This Is Not A Pretty Story

It’s been a while since I’ve written a #fridayflash, and I’ve forgotten how much fun it can be! Be sure to check out great flash fiction from all over the world by following the #fridayflash hashtag on Twitter.

This is not a pretty story.

November 16, 1992. Clemson University. I am flying. My new blue and white running shoes pound orange clouds from the ground. The clouds multiply, leaving a trail as distinct as any fighter pilot’s. I rewind and play the intro to Tori Amos’s “Precious Things” for the fourth time, fine-tuning the details of the video I’m directing in my head: A lone girl sits on an underground train. Successive light and shadow flash through the windows, illuminating and darkening her face. The alternation syncs simultaneously and steadily with the music and implied speed of the train. Slowly the changing of light and dark lose their rhythmic cadence until there is no discernible pattern and the scene becomes a rapid chaotic flash of light and dark that ends abruptly. Complete blackness. First line: “So I ran faster…” Cut to—

He comes from nowhere.

“And it brought me here—”

A slam so hard my tailbone cracks. I see nothing but his lips. And something shiny. So shiny, catching the mid-day sun.

“If you scream I’ll kill you.” His eyes. Hard. Polished black marble occluding blue-sky iris. I open my mouth and the shiny object takes shape. “C’mon!” he jerks my arm and pushes me into the only wooded section of Clemson’s perimeter loop.

I remember the sun. Through barren trees. Black flat human shadow with liquidly muted colors. Moving. Back. Forth. Backforthbackforthbackforth. Back. Sweat drips. Mine? His? The crunch of leaves. Reaching. His. My limbs are rock, legs endlessly falling. He picks up the knife. Holds it, suspended, under my right eye.

“You’ll never forget me, sweetie.” Far away laughter. Distilled concentration furrows his brow.

**

I wake up screaming. Again. My face chasms, splitting the bed. Far away voice. An arm reaches across the divide. “Annie?” I stone, protecting my side. Again.

In the morning light I can barely see it. A nearly four inch rough-edged, floss-sized scar below my right eye, running nose to ear. Eric always says he can’t see it. He wraps his arms around me and smiles into the mirror, meeting my eyes. I brush his arms aside. “I need to go,” I say, picking up the carryall.

“No human being should be reduced to a thing,” my philosophy professor had said my junior year. “Human beings are always ends in themselves, never simply means.” I raise my hand. “What happens if someone treats someone else as means alone?” He pauses for a moment. “I believe the act of treating someone else as a thing—no matter how small or brief—is an act of force. It cuts both ways. Both people lose their humanity in the interaction.” After class I cry in the third floor bathroom in a puke green stall.

“Are you okay?” a strange voice asks.

“I’m fine.” I wipe my tears, blow my nose, and walk calmly out the door.

**
“Annie?”

My mind somersaults the dusk-colored shapes of Willow Street in an elaborate water ballet.

“You’ve hardly touched your food.” His words float with street shapes, freely and indistinctly.

“Annie!” I startle and turn from the window, in shame. It’s our first anniversary.

“Why don’t we go?”

I grab my coat.

Outside, Eric takes my hand. Stopping in front of a metal bench, he says, “Let’s sit here for a minute.”

We are silent, our faces mirror. “I’ve been thinking,” he says, nervously spinning his wedding ring. He pauses. “I need to say something to you.”

The bench begins to split.

“I do see it.” He raises his finger against the glare of streetlight and places it gently on my face, tracing the entire length of the scar. My body shakes. I need to leave. Now. I stand up.

“No, you’re not leaving this time.” He tugs my arm downward. My eyes narrow. I will not be forced.

He lets go. “Please.” I sit down. “Please talk to me. I’m so tired of this coming between us.” His eyes graze my scar. “Tell me the story. All of it.”

I turn away. “It’s not a pretty story.”

“Sometimes we don’t need pretty stories. We need true ones.” Time suspends for one brief moment. He holds me. We both cry together in the middle of the bench, for all the world to see.

 

 

it’s about discovery and play

shadow play

school’s in

crumble

memory, accidental

negative capability

“… I mean NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, that is when [one] is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”– ~John Keats

Hello again.

Hello again! I’ve not been very active here since February, in part because I was spending more time developing other sites. But I’m back, and I have a lot of catching up to do. Windspirit Girl has traditionally included almost all of my VisPo and all of my flash fiction. Every now and then I’d post an essay or some photography. Perhaps a poem or two. Going forward, I intend to post more essays and photography along with VisPo, interspersing these with the occasional poem or flash fiction piece. In the meantime, I have a backlog of VisPo and photography I need to post. For those who’ve subscribed, please be patient with the volume of entries. I’ll try to keep it down to as few as possible, while making sure each entry has its own integrity. My first entry: breezeway.

breezeway

perspective series

perspective i: stair

perspective ii: filter

perspective iii: stare

sunk

“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground?”–Virginia Woolf, as quoted by Kay Redfield Jamison in *An Unquiet Mind*.

VisPo: Red Badge Series

Red Badge I: Apparatus

Red Badge II: mean/s/end/s

Red Badge III: Gift

Red Badge IV: nostalgia

slide

Leaves fall. Time slides.

she dreams

Originally I created this for a challenge on RedBubble, one that required layers in a photography or photomanipulation. I have mixed feelings about it, but what I do like is the idea of a little girl dreaming about being an athlete. 🙂 (This image is taken from three photographs I took: two at a kids’ soccer game and one of rain drops on a windshield (with a Steak and Shake’s and car lights shining through). They were edited in GIMP.

snow

snow i

snow ii

snow iii

snow iv

snow v

the road home

Thanksgiving 2010: the Farm

This Thanksgiving was magical, not just because I was surrounded by wonderful people, but because I spent it on my grandparents’ farm. It was cold, foggy, and rainy much of the time, but that seemed to add to its allure. I’d wanted to capture the wonderful contrasts in color this time of year, but the fog and lack of sunlight made it difficult. Instead, I tried to capture something of how the outdoors felt to me this weekend: full of subdued, subtle, and mysterious beauty.

New VisPo: “Yield” and “Letting Go”

Yield

Letting Go

Spin

These visual poems are the first created for a friend’s poetry film project.

“Beauty spins and the mind moves.” –Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Spin I

Spin II

x

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New Project: “Found” Asemic Writing

I have a new project: “found” asemic writing. It combines the tradition of found poetry with asemic writing. Found poetry is poetry formed by taking words, phrases, or passages from other sources and forming a new poem from them. The original text can be changed substantially or not very much at all in the creation of a new poem. Asemic writing is an open form of writing in which the writing suggests meaning, but the reader fills in the semantic content for her or himself. An excellent gallery of asemic writing exists at The New Post-Literate.

I’ve worked with the creation of asemic writing before, but in those pieces I created the patterns myself. For this new project, I take, photograph, and create from those I “find” around me in everyday life. A shadow between leaves, a splotch of paint on a sidewalk, or the curve and creases of a balled-up blanket–anything that suggests an image ripe for “reading”–will provide me with an image for writing. Some images/patterns will remain largely unchanged, and some will be altered, although their basic shape will still be visible.

 

shadow and leaf variation

oceans

the second day

in between

the not so long journey