W.A.S.T.E.
Smash Ace
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2008
- Messages
- 680
This piece is 1,109 words. It is the product of 3 days of arduous labor. It probably needs much work. I don't know when the deadline is, but I'll leave this here untouched. I need to distance myself from it for a bit and I'll hopefully get back to it before the contest is closed. Feel free to comment/critique. Thanks to all.
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For Love and All Its Pleasant Things
by Jesse Mancilla
“We are made of star stuff…Stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.” – Carl Sagan.
Tufts of stars pillow against the over-breaching pull of gravity.
He took a knife and inch by inch carved off the parts she didn’t like. Blood circuited to the white sheet in narrow rivulets. The shadow of a tree in the wind undulated in the pallid blue of a bedroom wall. The shadow thickened and thinned and crawled along the ceiling like delicate smoke from a cigarette. Mother would not approve of this morbid scene.
“Eduardo! What about Jesus?” she would ask him and he would reply “I gave up on the Body of Christ long ago, Mother. I only want the Body of Christy now.” Then his mother could be hidden in the deepest corner of his back pocket where light is bent into regression and sound is crunched into silence. For Christy, for Christy, he thought, this blood is for Christy. He dug the knife into the birthmark on his forearm.
There is magic in the way certain flowers bloom for the moon.
The knife vibrated in Eduardo’s hand and he knew this was a step forward for him. His therapist had told him that he couldn’t expect anyone to go all the way for him. People appreciate it when you meet them halfway or at least make an effort. This was his effort and he looked askance at the candy striped sheet and tasted winter and peppermint candy and felt the cold kiss of a distant December morning. There had been sleet in the air that morning.
"This is god crying," his mother had said. Leaves of grass broke like glass as they walked to a stationed cab. Eduardo stood next to his father. His heavy hand sifted through Eduardo’s hair with the weight of obligation.
“This isn’t good-bye,” his father had said. “There is no such thing as parents and their kids saying good-bye to each other. Just because we’ll be in different places doesn’t mean you won’t see me.” He looked down the street and followed a crow as it glided behind a building. “I promise.”
Eduardo stared at the yellow cab and his tongue flitted at golden angles, relishing the sweetness of a peppermint.
A scream in space shrivels into silence at the speed of thought.
The knife lay in a streak of blotting crimson. Eduardo observed his blood through a waning and nebulous vision. It has language, he thought, a language of polar construction that whispers in curves and trickles and screams in fractals and effusions. He heard his mother tussle with her blanket in the adjacent room. Does she hear his blood scream? Does it remind her of Abel and the power of the Father? He wanted her to go into his room. “I know my Bible”, he wanted to tell her, “and do you think father can tune into my pain and save me? Can he turn around in that cab and say good-bye with his eyes?” Along the ceiling, the shadow of the tree in the wind split and spread in imitation of his blood.
For 30,000 years energy trudges through the smoldering fusion of the sun until at last it pierces the surface, cuts itself free from thick solar tresses and beams into the anthracite veil of space.
“Why is he leaving?” Eduardo had asked his mother.
“Because your father is a b*****d drunk, mijo. Y coge a las mujeres como un maldito. His mind is too small for God.”
Is my mind too small for God, Eduardo thought, or is God too small for my mind? He lay on his bed in a coal veil of failed vision interrupted only by rhythmic flashes of light. He flowed like a sweet aroma in the blackness and wafted through the nudge of feeble synaptic planets that formed with every iridescent flash. Flash. Flash.
They said the only thing his father had left before his disappearance was a letter that started with “Querida Flor” and consisted only of violent, illegible scribbles. Neighbors reported they had seen an orange light flash over his home the night of the disappearance. Flash. Flash.
In the darkness, Eduardo was slung by the invisible hand of a planet and as he rounded its curve he saw the glint of soft metal in the black distance. It was a saucer. Flash. It was nearer. He could see dark figures moving in decelerated time. A face at a window. A brown hand. Flash. Fingers spread against the glass. A smile. Glistening eyes. Eduardo looked into those eyes and said good-bye.
Stars pitter into the arms of empty space as they collapse into white density at the compression of their own weight.
It was Christy who had caught Eduardo’s eye. Christy, with hair like swaying stalks of wheat and eyes like blooming cerulean fire. Christy, who spoke in fractals and painted landscapes with her tongue. Christy, who had the arc of the planets in the motion of her hands. Christy, who took those hands and placed them on his cheeks when she said that it couldn’t work between them, that it would never work between them. When he asked her why, she took her mouth and set his mind on fire.
“I don’t like the ridge of your nose. The size of your eyes.” She slid her fingers down the contour of his face. “The crusty redness of your pimples. Your droopy ears and your sloppy mustache.” She grazed his arms and his chest with her finger tips. “Your arms hang down too low. Your birthmark looks like dirt or s**t. Your chest is bigger than mine.” She turned to a group of onlookers and smiled. “Also, most of the school is sure that you’re a freak, that you’re half alien or something. Your dad was ‘abducted’, right?” She pinched his cheeks.
She had raised her balmy fingertips and squeezed his cheeks with a pressure so delicate and anomalous that Eduardo recalled it intimately as he lay on his bed and felt the weight of warm blood on his face. He felt himself sink into the mattress, as if descending into a cosmic mouth that would eventually devour him into blackness.
Andromeda dines on an ancillary galactic peon.
Eduardo lay on his bed and coughed out a final breath to the open arms of the sinuous shadow on the ceiling. Blood spluttered onto the knife. In his darkness, Eduardo slowly dropped the fetid atoms of an ancestral stellar core as he drifted towards a pulsing, luminous coil.
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For Love and All Its Pleasant Things
by Jesse Mancilla
“We are made of star stuff…Stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.” – Carl Sagan.
Tufts of stars pillow against the over-breaching pull of gravity.
He took a knife and inch by inch carved off the parts she didn’t like. Blood circuited to the white sheet in narrow rivulets. The shadow of a tree in the wind undulated in the pallid blue of a bedroom wall. The shadow thickened and thinned and crawled along the ceiling like delicate smoke from a cigarette. Mother would not approve of this morbid scene.
“Eduardo! What about Jesus?” she would ask him and he would reply “I gave up on the Body of Christ long ago, Mother. I only want the Body of Christy now.” Then his mother could be hidden in the deepest corner of his back pocket where light is bent into regression and sound is crunched into silence. For Christy, for Christy, he thought, this blood is for Christy. He dug the knife into the birthmark on his forearm.
There is magic in the way certain flowers bloom for the moon.
The knife vibrated in Eduardo’s hand and he knew this was a step forward for him. His therapist had told him that he couldn’t expect anyone to go all the way for him. People appreciate it when you meet them halfway or at least make an effort. This was his effort and he looked askance at the candy striped sheet and tasted winter and peppermint candy and felt the cold kiss of a distant December morning. There had been sleet in the air that morning.
"This is god crying," his mother had said. Leaves of grass broke like glass as they walked to a stationed cab. Eduardo stood next to his father. His heavy hand sifted through Eduardo’s hair with the weight of obligation.
“This isn’t good-bye,” his father had said. “There is no such thing as parents and their kids saying good-bye to each other. Just because we’ll be in different places doesn’t mean you won’t see me.” He looked down the street and followed a crow as it glided behind a building. “I promise.”
Eduardo stared at the yellow cab and his tongue flitted at golden angles, relishing the sweetness of a peppermint.
A scream in space shrivels into silence at the speed of thought.
The knife lay in a streak of blotting crimson. Eduardo observed his blood through a waning and nebulous vision. It has language, he thought, a language of polar construction that whispers in curves and trickles and screams in fractals and effusions. He heard his mother tussle with her blanket in the adjacent room. Does she hear his blood scream? Does it remind her of Abel and the power of the Father? He wanted her to go into his room. “I know my Bible”, he wanted to tell her, “and do you think father can tune into my pain and save me? Can he turn around in that cab and say good-bye with his eyes?” Along the ceiling, the shadow of the tree in the wind split and spread in imitation of his blood.
For 30,000 years energy trudges through the smoldering fusion of the sun until at last it pierces the surface, cuts itself free from thick solar tresses and beams into the anthracite veil of space.
“Why is he leaving?” Eduardo had asked his mother.
“Because your father is a b*****d drunk, mijo. Y coge a las mujeres como un maldito. His mind is too small for God.”
Is my mind too small for God, Eduardo thought, or is God too small for my mind? He lay on his bed in a coal veil of failed vision interrupted only by rhythmic flashes of light. He flowed like a sweet aroma in the blackness and wafted through the nudge of feeble synaptic planets that formed with every iridescent flash. Flash. Flash.
They said the only thing his father had left before his disappearance was a letter that started with “Querida Flor” and consisted only of violent, illegible scribbles. Neighbors reported they had seen an orange light flash over his home the night of the disappearance. Flash. Flash.
In the darkness, Eduardo was slung by the invisible hand of a planet and as he rounded its curve he saw the glint of soft metal in the black distance. It was a saucer. Flash. It was nearer. He could see dark figures moving in decelerated time. A face at a window. A brown hand. Flash. Fingers spread against the glass. A smile. Glistening eyes. Eduardo looked into those eyes and said good-bye.
Stars pitter into the arms of empty space as they collapse into white density at the compression of their own weight.
It was Christy who had caught Eduardo’s eye. Christy, with hair like swaying stalks of wheat and eyes like blooming cerulean fire. Christy, who spoke in fractals and painted landscapes with her tongue. Christy, who had the arc of the planets in the motion of her hands. Christy, who took those hands and placed them on his cheeks when she said that it couldn’t work between them, that it would never work between them. When he asked her why, she took her mouth and set his mind on fire.
“I don’t like the ridge of your nose. The size of your eyes.” She slid her fingers down the contour of his face. “The crusty redness of your pimples. Your droopy ears and your sloppy mustache.” She grazed his arms and his chest with her finger tips. “Your arms hang down too low. Your birthmark looks like dirt or s**t. Your chest is bigger than mine.” She turned to a group of onlookers and smiled. “Also, most of the school is sure that you’re a freak, that you’re half alien or something. Your dad was ‘abducted’, right?” She pinched his cheeks.
She had raised her balmy fingertips and squeezed his cheeks with a pressure so delicate and anomalous that Eduardo recalled it intimately as he lay on his bed and felt the weight of warm blood on his face. He felt himself sink into the mattress, as if descending into a cosmic mouth that would eventually devour him into blackness.
Andromeda dines on an ancillary galactic peon.
Eduardo lay on his bed and coughed out a final breath to the open arms of the sinuous shadow on the ceiling. Blood spluttered onto the knife. In his darkness, Eduardo slowly dropped the fetid atoms of an ancestral stellar core as he drifted towards a pulsing, luminous coil.
