Wallpaper

The peeling wallpaper is a dirty mustard, stained with a hundred silver lines and lives and loves and losses. Your eyes trace their erratic shapes in minutes that stretch for miles, slowly cracking under the immense pressure of unspoken wishes. A car door slams, somewhere beyond the wall. A glistening tear finds your lips and your tongue quests out, momentarily filling your mouth with the ocean.

You drove across the country once, a silver streak that cut through its core, to its core. You never knew the country until you had cut it down, split it into parts, its shattered pieces each a black mirror of the whole. She had been with you, then. She had filled the car with roses and earthy laughter, stripped you back beneath your skin and sailed silver across your soul.

The stained wallpaper is reflected in your shattered eyes. The dusty air is pushed from your lungs, then pulled back in. There are traces of her still, in the distant smell of woodsmoke, the creak of the motel bed, the light fleeing the room. The car's engine has stopped. Heavy boots are dragging your future toward your past. The boots are black and grey. You know this.

She had left before, but always returned, trailing emerald and sapphire through the hallway and scrubbing her boots clean of rubies. When she last left, you knew it would be different. Silver sliced across your body and you fell apart while she turned and disappeared.

The door opens easily and the boots drag the future inside, gemstones shattering on the tiles. You inhale, pulling in the dusty air, now tinged with roses. She says nothing, and you reply in kind. Your future meets your past, one long and one short, and then the boots turn and disappear.

Rubies cover the bed, soaking into the sheets. A car door slams. The wallpaper is a dirty mustard, stained with a hundred and one silver lines and lives and loves and losses.

Waterfall

The stars had long flung themselves around you, knucklebones forecasting the rest of the world, or perhaps just this night. Wood creaks as the wind tears the words formless from your lips, sending them tumbling down into the gorge below. The grass surrounding you is a rich verdant green, shadowed by the towering trees and the vast expanse of the dark. Every time you open your mouth you taste the wet earth, every breath inhales the frosted air, every sound that reaches your ears is met with confusion.

His lips move, as do yours, but if either of you are speaking words, you don’t understand them. The spray from the waterfall flecks your face with tears; the waterfall of your tears flecks the stream with salt. A heron cries out, perhaps answering you. Your knuckles are white and numb, clenching at vestiges of hope, his hands between yours. Droplets sit still on his eyelashes, like dew upon morning grass, wavering above dry eyes. A jaw chiselled from stone threatens to crush you beneath its weight.  He says two words, and though you can’t hear them you know what they must be, just as you know how hollow they are. Your hand stings almost as much as your eyes, red like blush swelling from under his stubble.

He does not move. Nor do you. You each stand, perfect in your isolation, fractured by your proximity, two halves of different wholes. The wood around you sways imperceptibly. An eternity passes, too quickly, and then you have moved, or perhaps everything else moved around you, hurled you toward the stream.

His hands reach for you, but your white knuckles have gripped their last. The river swallows you greedily, silver beneath the waxing moon, as it urges you to follow your wind-swept words. His granite face, breaking at last, splitting across the middle. Your throat hurts, torn from the screaming. You are weightless, unchained for the first time. You close your eyes, your mouth, your heart.

Overlooking the gorge there stands a perfect paradox, one fractured half of a whole that never was.

Fade to Grey

Two people standing in the woods, bright acrylic greens and reds surrounding them in royal sunbursts, cocooned by colour. There's a pause between them, a distance that could just as easily be a breath as a chasm. One speaks five words, the other does as they are told. Fade to grey.

A figure splayed across the ground, shattered glass lying in specific patterns around them, the last fragments of their broken wings. Hair like flames - not like? - and eyes green enough to dance in, dance until your feet bleed, red swirling with green. Fade to grey.

A crowded dance floor here, two terrified teenagers here, but there. Fog swirls and twirls, mimicking the dancers or perhaps drawn by them, impenetrable either way. The teens jump, no way of knowing what lies beyond. Fade to grey.

A flicker of a city, a flicker of a man writing on a train. The man could be in the city, but he could just as easily not. There is the warmth of the sun, dividing his face into light and shadow. The light writes apologies; the shadow does too. Fade to grey.

The seeds are planted, ideas coiling tight around the brain stem, some brighter or bolder than others. If you grasp at them too soon they shirk away, slowly smothered by the light of attention. They must be left in the dark to morph, find the shape they want, the face they will show the world. Then they will allow themselves to slowly uncoil and breathe on their own, and only then can they Fade to grey. No.No no no. Clutching at one, forcing its tail down, there is a burst of colour before it fades to grey. There is colour here, he KNOWS there is, but the shell is all a harsh, dead grey. He digs his fingers in, tearing apart the carapace, finding the entrails so vibrant in hues and piling them end to end along the paper, but the hues fade from the visible spectrum, the intangible not meant to be given form, not like this, and at the end with heaving breath and bloodied hands all he is left with is grey.