A lovely afternoon writing in the park, ending with me walking by a group of five or six little girls in floral dresses flying pastel kites. perfection. This is a piece I have been working on for quite some months, tweaking here and there, taking long breaks between writing. It is still incomplete, but walking away from the park to get a popsicle treat, I think I discovered the ending. That however has prooved to be a curse in itself, as I now try to stop myself from rushing through the rest of the story to write the ending. I'm very nervous about people reading my writing, but hopefully your criticisms will help improve the story. It seems fairly long for one post, but here it goes.
“tell me about yourself” he said, and she spoke of words once written on her skin. Tell me about yourself, and she remembered waking in a night soaked room beside him. Waking to this foreign lamp, to the right of her, which she had imagined to be circled by slivers of grass. She saw five lamps of varied heights, and some from the depression, and some from a Grecian goddess Artemis, and one that she remembered from her Grandmother’s bedroom, a vague outline of the room pounding in her thoughts. When she saw the lamp, she really saw the five outside, arranged and glowing on a slope of hill, her ankles illuminated as she weaved between. Seven minutes past twelve he had noticed her sleeping. Reaching over the body, he balanced his weight on his palm, not wanting to touch it. His hand sliced into the cool open air of her vision, monstrous beside the small glowing orbs of her imagination. One by one his fingers sent each lamp plummeting downwards, the only proof that they were once there being the trail of white cord which coated their electricity. The momentum of the fall in one final jerk, ripped each metal prong from the sockets that suspended themselves between rows of oak and the stars. The light he created in the room, beside her, illuminated her spine, which had often mysteriously bruised as a child. He was reminded of his motivation.
A white raised curve of his finger print left identical marks between each vertebrae. He had five fingers on each hand, and he aligned each with the knobs of her skeleton. She, already writing this moment in the past, found the same spine merging with vertical lines of bark that riveted from their roots and burst into the sky sprouting life. It had always been a delicate trick, placing her spotted back against the embrace of a tree. The tree would not mould to cushion her left shoulder blade, which seemed at this moment to protrude more than its twin. The battle between flesh and nature continued, with temporary truces; until the hushing sounds of life and leaves reminded her of an aching tear in muscle beneath her alabaster neck. She forfeits each time and leans forward. Trees don’t often surrender.
His fingers, still the same five on each hand, combed between the jagged wooden chips which had replaced her skin. He would never see her surrender. He didn’t see her eyes become teary from an insect caught between her two white pages. The speck of apple blood that wedged itself in the blank loop of the last ‘e’ in the word ‘there’. Moments such as these couldn’t exist in him, and so he took the same blood of a thousand springtails and traced it down her back. Over the scaly surface he felt from his nylon fingertips, the imprint of a red serpent gorging itself on every vertebral column. As it consumed the roots of her movement, she lay breathless in his bed.
In the next act he attempted his final reclaiming. Before this he took his hands back from her, for she had thought them her own. And so often had she used them as thus. Once, on a summer night that ruined them, windows closed to the screaming of wind which inevitably pressed itself against the pane, he saw her use his hands. They inched forward like wicker towards the hands of his brother. Not paternal, these four thumbs could belong to anyone. Could it be that because it was through his door that it infuriated him so? That the faint sound of friction between her index finger and his knuckle was sounding across his living room? Now, in the adjacent room, she lay and he sat. And in her quiet slumber she suspended her body across plains of grass. When she finally slept, every third night, beside him, this is where she would go. Body raised above a field. The small white pedalled flowers that she didn’t know the name of tickling her thighs. They reached their graduated arms to the largest of the glowing orbs of her dreams. The weight of her nocturnal being distributed over thirty one stems, nine hundred and twenty two pedals. While she rests he searches for the longest blade of grass. In one swift motion, he plucks the green stalk from its dopple ganger root that hides in the dirt. And so he repeats this process, collecting blades of comparable lengths. He forms them into a tapestry stronger than any tow rope on any oceanic liner. He crosses her wrists at the base of the serpent and ties. The grass rope is knotted around the most slender and delicate part of her arm.
