Waiting
Limit/No Limit ... Experiments In Subterfuge ... The Train
Blues and greys. Steel. And some rust. Some grease as well. So splatters of dead orange and black. Nothing white. No pure white. Just more shades of grey.
Silence. A night sprayed with stars. A canopy of pinpoint lights over fields rushing away to a forest of snow-laden spruce trees. Every so often, a frozen lake. Like some memory flying from view but still remembered later. Familiarity trapped in a snapshot. Sepia photograph of her there in front of her father and next to her brother, both dead now from the rage of the disease she carries as well. In her life blood, boiling in her veins like hot mercury. You were there. You weren’t there. Choose. Be part of the scene or not. Decide. Or just stop now.
Between the cars of the train, she could smoke, so she did. She stood almost carelessly and looked out into the swirl of dazed images rushing by. Ribbons of thought would spill out into the cold air. Memories, some sad, no, mostly all sad. She let them go, pushed, drove, forced them away.
Then a twist in the rails sent her lurching, grasping, clinging. Flesh to steel, crushing her left cheek and scraping away her skin like the buttery icing her naughty fingers skimmed from her mother's wedding cake. A second turn and lurch. She snapped back. Something hurt inside. Caustic. Cancerous. She heard its raw voice but ignored it. Then it sent a line of pain up her side. Not a line really and not a steady pain. More like a sequence of nerve endings spontaneously igniting and just as quickly extinguishing. More like agony pulsating. More like torture unrelenting. Then transverse. Encircling. Girdle of thorns.
“Fuck you,” she groaned against its weight.
Good for her, you think.
[Yes. Good for her. Bravo, bravado, bravanaseum. If you were not here, I would kill her in an instant, and let her die before the rise of another paragraph. Quietly and with some dignity. But you forbid it. You and your strained hope.]
Her legs weakened under her. Knees betrayed her. She fell and spun. And spun again. Arms and legs flailing just enough to keep her from falling out into the dark ditches of death that ran along each side of the tracks. Flesh to steel. Treads of metal scraping away one knee, then the other, and then as she turned her head from the roaring sting, the palms of her hands peeled away. Blood. Streaks of black red. She saw them. She ran her finger through the ooze and tasted it. Steel and something else, something sallow.
Her body ice. No more, she thought, this is the end. I'm letting go. Then, aloud, she looks at you through the streaked glass dividing you from her. Looks at you with tearful eyes smeared black, and asks, "Will you let me go now? Please, let me go."
Choose.
Decide.
Neat picture. I like her hair. Good song too. Whoever said aging like fine wine was talking about Leonard Cohen
ReplyDeleteI remember reading your story on Multiply and probably didn't know what to say at the time. This is a dark read, and for me, a little hard to interpret. Here goes: I think it's human nature to reach out and help someone who is about to "jump off the train." No one could possibly stand by and give another person permission to self destruct.
ReplyDeleteYou are the writer asking the reader to decide what should happen next. Save her. Give her hope and a reason to live.
Dark write but a good one. Subterfuge is right..leading the hapless reader to believe in any power to make the choice.. Did we choose to be there? Only in accompanying you on a make believe mercy mission which turns out to be a slow murder.Your one hand holding her broken body to the streaked glass, the other holding firm to the reader's collar in a marriage of desperation and morbid fascination.. the decision is as hopelessly out of our hands as her life is out of hers..
ReplyDelete...turn her into a zombie and have her walk the earth for a thousand years ..
..or not. :) I liked the twistiness of your story. No white, that's for sure.
Did I mention I liked the story? .... I did like it. A lot of talent wrapped up in those words.
ReplyDelete