her, to encourage her, which caused her to smile and lean away from her hiding spot in the shadow of his body.
"Daddy carries those," the coins. She reached out instantly to touch the bit of silver but before she did withdrew her hand, realizing she had gone into the bubble of the stranger. Her eyes would check for Madison's permission, for her reaction in the pause of her action. "Tricks?" She looked at Tag and blinked at him.
His eyebrows lowered when she looked at him, obviously not seeming to understand Madison. Penny and he played this sort of game with the English language. As she learned it she taught him and what he learned he taught her. He knew the root of her inquiry, he'd experienced just the same confusion once several years ago, "A trick is not always mean. Sometimes... you know someone is tricking you and the person is doing it as a joke, for you to be happy." He wanted to say entertained, but Penny had had trouble with that word last week. Sometimes she just seemed to think that there was a malevolence to words that he didn't quite understand. Perhaps it was because English was her first language and she knew the spirit of it better than he. She'd started speaking some Japanese with him, he enjoyed sharing that with her.
Penny appeared to be working the idea around in her head. One of her hands grabbed Tag by the collar of his shirt to steady herself as she leaned forward to poke the coin in Madison's hand. Doing it had amused her, she giggled and dropped back into Tag, sinking into the safe side of his flesh and shadow.
A letter was making its way to Andy Jacob.
Andy Jacob,
Word is that the Orpheum has been neutered by a fire. The Hive has taken a bow, but there's room for more.
Care to reinvent?
The Brothers
At the Hive, blood was stirring on the streets. Jennet was trying to raise a mighty flag to be rid of them. James Owen had had a crisis of the heart and was hoping to return, to see to it that the town he had abandoned in its time of need had survived. After all, hadn't Corren and Topaz saved the day, just before they left? It was important to keep their forces separate, they did not want to see Jennet gain more and more support.
That was the problem with things like poison ivy. None of the roots could be left behind to grow.
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FadedVelvet
Somewhat Respectable Poster
member is offline
Joined: Aug 2011
Gender: Female
Posts: 46
Location: Cadentia
Karma: 2 | | Re: Do You Love or Slay the Lion?
« Reply #13 on Nov 24, 2011, 7:49pm » | |
On this page is a man, scribbled in green as he stands behind the outline of a house on a sunny day. The man is far away, waving at her with a smile.
Why was it they were always so far away?
Bridges, Madison thought. She needed to build them into her world instead of burning them. Ashes in her eyes, cinders on her lips. A brief flash of recognition spent between child and woman. The coin met the air, a silver diver, luck in somersault. "Heads, or tails?" Her voice more diamond than coal. It fell into her hand, stretched out and waiting. "What do you think, Daddy? Will it be heads or tails?" Madison leaned forward so to peek, but did not, grinning instead but not without earnest.
It was good to watch this man so close to what he loved. She realised now why he had been a shadow, a man of so much shade. Yes, he had been the one to take reprieve against, he had the wisdom of watchful trees, the quality of one who not only watches but knows, artfully, how to wait. But he had pulled out his roots and began to move. It was Tag growing before her into the man he had wanted to be. Delicately, she stroked the child's hair and smiled, thumb against the child's brow. "Darlin' " No sadness. Penny reminded her of her shape as a woman. Of the possibility of her flesh.
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The cracked window pane glared in the jumble of bleak buildings along the very edge of town. It was a pockmark, a scar, a pain to look upon. Andy slumped in his bed, swatting a marker through the mail he did have. DECLINED, RETURN TO SENDER, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU TOO, RETURN TO SENDER, NOT HERE ANYMORE. FUCK YOU. FUCK OFF.
And, as life would have it, the last envelope was the one that caught his wretched eyes and stopped the marker in its flight. No red mark to leave there. But what he read left a mark on him.
The Hive. He smirked. He sat up. The words drew their wickedness into him. There was no denying some things. Some people were just plain bad. They did not err their minds with caution, their bodies with inhibition, their desires with scales. There only was want and have and the ruthless route there. He carefully folded the letter and decided it was time for a shower, a shave, and a ticket to the Widow's Spoon.
The window glared its broken eye over West End. The streets were empty. Tricia stood over Dr. Leiber's body in the morgue, wishing she could do something. Wishing she could do something.
On the crumbling spire of a forgotten church, a crow cried a eulogy
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Tag
Respectable Poster
member is offline
Joined: Dec 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 65
Location: Rhydin
Karma: 1 | | Re: Do You Love or Slay the Lion?
« Reply #14 on Nov 28, 2011, 8:10pm » | |
"Heads." Was his response and then he looked down at Penny, who appeared to want to both contradict her father so that she could win but also agree with him because he was the one she admired. When Madison moved to act as though she would peek at the outcome Penny gasped and quickly said, "No!" then, just as quickly she spat out the word, "Tails."
The man chuckled. It hadn't been too often that he could laugh like that around anyone that wasn't older than four. Sometimes it happened with Madison but most of the time when he laughed it was in a cage of restraint as if the sound could shatter his ribs and heart instead of take him further. Tonight it stretched the bones, made more room for pulse inside his chest and rolled over his company. Penny liked it when he laughed, it made her nose wrinkle and she looked at Madison with a child's demand, "Well, what is it?" The little girl wanted her answers, but the shadow and the diamond almost didn't need to look. They knew by now that comedy was tragedy and tragedy had become comedy.
Tag's dark eyes followed the motion of Madison's face. Had he ever seen her so happy? How had he not known that she had a love for children as he did?
In the Widow's Spoon three little girls were kidnapped from their fathers. A Brother smoked a cigarette outside. It had been raining heavily but now it was a sputtering mist. He leaned against the building, taking in a draw and letting the cloud of smoke leave his lips. Would Andy Jacob come? Not tonight, it was too soon. Draw in of a breath of smoke from the fire of his lung. The man would come.
His eyebrows lowered as he judged a stream of water, coming from the run off of the roof onto the ground. Swirling like mad, polluted water. Like dog piss, trickling down the way, highlighted yellow by the lantern light. Why did everything looked like a cow pasture with too much traffic? Piles of mud like shit and sickly pools of water ebbing around like urine.
He didn't see the crisp night sky with sterling stars appearing where the clouds had gone.
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