Saturday, February 20, 2010

Fun on a Bolt Bus!

I'm alarmed to admit that this post comes aboard a Bolt Bus from Baltimore to NYC. Internet on a bus?! I decided I wold post a few passages from a short story I'm working on.

"A victim of my own self-interest, I objected to their relationship. She asked me to keep my distance from her, and I respected her wishes. But I never stopped loving her. All I had to do was turn off the lights. Lay down in my bed. On my belly. Close my eyes. And there she was. Materialized in the immaterial. As perfect as I remembered her. Enveloped in the memory’s sweetness, like being carried away on a soft cloud into a horizon of infinite enlightenment. Then the cloud slips away and you plunge into hell’s gaping mouth, the ocean, spewing seal-shaped seaweed silhouetted under faint moonlight where appearances distort upon every step – the color, the form – and you’re stranded in a hell named, “Incomprehensible”. You plunge into memory’s reality; the inability to exist within the idealized inventions of your own mind. My love for Maria had fallen into the hands of memory. The claw hands. The pillow hands. The hands composed of a thousand featureless faces. And those hands possess a dignity.
"And she had long singe forgotten about me."

AND

"Yesterday I dusted the entire room and inside the closet. Then I swept, mopped, and washed the windows. Through the window I saw the laborious lug of repair vans ill-kept. On the sidewalk a woman carried a child in one arm and groceries in the other. Despite her young age, maybe 23, the lines on her face etched deep and sloped downwards. The child began to cry and the woman tried cradling him to comfort. Then she stopped, put down the groceries, held the child with both arms, and asked, “What?”
The child cried louder.
“I’ll leave you here.” Then she shouted. “I swear to God.”
The child cried. A man across the street undoubtedly heard but did not look. He smoked a cigarette, waiting for something. He just stood there.
And projected over the groceries, the vans, the thin rain slices, and the humans, each with their own mysterious stories, I saw my eyes. And it was there I realized that I’ve been looking at my reflection my entire life and could no longer recognize myself. "

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