anatomyofthewrittenword - Tumblr blog

anatomyofthewrittenword · 1 year

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amy tan's ghosts

I am sitting at brunch in the city and all I can look at is the ghost in the road.

Across the table, Cassidy frowns. “Lei.” She follows my line of sight out the window; seeing nothing there, she turns back to me even more confused. “You okay?”

The woman in the road stands facing me, unbothered by the cars rushing through her. She wears a headdress in the style of Chinese noblewomen from the late Qing dynasty, and her qipao bears the elaborate floral embroidery only the wealthy could afford; but she is drenched from head to toe, dripping rancid water that spoils the fine fabric. Her hair hangs matted in her face, knotted like river weeds over deep, dark eyes sunken into her skull.

“Lei,” Cassidy repeats. Now she is beginning to look worried. “Did you hear me?”

I wrench my gaze from the road and fumble for my drink. “Sorry, sorry.” The alcohol in the sangria burns as it slides down my throat. “Thought I saw someone I recognized, but…” I swallow and past on my best smile. You’re normal, Lei. Act like it. “It wasn’t them.”

Cassidy gives me a sympathetic look. “You look tired. Are you tired?”

I roll my eyes. “Thanks, Cass.”

“No, I’m serious. Is it your mom again? You’ve been all out of sorts since she came to stay with you.”

Cassidy has always been frank, not a bone in her body capable of bullshitting. It’s part of the reason I like her so much, why she’s one of my few friends from college I kept in contact with after graduation. But now her ability to see right through me feels a little too much like needling. “I’m fine, Cass,” I say, as firmly as I can when so much of my energy is devoted to keeping my hands from trembling. “Mom’s fine, too, though I appreciate your concern.”

Cassidy squints at me. But my mask must pass muster, because after a moment she smiles. “I can’t believe she’s here in New York. I still remember when she would call you in college, the crazy things she’d say. Remember when she made you put oranges on our windowsill in the middle of winter? My god, it drove you nuts.”

In the road, the drowned woman watches me. I force out a laugh. “Yeah, well, that’s her. Driving me nuts to this day.” I signal to the waiter to bring me another drink. “Now, what were you saying about your new job?”

---

Ghosts, my immigrant mother tells me, haunt every part of our lives. They are the imprints left behind on our world by those who died before they were ready and could not relinquish their hold on the living. There are trickster ghosts, mischief-makers who caused trouble and confusion to further their own means and could not pass peacefully with their truths half-buried; now they remain as mèiguǐ that stalk the country roads at night, transforming into terrifying animals. There are pestilence ghosts, the enduring wills of stubborn grudge-holders, who let their resentment of those who wronged them poison their souls; now they linger on in the walls of broken-down buildings and overcrowded tenements, leeching disease and decay into the air. Most dangerous of all, there are the hungry ghosts, and all their variations: Those who committed evil deeds in pursuit of their greatest desires, but died without achieving them. Now their unfulfilled longing and poisonous guilt combine to torture them for eons, cursing them to wander through their next dozen lifetimes howling for an absolution they can never quite reach.

Ma talked about the ghosts everywhere we went: In the line at the grocery store, when I whined for treats and she told me to quiet down, or the foul-tongue ghosts would rot the food in my mouth and turn my breath so putrid no one would ever come near me again; when she caught me giggling over the latest gossip on the phone after school, my homework still unfinished, and warned me to work hard and study well, lest I grew up so ignorant and simple that I fell prey to a trickster ghost’s cons and lost everything I had. In the summers, on the fifteenth night of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, she laid peeled oranges, bowls of rice, sugared nuts and cups of tea on the altar in the kitchen as offerings to the ghosts of our ancestors, who purportedly walked among us that day. “You must honor the past, Leilei,” she would say to me, while I rolled my eyes at the table, too lofty in my American self-assuredness to listen with any respect. “The future depends on it.”

The ghosts were Ma’s comfort, her support, her partner in raising me. While she worked fourteen-hour-days as the owner and only employee of our dry cleaning business, the ghosts taught me morals from Chinese culture, kept a watchful eye to ensure my good behavior, and granted me luck on everything from my grade school grammar tests to my college entrance exam. But if the stories had any real hold over me as a child, it was long gone by the time I became fluent in English. As I grew older and cooler, and more American with each passing day, I chafed at my mother’s favorite tales. Come on; I was thirteen already, practically an adult. Did she really think I would let some dusty old stories she’d told a million times before intimidate me into ting hua—following every nonsensical command she issued? What did it matter if I ate cold foods during the winter, if I stuck my chopsticks in my rice, if I wanted to keep a pet turtle? Did she have to control everything? Was there anything she wanted from me other than obedience?

Sometimes I think she clung so hard to those stories because they were all she had left of her homeland. There were never any other Chinese in Marlowe, Mississippi: No community to celebrate the holidays, no neighbors to gossip with in the same language, no Asian marts to pick up the ingredients for old family recipes. Walking through the town center on my way back from school, I watched the old white ladies point and whisper at me from across the street and understood what it might feel like to be a guǐ—a freak from another world. Those moments were the only times I felt grateful to have my mother’s stories at my side; to hope, however wistfully, that there was someone looking over me, even if they were ancestors long gone.

But whoever our ancestors were, whether or not they were watching over anything, my mother didn’t say. She never named a single member of our lineage; I never knew the names of my grandparents, if I had any aunts or uncles, where our family line hailed from in the vast diaspora of China. She never told me my father’s name, no matter how much I begged, no matter how many times we fought. It was as if to speak the names of the people we left behind was to invoke a terrible curse, as defiant to the natural order as wearing white outside of a funeral. Eventually I gave up trying, too exhausted by a lifetime of miscommunications, too hurt by her silence. I went away to college and moved on with my life, watching from a distance as my mother continued to worship ancestors made into ghosts by her refusal to name them, wondering what it was like to live a life haunted by the restless past.

---

The first time it happened, I was nineteen years old, riding the train late on a Wednesday night to my boyfriend’s parents’ house in Westchester for Thanksgiving. Exhausted by the morning of classes and a subsequent eight-hour shift at the grocery store, I fell asleep somewhere between Harlem and Riverside and woke to a little boy with a burned face staring back at me.

I didn’t scream; even sitting in that near-empty car, midnight only a few minutes away, I didn’t scream. The boy wore a quilted jacket and cloth shoes and held a cracked clay bowl. Part of his chin and his entire right cheek had been burned away, exposing the stark white bone underneath. He held out his bowl to me. I saw that it was filled with ash. “Shěng xiē chī de ma?” he asked politely.

In the seat in front of me, an older woman dozed under her jacket. Two rows back, a teenager listened to music as he gazed out the window, The Strokes faintly audible through his headphones. My heart hammered at what felt like two hundred beats per minute in my throat.

In the most stilted Chinese I had ever spoken, I told the boy I didn’t have any food on me. His face dropped in disappointment. “I’m so hungry,” he moaned. To my horror, he began to cry. “I feel like there’s a hole burning in my stomach.” The sobs contorted his mangled skin, transforming his face into a nightmare. When he opened his mouth to wail, flames billowed out of his throat, leaping so close I felt them singe my eyebrows.

I flailed back against the seat, throwing my arms up to protect to my face. In the darkness of my own embrace, the fast, panicked bursts of my breathing was deafening in my ears. I cowered there for what felt like an eternity, thinking frantically to myself, It’s a dream, it’s a dream—it has to be a dream.

The train creaked to a stop. The intercom overhead announced that it was the end of the line. Around me, the passengers began to collect their things and rise from their seats. I scraped up whatever courage I had and lowered by arms. The boy was gone.

I got off the train and walked through the parking lot to my boyfriend’s car on legs that shook so badly they barely held me up. When I fumbled my way into the passenger seat, my boyfriend grinned at me and leaned over to peck my cheek, then began to tell me about that afternoon’s football game. He was chattering on when we pulled out of the lot, while I stared silently out the window, gaze never leaving the bright windows of the train still on the tracks.

—

The next time was three years, four different therapists, and a standing prescription for Lexapro later. After my last therapist agreed with my first three that my single, isolated hallucination was likely a stress response to the pressure of supporting myself through school, rather than an impacting brain tumor or the first break of schizophrenia, I convinced myself they were right, took my medication religiously, and did all I could to ground myself in the waking world. I finished school, started work, made myself fit in with all the young white professionals that populated the financial scene in New York. Rifled through failed relationships like a rolodex of shallow distractions, always ending just before they could ask me where I came from, who I knew. I never breathed a word of any of it to my mother. Mental illness was a taboo topic, one that followed the old Chinese curse that to speak was to invoke. And if I wasn’t crazy, and ghosts were real after all…

Well. I thought I could bear that even less.

And then, one night after a disastrous dinner date, I woke with a start to pounding at the door.

At first, bleary with sleep, I thought it was someone at the front entrance. “Who is it?” I called out, groping for my glasses. The pounding continued as I shoved them onto my face and peered at the clock on my nightstand: 2:44 am. Was there a fire in the building? What on earth was going on?

“Ràng wǒ chūqù! Ràng wǒ chūqù!”

A chill swept over me. I slowly turned my head. The noise was not coming from the front door of my apartment; it was not outside my bedroom at all. The pounding came from only a few feet away, through the closed door of my closet at the foot of my bed.

The closet door rattled; I jumped. “Yǒurén zaì mai?” the voice of a young woman pleaded. “Please, let me out. Is there anyone there? You must let me out!”

I snatched my phone off my nightstand. In the middle of dialing 9-1-1, I froze. What was I thinking? What would I say—that a Chinese-speaking stranger had broken into my home and gotten herself trapped in my closet while I slept? And then, when they inevitably found no one there, what would I do? Continue working my twelve hour days in the dog-eat-dog world of financial consulting from the comfort of my padded cell?

I set the phone back down and drew the covers up to my chin. Then I called out, voice wavering, “Who’s there?”

There was an abrupt pause; then the pounding resumed, louder than ever. “Please, you must let me out,” the woman begged. “I didn’t sleep with Lady Wang’s husband, I swear. No one believes me, but I would never do such a thing. You have to help me. You have to let me out!”

I swallowed. “The door’s not locked,” I tried. “You can just—”

“Please, you have to help me! The lid is too heavy. I can’t breathe down here. Let me out, please; I don’t have much time left—”

The realization shocked me into silence. I stared at the closet door in terror. Suddenly the blankets were suffocating in their heaviness. I kicked them off, gulping for air. The pounding had stopped, but now there was another sound: Scratching—no, clawing.

The air in the room grew stifling. I slid down the headboard and slumped on my bed, gasping for breath while I listened to the ghost in my closet beg.

—-

I arrive home after brunch to an ice-cold apartment. “Damn it, Ma,” I growl under my breath, stomping to the thermostat. It’s 52 degrees, because of course it is. I crank it back up to 70 and go to find my mother in the guest bedroom.

She’s sitting in the recliner, blanket draped over her knees, watching a Chinese drama about the Sino-Japanese war. I stand in the doorway with my arms over my chest. “Ma. How many times do I have to tell you that you can keep the heat on in the apartment?”

“Gas expensive nowadays,” Ma replies, eyes never leaving the television. “Save you money. I prefer cold anyway.”

“Yes, but it’s not just you living here,” I say, pointedly. I sigh, too tired for this argument again. “How are you feeling today?”

Now Ma looks at me. She switches to Chinese. “I feel fine. Like always.”

When my mother first called me three months ago to inform me she was dying, I thought it was a joke. Had she seen a doctor? What was her diagnosis? What medications was she taking? I hadn’t even known she was ill; I couldn’t accept, even with all the suspension of disbelief that maintaining my relationship with her had required throughout my childhood, that my mother could be so unwell for so long and not tell me.

But there was no diagnosis; no doctors, no medications. One morning she woke up and could not use her left leg. The right one went shortly after. And that was it: No matter how many specialists I took her to, no matter how many CTs or MRIs were run, no one had any answers for us. “I’m sorry not to have anything more concrete, but the best I can come up with is some sort of conversion disorder,” the third neurologist we consulted told me, handing me the results of my mother’s latest, unremarkable nerve conduction study. “I’d recommend seeing a psychiatrist.”

Ma waves a hand at me. She points to the altar set up on an old nightstand at the foot of her bed. “Light the incense for me, Leilei.”

I sigh but move to do as I’m told, if only to garner favor as I tell her, “Don’t forget you have an appointment on Tuesday. Three o’clock.”

Ma hums. “Cancel it.”

I grit my teeth. “Ma. We talked about this. If everything else has been ruled out, then the only thing left to do is—”

“Leilei,” Ma interrupts me. She reaches for the remote and turns off the television. “I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

Ma looks at me calmly. “I’ll be gone by then.”

I stare at her. The words are nonsense, but it doesn’t matter: They chill me to the bone. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m out of time,” Ma says. “Please. Light the incense.”

My grip tightens around the lighter. “No,” I snap. “Not until you tell me what you mean.”

Ma sighs. My mother never seemed to age as I grew up: The only signs she ever bore of time passing was the slow whitening of her hair, even as her face stayed the same. But now, all of a sudden, she looks tired, and in turn it makes her seem old. “I can’t. You wouldn’t understand.”

I gape at her. “Are you serious?” I demand, in English.

“Leilei—”

“No!” I slam the lighter down. The rational part of my brain tells me I’m overreacting, that my mother’s just being dramatic; after all, for a sixty-something immigrant Chinese woman, being psychoanalyzed might actually be worse than death. But there’s something in her expression that disquiets me: The utter lack of fight. As if she has already accepted what’s to come, and is now only waiting for the end. “You can’t say something like that and expect me to just move on. I’m an adult now; you can’t keep treating me like a child—”

“You’ve been seeing the ghosts.”

My rant shrivels in my mouth. “…What?”

“For many years now.” Ma studies me seriously, then nods. “They are drawn to you. Your emotions. You feel what they feel. You allow them to be heard and seen in this world again.”

“I—can we not make this about ghosts, just once—”

“The beggar boy.” Ma looks somber. “He snuck into a boarding house one night looking for food. When the house caught fire, he was trapped in the pantry where he was hiding.”

I stare at her. For a second I am nineteen again, unable to speak for the horror of a burned boy sitting across from me. “Oh my god.”

“You saw him when you were hungry like him: Hungry for opportunity, for the future. For the chance to prove yourself.”

My throat is as dry as the desert. My heart is beginning to flutter in my ribs. “Ma…”

“The buried girl,” Ma continues. “Who was buried alive as punishment for the rumor that she slept with the noblewoman’s husband. You heard her cries when you felt as trapped as she did, in a job and a life and a world you did not belong to.”

My heart is pounding now, and there is a tingling sensation at the back of my skull. It’s how I feel whenever I see a ghost, like there is pure adrenaline rushing through my veins. I’ve always attributed it to my body going into shock.

“The drowned woman.” Ma’s voice cracks. Her face twists, brow furrowing and lips pressing tight. Suddenly I am looking at a sight far more terrifying than any ghost: My mother, trying not to cry. “When the invaders took her home, she traveled seven days and seven nights in search for a safe place to have her child. But on the seventh night, a terrible storm came down on the valley and weakened the banks of the river. She had no energy left to fight when she slipped down a steep cliff and fell into the water.”

My legs feel weak underneath me. I stumble to the bed and sit down. “How…how do you know about them?”

“You should not feel ashamed, Leilei,” Ma says, gentle. “Our people have suffered so much. Sacrificed so much. There are so many untold stories. You can give them a voice. It is a gift.”

I clasp a trembling hand over my mouth. “They’re…real. The ghosts. They’re all real.”

She blinks at me. “Of course.”

I bark out a laugh. “I always thought…god. I always thought you were full of shit.”

“Leilei,” Ma says, scolding, and for a moment I am a teenager with a messy room again and my mother is my whole world. “This is why you should always listen to your mother. Your mother is always right.”

I draw in an unsteady breath. “Why now? The first one I saw was eleven years ago. Why are you telling me now that you can see them, too?”

Ma sniffs. “You weren’t ready before.”

I glare at her. “Seriously? You’ve been avoiding my questions my entire life, and you’re not even going to be straight with me now, when I find out ghosts are real?”

She frowns at me. “I never lied to you.”

I scoff. “You never told me the truth, either. Everything was always half-truths and riddles. All I wanted was for you to be honest with me. But you could never just tell me what you were really thinking. Everything had to be made into some sort of life lesson.”

“I tried to guide you,” Ma says. “So you could do right.”

I swallow past the knot in my throat. “Yes,” I say. “But sometimes I didn’t need guidance. Sometimes I just wanted you to listen.”

Ma falls silent. We sit there for a while, listening to the cars pass by outside, the rush of the wind.

At last, Ma leans over and takes my hand. “Maybe you’re right,” she says. I blink at her in shock. “It was not you who was not ready. It was me.” Then she takes a deep, steadying breath and transforms before my eyes.

The color leeches from her skin. Her hair grows darker, tangled, filthy. The austere button-down cardigan and rayon slacks I bought her from Ann Taylor fade away into water-logged silk. The drowned woman sits before me, gazing at me with sorrowful eyes.

I flinch back so violently I fall off the bed. I land with a thump on the floor, the impact jarring my teeth. “No,” I gasp. Unconsciously, I attempt to scramble away, to put as much distance between myself and the terrible sight before me as possible. “No—”

“Don’t be afraid, Leilei,” the drowned woman murmurs. “I am the same person you always knew.”

I stare at her in horror. “…Ma?”

She rises from the easy chair and kneels before me. “My dear child,” she sighs. “I wanted to have you so badly. But my first life never gave me the chance. So I had to steal a second one.”

“I don’t understand,” I choke out. I can’t tear my eyes away from the vision’s blue-gray lips, the bones visible against her paper-thin skin. “How is this possible?”

“As I drowned in the waters of the Taiping River, I felt you still kicking in my belly. My life was done, but yours was over before it started.” Her colorless lips quirk. “But you still had so much fight left in you. You were so angry that you were robbed of the chance to live that you refused to pass on. And because we were one, I could not pass on, either.

When I died, I’m not sure where I went. Ghosts cannot think with such a clear mind, you know; mostly we cling to what is most important to us. I think I drifted for a long time. I watched my country change so much I could not recognize it anymore. And then, one day, I heard the words of a man promising a fresh start, a better life. People were following him, and I followed them. When I woke up, I was on the other side of the ocean. It might as well have been the afterlife for how unfamiliar it was to me. But I knew it was what I needed; what that man had promised: A new life.”

The tears drip freely down my face to pool with the river water on the carpet. My mother lifts a hand and just barely touches her fingers to my cheek. There is so much tenderness I can barely stand it. “Now you’re grown, with a life of your own. I have fulfilled my purpose. So, please, Leilei. Light the incense for me.”

Slowly, I climb to my feet and pick up the lighter. I glance back over my shoulder. My mother kneels calmly on the floor, watching me. It takes me multiple tries for how badly my hands shake, but finally I manage to light the three sticks of incense on the altar.

The scent of sandalwood fills the room. I return to the floor to kneel with my mother. Hesitantly, I take her thin, blue hands in mine. Her touch is cold, but the shape of them is so familiar: The same hands that carded through my hair as a girl, twining them into braids before school every morning. Sitting so close, I can see how sunken her eyes are, how she struggles to hold her head up—how tired she must be. I think of the long days she worked at the dry cleaner’s, how she would come home late in the evenings with her nails cracked from the chemical solvents. “Do you regret it?” I whisper. “Coming back? Doing it all over again, when it was so hard for you?”

Ma sighs, a sound like the wind through river reeds. “No, baobei. It was hard. But I’ve felt more peace as a poor woman watching my daughter grow up than I ever did as a noblewoman who never got to meet her child. I don’t regret a moment.”

She is beginning to fade away: Bits and pieces of her, dissolving into the air like dust. “Will I still see you?” I ask desperately. “Will I still see ghosts at all?”

“You will see them as long as your eyes are open, and hear them as long as you are listening,” Ma says, and I almost want to laugh again: Of course her last words to me would be yet another aphorism. “Feel for them, Leilei. Sometimes it is all they have left, to feel.”

“But you?” I press. Her hands have turned to vapor between my fingers. I can see the wallpaper through her, patterned with seashells. “What about you?”

Ma’s eyes crinkle. “Where I am going, I won’t be a ghost anymore. So you see, my dear: You have cured me after all.”

The shape of her mouth is the last thing to go, curved with a smile. Long after the sticks have burned down, the smoke from the incense drifts in the air.

End

#pls reblog to support if you enjoyed this! :) the author thanks you eternally #prose #spilled ink #short story #fiction #creative writing #ghosts #ghost story #amy tan #original fiction #writeblr #going for a #the haunting of hill house #vibe #honestly this is a stub and could use expansion but it makes for a neat small piece #magic realism

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 2 years

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i am new england born and bred, proud of wet summers and stubborn winters, east coast best coast baby. a girl of color, but louisa may alcott feels like a great-aunt, and i one of her little women— we both ran along the concord river with our skirts trailing in the mudwater. amber fields and apple orchards, mossy brick walls reclaimed by the forest, the quiet, quiet, quiet of snowy woods in the deep of january. robert frost’s loneliness tattooed on my ribs in the jagged silhouette of barren treetops, with their bare skeletal arms; mary oliver’s hope, warm in my lungs, sweet as a provincetown summer. in the moonlight, i dream as emily did, swathed in fog, of death and the great beyond— she must have seen what i do, ghosts in the reeds by the edge of the pond, poetry in the long grass.

i long to sleep in the orange leaves, and watch maples grow overhead— but it is not my time yet, not yet, and the land is already full. for now, and a little while more, find me on the empty beach, long after summer has gone; and there is only the ocean, crashing on the shore, calling for me from beyond the waves.

-"local girl," by anatomyofthewrittenword

#poetry #creative writing #spilled ink #poem #new england #new england gothic #emily dickinson #robert frost #mary oliver #louisa may alcott #little women

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 4 years

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another installation of perissologist posts random shit from her googledocs:

Four shots of Grey Goose, a glass of Lagavulin, and a cold Corona later, Danny finds himself on the dance floor, the music pulsing thickly in his blood, a gorgeous girl with dark red hair in a glittery sequined dress moving against him with her arms around his neck. He tilts his head back and lets himself melt into the heat pressing in around him, the lights and the noise that bind the club in a dizzying spell. He’s trying to enjoy himself, but his migraine from earlier is back with a vengeance, made all the worse by the alcohol that makes his head feel like it’s about to fall off his shoulders. The girl smiles at him, green eyes glittering, and leans in to mouth at his neck. She smells like expensive perfume and lime juice, and when she kisses him, her lips taste like Patrón.

Danny swallows past the cotton in his mouth and rests his hands on the girl’s hips. He gently pushes her back. “Sorry, I gotta go,” he says in her ear, hoping he’s loud enough to be heard over the music. She merely smiles at him, uncomprehending, and Danny sighs, deciding it’s not worth it. He turns and pushes his way through the crowd, stumbling off the dance floor and down the narrow flight of stairs to the men’s room in the basement floor.

He’s relieved to find it empty—somewhat grimy, but blessedly quiet. Danny stumbles to the sink, head swimming, and looks at himself in the mirror. His hair’s a mess from where the girl ran her fingers through it, and his eyes are bloodshot, bruised underneath. He looks awful, and feels it, too.

One of the fluorescent lights above the mirrors flickers, humming with the sound of broken circuits. A pipe in the exposed ceiling is dripping a pool of water onto the blue-tiled floor. The music from the club above echoes down into the room, the words muffled but the beats heavy enough to shake the walls. Danny closes his eyes and feels the world sway around him. The DJ’s playing some shitty EDM remix of Dancing Queen, but a floor removed, all of the tricks and frills fall away, and it sounds like what his mother would put on their old record player on rainy Saturday nights, making dinner together in the kitchen and singing along to the crackly vinyls.

Slowly, quietly, Danny becomes aware of something in the air. It feels heavy at his back, significant—like the change in air pressure before a summer storm, or the strain of a held breath. A tension, that sings to Danny and beckons him to turn around. When he does, his eyes are drawn, inexplicably, to the puddle on the floor. The pipe has stopped dripping; the puddle it formed is round and smooth, perfectly still. It reflects the walls and ceiling of the bathroom as well as the mirrors above the sink. The water is dark, but the way it catches the one faulty fluorescent light from the sink—it almost looks as if there is something moving inside it.

An inescapable feeling of dread curdles in Danny’s stomach. He becomes certain that there is something inside of the puddle.

Danny stumbles back and fumbles for his phone. He freezes with it in his hand, staring at the dark shape writhing below the surface of the puddle. What is he thinking, he can’t call the police—what would I say? I’m in the men’s room at a nightclub and there’s a puddle and I think there’s a monster’s in it?

The phone suddenly clatters from Danny’s nerveless fingers. He stares, breathless, as a clawed hand breaks free from the surface of the puddle and latches onto the tiled floor.

Fuck! he shouts in his head. The claw scrapes against the floor and pulls out a shapeless mass. The mass writhes for a moment, then abruptly consolidates into a deformed head and a set of shoulders. Eight milky-white eyes open in the expressionless face and lock onto him. Black skin stretches over the emaciated frame, so dark it’s more the absence of light than a color. Danny chokes on the horror rising in his throat. The…thing—it seems as if it’s forming as it emerges, and the shape it takes on is roughly bipedal, but—Danny cannot understand how it’s alive. It looks…burned. Like a child’s nightmare of a corpse.

Demon, the thought breaks into Danny’s mind. It’s a demon.

The creature pulls the rest of its body out of the puddle and unfurls to its full height. It towers over Danny, pupiless eyes blinking, utterly silent. Danny thinks that if it were snarling, or screaming, he might be less afraid, might be able to move his feet and run—but it makes no noise, just looms there, sucking all the air from the room.

Danny feels like the walls are warping around him, like the next nearest human soul is a million miles away, like reality is a flimsy piece of paper mâché that’s crumpling in on itself. The demon moves forward and opens its mouth, and for a second Danny is convinced that it will speak to him, only he can’t fathom what a demon’s voice would sound like so he can only imagine his own—

The door to the bathroom bangs open, and someone strides in. It takes Danny’s terror-strung brain a second to process, but when it does, he recognizes her: Green eyes, red hair, and a sheath dress that glitters like a newly minted coin. The girl, he thinks, as she comes to a stop in front of him, facing the demon. The girl I was dancing with.

The girl seems utterly unfazed by the monstrous creature, and for a moment Danny thinks she must not see it—but then she sneers at it, like it’s shit on the bottom of her shoe. She’s going to die, Danny thinks, frantically, and pushes himself off from where he’s pressed against the sink, intending to move in front of her—

The girl reaches into the jewel-encrusted clutch hanging from her skinny shoulder. Her hand closes around something. Then, as Danny watches, she pulls an enormous silver sword from the confines of her tiny purse, like a magician pulling an endless rainbow scarf from his hat.

The sword flashes through the air as the girl swings it at her side. She grins, wide and delighted; the look in her eyes as she sizes the demon up is hungry, predatory. The demon opens its mouth again and this time it shrieks; then it launches itself at the girl, its scream echoing through the empty stalls. The girl raises the sword and slashes it downwards just as the demon reaches her. It bisects the creature mid-leap, slicing it clean across the chest from shoulder to hip. The two halves of the demon fall apart and thud to the floor.

The girl straightens and smirks as the remains of the creature crumble into ash. She turns, then, and fixes her eyes on Danny. Any breath that remained in his lungs during his valiant fight not to pass out leaves him now. The demon was blatantly horrifying, but—the look on the girl’s face, the smile she wears; they speak of infinite intelligence, and a malevolent glee. Above all, she looks at him the same way she looked at the demon before she cut it down: With the absolute lack of fear and an all-consuming hunger.

“Hello,” she purrs. Her voice is the same sweet, breathy one he heard when she first pulled him onto the dance floor, but now it rumbles with the power of thunder, shaking the room. The sink trembles under Danny’s white-knuckled grip. “I know you.”

Danny swallows. “Who—who are you?”

The girl tilts her head. “Curious,” she says. “You could see it, couldn’t you?”

Danny’s gaze flickers to the pile of ash behind her, and that’s all the answer she needs. She lets out a delighted laugh. The stall doors rattle in their frames. “You could. I knew it.” She steps closer, stiletto heels clicking against the floor. The tip of her sword, held lazily in her hand, drags across the tile with a thin, metallic screech. “But you’re not one of us.” She leans in, close enough that he can smell her perfume again, and inhales. After a moment, she draws back, eyes even brighter than before. “But you’re not a stitcher, either. So how could you see it?”

I’m both, Danny wants to say, but the words lodge in his throat. He blinks rapidly, trying to clear his vision, but—no, he’s not seeing things. The air behind the girl is warping, folding in on itself like an invisible fist has grabbed hold of reality and is twisting. When Danny doesn’t answer, the girl heaves a sigh and shrugs. “Oh well,” she murmurs. She reaches out a manicured hand and runs it gently through Danny’s hair. “I’m still hungry. I think you’d make an excellent desert, don’t you?”

Fuck, Danny thinks, again, just before a bright flash of white forces him to look away. When it fades, Seraphine and Elias are standing between him and the girl, holding tall white staffs that gleam with the shine of polished wood.

The girl falls back. “You again,” she spits in disgust. Her eyes are on Seraphine. “I told you I’d kill you if you came back here.”

“Yes, Natalia, we know how you like to be dramatic,” Seraphine snaps. Then she grips her staff sideways in both hands and uses it to shove the girl back and into the warped-looking spot in the air behind her.

The girl vanishes, like she was sucked up by some unseen force. Seraphine whirls on Danny. “Close it!”

“I—what?” Danny stutters.

Seraphine jabs a finger at the anomaly. Danny jumps as the sound of furious screeching seems to penetrate from another room. “The tear—close it!”

“What does that mean?” Danny demands.

Seraphine growls, the sound shaking the floor underneath Danny’s already unsteady feet. The disembodied screeching is getting louder. “Stitch it closed!”

Oh. Oh. “For fuck’s sake!” he half-shouts. He pushes forward, past Elias and Seraphine, and shoves his hand up against the warp hole. A hot electric shock flashes through his body, but he forces himself to concentrate, to pull loose a memory important enough to heal this particular wound—

He’s sitting at the kitchen table, his mother across from him. The windows are open and radiant with sunshine. A sweet summer breeze blows through the house, carrying the scents of freshly cut grass and rain-wet reeds into all the dusty corners. A perfect Sunday afternoon.

“Focus, Danny,” Alia laughs. He gives her a guilty smile and brings his attention back to her hands. She’s showing him how to thread the yarn through the other strands on the loom so that the strings don’t tangle. “Over, under, all the way to the end; then pull it straight and push it down.” Her fingers move nimbly over the wooden frame as she talks.

In the window, the afternoon sun grows brighter and brighter. It expands into the kitchen, eating away at the walls and ceiling, threatening to obliterate everything in Danny’s vision. In the past, he nods, pretending to look interested, but Alia can see straight through him. She clucks her tongue at him disapprovingly. “I know it’s boring to learn, but weaving is a family tradition, Danny,” she says. The light grows until it encompasses everything inside the room. The last thing he sees before the memory is swallowed is his mother’s persuasive smile. “One day, you can teach your kids, too…”

Danny opens his eyes. The bathroom is quiet and still, but not the unnatural, prickling stillness from before; a softer quiet, broken by the sounds of squeaky plumbing and distant footsteps, the club music still thumping from the floor above. The warp hole is gone. Danny looks down. The puddle is still there, but the pile of ashes has disappeared. The scratch on the floor from the girl’s giant sword is gone, too.

Danny starts when Seraphine grabs his arms. He looks up to find her beaming at him. “It worked!” she exclaims. She sounds absolutely exhilarated. “You stitched the tear! It actually worked!”

Danny swallows past his dry throat. “If you’d like,” he begins, as steadily as he can manage, “could you tell me what the fuck just happened here?”

“You entered a liminal space,” Elias says. He’s holding Seraphine’s staff for her and looks more uncertain than Danny thinks he has the right to be, given that he actually knows what’s going on here. “The tears in the planes that we told you about, they form narrow slices of parallel realities that exist between realms. Because liminal spaces don’t belong to any one plane, they inspire activity from all three.” He waves to the puddle on the floor. “You know that demons spawn from still water.”

Danny shudders out an exhale. “I guess I do now,” he says, and he does—upon searching, he finds that the knowledge is already familiar. He just doesn’t remember where he learned it.

“The unbalanced energy of liminal spaces—how should I put this—encourages…events.” Elias looks upward, and Danny follows his gaze to the leaky pipe in the exposed ceiling, the one that dripped the puddle onto the floor. “I guarantee you that even if a plumber came in every day to fix that pipe, it still would have somehow managed to drip the water needed to form a body big enough for that demon to spawn.”

“Let me get this straight,” Danny says. “You’re saying there’s a liminal space in this bathroom? In the basement of a Vegas nightclub?” He pauses. “In the men’s bathroom?”

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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most of the trees have shed their skirts by now, purple and gold, autumn auburn filigree. they rise on the horizon in endless depths, wet black brushstrokes against a pale morning sky— washed with rain, opalescent with sunlight that turns silver inside pearl-sheen clouds. like them, i am almost a skeleton. i wish i could go with as much dignity. the rain is calm today; it feels like an old friend, beckoning me to come away with her. i dream of a long, misty river, and i on a boat down the middle of it. on either side, the shore, craggy with rocks and crowded with pines, reassures me, like two guiding hands; but i am not ready to make landfall yet. i’d like to drift in the fog a while longer, and see what awaits me, just beyond the bend.

10/22/16 by anatomyofthewrittenword

#please reblog if you can!#poetry #spilled ink #creative writing #fiction #free verse #writers on tumblr #Autumn #fall #October

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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this is how you heal a broken heart. i. that boy has eyes like the pouring rain and a body like a lake-- smooth glass calm on the surface and tangled dark depths, down below. when he holds you ‘round the waist on damp october mornings, you feel the outline of his scars through the paper-thin veneer of his cotton t-shirt and wounded pride; and you think, this is okay, the sink running, the kettle warming, the fog not yet lifted over the crowns of the treetops of the forest that crowds the horizon. ii. at high noon on hellfire-hot summer days, your blood boils under itchy-restless skin, and you feel like you could be a raging phoenix, calling forth infernos of endless destruction from the divots of your palm. you need a river, you think, to steep your body in, a cool current to wash over you; and someone to hold the back of your neck and keep your nose above water when you feel like sinking below the high tide inside your bathtub. iii. she is all dreams and nightmares, torched constellations against velvet black skies, too much story and neon aether matter to be held like something simple. i won’t break, she says, daring you to touch her, but that’s not what scares you; what scares you is that she’ll break you, with the tenderness hidden in brushstrokes of fingertips over skin, bone-and-ash fortunes scattered in the shadows that fall from the flutter of her eyelashes, the curve of her back like a mountain range, dark with secrets, swallowing travelers whole. iv. you wait for the nights when you dream quiet and cool as still water and constellations; they will come. and they will be worth it.

kitchen song by anatomyofthewrittenword

#artists' PSA: Please Reblog Instead Of Liking!!!! Ur An Angel (TM)#poetry #fiction #creative writing #spilled ink #writers on tumblr

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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that boy is beautiful, beautiful. he has skin like the sunwarmed sand, hot and coarse and golden, and eyes bluer than the sea itself— and that’s a compliment you don’t give out easily. he is icarus against the waves, full of restless yearning, brighter than the sun. abovewater, his warmth burns; but below, the tide softens his blazing human edges into fire you can hold in hands that have only known ice. he says he doesn’t mind the cold of the currents, far from shore; his blue lips lie, but it’s sweet, you think, this novel concept of sacrifice. (your sisters laugh, mocking, do you love him? as if mermaids’ hearts could hold anything more than seaweed and salt.) later, you might steal the breath from his kiss while he’s too charmed by your song to care; and later, maybe, you might pull him with you down into the dark heart of the ocean to keep beside you, always, a precious treasure, secreted away— but for now, for now. you will catch him when his wax wings melt and hold him afloat as he laughs, a flame still burning yet.

for the fire cold water is destined to smother by anatomyofthewrittenword

#for the anon who keeps GUILTING me #.....thank you #mermaids #poetry #creative writing #fiction #spilled ink #icarus #mythology #greek mythology #fantasy #writers on tumblr #if u enjoyed do me an Artist's Favor and reblog and i will owe u a life debt

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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I've come to the conclusion that everything you write is a work of art.

you are too, too, too kind.

#file under: untrue things that boost my ego nonetheless #asks #anonymous

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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there are three bodies that light the way: the stars, the moon, the sun. ~*~ the stars are a girl born under a bad sign, a rain-greened sproutling woven up between the cracks of poverty and industrial clout, delicate-eyed with a pretty smile and rust and iron fillings for bones. she smiles like she knows a million secrets, hidden in the dark spaces between her bright quips and supernova revelations; her fingers itch to fix and stitch, her callouses are tender. if you give her your heart, she will hold it close in the cupped circle of her hands, protect it with every beat of her brave soul, fight for it, bleed for it, until you, you poor, broken thing, become whole and new again in her arms. watch the gentle girl rise on the hill in the midst of war, a goddess forged from the fire that burns down entire worlds, palms raised to borrow the breath of the universe; she is a billion scattered beings woven into one. in the pale yellow light of dawn, she sits at the end of the bed, shoulders bare, curled around the warm end of a cigarette; you will press your skin to hers and feel her slow, burning heat, and you will love her as perfectly and desperately as the ocean loves the shore. the air she exhales into your mouth when you connect in kiss will always be the last thing that keeps you from drowning. ~*~ the moon is a boy with hair black as night, eyes green as the deepest parts of a lagoon, silver on his tongue and silver in his bones and silver in his heart, holding the broken pieces together. he is lucent, beautiful, whole from a distance and cracked up close, half shadows half the time and all light, the rest of it. he smiles quick and talks quicker, goes straight for the throat, fights for every second with teeth and tongue and perfect yawning maw; he flips shiny secrets in the air like magicians might flip coins, and depending on which face lands he will cut you down where you stand or love you, all-consumingly, until he burns himself down to ashes. his kisses taste like smoke and dancing sparks, bitter coffee, burnt sugar, the damp earth after rain that covers fresh graves, alfalfa sprouts, cold iron adrenaline. he will bruise himself in his desperation to hold on to the fast-spinning earth, and it will be your job to uncurl his tightly clenched fingers and press a kiss to his bloodied palms-- if he is a fallen angel, you are the benediction that raises him up again, and in his arms you are holy, and in your arms he is the fragile beautiful vulnerable world that you will protect with your dying breath. ~*~ the sun-- the sun is a boy who burns a trail behind him everywhere he goes, skin wrought from flames, with a wide, voracious smile and a hunger that claws him hollow, a heart like a hummingbird, clamoring to break free from the bruised cage of his ribs. he laughs too loud and moves too fast, accepts affection only in the form of fists and bitten lips, blinds you with his brightness in the gray bleak wasteland of night. loving him is like loving the ever-raging forest fire that destroys everything it touches in starving glee, only to leave behind a soft clean world, the precious dark dirt beneath the ashes untouched, ready to give forth new life again. slow down, you’ll beg him, but he’ll never listen; he is all fight, like a figure from a greek myth, burdened with glorious destiny, awaking every morning ravenous for the storm. that is how you know he loves you-- he is only ever quiet when you lay your head against his chest to hear his thunder heartbeat; and he is only ever soft when he flattens his palms over your skin and asks you how long you’ll stay. forever, you say, and wish he would believe you; but for now, it will be enough to sooth kisses over those jutting bones, and beg him to lay down his sword a while, so that you might hold him while he sleeps.

loving young gods is a hard thing to do by anatomyofthewrittenword

#i wrote this as a sort of ode to the three main characters of my novel but #it's ambiguous enough to post here i guess?#poetry #spilled ink #spoken word #mythology #gods #love #heroes

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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I check your blog every single day hoping that you've updated, but every time, you haven't.

me too, my guy. me too. but, just for you, i will post a rambling poem-type thing i wrote for the main characters of my novel. thanks for still holding out hope i guess? i’m impressed and grateful

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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black coat, pink balaclava

angels, angels, angels. they’ll be the death of you.

~*~

the one who lives at the end of the floor never comes home, only appears sometimes in the smallest hours of the night, dressed in glittering black, always ready for a party. she laughs with her mouth wide-open, lined in crimson, and moves like a storm, coming and going in a flurry of slamming doors and spluttering lights. sometimes she brings girls back with her, girls with sharp stilettos and even sharper cheekbones, and their cawing laughter whirls through the hall like a flock of crows, thumping and fluttering against the peeling wallpaper, dark and cacophonous and just as foreboding. you’ve lived next to her for maybe a month, or maybe ten years, but she never remembers your name, doesn’t care to try; only half-smiles at you, pityingly, and asks “sorry, darling, did you say something?” on the rare occasions when you remember to ask her to quiet down. on cold rainy nights, you can hear her stomping shake the walls, the very bones of the building trembling with the effort it takes to contain her; and sometimes you think her laugh follows you, even into your dreams.

~*~

there is one who frequents the new york underground, and you’ll find her at any and sometimes every station, especially at the stops that are never anybody’s final destination. she is the stillness in the evening rush, the back turned to you from every angle, more the absence of space displaced than a being existing. somehow, you can hear her wings rustling even above the clamor of the crowds, and you know when they’re extended by the way their shadows dim the lights and cast jagged shapes across the grimy walls. she stands close to the tracks, too close, and usually when the train comes it’s a thunderous living roar, but when she’s there it’s a vacuum of noiselessness, like all air and sound and motion has been sucked from the teeming masses to create a pocket-realm of deafening silence. the bubble only pops when she meets your gaze through the flashing spaces between subway links, and there’s the feeling crawling up your spine that she doesn’t exist when the cars obstruct your view. when she grins, it’s toothy, feral as something that thrives in the sewers—and her eyes, her eyes, they’re as deep and black as the tunnels themselves.

~*~

the friendliest angel you’ve ever met wears black leather and metal studs, smiles a perfect cupid’s-bow smile from lips painted dark as tar, splashes tequila on you while tossing back overenthusiastic shots like she’s anointing you with holy water. she likes her smoky pool halls and bars with sticky floors, running her blunt nails along the base of your skull, scratching swollen red marks along your jawline and down your neck as she pulls you in for a messy kiss that tastes like salt and fire. she feels the most real out of all of them, you think, with her love for punk rock and her taste for patron, and sometimes you can forgive the cold, vicious glee in her eyes when she watches bar brawls unfold, and forget how she rolls her shoulders back when she’s enjoying a cigarette (like she’s shaking something out). one night, you keep her company while she takes a smoke break in the alley next to the club, and four men with hoods pulled low begin to stalk towards you, like something out of every nightmare your mother warned you against as a child. you falter, swallow, look to her in a silent plea to go back inside—but she’s too busy watching them to notice, the expression on her face like a predator who can’t believe her luck. she grins, delighted, savage, and by the time the men have realized their mistake, her outline is already blurring, lengthening into something with a hundred eyes and a hungry, echoing laugh. you leave before you can see the outcome, but a week later, the news reports four members missing from the local street gang. they never find any bodies.

~*~

there is one you will never forget, despite how the others blur and fade from your recollection, distorting and dimming more and more each time you reach for them in your memories. you see her through the open window of the neighboring apartment building, and it’s like looking through a porthole into another world, slipped between the planes of your own. she is dust-colored skirts and thin, frail bones, translucent skin and eyes the color of still water, so beautiful it almost hurts to look at her. she catches you watching her as she paces around the room, and for a moment there is something terrible and knowing and jarringly, unbearably human in the sadness in her gaze—then the moment passes, and she smiles at you as she flips the knife in her hand so that the curved blade glints in the burning amber glow of the setting sun. when she turns to the full-length mirror on the wall and lifts the knife to her shoulderblades, you feel a sudden, sickening lurch in your stomach; and when she makes the first cut, you close your eyes and turn away, thinking of how, before he fell, lucifer was called the morning star, bringer of light.

~*~

angels, storming down the halls, angels, haunting crumbling subway stations, angels, shaking dust and grime and burning ash from their wings. watch for them in boarded-up houses and decrepit urban ruins, in hectic, overflowing crowds, laughing at you from three seats away over the shoulder of the bartender with the black bowtie. when the world ends, they will finally walk free as they were always meant to be, and scorch the earth in their footsteps—but, until then, hear them clawing at the veils that separate worlds, see them flashing their wide, voracious smiles around dimly-lit corners, feel them waiting, waiting, from the body of the cashier at the supermarket, the child perched on the stoop of an abandoned building, the girl sitting next to you on the train on the long, lonely ride home.

#hot off the press #prose #angels #mythology #gothic #spilled ink #creative writing #fiction #writers on tumblr #religion #urban mythology #women #feminism #spirits #supernatural #paranormal #more angel stuff for you guys because they're so fun to write about?? it's true. try it #apocalypse #gods

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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past lives

in eastern religion, the concept of reincarnation posits that the soul is eternal, constant from birth to death to rebirth, wearing lives like winter fashion, until it’s time to change coats again. they hold rebirth like westerners hold the promise of heaven: the incentive to do good with this life, so that it might be a little easier the next time around.

living this life for your next: you know the feeling. you always thought you were destined for something more— not necessarily grander, just more. sometimes, it’s four o’clock and the kettle’s whistling, and the kitchen is warm but it’s oh so quiet, and you close your eyes and see gondolas in venice, elephants in india, mountains you never climbed, oceans you never swam. adventures seemed so real in the storybook imagery of your childhood imagination, but somewhere between your college education and grindstone career, every step you take starts to feel like it falls just a little to the left of the footprints you were supposed to leave; and maybe that’s growing older, but you can’t shake the feeling that you’re just a mirror image in a divergent universe that was never supposed to exist.

this is not the loneliness of traveling far from home, of being the only one of your kind in a room, of not recognizing the signs on the side of the interstate. this is the loneliness of a crowded room, blurred faces, like smoke, slipping past you on the sidewalk, standing on a forty-story rooftop and gazing over a city laid out before you, knowing it is full of life, ever-busy, but hearing only the exhale of the cold wind, and feeling only the ache of the lights in your eyes. this is the loneliness of blinking awake on a sunday to the empty space in the bed beside you, and missing someone who was never there; this is the loneliness of soft afternoon light in the window, the rustle of piano keys as they dip from note to note, the ringing silence between the end of the symphony and applause. this is the loneliness that seeks you out and names you, that claims you for its own, that makes you in its image, until you are more an idea than a human, more longing than a life lived, more nostalgia than memory.

on rainy fall mornings, as your cup of earl grey gives up the ghost to the wet october chill, you look out your window and speculate about past lives, and wonder if it is those memories that haunt you; or maybe it is just half-remembered dreams, already slipping away by the time you wake.

#poetry #spilled ink #fiction #creative writing #poem #loneliness #reincarnation #past lives #wanderlust #adventure #travel #if u enjoyed pls reblog and I will be forever grateful!

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anatomyofthewrittenword · 8 years

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coral lips, quick to kiss

this is what it’s like to love an angel of war.

~*~

throughout history, media—be it summer blockbusters or ancient greek epics—has always romanticized the male as the force of destruction, the unstoppable powerhouse, the wild-eyed warrior with sword raised and teeth bared. you meet her in a dusty bar somewhere in soho, where old italian men come to drink dark red wines out of crystal tumblers and the bartender wears a vest and a pert black bowtie. she doesn’t look like the blue-eyed, red-mouthed femme fatales you see in period films and spy flicks; she’s got on coral lipstick and a white satin sheath dress, a broad-brimmed hat straight out of the 1960s, and when she looks at you over the top of her aged Scottish whiskey, there’s a sharp, feral sort of intelligence in her gaze, one that hints that she’ll just as soon destroy you than love you. when she’s bored of talking to you, her pupils and irises disappear and her eyes blaze bright, burning white, and when you blink, she’s gone and you can’t remember why you were just talking to thin air.

~*~

she does this the first three times you meet, spread out over the course of two years. by the fourth time around, she’s so exasperated of running into you all over downtown manhattan that when she spots you sitting alone in an upscale french restaurant in greenwich village, she sighs and rises to cross the dining floor and seat herself in the empty seat across from you, and your date running late in queens suddenly forgets he had any plans at all. she introduces herself with so much breezy charm that you never get around to realizing how odd it is that a beautiful stranger has taken over your night, and you spend the next hours talking about everything from middle eastern politics to napoleonic warfare to things to do in new york on a budget. you don’t recall this until later, but she speaks with the confidence and precision of a military general, shoulders ramrod-straight even as sits with her spine curved in feline grace, each word carefully enunciated in her rich, velvety voice. at the end of the night, her lips leave a coral imprint on the rim of her wine glass, and when you leave together, she hooks her pinky finger around yours and leans in to whisper in your ear, “come home with me.” you look at her, standing in a cream-colored wrap dress in the city’s effervescent lights, and there’s nothing inside of you that’s capable of denying her.

~*~

you know what she is three months later, tangled under moonlight in her silk bedsheets while she runs slender fingers through the curls at the crown of your head. there’s no process of figuring it out, no slow and dawning realization; the knowledge comes to you in a moment of sudden and perfect clarity, and when she opens her eyes and smiles at you across the goose-down pillow, you know that it’s no accident. her mouth, still smeared with some leftover coral from your night out, purses in a quiet, playful “shh” before she leans in and presses her lips to yours, and you forget the inhibitions crawling up the back of your throat because kissing her is like kissing the sun.

~*~

you’re walking hand-in-hand with her down state street when you see a homeless man huddled on a tattered blanket outside of the corner store, shivering in the pre-winter chill. she halts and gives you a charming smile, eyes twinkling as she says “one second”; then, as you watch, she approaches the man and lowers herself to her haunches, the hem of her peacoat brushing against the pavement. she hands him a twenty dollar bill, and you inch just close enough to hear her when she says “go into the store and buy three Powerball lottery tickets; you’ll only need the third one,” and see the curve of her lips as she reaches out and grazes the tips of her fingers against the man’s temple. by the time she retracts her hand, he is staring at her with wide, disbelieving eyes, mouth open in shock. “the voices should leave you alone now,” she announces, and he’s still staring at her as she rises and returns to your side, linking your fingers together again. “lunch?” she asks brightly, and you let her lead you away as you gape over your shoulder, watching as the man rises unsteadily from his blanket and stumbles into the store.

later, over vietnamese subs at your favorite Asian fusion eatery, you ask her why she did what she did; she takes a moment to pat delicately at the corner of her mouth, taking care not to smudge her pale pink lipstick, before replying, “within thirty-one days, that man will be unfathomably wealthy and enjoying better mental health than he has since he was fourteen. in less than a year, he’ll have reformed his life, claimed to have ‘found God’”—here her fingers curl in sardonic air quotes—“and in three years time, he’ll be a pastor at a church down the street, converting nonbelievers left and right with his roguish charm and passionate sermons.” she gives a fluid shrug and reaches for her glass of sparkling water. “more for our side, right?”

you watch her as she sips her drink, frown lingering on your face because you knew she was a…well, you knew, but you hadn’t ever really known until now. “‘found God’?” you ask, mimicking her air quotes, and the smirk she shoots you only serves to confuse you more.

“well,” she says, with a sharp, tinkling laugh, “can any of us really find God?” she returns to her sandwich without another word, and you sit back and reconsider everything you thought you knew about religion.

~*~

it’s a balmy, beautiful saturday morning, and you have plans with her to grab lunch at that new gastronomy restaurant that’s opening downtown, but your morning routine is cut rudely short when you walk outside to grab the paper and something hard collides with the back of your head, sending a burst of pain through your skull before you collapse on the sidewalk in front of your neighbor’s petunias. you wake in an decrepit warehouse tied to a kitchen chair, and when you lift your head and blink the bleariness out of your eyes, it’s to find a ring of men and women standing around you wearing velvet capes with the cowls pulled low, outfits that look like they’re headed to sunday mass visible through the gaps in the robes. a woman with hay-colored hair and a small, pinched face steps forward and brandishes what looks like a goddamn letter opener, and when she raises it and demands, “where is the servant of God?”, you spit out the blood in your mouth and resist the urge to laugh because, really, a cult kidnapping? on a fucking saturday morning?

you realize that the letter opener is a lot sharper than it looks when the woman slashes it across your collarbone, and the pain is so great it burns the breath of your lungs. as scarlet blossoms around the cut in the front of your new shirt, she holds the knife in front of you and lets you watch your own blood drip off the edge; then she snarls, in a voice that’s supposed to be intimidating, “we know she is here, in new york; we know you know her.” she gets close, close enough that you can see the freckles across her nose, close enough that even through the haze of pain and irritation clouding your mind, you can see the hint of self-delusion in her eyes. “she will lead us all to salvation, and if you keep her from us, we will—“

you never find out what “they will,” because at that moment, the entrance to the warehouse explodes inwards, and a form made out of pure, molten light steps through the opening. you’re no stranger to anger—you do live in new york, after all—but the thing that comes into the warehouse is fury personified, rage so fierce and deadly and absolute that it sweeps outwards, blistering the skin of the cultists that stare in dumfounded shock. they try to run, but find that their feet are rooted to the floor; so, instead, they wail, arms coming up to shield their eyes as your angel of war stalks forward, leaving pools of melted concrete behind in her footsteps, fire trailing from the crown of her head, eyes nothing but vacuums of scorching white. “Who are you to claim my name in vain?” she roars, and in the next instant she is wielding a sword so enormous it looks like it could split the world in two, searing blue in its heat; it almost seems to vibrate in the air, and you swear you can hear the sound of a thousand distant screams emanating from it as she lifts it in her hand. “I am bellum, praelium, cassida; I am mortem and exitium; I am carnage and ruination, the abolition that scorches this earth, and you—are—judged!” she raises the sword above her head and the cultists scream, and the rope cuts into your wrists as you jerk forward against your restraints and shout out, “wait! don’t!”

the desperation in your voice is just enough to make her pause, those all-seeing eyes turning to you as her mouth creases in a frown. “don’t,” you repeat, voice weak, feeling like all the energy has been drained from your body. “they’re not worth it.”

she tilts her head, and it’s yet another reminder (on top of the holy fury and body made of fire, that is) that, while she may be good at playing human, she decidedly isn’t. “They hurt you,” she says, as if it’s as simple as that; and maybe it is for a servant of god, but it’s not for you.

“i don’t care,” you say, and that’s not right—you do care, because your head and your chest still hurt like hell, and you were really looking forward to trying that new restaurant today. “i mean—it doesn’t matter. they’re fanatics; they’re just desperate. they don’t—it doesn’t—” you sigh, too tired to finish the sentence, but she seems to understand, because she lowers the sword and frowns again, this time looking at the whimpering cultists like a scientist might look at a mouse running around a maze. then the sword is gone and the cultists are no longer glued to the spot; they trip over their robes and each other as they flee, and that’s the last thing you see before your body and mind give up in tandem, and you release yourself to sweet unconsciousness.

~*~

you wake up in a strange place for the second time that day, but this version involves a bedroom with muted yellow walls and lace curtains over the window, fluttering in the soft breeze. the first thing you notice is that nothing hurts: the wound on your sternum is gone, not even a scar to mark its passing, and you feel more comfortable and refreshed than you have since childhood. the second thing you notice are the fields of grain that stretch to meet the horizon outside the window, and you realize with a jolt that you are most decidedly not in new york anymore.

you blink and she’s there at your bedside, leaning over you to press a cool kiss to your forehead, silken curls spilling over her shoulder to brush against your neck; when she pulls back, there’s a gentleness that you’ve never seen before on her face. “where are we?” you ask, faintly bewildered, and she smiles as she glances out the window.

“kansas,” she says. “farm country. it’s nice, isn’t it?” she laughs, and it isn’t her usual knives-and-cutlery tinkle; this is a softer sound. “idyllic.”

she moves to pull away, but you grasp her hand before she can, and it’s a testament to the time you’ve spent together that she lets you. there’s a resigned look in her eyes when she meets your gaze, but you ask her anyway, voice quiet with the request: “why are you really here?” you let loose a self-deprecating laugh, adding unnecessarily, “no one who carries a sword that big goes anywhere just to proselytize.”

this elicits another small smile, and you wait while she traces formless shapes on your inner forearm, face hidden by the curtain of her dark hair; then she sighs and stands, and you think she’s about to leave until she climbs into the bed next to you, allowing you to move closer and into the circle of her arms. she inhales, deeply, and you watch as her chest rises and falls with the breath, marveling at how humanlike she can be.

“there is a war,” she begins, “between two races of beings that are bigger and older and more powerful than anything humans could ever imagine. compared to us, you are tiny, fragile; seeds in the wind.”

“thanks, i always wanted to feel more insignificant than i already do,” you drawl, but she just smiles and lifts a hand to trace a delicate finger along your hairline.

“tiny, but not insignificant,” she murmurs, and there is something like confusion in the brightness of her eyes, something also like wonder. “some time in the past—entire civilizations ago for you, but not so long for us—one of our own was injured in battle and crash-landed on your world. he was a superintelligent life-form among a species that had just crawled out of the mud, and they looked to him as if he was a piece of god—and so that’s what he became. during his time with them, he realized that, somehow, their belief in him…made him stronger. healed him. these humans, with their simple, limited minds and their frail, breakable bodies, could empower us, rulers of galaxies, through something we did not have: their emotions. when his body had completely mended, he returned to our people and told them of this newly discovered phenomenon, and our military leaders rushed to harness the newfound source of power that was the collective human mind. a defector brought the news to our enemies, and thus began the race to ideologically colonize earth: the species to recruit the most believers would gain the upper hand in the war.”

it’s almost ludicrously grandiose, but somehow, it also makes absolute sense; but she still hasn’t answered your unspoken question, and even though you’re beginning to fear the answer, you press the issue anyways, because if nothing else you’re a foolish human and you need to know the truth. “and the sword?” your voice is quiet to hide the tremor, but you think she hears it anyways, because her hand stills in your hair. after a moment, she exhales and pulls you closer.

“it’s called ‘the world-destroyer,’” she says. “somewhere along the way, we…realized that destroying a believer imbues us with a temporary burst of heightened power.” she swallows, and it’s the first time you’ve ever seen her act uncertain. “i am a high-ranking soldier, a warrior of the holy order; it is my life’s mission to further the glory of my people. the world-destroyer is one of the most powerful and sacred weapons in our arsenal; it was given to me when i was just a child, as the seal that bound me to my fate. my orders were to come to earth, recruit believers, and await further instruction; and, when the time came, it was to be my duty—my destiny—to wield the world-destroyer and sacrifice earth, thereby giving our people the advantage we would need to end the war, once and for all.”

you want to laugh at how morbidly ironic it is, that all of the righteous and loving in the world are just lambs, headed for slaughter. after a moment, you move closer to her, unconsciously seeking a heartbeat as you press a kiss to her throat, trying not to feel stupid when you fail to find one. “’was’?” you ask, softly, and look up at her as she frowns, eyes distant, fingers curling against your neck.

“i used to believe that destiny was everything,” she admits at last, voice heavy. “but now i am beginning to question if there isn’t more merit in will.”

~*~

kansas is kind to a new york city-dropout, and you spend a half year with her in that sweet little farmhouse, telecommuting for work, going to the artisan’s market on wednesday afternoons and barbecuing with the neighbors two miles down the road on the weekends. sometimes you wonder at how the countryside can hold her, but she seems to be in her element here, waist-high in grain that whispers in the wind, watching dust bunnies blow across the empty road, basking in the hot blaze of the sun on her skin. when you ask her why she seems to like it here so much, in this town where nothing ever happens, she gives you a sharp grin, wiggles her shoulders, and says, “there’s room here to spread my wings”; and you spend the next hour staring at her back, wide-eyed, wondering if she meant that literally.

they come in the middle of the night at the end of the summer, appearing without warning to fill the fields outside. you startle awake in the pale wash of moonlight, skin prickling, to find her already up and at the window, a frown twisting at the corners of her mouth—and, fuck, she wasn’t exaggerating when she said army. there are thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as far as the eye can see; they are all slightly blurred around the edges, as if they aren’t quite used to taking on the human form yet, and they are all facing the farmhouse, staring up at your bedroom window, where she stands framed in lace. she half-turns to look at you, and there is such unfathomable sadness in her eyes that your heart twists at the sight of it. “it’s time.”

“no.” in an instant you’re on your feet, reaching for her, voice breaking. “you don’t have to do this.”

“it is my destiny,” she says, and your eyes widen when a single drop of moisture breaks free from the corner of her eye and trails down her cheek, because she’s never looked so painfully, wonderfully human.

“it doesn’t have to be,” you say, desperately, and scramble for the words she murmured into your hair that night after she rescued you from the cult. “what about will?”

she stares at you for a long, long time, and you taste defeat long before she touches her fingers to your cheek and whispers, wretchedly, “i’m sorry.”

she vanishes, and you run to the window to see that she’s reappeared on the front steps—but she looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and the breath falters in your throat when you realize that this must be the closest she’s ever come to her true form. she wears plates of some intricate, beautiful golden armor, and her hair is fire down her back; in her hand is the world-destroyer, illuminating the farmland with its eerie, burning blue glow.

a figure steps forth from the crowd, and when he speaks, it is with the rumbling, absolute authority of a king. “Cassida,” he says, in some ancient, hissing tongue, and it almost hurts for you to listen, “it is time. Wield the Destroyer of Worlds; deliver us to our final victory.”

your hands are shaking and you want nothing more than to look away, but somehow you can’t bring yourself to move an inch as you watch her glance down at the sword in her hand. there is a single, breathless moment in which she lifts it, and it blazes a little brighter—and then she is turning and looking up, and your eyes meet across that seemingly endless chasm that stretches between you, the human and the angel. for a heartbeat the fire and righteous fury fades away, and she is smiling at you over the shoulder of a bartender wearing a black bowtie, and she is laughing as she helps mrs. keller down the road prepare watermelon salad—and in that moment, you know exactly what she is, the knowledge coming to you in a moment of perfect and sudden clarity.

she turns back to her leader, her king, and replies, calmly, with the barest hint of mirth in her voice: “No.”

a restless murmur runs through the assembled soldiers; the king’s eyes narrow. “Cassida,” he says, warningly, “do not test me. This is not the time for games.”

“No games,” she says, and she lifts the sword a little higher, twisting the handle so that the blade shimmers in the moonlight. “This war has consumed us for too long, warped our once peaceful society into something shameful and unrecognizable; I will not let it destroy another, innocent race. This blade has the power to end entire worlds; it is tied intrinsically to the very being of our species.” she pauses, and you think she learned dramatic effect from the vintage noirs you used to laugh over together. “What would happen if I were to break it?”

as one, the soldiers all shift back, and you think you can detect something like horror rising from their collective. the king growls, the sound like thunder that warns of a storm. “You would not dare,” he spits; somewhere in the house, a window shatters. “Destroy that blade, and you will destroy us all.”

“Be calm, my King,” she laughs, all knives and cutlery and smirking coral lips, “we will reform. But, by the time we do, Earth will have lived out the entirety of its long and magnanimous life undisturbed, no longer vulnerable to our greed—and we will be forced to resolve this war in peaceful terms, or fight it again on equal grounds.” the king snarls and lunges forward, but it’s too late: she has grabbed the other end of the sword in her hand and brought it down to shatter over her knee.

there is a blinding blast of light that knocks you to the floor, and a cascading, chorusing scream that rises to scrape at the sky—but by the time you scramble back to the window, there is nothing but the endless countryside, serene under the moon.

~*~

sometimes, you think you see her, scattered around new york: discussing napoleonic warfare over aged red wine at a tableful of old italian gentlemen, watching black-and-white movies at the vintage theater in greenwich, applying coral lipstick in the display window of a boutique in lower manhattan. sometimes, you wonder if she’ll remember you, when she wakes up millions of years in the future; then you remember that it doesn’t really matter, because you’ll be long gone by then, anyways.

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