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Reading: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller This was brilliant. Song of Susannah, Stephen King For a while there I LOVED the Dark Tower books, could not WAIT until the next one came out, then I just sort of lost steam, I guess. I'm motoring through this, but either I am Just Not Into this storyline any more, or this one is kind of, well, sucky. He lost me at "Stephen King", let's just say that. Check out: Today I spent a ridiculous amount of time reading up on Abbie The Cat. Artifact:
There's no place like home, therre's no place like home, there's no place like home. Journal links: Amalah | Saturday, January 22, 2005 Four (4) Stories I Never Wrote
Inside the bus, the window next to her face is streaked with grime and her seat is cracked, plastic peeling back to offer a tempting curl; she makes the seat worse, she can't help it. Outside the bus, the world rolls by in a blur of pine trees, truck stops, telephone poles. She cradles her swollen belly with one hand, plucks the unravelling plastic with the other, thinks of nothing the bus has left behind, only what's outside, ahead.
2. Do you know what it's like to have someone actively trying to kill you? I'm here to say that frankly, it sucks. It sucks big time. My name is Pace. I'm twenty-nine years old. Currently, I live in Las Vegas, and I work at an establishment that goes by the name of The Pink Pussycat. I don't exactly serve drinks there, if you get my drift. I've been running for almost a year now. Running from a man I thought I knew, a man whose every word to me turned out to be a lie. Especially those three little words every girl wants to hear. No, not those - you can take love, what I'm looking for is "You're in charge". Except I wasn't. Not even for a fucking minute. Path of destruction is a term used in emergency rooms, referring to the effects of a bullet on human flesh. See, when a projectile enters the body, it tumbles. The same bullet can cause different amounts of damage in different parts of the body depending on where it is in its tumbling phase. You could say Chris Thanos tumbled into my life. And, well, you could definitely say he left a path of destruction.
3. “This isn’t like I expected it to be.” A short, amused grunt, then: “Well, what were you expecting?” In the silence that followed, a lone frog chirruped a staccato note before falling silent again. “I don’t know.” “Then I guess you weren’t expecting anything at all.” The wooden slats of the porch creaked as weight was shifted, the sharp silver smell of butane suddenly strong. A plume of smoke, thickened by the chill in the air, blew eastward. “Guess you could even say you got what you wished for.”
4. Today's visit is no different than yesterday's, or the day before that, or last month's: she sleeps, or whatever it is she's doing, maybe he shouldn't think of it as sleep, but to think of it in any other way brings a spreading sort of blackness that threatens to fill the room. He doesn't want anything in the room but hope, so he tells himself she's sleeping, just resting, just healing. There is no sound but her even breathing. He watches moisture collect in one of the many tubes that snake around her body - a drop grows fat, then falls. She breathes. The floor is green tile and her bed has black rubber wheels on the bottom. When the nurses come, he turns his eyes to the floor and watches their white-soled shoes moving around her bed, while they are doing things to her. He looks at the tiles and the wheels and their shoes and waits until they are gone. Today he pulls a chair closer to her head, her closed eyes, and he whispers to her about birds. You should have seen them this morning, all at the feeder. Waiting for you to come home. Starlings, he says. Chickadees. Junkoes. Sparrows. He speaks the names of birds like talismans, while she breathes, while hope hangs heavy in the room. |
