Rambling 1-4

Splintered wood form old houses littered her summer trail with foot pinpricks in-between rocks. Her toes bled. The sickness offered take from the diseased ground, to ill her cuts and scratches. She resisted with the magic within her. The special power kept her burning beyond exhaustion and waste of her muscles. A great glitter in her blood. The trail wound and continued.

 Wondering why I feel the distinct call of longing liquid evil, as the small vessels of its blood pass through my heart and mingle with the oxygenation that survives me.

 The leaves trickled with acidic water, biting at stems and stalks, stinging the ground as it splashed. The world hissed with eating acid. Grotesque masses of rain-chewed plant mass slopped against the forest floor as they died and coalesced into compost and chemical mush. Leaves rained as the muscley interiors of tree trunks opened up to the chew of the rain and let the steaming liquid reach their vital bones.

 “Why is it I hear the screaming,” she thought in her room, “why is it I can feel the touch of their call?”

 A long nail dragged stars in my skin and drew blood with wide strokes that poured down my arms and dripped deep into the woodwork, where it fermented and dried.

 The dark image stares down at me, from the very corners of this room, and I cannot escape the smell of its teeth and drool as it trails its long way to the floor.

 I traced the heretic lines of the star with my finger. The way it grooved the ground with texture vibrated up my wrist. I salivated.

---

She stood at the edge of the pit. Short, dying shrubs seemed to lean into it, leering towards the darkness as if about to tumble in. Their roots dangled down the hole like rigid streams of water frozen in time. She smelled the dark within. It was old, oily, musty with age and untouched damp that’d spent ages in its cracks.

 She looked down at her uneven skin and began carving away at herself. The stars of skin cells shone red and razor bladed to the floor, in thick cuts of meat. She stared at her red juicy fingers and thought: “This is what it’s like to release. This is what it is like to feel beautiful.” She raised the stained fingers to her face and applied the lipstick. The bright mirror fluorescents burned her eyes but she blinked through the tears and became the person she always wanted to be. “I am beautiful. I am beautiful. I am beautiful…”

 She sat down in the chair next to herself and draped her arm across her own shoulder, whispering small things, patting and stroking the back of her head and assuring that every stress and anxiety would slowly melt away. The girl cried, one of herself, and the other girl’s cheeks were dry, like she could and could not feel the tears welling up in her throat.

He opened his eyes. Blood crusted to his brows cracked and flaked as he blinked. The morning sky sagged with overcast clouds. He thought about rain. He thought about cold water for the bruises and cuts on his face. The sky did not drop. He leaned up off the ground.
 The hard rocks he’d laid on poked at his back still with lingering soreness. His spine snapped with pops as he stood. He winced. His cuts shifted and stung. Putting weight on his right foot ached. It’d been sprained. He spat red and a dislodged, rotting tooth on the ground.
 He eyed the tooth. It’d fallen in a footprint. There were many footprints leading away from where he’d laid. He fingered a kit of poisons at his side. His cuts stung. The buildings he’d been left behind hadn’t spoken since he’d woken; they remained silent and cold and most likely empty.

 I stand in my father’s house with fire and acid breathing straight up my throat into my brain. I see exactly what I want to do. I see exactly what I want to do. His blood runs down my temples. My body is a temple. The sacrifice starts at its base and drips slowly down the stairs to the masses, running down my chest, stopping at my wasitline where my tight belt cuts off the circulation of his bleeding. I inhale and choke on the bloody acid. The sacrifice stings my eyes.

 He knelt on the hard earth before his altar. Sharp gravel in it pierced his knees. He ground his legs into them. The pain was supposed to distract him from the small lit wicks and dripping candlewax, but they became brighter as he did, more vivd, until the stones screamed agony into his shins along the flickering candle-shadows of the deep basement. Tears welled in his eyes in the dark.

---

He felt ashamed of the knife he wished was in his palm. He should not want it there. She kept screaming at him, her eyes wide and accusatory and angry and beating him with their harmful gaze. He had to stand passive and still. Any movement would make it worse. Any mention of a feeling of his own. The anger bottled and filled like a flame in a potion jar. Her screaming made him feel so small. He wished for the knife. He wished to see her chest split open. He wished to see her ripcage open like a set of red, toothy jaws, organs spread within, pumping still, pushing blood in-between the places it would leak. He locked eyes with her as she yelled. He imagined blood leaking before them. Pushing the knife into her eye sockets, behind the balls, popping them out…
 “I have to excuse myself.”

 The ghosts lined up for the arrangement of stars, stone-faced, upset that it was coming. Some stood with their mouths agape. Awed. Disgusted. Bored. Tired. They did not want to be there. They had to sit and wait out the death of the alignment, the coming plague and blight on the land, they had to wait passively by the smell of rot and the screaming and waves of tidal blood.

 He stumbled messily to the damp cobblestone walls of the well, sobbing, feeling the hatred on his fingers and the glass vial breaking in his palm, his blood and its contents dripping moonlit into the deep dark with echoing splashes.

---

I am lapsing into not existing again, quickly falling into the walled place where I cannot be seen or heard or felt. Where it’s like the ties holding my breaking arms mean I won’t feel, either. That I am stuck in this dark spot and there are no hands to grab, ladders to climb, ropes to haul me. I have fallen into loneliness.
 I have been pushed into loneliness.

 The tears jacketed her whole body, warm on her neck where the salt water was fresh, frigid cold where weather took ahold of the cold tears and made them mark goose bumps on her legs. Made the icicles trail their knife points down her soft skin. After a long while of sobbing she could not feel the difference between new and old.

 He lay fetal in the mud. Gravel decorated his body, bunching behind his legs and neck and back. He cried and choked in his sobs until he could feel the redness tearing at and bleeding his throat. He looked across the way, across the mud, not too far from where he lay. His neighbor’s boy was face down in the earth. He had not moved in hours. The man’s chest heaved as he wailed and sucked in dirt and choked on it and then vomited a mass of pebbles and blood and thin bile. His neighbor had died, sitting up, not far from the boy. Ravens picked at his eyes. The man wailed.

She pushed her hands deep into the stinging film. The bubble nettled her hand with bitty bristles and a stabbing sensation, at first, then accepted her flesh beyond the film. The pain burned. She looked at the condition of her fingers on the other side of the soapy window.
 Bone. The film had not accepted her skin, had burned it off. Her eyes rolled back into her head. Bone. Her screams shook the branches of the forest.

 Stones sat silent and grey and lonely along the icy riverbank. Their lichens were grey and dark-dull under the overcast sky. Every stone wanted to shiver so terribly, wanted to groan and move their ancient muscles and feel the heat of a nonpassive friction or small exchange of warmth with a neighbor, but they could not move. The rocks eyed each other with loneliness and heartsickness for partners they could never touch. At least, the statues of themselves cried without words or noises, at least let us feel the trickling warmth of tears, at least let us salt ourselves to cure the pangs of loneliness. Frost grew up the bank from the frozen river.