r-was

[r-was]

commission for @jabbloo 🥺❤️❤️❤️💕dslfsd omg

Lena might have dressed too lightly for their trip today, but damned if she’s going to admit that to Ray after the way she chewed Ray out for suggesting it. She’d insisted things like, “You worry too much!” and “I’m an adult, you know?” in response to his caution, but braving the autumn chill is much easier in theory than in practice, so when Ray walks ahead she rubs at her arms as goosebumps prick her skin. It’s quiet as they walk through the verdant forest, the crush of grass beneath their feet muffling their footsteps, and the quiet makes her restless. “Hey, Ray!” She calls, catching up to walk slightly ahead. “Why don’t we grab some herbs while we’re out? Exercise is nice and all, but a day off is no reason to slack.”

Ray’s surprised at first, but a smile quickly tugs at his lips. “That’s true. I thought you might like a day off,” he says, and a flash of teeth turns his grin into something wry, “but knowing you, every moment’s just an opportunity to get something done, right?”

Lena grins, bright and open. “Yep! No reason to sit around waitin’ when you could be doing something useful. This way we’ll have a few more herbs around before we’ve gotta go get more.” Lena wanders on ahead, heartened with her new purpose, occasionally stepping into the undergrowth when she spots a familiar leaf or bloom. She carefully puts each one into her bag as she find them so they aren’t destroyed. Ray watches her busy herself as they steadily progress through the forest and a warm contentedness spreads out from his chest. She’s a hard worker—anyone can see that—but Lena is more than her stalwart bullheadedness. Ray has seen the way she talks to a patient while assisting around the clinic, and he’s seen the way she’ll quietly get things done while he’s busy so that he returns to less work than expected. Lena is headstrong, to be sure, but she’s kind too, and gentler than anyone would expect of her at first glance. He’s glad to have her back, and not just because she’s handy to have around.

“Lena, you know you missed a bunch over here?” He calls, and a moment later her head pops up amidst a tangle of fern leaves. Ray continues, “No wonder I always collect more than you if you leave this many behind!”

His tone is teasing, but Lena’s outraged at the suggestion. “What! No way! You think you collect more than me with those tiny arms?” Her should startles a small bird and it takes off from a nearby branch. “All right, that’s it! I’ll show you what a real armful looks like!” And, just as he predicted, she gets back to her task with twice the fervor as before. Ray laughs, plucking the few fronds he found and slipping them into his own bag. At this rate they won’t have to go on another supply trip for a while. Even though it delays them, her enthusiasm is too infectious to damper.

Naturally, they reach the lookout point behind schedule and Lena is dragging her feet as Ray settles beneath the tree. It’s a place he discovered a while back—an open field hidden within the forest that looks out onto the Aakhen colony. “Please tell me you’ve got some food in that thing,” Lena complains, flopping down next to him with a huff. “I’m seriously beat. Who knew plants grew so fast? Didn’t we just come this way last week?”

Ray’s smile is soft, and he forgoes reminding her that that was a different, if similar-looking path. From his bag, he procures a modest feast, enjoying the way Lena’s face lights up, eyes huge, with each new dish he procures. “You didn’t think I was going to make you hunt for your own food on your day off, did you?” He asks with a sly smile.

Lena’s practically bouncing in place where she sits in the grass, eyes darting between the dishes and trying to figure out which one to eat first. Ray isn’t a particularly good cook, but Lena’s so hungry right now that she doesn’t care. “Oh man, Ray. This looks so good. I could kiss you right now, you know?” The words are out before she realizes it and her eyes dart up to him, shocked and guilty. Half a smile is frozen on Ray’s face, and they just stare at each other a few heartbeats before Lena abruptly tacks on, “To… distract you so I can take your helping too!”

Eager to not focus on just how effective that strategy would be, Ray laughs, breathless, and says, “Even now you’re working on your battle strategy?” His teasing tone is undermined by the nervous way he watches her take the first bite. “I’ve been working on this,” Ray says, uncharacteristically nervous as she chews. “You know I’m more of a healer than a cook, but I’ve been practising.” He feels self-conscious admitting it, even just to Lena. “You don’t have to eat it if it’s not—” He’s cut off when Lena holds up a hand, still chewing, to silence him. The quiet hangs in the air like a promise as she finishes her bite.

“This is really good,” she says, but Ray’s skeptical expression makes her backtrack, crossing her arms in thought. “I mean, it’s a little on the salty side, and a little overcooked…” She holds up both hands when he deflates. “No, listen! I’ve had your cooking before and it was, uh, not good. Sorry. But this is…” Words always fail her when she needs them the most. “This is good, Ray. Maybe just…” She glances around at the shrubs nearby and up into the trees. “I guess we can’t cook any eggs without making a fire,” she says, thoughtful, “but I’m sure there’s something—Oh!” Lena’s face lights as she digs into her bag, rummaging around until she finds one of the plants. “See, normally we use the leaves of this one for a poultice,” she says, turning the plant over in her hand, “but these little seed capsules actually make a great spice.” To demonstrate, Lena breaks off some of the seeds and crushes them in her palm, sprinkling the resulting powder over her serving, then Ray’s. “Little details like that actually make a big difference,” she explains, once she’s done. “But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”

The words stick like a thorn in his clothes, because Ray hadn’t even considered adding a spice. He’d assumed they’d be hungry and wanting food after that walk. The realization makes him smile. “Actually, I don’t know where I’d be without most of what you say.” Maybe it comes out a little too affectionate because when he takes a spoonful of his newly spiced food and glances back up at her, Lena’s staring at him like he just ate his own coat. Ray feels his face heat up and a panicked, “This is really good!” bursts from him before he can think of anything clever to say.

Lena stares at him for a few heartbeats before bursting out laughing. At first, Ray can only watch her in shock as she clutches her stomach, smile pulled wide across her face, absolutely howling in the otherwise-still forest. “You made it!” She laughs, downright uproarious. “Don’t sound so shocked, Ray, geez!”

“No, that’s what’s so shocking about it!” He insists, amusement rippling in his voice, and then they’re both laughing under the tree. It’s easy as anything, comfortable as the warmest bath Ray’s ever had and all the silk sheets he used to take for granted. It’s so easy, and when he looks into her eyes when they’ve both caught their breaths, it feels right, too.

After their meal, they still have some time left before sunset. Leaning up against the tree and looking out over the Aakhen colony, Ray points out all the places that they know. “And that’s where I get that nice lavender tea for the patients,” he explains, “the woman there blends it herself.”

“Oh,” Lena’s engrossed even as the chill creeps up her arms. “The one whose daughter you saved?”

She can feel Ray’s warmth where the soft fabric of his shirt touches her arm, and the way his body shifts when he laughs. “I would hardly call it saving,” he says, good-natured, and his leg relaxes as he tells the story, brushing against hers, “but she was quite ill, yes. They keep trying to give me a discount now, even though I barely did anything.”

“That’s so you to say,” Lena responds with a playful nudge, but before she can continue, a shiver goes through her, and goosebumps crawl right up to her shoulder.

Ray straightens up, casting a worried glance over her, looking every inch the healer he is. “I told you to dress warmer,” he chides, draping one arm across her shoulders and reaching around to pull his cloak over her. “There,” Ray says. “Better?”

Indeed, Lena is suddenly feeling much warmer than a moment ago. “Yeah,” she mumbles, “It’s not that cold, though.” Especially not when she glances up and finds that he’s much closer than she imagined. “Uh,” Lena’s eyes shift awkwardly to the sprawling Aakhen colony beneath them. “Wait, let me find the clinic.” She squints into the distance, thinking aloud as she tries to read the view like a map. “Well, if that’s where we buy the bandages…” She traces her finger through the air, following the narrow streets she knows so well. It takes her a minute, but, “Oh! It must be that one! The one with the slanted roof.”

Lena can feel Ray’s laugher, warm and rich, in her own chest. “Yep, you’ve got it. Looks like I tricked you into learning geography on your day off. Don’t be mad”

As if she could be angry with him. “It was fun,” she says, resting her head on his shoulder, comfortable now. “It’s always fun with you. Maybe we should get married so I don’t have to figure out what to do when you’re not around.”

Ray stiffens against her and fear floods her veins like ice. She looks up at him to laugh it off, but Ray’s face is so close that it makes her stomach turn over. His eyes are as grey as she’s always known, but this close she can see the green in them too, like a field of grass hidden amidst stone.

She inhales, but Ray speaks first. “I’d like that,” he says simply, and the flush rises in his cheeks before he catches himself. “Um, I mean, if you were to stick around. The other thing, well…” They’re quiet, staring at the remnants of their lunch, the field sprawled out before them, and the spot where their knees touch. The scent of winter is in the air and the taste of their shared recipe is on their tongues. The silence is unusual, but it doesn’t make her restless any more. Ray swallows, then speaks up, “If that’s something you’d like, I’d be happy to have you, Lena.” He turns his eyes to hers once more. “As my wife, I mean.”

Something slots into place for Lena then that she hadn’t understood before. She’s happy with Ray in a different way than when she travels or trains. She’s comfortable with him, excited to return to him after a long day. Looking up at him, she realizes it: She wants to return to him.

A smile breaks across her face like sunshine over water. “All right,” she says, casual, and shock shatters Ray’s expression. “Don’t look so surprised!” Lena laughs. “I was the one who suggested it, after all.” She nestles against him, letting his warmth spread through her. “Yeah. We’ll get married, then. And we’ll live…” She lifts a hand, pointing into the distance, towards the building that smells like spice and smoke. “There. In the house with the slanted roof. And I’ll always collect more herbs than you.”

Ray is smiling down at her, softer than she’s ever seen. “All right,” he agrees, pulling her closer. “Let’s do it.”

#this was such a pleasure to write omg... please we are best friends now #thank you for commissioning me!!

[r-was]

commission for @jabbloo

“Ray! Hey, Ray, you in here?” Lena’s boisterous as ever as she pushes her way into Ray’s clinic, arms full of plants that definitely looked better before they were yanked out of the ground. The air inside is warm and smells of smoke and herbs. The scent calms her as it often does now, and the warmth seeps into her chilled skin.

“In here,” comes his voice from the back room, and when Lena enters, he’s hanging up freshly washed bandages to dry. Ray offers her a smile over his shoulder as he works. “Did you get them?”

There’s a ripple of laughter in Lena’s reply. “Obviously! You’ve seen me fight a skorpion, right? No way some plants are gonna get the better of me.”

Ray is grinning when he turns around, the last of the bandages drying in the warmth. “Well, it certainly looks like something got to you,” he says with a teasing lilt in his voice, arching a brow at the myriad cuts and scratches across her bare arms.

Lena had all but forgotten about them, but as she follows his gaze a sheepish smile creeps across her lips. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “Right. Some of the spiders gave me a hard time, but I sent ‘em running. Don’t worry about that.” The reassurance falls on deaf ears, just as she knew it would. Lena sighs as Ray starts on his usual spiel and opts to cut him off instead. “Yeah, I know, even the smallest wound can get infected.” She can’t help but smile, offering a flash of teeth in response to his concern. “Well, let’s get it over with, then.”

As she steps towards the examination table, Ray laughs, warm as if it had been heated by the fire too. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were getting used to being here. Planning on staying, are we?”

“What?” Why is it, then, that his words can make her flush warmer than any flame? “No way! You know I can’t. Hey, are you trying to get me to stay so you don’t have to find another assistant?”

Ray’s smile is calm, but there’s something mischievous glittering in his eyes when he says, “No, of course not!” But as he pulls a familiar poultice off the shelf, Lena is still thinking about it. Could it be possible to stay here? She watches him as he works, careful fingers rubbing the mixture against the wounds on her arm. His eyes flash up and he offers that grin that tugs at her heart. “What’re you looking at?” Ray asks, “I know I’m good looking, but you’re making me shy, Lena.”

Again, heat rushes up her chest to her face, and Lena swears that once he’s done, she’s going to douse that damn fire. “Just get to work! No wonder you need an assistant when you spend all your time talking!” But her words are softened by her smile, and she can tell by Ray’s grin that he doesn’t mind the teasing either.

#here you go my friend :) yours to keep!

[r-was]

Endurance Test

               “He was about my height,” Miranda said to her red gel nails before tipping the mug back and leaving a red stain where her lips had been. Rob stared at it for a moment as if it would bite him. He was usually in charge of making the coffee. Miranda liked to play with the water-to-coffee ratio and, in his humble ex-barista opinion, turn perfectly drinkable coffee into sludge, but it was hard to turn down a hot cup when he’d just come home from work. Miranda pursed her red lips, already smudged from the coffee and the grilled cheese they’d shared. “Or maybe a little taller.”

               “So would you say about five-foot-ten?” Rob prompted, touching the tip of his pen to a blank page in his notebook. He hated bending over the low coffee table to write, but if he sat at the dining room table Miranda would complain about ‘not joining her for dinner.’

               Miranda’s head tilted to the side, resting against her knuckles. A loose lock of auburn hair fell against the loveseat’s leather back. “I don’t know,” she said absently. “You’re a better judge of height than me.”

               Rob thumbed his glasses further up his nose. “It’s important for visualisation. What about ethnicity? Caucasian?”

               “Probably mixed.” She turned towards him, nestling her back in the corner of the couch, and drew her legs up under her. “He had that look about him.” When she noticed Rob’s unimpressed look, Miranda sighed. “I don’t know. It was a two-minute interaction. You don’t interrogate me every time a man hits on me in a bar, so why this?”

               “When a man hits on you in a bar, his intentions are clear. But giving you a necklace out of the blue? Don’t you find that strange?”

               Miranda rolled the necklace’s fake pearl between her fingers. “Not really. It’s not the first time a man has done something for me.”

The scent of grilled cheese was getting to him, and he wanted to wipe the crumbs from where they’d stuck to her lipstick. He’d been with her when she’d bought her first stick of crimson lipstick from the drugstore in high school. She’d never looked back, and sometimes Rob felt as if he never looked anywhere else. Miranda leaned forward across the loveseat to place her coffee-warmed hand over his, still poised with the pen above the page. “You’re not on duty. Just forget about it.”

The pen snapped against his notebook as Rob leaned back, offering her hand a brief squeeze before releasing it. The leather squawked in protest, but he had moved past the period of being around Miranda when they graduated high school. Rob had steamed milk until it howled for mercy and Miranda had sat at the bar, all short skirts and long coats, and read vocabulary terms to him over an open textbook. They’d gone to prom together, too. As friends. They’d got all their graduation photos taken together. Their 800-square-foot apartment was too much for one single twenty-four-year-old to purchase, but two made it feasible. Sometimes Rob had wondered if there was a reason that such apartments weren’t available to people who had no time to tidy them between classes and part-time work. They’d adapted, though. They always managed.

“I guess you’re right,” he said at length.

“You always pause when you’re editing yourself.”

“I do not.”

Miranda’s hand brushed against the fabric of his French cuffs sleeve, as if that would ease the lines from his forehead. “Don’t edit yourself around me.”

Rob turned his palms to the ceiling, dislodging her. “What if it’s tapped?”

Miranda’s eyebrows arched. “Tapped? Rob, this isn’t CSI: Miami.”

“Miranda.” Swivelling towards her, Rob spread his hands. “Do you know how many women every year get murdered by men they thought they could trust? How many times I’ve heard ‘he was my friend’ or ‘he seemed like a nice guy’ from women found bloody in alleys?”

“So should I only talk to women? Only operate between the hours of ten and two when the sun is highest in the sky?” Miranda challenged. “I really needed to be more afraid of men than I already am. Thanks.”

“You should be afraid!” Rob exclaimed, coaxing his hair into further disarray with his fingers. The first time his hair had looked so tousled was in their first year of college, when Miranda had slicked back his hair for a date. At the time he’d claimed that it wasn’t him, but it seemed like he’d taken on the persona she’d crafted for him. The girl hadn’t stuck, but the stylishly dishevelled look had. “I don’t want to have to deal with it when they show up at the door with a bat! Women have been tracked for weeks with smaller things than a cheap necklace.”

Leaning back, Miranda rested an elbow on the back of the couch and appraised him with a steady look. Her stockinged foot a fallen law textbook before it opted to rest on the coffee table instead. Finally her eyes dodged to the TV remote and then the dark screen. “If you interrogate every friendly man in my life, people will think you’re my boyfriend.”

A nerve jumped in Rob’s lip. “I can’t look after you forever. You’re twenty-seven. You have to start being more careful.” In the next room, the refrigerator began to hum and the dim lights flickered. Rob had insisted on buying a ‘proper’ lamp for the living room to save his already-failing eyesight and save him the strain of surviving in half-light. He’d neglected to turn it on tonight and Miranda had never been bothered by cave-like conditions.

“That’s rich, coming from the guy who’s only had one girlfriend since high school.”

Rob smiled. He usually did when he had nothing to say. “You know why I broke it off with her.”

“Because she couldn’t tolerate you living with a woman. You should have stayed together, since apparently you can’t tolerate it either. Why are you being like this?” She picked at the couch cushion while Rob stared hard at the line between her brows.

“It’s called looking out for you. Someone has to do it.”

Miranda’s heel hit the base of the couch so suddenly that Rob jumped, and his neck craned as he watched her rise. She always liked to dress up when she went out, but it left a bitter taste in Rob’s mouth to know that he was the only one to see her like this. That men might look at her and deem her desirable as if they’d seen every side of her. Rob never had any doubt that she would look good in yoga pants and a sweater, but the thought that another man might made his clammy hands lock together in his lap. “I look out for myself,” she said. An arm swung out, sweeping the dusty air. “I earn my keep, don’t I? You don’t have to coddle me like this. I’m not sixteen anymore.”

Rob was on his feet before she finished. “Then stop being an idiot. If you keep having flings, you shouldn’t come home crying and expecting me to share a bottle of wine every time you get your heart broken.”

Miranda’s eyes went wide. “I do not have flings!” She shrilled, and Rob felt the rush of striking a nerve. “At least I put myself out there instead of marrying myself to my work! If you think our marriage pact will save you from the single life, I have some bad news. I don’t marry overprotective jerks.”

Robs lips curled, and he could feel the latest wrinkles folding around his mouth. When he let out a breath, the red strands that fell around her shoulders lifted. Her chest heaved with anger. “At least let me take a look at it,” he said at last. She watched him for a long moment before lifting her chin in acquiescence. Sliding his hands beneath her hair, Rob ran his fingers carefully along the chain, feeling where the rough metal and smooth skin met. This close, her hair smelled like mint and Miranda. He turned the pearl over in his fingers. A thin chain like that would snap like nothing, he thought. He’d grappled with suspects who’d had similar necklaces break with less than it would take him to make this one irreparable. He could tell her it really was bugged; that he’d take it to the station in the morning.

When Miranda’s breath tickled his cheeks, Rob looked up to meet her steady gaze. She wasn’t afraid of him, and had no reason to be. He was calm, cool, dependable Rob. Not some jealous hothead. He released the necklace, noting that “It looks fine,” and was about to drop his hands when Miranda caught them in her own.

“Thanks for looking out for me,” she said, and her smile pressed dimples into her cheeks.

“Someone has to,” Rob responded demurely, noting that in the decade he’d known her she’d never complained about how his hands got clammy when she touched them. “Friends?”

“Of course, dummy. I didn’t ditch you when you were dating that horrible woman, did I? That’s what friends do. You’ll regret it in three years when we have to tell the neighbours that we are getting married, after all.”

Rob smiled, deciding that caring about her since high school was worth more than any necklace a stranger could give her, anyway.

#project: endurance test #wc: 1578

[r-was]

Geode

[ ORIGINAL ]

           It took two hours of kissing for me to realise I didn't like you.

           I wish I could say we were young and stupid, but that would be a lie. I knew all too well from the beginning what you wanted and you knew perfectly well when we started talking that I just might give it to you. I didn’t know what I wanted, but now I know it wasn’t that.

           Autumn is such a half-assed season. Perfect, I suppose, for a half-assed romance. You liked to take pictures of the sky while I smoked and you would always brush my bangs to the side so that I couldn't see out of one eye. I would watch you watch the sun setting from the window of a café or from my living room couch, and when I would ask what you were so intent on you would smile and shake your head like it was all some big secret. You wanted to plant trees and drive to New York. I wanted to order out. You had big dreams and I had a whole ocean of talent that I wasn't willing to dive into.

           For Christmas, you bought me a pair of headphones, apologizing that they weren't all that great but you thought I'd like the huge black-and-red cups that would cozy up to my ears. I nearly bought out the drugstore of sweets for you and threw a new scarf into the bag as well because you always seemed to be cold. At the time I didn't know that the ratty old scarf you wore every other day was knit by your grandma. I never got to meet your grandma, but I did meet your brother—tall and built, older than you, and he would always look at me sideways, sizing me up the way you might when you find a spider in your bathtub—marking it in your mind so that you remember to come back later and wash it down the drain. I don't think he disliked me—not until later, anyway, though he gave me a mean look when he arrived home late and you were still sleeping on my shoulder.

           I never told you about that, did I? You looked so peaceful—soft around the edges that I couldn't bear to wake you, and I sat there until what must have been one in the morning when your mom came down and relieved me of my duties. Where is he? You asked as I stood in the next room, lacing up my converse.  He's gone, your mother reassured you, and I could only barely hear your sleepy sound as I opened the door and left it with a click.

           I thought about it that night. Though my eyes were on the road, my mind was on you—what did I really know? You once liked to paint and you had a hidden passion for geology. Rocks, of all things, was what made your eyes light up on the afternoons we shared over hot pot and milk tea.  I fancied how easy life would be if you could take people and crack them open like the rocks you told me about, so that one might catch a glimpse of the hollow center and the gems that sprouted like disease before putting both pieces back together and pretending that you couldn't see the seam.  I wondered what I would look like on the inside as I pull into my driveway. I wondered if I look the same now as I did before I met you. I touch the button on my Playstation and the device lights up, bright and blue. I hoped I'd changed.

           I' was still playing at five in the morning when you texted me, apologizing and flustered that you'd fall asleep on me. I read it, set it aside, and responded forty minutes later that I didn’t mind, that I wasn't up all that late, anyways.  The rubber grip on my left trigger came off, and I spent ten minutes in the pause menu trying to put it back on.

           Something shifted in me, like the pieces of a puzzle when you take them apart, shuffled this way and that until the pieces forget where they're going and where they've been. I don't know you. I want to know you. I'm interested in you, like I've never been interested in anything else before. I ask about your childhood, the time you spent in school. The time before me. I want to know everything. I was watching you as you pluged my headset into your iPod and leaned over the table, lips curling and shirt falling forward so I caught a glimpse of your collarbone.

           I sang this is choir, you tell me. I never knew you were in choir.  I hear the music before you let the headset clamp around my ears. Piano, and then a voice, low and flat like he's complaining in his sleep—Step one, you say you need to talk, he tells me, he walks, you say sit down it's just a talk.

           We hadn’t kissed yet, though I'd be lying if I said it hadn't crossed my mind. I didn’t know what a kiss meant. I didn’t know what we meant. We spent so much time together that everyone though we were dating anyway. I guess I didn’t mind—like my friends said when I first jerked a thumb at you; you're gorgeous. If people think I actually can snag someone like you? Bonus.

           We went to movies because you love them. Something historical. Something about World War II. I put too much butter on the popcorn and had to surreptitiously wipe it on my wrist. I didn’t like that you were paying attention to the screen instead of me, and I crossed and uncrossed my legs.  How does it happen in fiction? Was I supposed to reach for the popcorn at the same time that you do? No. That's stupid. I waited until both hands were covering your mouth, shocked at whatever was happening on-screen, and then I lifted an arm and draped it over your shoulders like it was nothing. There's a beat, just enough for me to wonder if I should take it back, and then you leaned in a little closer. It was two minutes before my arm went numb.

           We haven't kissed yet, but I’ve gone through it a thousand times in my head, exactly how I want to do it. While you’re struggling with my PlayStation, I’m watching you. You shout when you beat the boss, fist attached to tiny wrist punching a hole in my stagnant bedroom air. I leaned over then, murmured something that might have been a hey, and you glanced at me, glowing and flushed from the virtual exertion. You look fantastic. I barely know what I'm doing, but your skin is so soft beneath mine and when I kiss you, your lips barely move.

           I fancy I can see your pulse in your neck. Was it your first? When I ask, you shake your head and tell me about someone with shoulder-length blond hair who probably just wanted to be number one. He wasn't good, you say, not like me. That makes me smile as I sit back against the back of the couch. Should I feel something more? I think I should feel something.

           Sometimes I ask, sometimes I don't. You don't. You kissed me once in front of your entire family—we were setting up to watch a movie and you came back from the kitchen, sat a bowl of chips in my lap and, with a hand on the arm of the couch, you lean right over and kissed me in front of your mother and brother. My nails scratched on the fabric and I was sure the seat was going to capsize, but it didn’t, and you sat right down next to me so that the chips almost spill across both of us. I spend the rest of the movie wondering how you can be so bold; if something compels you that skipped over me in the gene pool.

           It took two hours of kissing for me to realize I didn't like you.  Not like that. Not on top of me with your knees on either side of my waist and your nose crushed against mine and your breath in my lungs. I thought it was twenty minutes, but I looked at the clock and it was almost four in the morning. I cursed and you smiled so sweetly at my hair, standing on end, and the way I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, couldn’t seem to calm down. I despaired as I drove you home. My friends would be cheering for me if they knew, but I feel nauseated and I want your hand off mine.

           I tore myself up over it. Isn't kissing supposed to make you feel good? All I can think of is the way your hair tickled my face too much and got in the way. All I can think of is that this isn't how I want you—I want you smiling and brushing a thumb over my knuckles, not with a face colliding with mine and fingers searching purchase behind my ear. I want you to make me feel something, not the dull sort of nothing that was my life before you.

           It would be simple if people were geodes: if you could just crack them open on the sidewalk and check what they've got inside before putting them back together, good as new. I don't know what your insides were like, but I figure they were a lot like mine—blood and intestines with a little bit of hopelessness mixed in. If I'd cracked you apart on day one when you first sat across from me, perhaps I could have saved us the time. I wonder if now you tell others about the last person you kissed, who nearly bolted out the door the moment your hands found the hem of his shirt. I wonder if you tell them how I looked utterly stricken the rest of the night—or morning, as it were. I wonder if you felt anything, if it felt right to have our noses crushed like that—I still can't get over the nose thing—and if you had any inkling of how it tore me up to tell you goodbye. I wonder if you think there’s something wrong with me, too.

           I’ve always laughed at jokes about sex because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but being with you made me wonder if there is something I’ve been missing all this time. Something basic. Primal. Maybe I broke open that night and you saw that I was hollow where that need should be. Maybe that’s why you let me go so easily.

           I wish I could have been more for you.

#prose #draft #Geode

[r-was]

Why We Aren’t Friends Any More

Your laugh is annoying. You ratted me out to the gym teacher. You always chew your lip and I hate the sight of blood. I deserved him, not you. You questioned the logic behind me buying a $200 bag. You always say no to the ski trip. You didn’t come to my birthday party so I didn’t go to yours. I still love you, even though I said being friends is fine. You believe in God. You don’t believe in God. I want to be friends with them, and they don’t like you. It was your own fault for falling in love with me. There is something brittle in me that you are trying to bend. I don’t know. You never told me.

#poem

[r-was]

#poem #it's an assignment #call it a mashup

[r-was]

Demitasse

           Standing like a flag metallic and sleek curved inwards like it seeks to hold itself; that its edges want nothing more than to curl inward a stainless steel calla

It curves in the middle like a spine arched in pain or pleasure crying out

And at the bottom below the waist it displays the world as it is distorted and stretched, as if someone has caught it in their fist and is twisting the earth and the air and everything

and ending in softness despite it all thin and blunt and round, like cupped hands of smooth metal

#poem

[r-was]

Osseous

           Skeletally my right side is four millimetres longer than my left

Apparently up to two millimetres is normal

I wonder if the weight of my heart weighed down my bones

Is there a bend in the left side of my ribcage? Are there burn marks on the inside of my bones?

Who designed this body with such an incapacity for emotion

#poem #mfw I post on the wrong blog

[r-was]

              “Tell me about him,” Megan said.               “I don’t want to,” Darren responded. “I’m sick to death of talking about him.” His eyes were heavy and his lips were sad. “Sick to death.”               It was cold. The lights of the bridge drowned out the stars. Darren watched the dark waves beneath them, filled with a frigid hunger that Megan felt too, somewhere in her ribs. The sleeves of his hoodie were rolled to the elbows and though she could see goosebumps on his pale skin, Megan said nothing. She tugged her leather jacket tighter across her chest and watched him in silence, conscious of her skinny jeans and black boots and how strange she must look up here, standing with a boy who looked like he’d just rolled out of bed. She rested her hips against the barrier that stood between her and the drop to the inlet. “Tell me about him.”               Darren drew in a breath like he’d been drowning, or smoking for fifty years, dry and hard like creaky wooden floors. “I can’t any more, Megan. I don’t want to. That’s why I’m here.”               “What was his favourite colour?”               The answer came instantly. “Blue.”               “How do you know?”               Darren watched a light moving in the distance, a boat or maybe a low-flying plane. Unfolding his arms from the railing, he gripped the bar instead. “I just know, okay?” The muscles in his forearm flexed and Darren took another breath, as if preparing himself to vault, but the words that followed were wilted. “He bought all his clothes in blue.”               “That jacket,” Megan said, remembering. “You said you were there when he bought it.”               Darren nodded, and Megan could hear the lump in his throat when he continued. “I was there when he died in it, too.”

              Megan Chang hadn’t known Jon Sparks all that well. While she was firmly rooted in the highest social circle of the high school food chain, he had been a wanderer. Jon had been the type of person who, by not belonging to a group, he had belonged to all of them. He’d been an embellishment of sorts. An honorary popular kid. He’d been kind to her, but she hadn’t known a thing about him.               “He used to play soccer,” Darren had told her once, lying on his back and staring at the clouds through his fingers as Megan had dusted pine needles off of her boots. “In Elementary school. Sixth and seventh grade. He was fast, but his kicks were always sideways. He’d always try to pass it to me so that I could score, until everyone else caught on.”               Megan watched an elderly couple making slow progress around the park. “He doesn’t play anymore, right? Why not?”               “I quit,” Darren responded, sitting up so abruptly that Megan thought he would fall forward and right down the hill. “And he did too. Hell if I know what he was thinking.”              “He liked playing with you,” Megan said, watching as he picked at a loose thread in his jeans.               “Maybe,” Darren said, straightening up like he was made out of wood. “Maybe not. There’s your one thing, Chang. See you tomorrow.”

              It had become sort of like a game. Like how when her and her brother would Skype on Sunday evenings, Megan would always say, “Tell me one thing about college,” and Nathan would tell her about the rivalry between the Forestry and Engineering departments, or about how it costs eighty dollars to buy a textbook that doesn’t even have a spine.               “How do you read it, then?” Megan had asked, running a brush through her dark hair.               “You put it in a binder,” Nathan had said with a hint of a smile. “Your hair is getting long, mei mei.”               Megan shrugged. “You don’t have to call me that when mom’s not around.”               “If I never practise then she’ll accuse me of forgetting our culture.” A slam and a series of loud shouts cut him off and Nathan glanced at something off-screen. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll talk to you next week, okay? I love you, Megs. Study hard so you can come here next year, okay? Zai jian.”               “Bye,” Megan had responded a moment before her brother cut the call. It felt similar, she thought, watching the video chat shrink into a meagre icon of her brother, to seeing Darren slouch away from her down the hill, so eager to be gone and yet leaving the promise of tomorrow behind like a perfume.

              “Tell me something about him.” Darren had been just out of her reach all day, ducking around corners or into the washroom whenever he caught sight of her, but she’d found him walking in the rain, hood up, at the back end of the school.               “I’m done, Chang.” He’d told her then. “I’ve told you everything.”               “You haven’t.” Darren tried to turn away but she caught his arm, raindrops beading on her wrist where her umbrella could no longer reach. “You’ve barely told me anything. He was a person, Darren. There’s so many things about a person that you can’t just run out—“               “He’s dead,” Darren had said like the words were a stone. “He’s been dead for three weeks. Get over it.”               “You get over it!” Her voice was shrill and angry, but Megan didn’t relent. “The parking lot’s the other way. I know you didn’t take the bus, either.”               “Fuck off.”               “One thing and I’ll go!”               Darren spun around and threw Megan off with enough force to make her arm smart. “He died instantly.” A hand was brought up close to her face, but Megan didn’t flinch when he said “Jon,” or when he held up another and said “Car.” She didn’t blink when he brought his palms together with enough force to send her hair fluttering. “Dead. Just like that. Happy?”               “No,” Megan responded. “Everyone knows that. Tell me something else.”               Darren bared his teeth, but the words came slow “Why do you care? You never even looked my way until he died and now you won’t leave me alone. Why?”               “You knew him.”               “Everyone knew him! He’d talk to anyone who moved!”               Megan shook her head. “Not like you did. You were his friend, Darren. Really his friend. He cared about you.”               The anger in his dark eyes flatlined. Drops of rain rolled down his face and Megan couldn’t help but think how incongruous her pink polka-dot umbrella looked against the soaking cotton of his hoodie. She tilted it over him anyway, bringing them closer.               “Tell me,” she said, “and I’ll leave you alone.”               He was silent for so long that Megan thought he was going to stare at her until she left. When he spoke, the words were like sand. “He was a shit driver. He got excited and drove too fast. Never hit anyone, though.” Another moment passed, and then Darren shoved past her. “Bye.”               She turned to his retreating form. “Where are you going?”               Without turning, Darren pointed back the way she’d come. “To the parking lot. Like hell am I taking the bus.”

              Darren’s forehead rested on the railing, wind ruffling his hair, hiding his expression from Megan. “Why do you want to know about him? What difference does it make now?”               “I wanted to know him.” Cars whizzed past on the bridge but no one took notice of two teenagers standing alone on the walkway. Driving that fast, the pair probably looked more like a couple than lopsided, uncomfortable acquaintances.               “Never would have guessed, with the way you basically ignored him and all.”               “I didn’t!” She began to argue, but found that with the wind tearing at her hair and clothes, she didn’t have the energy. “It’s more complicated than that.”               “Of course it is.” Darren threaded his fingers through his hair and stared through the shining skyline to something only he could see. “It’s always more complicated than that.” The wind tackled them again and Darren turned his black-hole eyes on her, then down at the bridge. “You shouldn’t have come.”               “Well I did,” she countered. And then, “I’m here.”               Darren’s knuckles were white on the peeling, rusty metal. “Fucking hell.”

              “It should have been me,” Darren had said once, slouched in the back of the school library as Megan had sat primly a short ways down the aisle with a book that she wasn’t reading balanced on her lap. The shelves dug into her spine as his words wedged themselves between her ribs. “He had potential. What do I have?”               “You’d put Jon through this?” Megan challenged, reading the same sentence for the eighth time.               Darren levelled a stare at her. “Why are you still here? I already told you. He liked pineapple on pizza. He liked anything on pizza. Blew my mind every time how he’d eat the stuff. Go away.”               “Why are you still here?” Megan echoed, knowing in equal parts that she sounded childish and that she still had digging to do. “You’re not reading.”               His head fell back against the shelf and Megan watched as he scratched it on one of the metal book ends, as if there was an itch that wouldn’t be ignored. She expected him to argue but he didn’t. “It’s quiet here. Everywhere else is so loud.” His eyes were closed, and Megan watched his chest move in slow, steady breaths. “Everyone moves on so quick.”               Beside her, Megan’s phone vibrated, but she let it be.

              “It’s cold,” Darren said, as if only now realising how chill the wind was coming off the waves.               “Warmer up here than down there.” Megan moved herself further into his field of vision, leaning her side against the railing.  Darren glanced at her briefly before turning his eyes back on the city moving in the distance. His breathing was slow, as if he was asleep.               “Why’d you say that?” He asked.  When Megan didn’t respond, Darren filled his lungs with air and let it all go. “Why are you here, Megan?” Still, she was quiet. His tone dropped so that it was barely audible over the cars passing by. “How did you know?”               She thought about the way he’d been talking lately, his perpetual hoodie that, only months before, had been something she would sneer at. Megan thought about the darkness around his eyes and the way that, were it not for her persistence, she might not have heard his voice at all since Jon’s death. She shifted her weight, trying to catch his gaze. “I had a feeling.” Darren was silent, guilty, and Megan tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Tell me something. Then, if you want to go, you can go.”               He could have done it then, she thought. She wouldn’t have been able to hold him back if it came down to it. Darren was stronger, and he had more will to leave than she had to make him stay. The slack, nothingness of his face pinched between his eyebrows and at the corners of his mouth and the lump in his throat bobbed as Megan watched on. Then, gratingly, he spoke. “Jon Sparks,” the name was spoken like a ritual. Darren stopped, rubbed his frozen cheeks, and started again. “Jon Sparks was my best friend.” The world was silent then. Even the cars had died down, as if the whole world was listening to Darren’s confession. “He was my best fucking friend and I let him die.” His hand dangled out over the water, thumb rubbing on an upturned palm as if he was letting sand escape through his fingers. “I lost him. I have nothing.”               Megan waited a beat before responding. “You have me.”               Darren eyed her, as if expecting her to bite. “Bullshit. Your friends would drop you in a heartbeat.”               Her fingers flexed on her elbows. “I don’t care.”               He held her gaze for a long while, but Megan didn’t cower. Finally, Darren pushed himself off the bar, letting his fingers linger there for a moment longer. “Everyone moves on so fast, but I feel like I’m going insane.” Only when he let his hand drop did Megan allow herself to breathe.               “Tell me about him,” she spoke softly. “One thing a day.”               Darren let out a breath and pulled his hoodie over his head. “Fine. Come on, Chang. It’s freezing.”               She fell into step beside him. “He would be sad too, if you died.”               Darren didn’t look at her. “I know. The hypocrite. I’ll never understand him.”               He drove her home. Half a block down the street from her house, Darren let her out. “See you tomorrow, Chang.” When she turned, his expression was shrouded in darkness.               “Promise?” She asked, and her voice sounded larger than she felt.               “Sure,” Darren responded. He shifted and a sliver of light cut across his face. He wasn’t smiling, but it was close. As Megan pushed open the front door to her house his car whispered past, down the street and into the night.

#draft #prose

[r-was]

I Wish

I wish I could have told myself  when I was eight years old  lying, eyes wide open, in bed,  so stuffed with dreams that  I could hardly fall asleep for fear  that I would miss even a moment   of my own potential

That one day I would rise early  to paint the closet that, at the time,  held all my fears at once,  a soft green

That I would work the job  I’d always dreamed;  that I would walk in and  hear my name chimed by  so many people, all at once

That I would attend the school  I feared was always out of reach  and nestle in there  as easily as in my sheets  when I was eight years old

Maybe I would have slept.

Maybe.

#I don't know why I accidentally posted this on my personal but here we are #poem

[r-was]

❝               His body was rigid when he washed the soap off, like his own brand of rigor mortis had already set in, with skin that was still warm and flushed from the shower. Still alive. The thought struck him abruptly, and he could only stand and watch as soap receded, leaving behind skin as pale and thin as paper. Darren stopped, startled by just how white he was, how thin his wrists were, and how his vein pulsed, blue as a bruise. His bones stick out in his knuckles like rocky outcroppings on a mountain, hard and jagged. His fragility caught in his throat as he turned his arm over, noting the dark hairs that sprouted there, eerily aware of how delicate his life was—how delicate everyone’s lives are—and how easy it was for someone to just break beyond repair.     ❞         Written by ℜ. 

「 Part One |  Part Two  | Part Three |  All. 」

#project: urban desert #prose

[r-was]

Urban Desert.

                                                     part 1  / part 2  /  part 3  

           Darren’s blood caught fire with humiliation and shock, searing through him as if he were made of sawdust. The lump in his throat was heavy now, and there was something thick like bile there too. He wouldn’t cry here. He wouldn’t give Mrs. Sparks that satisfaction. Darren held out the nameless flowers to Mr. Sparks, searching for anything to say that would mend the rift that had torn between them.  All apologies felt empty when held against a father’s grief. All emotions drowned in the depths of a father’s frown. “Please take them,” he said at last. “I want... I want Jon to have them.” It was the closest to the truth he could get. Wordlessly, Jon’s father took the flowers and Darren stared hard at the ground, mutely dismayed to notice the pastel colours there. A bluebell crushed beneath his shoe, though it fought to regain its shape when he shifted off of it, stretching slowly back to the sky. Darren couldn’t tell if the expression on Mr. Sparks’ face was a smile or not.

           Across the field, Nathan stopped and looked up, tracing the progress of a broken boy he had once looked up to as he trekked across the lawn to the road, hunched up against some wind that only he could feel.

           The funeral had startled him, both in the lingering murk of the family’s mourning, and in his own assumptions. Since they’d become friends, Darren had never been turned away from the Sparks, and it had often been joked that he was the son they never had, though, as Darren had seen, that was a fragile title. He couldn’t seem to forget the bitterness in Jon’s mother’s voice, or the strange weakness in his father’s. Though Mrs. Sparks had been leery of Darren especially in those early months, even she had warmed up to him eventually, though Darren was never as doted on as her true son.

           “My mom asked me today if I’d been smoking,” Jon had said one evening in tenth grade as the two of them swung absently on a swing set in an elementary school near Jon’s house.

           Darren wasn’t sure what to make of it. He raised a brow. “Why?”

           Jon was grinning. He was always grinning. “She thinks you smoke, dude.”

           The corners of Darren’s lips pulled up. “My dad would kick my ass if I smoked.”

           On the swing next to him, Jon was laughing. “I know. That’s what I told her. She said ‘good,’ because apparently some parents have to look out, especially when their kids are...”

           As Jon pumped his legs, swinging higher and higher, Darren pushed him for the last shred of information. “When kids are...?”

           On his next swing past, Jon gave him and impish grin, infinitely amused by what he withheld. “Sullen.”

           At the apex of his swing, Jon slid loose and let go, soaring high into the darkening sky with arms pedalling as if he was trying to control his flight like a plane, leaving Darren on the earth, pondering over the word ‘sullen.’

           The memory hit him hard that day, like the sound of Jon’s shoes hitting the gravel playground, stumbling a bit but never falling. After the funeral, Darren had driven a long time that day, unseeing until he came to an unfamiliar side street, when his vision was blurred so much that he was certain he wouldn’t see someone even if they were stood right in front of his car in a crosswalk. He had pulled over and leaned his head against the steering wheel as his body convulsed, and hot, humiliated tears dribbled down his cheeks. They had welcomed him like family, hadn’t they? They kept snacks in the kitchen because they knew Darren liked them, and he’d sometimes joked that even his own family didn’t do that for him, but in the car when he was considering a life without Mrs. Sparks joking about how he would have to start paying rent if he hung around any longer, or Nathan curled up on the couch next to him, hoping to get to play a two-player game on Jon’s console, the thought of the cupboards at Darren’s home, devoid of anything to eat when he was peckish was suddenly more than he could bear. He slapped the palm of his hand hard against the steering wheel, and thought once more of the sound Jon had made against the car. “Why did I have to rush him?” He asked the console. What was more important than his life? He thought, when his mouth couldn’t form the words any more. On the steering wheel, his knuckles were white. What was more important than my best friend?

           With the sound he made with every breath, Darren could almost imagine why Jon’s mother had thought him a smoker, though she had never seen him in such a state. No one had. Even at school he’d held it together, opting to stay in class when other students who had barely known Jon left class to go to the hired grief counsellors—or, more likely, to Starbucks. He had sat in class and stared at his pen above his notebook, too numb to do anything more than pack up when it was time to leave.

           It had been two months since the funeral already, and his knuckles were still pale on the wheel as Darren drove without a destination in mind. English class had been a dream, vague and disorienting, and Mr. Hamilton had given him the same look he did every day. There had been a couple times since Jon’s death that he’d suggested a counsellor to Darren, but Darren’s pride was already shot though enough without being that kid. He was already sullen, after all, so there was no desire to be sullen and seeing a counsellor. After a couple attempts, Mr. Hamilton had stopped asking, but he never stopped with that concerned look. Now, realising that he hadn’t heard a single lyric since he got in the car that afternoon and couldn’t even remember any songs that he’d listened to, Darren turned the music off. There was no point in playing it if he couldn’t get lost in it. His palms stuck to the steering wheel as he turned around a corner without touching the brake. Too hard, he knew, but it mattered so little.

           Even entrenched in thought as he was, his eyes watched the road and his brain worked, as if on autopilot, to read whatever he drove past. At a red light, Darren stared at a sign until the opposite crosswalk’s hand stopped flashing before he computed it. Mountainview Cemetery, his brain informed him. Where Jon is...

           Darren bit his lip hard and hit the gas as soon as the light went green. Though his foot seemed heavy on the pedal, he never went a tick above the speed limit. He refused to speed, after all. He refused to be the one who would take someone’s best friend away. Furiously, Darren turned down a cheerful side street decorated with cheap plastic Christmas decorations and lights, glowing different colours in the fading sun.

           The fading sun. How long had it been? Darren tried to remember. He’d left school when it ended, no later than three-thirty, and already the clock on his dash told him it was nearing five. He tried to count back the hours, remembering where he had gone or what he had seen, but found nothing as he groped for any sort of memory. So engrossed was he that he almost didn’t see  the sports car jamming to a halt in front of him. Darren slammed on the breaks, and the sound of protesting tires filled his ears, his nose, his mouth, suffocating him until his head jerked back against the seat. His palm slapped the steering wheel in a wordless fury as Darren shoved his lips together to keep from yelling. What now! He thought, but didn’t trust himself to speak. In the small amount of space between the bumpers, the red sports car backed up and drove around something in the road. A pothole, Darren thought, pressing his knuckles to his teeth. This area was full of them, and they functioned almost like speedbumps. The bottom of his vision was fuzzy until something clicked in his mind and Darren focused on the obstacle. Then, before he understood what he was doing, Darren tore his door open and all but threw himself out of it.

           “Hey! Stop!” He called. “You hit a kid!” The vehicle’s only response was to veer around the next corner, not so dissimilar to how Darren had done only a minute ago. He found himself standing over the kid, and then crouching with his knuckles on the pavement. The kid couldn’t be more than six. “Shit,” Darren said aloud, glancing around the street, abandoned save for his idling car. The boy had light brown hair streaked with blond, and gold-brown hazy eyes that were blinking, distant, as he tried to understand.  Darren had seen that look before, in his own face in the mirror that morning and, more alarmingly, in Jon’s as he had been wrestled into the back of the ambulance.

           “Hang in there,” Darren said, though his voice wavered. “You’ll be okay.” The boy made a whimpering sound between his teeth as Darren’s first-aid training was exhumed from beneath layers of sand. Don’t move the body in case something is broken. Darren frowned at that. He wanted to get the boy off the road, at least, but the car parked in the street should prevent anyone from driving over them. Maybe it would even act as a beacon: help me, something’s wrong. Darren could only hope. He stripped off his jacket and did his best to cover the boy to keep him warm, though it reminded him eerily of the body bags he saw on TV. After that, he stripped his hoodie and held it against the child’s head, where he’d collided with the cement. Try to stem the bleeding. Use your clothing if you have to. Crouched there in his T-shirt, Darren glanced around again. Why isn’t anyone coming? Fraser is a busy street. Hasn’t someone seen? He pulled his phone out of his pocket so quickly that he almost fumbled it and dropped it onto the road.  Shouldn’t someone be here by now?

           He waited with the boy, hands trembling with fear and adrenaline as he felt a memory coming over him like a wave. Darren squeezed his eyes shut and grit his teeth as it roared in his ears, drowning out the sound of exhaust and breeze in the trees as it got louder and louder.

          The sound afterwards was dead silence. After the slap, he’d been too shocked to act, with eyes locked on the spot where Jon should have been, with nothing but brake lights in his vision. There was something there with limbs bent that weren’t Jon’s, and a horrible sound that could never come from Jon’s lips. Everyone else on the street had froze too, watching the same spot that Darren was. His body had moved faster than his mind then, and Darren had pelted out into the middle of the street, falling onto his hands and knees and leaning over Jon. Around him, traffic was stopping and people were pulling out their phones, dialing, texting, taking pictures, looking out their stupid car windows to gawk and thank goodness that they weren’t involved. That they weren’t falling in quicksand.

           “Jon!” Someone had yelled, though Darren was the only person around who knew his name. His voice was harsh, high-pitched. “Jon!” Jon’s green eyes were wide open, staring, horrifying in the dying evening light and lit from beneath by the headlights.  They made his face seem to glow, bloodless as he made that sound again. Someone somewhere was yelling, harsh and rasping. The blood. It stained Jon’s light blue hoodie. You idiot, Darren had  thought stupidly. It’s too cold for that. It’s not summer any more, Jon. You’ll catch cold. Darren grit his teeth as his eyes began to burn. He didn’t understand why Jon would run for him. I’m not worth it, he’d thought. Later in the hospital Darren had clenched his hands into fists and cursed Jon for not looking both ways, but it was an empty anger. An empty anger for an empty person. He clutched the back of Jon’s head, hating how limp it was and wanting Jon to pick himself up and curse his own stupidity. Darren didn’t know where the blood was coming from, and he didn’t care. His eyes were frozen, staring at Jon’s, waiting for any sort of recognition. The world blurred and shook. When it didn’t come, his body had collapsed, and his head had fallen onto Jon’s shoulder. Why did you run to see me?

           He only vaguely remembered being pried away from the wreckage, struggling as they’d put Jon on a stretched and hooked him up to tubes and wires. They had wanted Darren in hospital, to speak with police as a witness. It wasn’t until later that he had noticed the blood. They had washed his hands, but it still covered the right side of his shirt, almost like part of the pattern, black on white on red, but it wasn’t. It was Darren’s own creation—his own horrific creation, and he needed it gone. The police had restrained him when he’d tried to tear it over his head, but Darren’s voice had cut through the air like a knife. “Get it off!” He’d shouted. “I need it off now!” They had eventually allowed him that tiny comfort. Afterwards, the only sound he’d heard was the high-pitched beep that never seemed to end, that meant it was too late for goodbye. That meant Jon was gone.

           The sound faded, becoming part of the past. Instead, he heard sirens and opened eyes that he hadn’t realised he’d closed, sticky, like sand in the morning. He looked up blearily, and as his eyes focused, Darren saw the ambulance pull around the corner and down the street. He didn’t stand, but the paramedics who got out knew what they were doing. They bustled around the boy as Darren edged back, feeling out of place and doing his best to stay out of the way. Another paramedic spoke to him as the others worked over the child.

           “Do you know this boy?” She asked. Her hair was pulled back into a high ponytail without a wisp out of place. Crisp, Darren thought. Professional.

           “No,” he spoke shakily. “I just saw him get hit by the car in front of me.”

           “Okay,” she said, writing something down on a pad of paper as the wind blew a strand of hair over her shoulder. “You’ll need to come with us to the hospital to give us the story. Do you need to call anyone before we go?” Darren had shook his head numbly, to startled to speak, and went to park his car before climbing into the ambulance. Sitting on the hard white bench with the child’s hair so close to him, Darren listened distantly to the paramedics speaking. The bandages are well done, he heard as if in a dream. He would have bled too much otherwise. Other words drifted through his head. Mild concussion. Bleeding. Maybe a broken arm. Nothing too serious. Good thing he was found so soon.

           Darren waited in the hospital after the police interview as if in some separate reality. He had been surprised that he managed to remember the license plate of the sports car, but still felt like there was a rift between him and the rest of the room. He’d sent his mom a simple text saying he’d be home late and explained to the child’s frantic parents what had happened when they came rushing in. He sat nearby as they fretted about their precious Michael until a nurse called the family’s last name and they rose, with Darren trailing tentatively behind them with his hands in his pockets. “The car doesn’t seem to have been driving too fast,” the nurse explained, “so his injuries weren’t as bad as they appeared.  Still, you’re lucky that this man reacted so quickly. It might have made all the difference.”

           A chill ran down Darren’s spines as the parents turned, and his stomach flip-flopped when he saw that their lips were pulled back into toothy grins, not the wolfish glare that Mrs. Sparks had given him. “You’re lucky to have someone so responsible to help him,” the nurse reiterated, as if afraid that someone hadn’t heard. Three smiles found him, and Darren felt his own lips twitch, just slightly. In his pockets, he turned his keys over and over in his palm.

           It was getting late when the boy’s parents sat next to him, one on either side. “You should go home,” Michael’s mother spoke, setting a hand on his shoulder. “He has to stay overnight for his injuries, and I wouldn’t want to keep you from your parents.” Darren had begun to protest when she offered him a brave smile. “Tell you what. Give me your number and I’ll text you as soon as we hear any news of him.” The relief and gratitude that Darren felt had been so overwhelming that it was all he could do to nod, and beneath their smiles as they waved him off, Darren felt his own lips split like dry earth in a desert, or like a flood tearing across a barren land. “Thank you,” the mother said for what must have been the millionth time that night. “We’re truly grateful. If there’s ever anything you need, don’t hesitate to call us, okay?” Darren nodded, and something in his chest seemed to dislodge itself from his ribs.

           He left the hospital soon after, deciding to walk home and go get his car tomorrow. Tonight, he decided, he would enjoy the crisp air outside and this feeling, like all the salt water had been forced from his lungs. The automatic doors slid open in a whisper and Darren slipped out, breathing the cool night air like a man lost in a desert who had finally found water.

                                                                                                   fin.

#prose #project: urban desert #god im exhausted #wc: 6030 #now.....to edit

[r-was]

Urban Desert.

                                                       part 1  / part 2  /  part 3

           He’d known, of course, because he’d spent Friday evening in the hospital, and had been there when Jon’s parents were told that their son had succumbed to his injuries. He’d been there, across the room, as Jon’s mother started to wail and his father wrapped both arms around her and rocked them gently, doing his best to hide his own tears in her shoulder. The two of them had left without him, even though it had been Darren who gave the nurse their phone numbers to tell them of their son’s injury. Darren had sat there a long time, with his hands laced between his knees and his head bent as if in prayer, until a nurse had touched him on the shoulder and offered to call his parents for him. Darren had handed her his phone, silent and sullen. He wouldn’t know what to tell his parents, anyway. ‘Can you pick me up?’ It felt too mundane for the gravity of what had transpired. ‘I’ll be home late.’ It was already ... what time was it?

           Darren had been dimly aware of the nurse speaking quietly into the phone, and of the way the lights buzzed above his head. He didn’t know what she’d said. He didn’t even know who’d picked up the phone. His parents had arrived later, though as Darren hadn’t looked at his phone when the nurse had returned it, he couldn’t rightly say how much later. He was too stunned to check the clock on the wall when they left. His father put his hand on Darren’s back to guide him towards the sliding doors, and his mother had picked up his jacket from the seat next to where he’d been sat. “Dar,” she’d said. “It’s cold outside,” and Darren had slid his arms numbly into the sleeves, but they had felt like sandpaper on his arms.

           He ate lunch in the hallways, hunched against his locker in the same place that he and Jon always had. Darren had come up with an array of reasons why he never moved from it, ranging from the lighting to the idea that he couldn’t be assed, but in truth, he suspected it came down to habit. He always found his way back here, even when he wandered the halls for another place to sit. Darren forced himself to eat, remembering the weakness that comes from hunger and the tissue paper that covered the bones on his wrist that morning. The food slid down his throat like an hourglass draining away before it stuck, caught on a sound that leaves him winded, and then, choking. A gasp, Darren realised wheezing as bread caught mid-swallow, that gasp, like the last one Jon would take. It had sounded like Jon had remembered a story from class, or that he had a text next block, but that couldn’t be. Darren’s head had turned toward the sound before had had realised it, only to see his backpack again where Jon rightly should have been. Where Jon would never be again.

           The shaking had started in his hands again, and Darren knew that he would never be able to finish his lunch now. It thumped in the garbage as he pushed his way through the doors that lead outside, and winter wind bit into his lungs as he coughed the last of his lunch into his sleeve. Darren grit his teeth and ran without direction, fetching up three blocks away with his back to a tree without memory of the journey. His breath burned against the back of his mouth as he sunk down, grappling with pride and welling tears. What was that? He asked himself in disbelief. It had been to real to be imagined, but had someone been walking past that he’d ignored? Was he losing it? Darren let his head drop back against the trunk, and the grey sky above him was unfocused and unimportant. At least he had a car, Darren thought, so he wouldn’t have to ride the bus home with the other student. At least in his car he could be alone; a place for him and Jon and his thoughts. He couldn’t stand to deal with their pity today. Death was hard for the dying, Darren knew, but no one ever mentioned the living. No one seemed to know what to do with those left behind.

          But these days, even past his loud music, his thoughts always turned to the accident, and when he swallowed those thoughts like a razor, the scene of the funeral came back to him, as it often did. It was a Sunday, sunny and unseasonably warm for October, almost as if the world was mocking the death of a seventeen-year-old and all the slow-moving figures in black that had gathered for him. Darren had brought some flowers—he didn’t know what kind, but they had felt right somehow. Sort of blue and purple like sadness. Like Jon’s jacket. Like guilt. He’d even worn his best-and-only suit and showed up just as the first guests were trickling up to meet a hand-wringing mother and a calm-as-ever father. Despite himself, Darren felt uneasy. It was a family funeral, he knew, but the Sparks had been more of a family than Darren had known. His own parents had tried, of course, but if was oft the case that people found homes outside of the one made for them, and Jon and Mr. Sparks had both seen Darren as more than just another sullen teenage boy, even when he wouldn’t open up for anyone.

           Jon’s five-year-old brother Nathan was outside on the lawn picking bluebells. Nathan’s hair was a white gold, paler than Jon’s had been, and with his white shirt the boy looked like he was glowing. To calm his nerves, Darren had gone over to him then and crouched beside the child in the grass, trying to keep his voice steady when he spoke. “Hey, Nate,” he had said, as casual as nerves would allow.  “What have you got there?” Nate sniffed and looked up at him squinting into the sun, his blue eyes bright against pale skin.

           “My mommy told me not to talk to you,” he said hesitantly, like he didn’t know what the words meant or why he was saying them. His eyes searched Darren’s face as if he could find more bluebells there. The back of Darren’s neck prickled, dribbling all the way down his spine, and he swallowed the sudden fear in his throat. His eyes flicked to the grass before meeting Nathan’s again. Somehow he knew that his own face was shrouded in shadow. Like a mystery. Like a villain.

           “All right,” he said, as bravely as he could. “Keep up the good work, Natty.” He had ruffled the boy’s hair and straightened, forcing a deep breath into his lungs. Gathering all his courage, he walked to where Jon’s parents stood, greeting a couple that Darren had met once and recognized as Jon’s aunt and uncle, though from which side he couldn’t remember. A dark-skinned girl called to Nathan, and broke away from the procession to run to him across the field. As Darren passed her by, he felt the air rush past him as she ran, so small and free and alive. Darren’s chin was down, but his eyes were on his goal, as if afraid that he would get lost on the lawn. Jon’a mother noticed him first, and her husband picked up on his darkened expression. “What are you doing here?” She’d asked when he was closer, accusation dripping from his voice.

           “I’m here for Jon,” Darren tried. “I just wanted to...”

           Before he could find the words, he was cut off by the voice that always, always had made him and Jon leap to attention whenever it hit that pitch. “You’re the reason Jon is dead,” she told him, and her lips shook and her lipstick crinkled as her mouth forced the words out like poison. “You texted him eight times. Was it so important that he left right then? He didn’t even finish his dinner, you know. He didn’t even bring his coat. He was so excited to see you. He was always excited to see you, and you—“ Her voice broke, and Darren watched as she struggled to hold the last of her composure. The last words Mrs. Sparks got out were “Have you ever seen a murderer show up to their victim’s funeral?” Then she was crying again, and her husband was rubbing her back reassuringly. One more withering look was offered to Darren before she turned away, moving towards a cluster of adults that Darren didn’t recognize. Mr. Sparks turned to him then, his crisp eyes now hazy with grief—one that he had caused, Darren reminded himself—to put a firm hand on his shoulder, as he had done many times under very different circumstances. When he spoke, his voice was as cool and sympathetic as mist. “I think,” he started, and Darren was surprised to hear how tired this man sounded. “I think you should go.”

           Darren’s blood caught fire with humiliation and shock, searing through him as if he were made of sawdust. The lump in his throat was heavy now, and there was something thick like bile there too. He wouldn’t cry here. He wouldn’t give Mrs. Sparks that satisfaction. Darren held out the nameless flowers to Mr. Sparks, searching for anything to say that would mend the rift that had torn between them.  All apologies felt empty when held against a father’s grief. All emotions drowned in the depths of a father’s frown. “Please take them,” he said at last. “I want... I want Jon to have them.” It was the closest to the truth he could get. Wordlessly, Jon’s father took the flowers and Darren stared hard at the ground, mutely dismayed to notice the pastel colours there. A bluebell crushed beneath his shoe, though it fought to regain its shape when he shifted off of it, stretching slowly back to the sky. Darren couldn’t tell if the expression on Mr. Sparks’ face was a smile or not.

           Across the field, Nathan stopped and looked up, tracing the progress of a broken boy he had once looked up to as he trekked across the lawn to the road, hunched up against some wind that only he could feel.

                                                                                  next.

#prose #project: urban desert

[r-was]

original here.

#poem

[r-was]

                                                        part 1  / part 2  /  part 3

           The car was moving too fast, this much he knew. Darren had spotted Jon as he’d reached the intersection. He had called to him, waved him over, even smiled in encouragement as he’d started to jog. By the time Darren saw the car, it was already too late. He had yelled to stop, but the car moved faster than sound, and by the time he could mouth the words, Jon was gone. One second he had been half a cross-walk away, living, breathing, with white breath blooming from his mouth, and the next he had been twelve feet into the intersection, where the only white came from the exhaust pipe and the glimmer of streetlights on red metal. It had been over in a second then, but it was longer in the dreams. In dreams he could pick out every freckle dotted across Jon’s face, and see the flush in his cheeks from the biting autumn wind. He could see every eyelash under the crease of Jon’s eye and the way his smile faded slightly in confusion before he was gone. Jon’s last breath, loud even against the slap of the car, echoed in Darren’s ears. In dreams he never saw the body. His dreams were all brake lights, and a new fear that would grab hold of his heart and refuse to let go.

           This was when Darren always woke up. Gone were the days when he’d sit up in bed from the horror of it, but he still gasped as his stomach roiled, and choked on each agonizing mouthful of air. When he stopped coughing, Darren covered his face with his hands and sobbed, shocked tonight as every other night by how vivid it all was, and appalled that he was condemned to relive it night after night, as if his waking hours weren’t hard enough already. The bump in his throat bobbed with every failed attempt to swallow the grief that rocked him like a boat at sea and threatened to capsize the bed he lay in. It was a long time before the shaking of his chest stopped, and when it did, Darren only laid there and stared at the ceiling, eyelids heavy with wet eyelashes, dried tears, and shame.

           He wasn’t sure what time it was, and somehow couldn’t bring himself to reach for his phone to check. Darren was surprised, tonight like every other night, at how spent his grief left him, and how long it took for the storm to pass. He felt as if he’d spent the night being pelted by a bruising rain when in truth he had only tossed and turned among his sheets. Memories welled up like bubbles from a drowning man’s mouth. In ninth grade, the two had been paired up as the two odd ends in P.E., Jon as the new student that year and Darren as the moody one that everyone had learned better than to invite.

           “Ready for this?” Jon had asked, bouncing the volleyball once before settling into a serving position. Darren had made some attempts at looking ready and responded with a simple “Sure.” Jon served, and when Darren swung his arms up to knock it back, the ball had gone careening into the neighbouring court, just as he’d expected it to.

           “One nil,” Jon called, holding up a hand as the guy in the next court tossed it back at him. Darren had been chewing his lip, but the comment caught him off guard.

           “What?” No one kept score during P.E., especially when they were only practising.

           Jon was preparing to serve again. “One nil,” he repeated. “You knocked it out of the court, so I get a point. That’s how it works, right?”

           Darren didn’t know. He’d shrugged and Jon had served him again. This time it had gone into the net. “Two nil,” Jon announced, and held two hands aloft. “Pass it. You should try bringing your arms up straight, so you have more control over where the ball goes.”

           “Whatever,” Darren had muttered, tossing the ball over the net. “Volleyball is a girl’s sport, anyway.”

           Across the court, Jon had been grinning. “Nah, man. Don’t say that. It’ll mean you’re losing at a girl’s sport.” It had irked Darren at the time, but soon after he’d taken Jon’s advice to heart. He’d gained two points that game, and four the next time, when they’d paired up out of choice rather than necessity. He’d also learned that getting a point meant that he had to retrieve the ball, rather than Jon doing it. “Keeps you humble,” Jon had said months later when Darren had mentioned the rule. That had been two years ago, and now they were so evenly matched in volleyball that Darren couldn’t rightly say if he won more or less any more. He couldn’t remember the results of their final game.

           His alarm went off a long while later and the room remained still until a trembling hand reached to turn it off. Even hours after the nightmare, wisps of terror still clung to his clothes like exhaust, because the image was back and as vivid as ever,  burning like it had been branded there. Darren plucked his body from his bed like a tissue, dragging himself with crusty eyes to the bathroom and the shower, flipping the light on before deciding he’d rather do it in the dim light from the window. With water dripping from dark hair and fingertips like grief, Darren found himself doubled over, with nails dug into his ribs and the bones in his spine sticking out in abrupt ridges all the way down his back. He was out of tears, but the sandpaper in his lungs rasped as water dribbled over his lips and down his chin. The wave had crashed over him so suddenly that Darren couldn’t say for certain what had brought on the grief, only that it was there and that it was crushing him.

           His body was rigid when he washed the soap off, like his own brand of rigor mortis had already set in, with skin that was still warm and flushed from the shower. Still alive. The thought struck him abruptly, and he could only stand and watch as soap receded, leaving behind skin as pale and thin as paper. Darren stopped, startled by just how white he was, how thin his wrists were, and how his vein pulsed, blue as a bruise. Since their bouts in P.E., Darren had grown increasingly competitive, and had taken to lifting some of his father’s weights that were left in the TV room, but now his bones stick out in his knuckles like rocky outcroppings on a mountain, hard and jagged. His fragility caught in his throat as he turned his arm over, noting the dark hairs that sprouted there, eerily aware of how delicate his life was—how delicate everyone’s lives are—and how easy it was for someone to just break beyond repair. Darren was still reeling from this realisation when he tilted from the shower and leaned over the sink, nauseous. His dark hair dripped as he took several deep, shuddering breaths before slowly raising his head to look at the mirror. “I can’t live like this,” he gasped at his reflection, shaking in the mirror like a cloth stuck to a branch in wind. His eyes are a deep, murky blue, like the sea during a storm. “I have to stop this.” The boy in the mirror stared back, the bones in his collar sharp against his pale skin.

           At school he was dead. He should have been dead. He wished he was dead. The teachers droned on and their words faded in and out, but all Darren could hear was an echoing sound like tires screeching somewhere far away. It was distracting after a while, but never anything more. They were lenient with him, at least, ever since the day that they’d made the announcement over the P.A. that Jon would not be coming to school today, or ever. People had looked at him strangely that morning, wary of the darkness under his eyes and the way he stood at his locker, silent, as if waiting for someone to come and walk with him to class. Darren had already known what would happen when the chemistry teacher had asked everyone to be silent when the wall speaker had come on. Darren had sat his backpack on Jon’s seat, as if reserving it for him, and people had turned to look at him when they realised what had happened. “I’m sorry that this happened so close to home,” Mr. Miller had told the class, but he’d been looking at Darren.

                                                                                    next.

#prose #project: urban desert #alright a bit of background for those who read it #I originally wrote this in grade 12 and I'm working through it now ... it's what got me my scholarship #will be editing it for a while probably

[r-was]

I have too much of my dad in me for my mother to love me.

she says I have his eyes.

#quote #spilled ink #project: the house between us

[r-was]