11/21/2017 2 Comments A Child on a Tuesday MorningThere are times when an undeniable light, persists amid undeniable darkness. There are times when joy seeps through the cracks of a fractured underside, a broken tomorrow. Our cameraman is wandering aimlessly through a house of barren walls and muted colours. Soft music illuminates the screen, and the sounds of cooking drift in and out of the kitchen. But our cameraman focuses not on these things; his wandering is more focused and direct. He is not wandering, he is searching. Our cameraman stops finally at a glass door, and allows his camera to rest on a point. The door is a little dirty, with smudges at about dog nose and child finger height. A screen door creates a thin black web that wraps across the entire frame, possibly into forever. Through this web we can make out a gray deck, on a gray day, with a gray table to the left and a small child to the right. The child is yellow, head to toe she glows with an exceptional brightness. It ricochets off of the grey surroundings; it lingers with a salty pink hue. The child is dancing, a dance that seems more like floating, like kissing the air instead of the ground. She is dancing with a tall peach coloured rabbit, the rabbit is almost as tall as she is, and almost as real. The two carve away the day with each flick and flit of their soft small limbs. The child is in control, and yet she seems free—free to go anywhere and see anything, free to move in any direction that her heart yearns for. In her eyes there is a wholeness, an alertness. She is she, without question or confusion, she is what she is now and what she will be tomorrow and for the rest of her years, none of this makes her nervous. A smaller brown child waddles into her melodious scene, with heavy measured steps that plop and pound into the gray deck’s planks. She is shrieking, she is shrieking something at the dancing girl. She is forming words; she is trying to say her name. The girl takes no notice of this small thing moving through her space. She is too entranced in the wonders of her limbs and how the sky spins when she does. The young child is ignored and eventually gives up. The girl and her rabbit go on dancing--the rabbit tosses and flies through the air--the girl hums and closes her eyes. Our cameraman takes a step back. This…. must truly be paradise, he thinks. Paradise is not a place, not a thing… but a moment, a feeling, a light that shines through grayness, even on the grayest of days.
Years later, a woman sits alone at her desk. The time is late in the evening, she is tired and uninspired, exploring the depths of her laptop’s files. She comes across a video, one taken a long while back, when camera quality was not good, and nobody cared if it was. In the video a girl is dancing to soft music, with a peach coloured rabbit in her arms, carving out the sky and putting it in her pocket. She recognizes the short blonde hair, rounded nose, and puffy cheeks as her own. She recognizes the rabbit as well, as one she held dear in her younger years. This cannot be me, she thinks, I was never that happy, I was never that free.
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11/9/2017 1 Comment Frank and IOne night I had this dream. I dreamt that I drowned Frank Sinatra, in a shallow pond filled with soapy black water. He did not struggle. I even think I maybe saw a slight smile cross his stony face as I placed his body in the water and pressed my hands against his chest. I watched the air bubbles being released from his mouth and reach the surface only to break apart, and join the chilled air of nowhere in particular. When the air bubbles ceased and I saw his eyes close for the final time, I drew back onto the bank to contemplate a book I had just finished reading, and I wondered what the weather might be the following day. As my eyes grazed the rocky horizon, craftily skipping over Frank’s lifeless body, I noticed a scorpion slip into the pond on a pair of crooked legs and swim out to the center. With the skill and precision of an anxious frog, I then watched him leap onto the sunken chest of my drowning Frank Sinatra, take a delicious chunk from his stiff lower lip, and swim languidly away. Frank’s lip began to swell, it swelled to the size of the dark pond, until nothing could be seen but stretched and blotchy skin. I stood from my spot on the bank to inspect this site, and just as I reached the water’s edge, I saw the scorpion ascend into the sky, not a care in the world. I crouched by the pond and began calling out to Frank, asking if he was still in there swimming, or if the scorpion had taken him with it. The mess of skin then began to sway and tremble, and from underneath the old shell of a swollen lip Frank Sinatra appeared to me, this time smaller, and very much alive. He was about the size of a doll, one that I remember playing with as a girl. He smiled at me and nodded a hello, I bent down lower to get a better look at my undrowned Frank, and as I did he wrapped his miniature arms around me as if asking to be held. I was never much of one for refusing something so small, and so I picked him up, and held him like the doll I had held so many years ago… almost as one holds a small child, but with a grasp more tender, so as not to break any arms or feet. I asked him how he was feeling and he said fine, I asked him if he would like a drink of water and he replied calmly: I have had enough water for many, many lifetimes. With no words to argue I simply nodded and carried him to a platform hidden in a field of quiet reeds. I set him there gently and propped his head on a flat rock, his gaze wandered over the night sky above us, one filled with few stars and many memories. He then began to speak; he spoke of everything and nothing, of himself and of humanity. His voice was of one very far, yet very near, I did not look him in the eye, but instead stared blankly at the same stars he saw, letting his words fill my eyes and ears. He told me that though he had many friends, he was very lonely. He told me that he regretted never truly knowing his mother, that she was only a familiar face and a soft set of hands, nothing more, nothing ever. He told me that he had never truly felt love, that he had only begun to sing of it out of irony, it brought him deep sadness that we had all taken him so seriously. I am deeply troubled. …He lamented… I am full of regret. With no response from me, he sighed and began to hum quietly to himself, a song which I did not recognize; perhaps he was making it up. I asked him if he might accompany me to a nearby mountain, where the thin air might help our minds to rest finally under these dim stars. He sighed again, this time drawing his gaze over the surrounding mountains. He sat up with no words, and he fixed my large head in his small hands, and placed a warm kiss on my forehead. We lingered there for a moment; there were no sounds, and no movement among the brush. With a deep inhale, Frank Sinatra, about a third of his size, stood up and walked slowly back to the pond from which he had come, it was still as soapy as ever. With one last glance in my direction, he proceeded into the water; he descended into it as one would walk down stairs, his small body disappearing just a bit more with each step. I wondered to myself how someone could walk into such shallow water and disappear as if it were deeper than the sea. But before my thought had finished, so had he-- and my dear Frank was forever gone. 11/2/2017 3 Comments Complications in a Fake FightIt’s complicated. It’s so complicated. Is it really that complicated? Take off your clothes. Sit and a circle with covered eyes and sing. Scream. Disappear. It doesn’t truly matter. Welcome to the rest of your life they say, smiling and locking the door behind you. It’s an unspoken truth; there is only one escape, a last resort, an unspeakable. But don’t take it from me. Listen to their speech, their speeches, so many speeches! We all want to be so smart. We want to figure it out before anyone else. I’m the genius in the room, learn from me, respect my words as I spill them all over you. Disgusting.
Everything is spilling, spilling, spilling and we don’t know how to fix it. We patch and pray and watch the disaster unfold all around us. It’s interesting so it’s okay. I can write about this later in that secret notebook I keep stashed underneath my pillow. Pillow? A hideaway, full of dirty socks and the best kept secrets of your small existence. Everything is small but it’s so, so big and we can’t seem to truly escape. Escape? What have I told you about that? It’s impossible. Except that it isn’t, but we won’t consider that for now, it is too unpleasant. There are some people who even believe “that way” is not an escape. That after trying to leave “that way” you will instead become sucked down into the gooey bottom of the world. I miss the world as it was when there was no heaven she says to her pastor. “But there was always a heaven” he replies, doubt suddenly trailing his words. Everything is complicated. ‘I just want to go home’ she cries quietly to herself. But he’s heard her. He’s afraid of those words. His blood feels colder all of the sudden. Wasn’t she home? She sits balled up in a bed (hers?) drowning in sadness and snot. She’s crying over nothing really but with each tear that falls it grows. Soon it is everything. He feels strange. An onlooker trapped in the viewing compartment of a train as it circles its victim. A small child bound to its tracks. ‘I miss everything’ more sobs. His eyes feel wet. He is trapped, he feels lonely for her. He wants to reach out and touch her, trapped in his box. A new form of torture? Why is he there? He hates feeling her loneliness. He wants to feel his own, to touch his own skin and have it feel familiar. He sits and claws at his face. No pain. No sensation. She is crying harder. He balls up like her. It feels like the only thing to do. She is screaming. She is having an imaginary fight with an imaginary someone. They have been cruel to her. What is their name? Where did they come from? She laughs with no pleasure. She is angry. An angry laugh. Something happy—filled with poison. His fingernails begin to tingle, he looks down and tugs. One by one each fingernail exits his hand, falling to the floor of his glass looking box with graceful precision, falling in a neat pile at his feet. She is lonely, yelling at no one--a wall, a pillow, a dresser drawer. Whose room is this? Why am I here? He is lonely so lonely, he is getting smaller now, shrinking like his empathy. The girl is still crying. He no longer cares. He watches the room get small while he melts, melts, melts into his glass box. He looks to his right. His fingernails are stacked high above him. He has matched their size--finally equal but even more afraid. The girl is screaming and crying and hitting a picture on the wall. It is a picture of a house. (He does not care.) He is small and here and trapped in a box the size of a person while he is now the size of his lost fingernails. He laughs. So complicated. |
AuthorAvery Atlas is the author of all posted pieces. Archives
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