Stories need a roof over their heads too
There’s something wrong with what I’m hearing, the same few syllables on repeat now, for the umpteenth time. Like listening to a broken record. Not sure whether the problem is the loudspeaker or if it’s you. Tell me something I haven’t heard before. No?
“Don’t take it personally, friend. It has never been about you. Fate conspired for you to meet me here today, in the middle of muddy fucking nowhere. That’s all there is to it,” the mercenary pats the shoulder of the dying enemy soldier propped against the crumbling wall. Continue reading “The Mercenary”
Through the night, she dreams dainty dreams. She dreams of some other, not the one next to her. Such is the fate of her choosing, yet she does not have a say in who will own her night, tonight. Eyes wide shut, the mind sheds inhibitions, dreams betraying secrets too shameful to admit to in broad daylight. Conventions unbound, possibilities endless, she dreams of other faces, in familiar/new places, exploring the hidden spaces where iron will and desire so often tangle under the bedsheets.
Why is resistance always so conspicuous by its absence?
Normalize. Compartmentalize. Over-analyze. Kick it down through the trapdoor of the oubliette, shut it firm and lock it away with a key. Swallow the key and forget it even existed. Let the darkness consume the darkness. Set a timer on the app. Get on with it. Re-focus. Pretend. Fail.
Now you see me. Now you don’t. You know I’m here. You hear me buzz. I am the Annoyer. The All-Seeing. You would swat me to oblivion if I sat in one place for too long. Good for me I don’t.
I am a fly on the wall. And your secrets are all mine.
The peculiar nature of the human condition is that their hearts can break, heal, and break all over again. It makes me pause. I oft wonder at it but still, I find it all so very amusing. Humans weep, cracked asunder, and their tears become just another element that enters and erodes the edifices they erected, not unlike the wind or the rain. It is their frailty that defines them, it molds who they are and who they aspire to be, in their short lifespans. It spurs them on to do great things, each a small attempt at erasing insignificance. And then it conspires to turn them and forces them to tear all their accomplishments down. With time they feel they do not have, their hearts heal. Then, they repeat it once more.
They call me Blackheart, and they mean it as an insult. Blackheart in his black obsidian tower. Stoneheart, unfeeling. A heart black as sin. I embrace it, truly. I do not have a heart, at least not how humans define it.
This is a pamphlet. A single voice adrift at sea.
If no man is an island, one man is an island. I am it. An island wracked by a storm of man-wrought proportions.
We’ve lost so much.
I’m not sure what’s worse. Whether us not remembering what good was in the world. Or choosing to forget there actually was some good in it. Mankind retreated to some preternatural state, where violence is the one universally accepted currency. I feel ashamed to admit I have dealt in it too.
Tick tock, so sounds off the clock, peeling seconds off the finite loop.
Tick, that’s the sound of all the time which he has left.
Tock, that’s the echo of one ragged breath to use less. Continue reading “Tick Tock”
Tonight, I lay her down on a bed of black orchids.
To me, she is the most dazzling flower of all, despite the solemn black garb she favors so much. She has always been at home in the limelight and on the red carpets winding through thick crowds and leading up to grandiose palazzos. Drawing all the gazes, of both men and women. She is nameless – she could become anyone she wanted at a moment’s notice. All she ever needed was a camera pointing at her and a few deft touches of kohl.