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rainbowfic2016-08-20 08:49 pm
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2016-08-20 08:49 pm
Meme Party 15, Olympic Gold 5
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Lilith Faire Aug 20th Second Stage: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sarabareilles/notalone.html)
Characters: Spenser
Colors: Meme party 15 (That Escalated Quickly), Olympic Gold 5 (bronze)
Word Count: 1,100ish
Rating: PG-13, implied R?
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: How it can all go wrong before you even notice. (And what he was thinking about instead.)
Note: This is possibly the most obtuse, blink-and-you-miss-it interpretation of a prompt so far. :P
Ways of Unbuilding
I can’t make up my shitty little fucking mind anymore.
All day long, I wonder: what if I just stepped off the curb and into traffic? What if the unused brick chimney on that old apartment building comes loose and falls on me? What if I just stand on the edge of this drained concrete swimming pool, let my body ragdoll, and land however I fucking land? What if I casually poured myself a glass of antifreeze, sat down to fuck around on my computer, and absent-mindedly drank the whole thing before I had a chance to rethink it? What if I payed someone fifty bucks to throw a goddamn brick at the back of my head?
Eventually, there gets to be a point where I want to go ahead and do whatever the fuck the thing is. Just to get myself to stop thinking about it. And stop thinking about everything else, for that matter. A thousand and one screeching birds with one fucking sharply-splintered stone. But, by then, the opportunity has always passed. I go on.
I go on, through work-work, and what’s left of my own work. Through life’s endemic background noise of make-work, and the long and empty hours that fill out my days, such as they are, such as they even separate anymore. I go on, until the what-ifs are eventually replaced by a morbid fear of dying in my sleep. Of missing something, of not being the one to choose, of never seeing it coming.
Not that it matters. I couldn’t sleep if my life/death depended on it. When monotony outweighs fear, I chew through whole rows of antihistamine tablets. Every time I open my toolbox, or go looking for something, or put on my shoes, I find empty blister packs and little pieces of paper and foil everywhere.
They don’t help. They only make me see things.
I’ve been seeing things anyway.
*****
“I just, like, do this horrible shit to survive.”
You hear it all the time from assholes like me, with whom, when I stop and think about it, I have absolutely nothing in common. At least, not anymore.
I’ve long since stopped worrying about survival. And I’ve known since the very start that this job was just as likely to kill me as support me. I’ve been punched, stabbed, kicked in the ribs, and have had countless things thrown and swung at me. I chased down someone who refused to pay and totaled my car when I crashed it into theirs. I’ve gone through dry weeks with no jobs in sight, ate out of dumpsters when I ate at all, got sick and threw up in gas station bathrooms.
So, I can’t really say I do this to survive. I do this because I started. And I’ll do it until it either runs its course or kills me. A plague of violence and uncertainty that I can’t sweat out.
*****
I never went easy on anyone, but, back when I was self-employed, I could leave before I really had to feel anything. I’d park my car, let my body act on its own, then drive back to the real world, full of a vague sense of accomplishment, and the heady rush of getting away with something nobody ever should. It wasn’t the killing I’d gotten away with. It was the feeling like a killer.
Nowadays, working for the doctor, I linger. The whole world seems to stop around us as he does the job and I hold the flashlight, bulbs glinting off someone’s wet insides. I stand tall and still, like a camera on a tripod, recording everything; livers then kidneys then lungs and then hearts. How to unbuild a person Reels and reels of this pile up in my head, crowding everything else.
And, at the end of the day, I still don’t feel like a killer. I feel like something that hangs in the air, watching how everything, for one person at least, ends.
Either way, I barely feel like a person.
At the very least, a killer decides.
*****
One day, pre-dawn, after a particularly dirty job, I panicked, because I was covered in blood, and I didn’t know whose it was. Mine? Theirs? Both?
Both seemed most likely, and, somehow, so much messier. With everything randomly splattered and dried to an amorphous red-brown, I couldn’t tell me from him. My blood, once a part of me, had been devoured, reabsorbed entirely into the whole blood-concept. I’d been pulled out of myself and annihilated.
And I’ve panicked every time since.
I strip naked and throw my clothes on the pile, watch an existential dilemma being devoured, being reabsorbed into the dirty-laundry concept. Then I fill the tub, add a glug of bleach, and soak, imagining the chlorine scrubbing my pores, until every blood-atom is gone and the question renders itself mute.
The water is itchy and harsh-smelling, the summer feeling of pools and fountains. I imagine the chemicals eating through my skin; holes widening in my abdomen, blood spiraling upwards as my guts break free and float. Or I imagine myself corroding like metal, turning green and brittle, breaking apart.
If I stayed long enough, I’d finally be clean. If I stayed long enough, everything that’s been living on my skin since the day I was born would die off and float to the surface.
If I stayed in long enough, I would, at long last, become an entirely self-contained being.
The only problem is, I’ve never found out how long is enough.
*****
I’d been awake for days. I didn’t know what to do.
So I drove to Maria’s place, failed to hold or follow the most basic conversation, and asked if I could maybe take a nap. She offers me the bed, and I stay there for almost a day. I hear her shuffling through her afternoon and evening. I hear her go to work, I hear her come home, I eventually hear her saying she won’t mind sleeping on the couch if I’m still tired. “‘Night ‘night, Spense!”
Or, I barely hear her. I’d spent the whole time lying in a stupor, streaming shitty horror movie after shitty horror movie, drifting from Watch Next to Watch Next, hours and hours of splattering flesh and raw-throated screaming. It doesn’t scare me. It’s actually prettier than what I’m used to. A fantasy. How the other half thinks I live.
And, in the end, the hero is bloody-faced and exhausted and triumphant, pouring sweat and panting into the microphone. The killer, the monster, the madman; they’ve all been put down at last, or are crouching offscreen somewhere, hiding in the woods, waiting to come back better.
No matter how I choose to see myself, I can find an ending that doesn’t hurt. An ending I would gladly live or die with.
This, I have to believe.
Story: Corwin and Friends
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Lilith Faire Aug 20th Second Stage: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sarabareilles/notalone.html)
Characters: Spenser
Colors: Meme party 15 (That Escalated Quickly), Olympic Gold 5 (bronze)
Word Count: 1,100ish
Rating: PG-13, implied R?
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: How it can all go wrong before you even notice. (And what he was thinking about instead.)
Note: This is possibly the most obtuse, blink-and-you-miss-it interpretation of a prompt so far. :P
I can’t make up my shitty little fucking mind anymore.
All day long, I wonder: what if I just stepped off the curb and into traffic? What if the unused brick chimney on that old apartment building comes loose and falls on me? What if I just stand on the edge of this drained concrete swimming pool, let my body ragdoll, and land however I fucking land? What if I casually poured myself a glass of antifreeze, sat down to fuck around on my computer, and absent-mindedly drank the whole thing before I had a chance to rethink it? What if I payed someone fifty bucks to throw a goddamn brick at the back of my head?
Eventually, there gets to be a point where I want to go ahead and do whatever the fuck the thing is. Just to get myself to stop thinking about it. And stop thinking about everything else, for that matter. A thousand and one screeching birds with one fucking sharply-splintered stone. But, by then, the opportunity has always passed. I go on.
I go on, through work-work, and what’s left of my own work. Through life’s endemic background noise of make-work, and the long and empty hours that fill out my days, such as they are, such as they even separate anymore. I go on, until the what-ifs are eventually replaced by a morbid fear of dying in my sleep. Of missing something, of not being the one to choose, of never seeing it coming.
Not that it matters. I couldn’t sleep if my life/death depended on it. When monotony outweighs fear, I chew through whole rows of antihistamine tablets. Every time I open my toolbox, or go looking for something, or put on my shoes, I find empty blister packs and little pieces of paper and foil everywhere.
They don’t help. They only make me see things.
I’ve been seeing things anyway.
“I just, like, do this horrible shit to survive.”
You hear it all the time from assholes like me, with whom, when I stop and think about it, I have absolutely nothing in common. At least, not anymore.
I’ve long since stopped worrying about survival. And I’ve known since the very start that this job was just as likely to kill me as support me. I’ve been punched, stabbed, kicked in the ribs, and have had countless things thrown and swung at me. I chased down someone who refused to pay and totaled my car when I crashed it into theirs. I’ve gone through dry weeks with no jobs in sight, ate out of dumpsters when I ate at all, got sick and threw up in gas station bathrooms.
So, I can’t really say I do this to survive. I do this because I started. And I’ll do it until it either runs its course or kills me. A plague of violence and uncertainty that I can’t sweat out.
I never went easy on anyone, but, back when I was self-employed, I could leave before I really had to feel anything. I’d park my car, let my body act on its own, then drive back to the real world, full of a vague sense of accomplishment, and the heady rush of getting away with something nobody ever should. It wasn’t the killing I’d gotten away with. It was the feeling like a killer.
Nowadays, working for the doctor, I linger. The whole world seems to stop around us as he does the job and I hold the flashlight, bulbs glinting off someone’s wet insides. I stand tall and still, like a camera on a tripod, recording everything; livers then kidneys then lungs and then hearts. How to unbuild a person Reels and reels of this pile up in my head, crowding everything else.
And, at the end of the day, I still don’t feel like a killer. I feel like something that hangs in the air, watching how everything, for one person at least, ends.
Either way, I barely feel like a person.
At the very least, a killer decides.
One day, pre-dawn, after a particularly dirty job, I panicked, because I was covered in blood, and I didn’t know whose it was. Mine? Theirs? Both?
Both seemed most likely, and, somehow, so much messier. With everything randomly splattered and dried to an amorphous red-brown, I couldn’t tell me from him. My blood, once a part of me, had been devoured, reabsorbed entirely into the whole blood-concept. I’d been pulled out of myself and annihilated.
And I’ve panicked every time since.
I strip naked and throw my clothes on the pile, watch an existential dilemma being devoured, being reabsorbed into the dirty-laundry concept. Then I fill the tub, add a glug of bleach, and soak, imagining the chlorine scrubbing my pores, until every blood-atom is gone and the question renders itself mute.
The water is itchy and harsh-smelling, the summer feeling of pools and fountains. I imagine the chemicals eating through my skin; holes widening in my abdomen, blood spiraling upwards as my guts break free and float. Or I imagine myself corroding like metal, turning green and brittle, breaking apart.
If I stayed long enough, I’d finally be clean. If I stayed long enough, everything that’s been living on my skin since the day I was born would die off and float to the surface.
If I stayed in long enough, I would, at long last, become an entirely self-contained being.
The only problem is, I’ve never found out how long is enough.
I’d been awake for days. I didn’t know what to do.
So I drove to Maria’s place, failed to hold or follow the most basic conversation, and asked if I could maybe take a nap. She offers me the bed, and I stay there for almost a day. I hear her shuffling through her afternoon and evening. I hear her go to work, I hear her come home, I eventually hear her saying she won’t mind sleeping on the couch if I’m still tired. “‘Night ‘night, Spense!”
Or, I barely hear her. I’d spent the whole time lying in a stupor, streaming shitty horror movie after shitty horror movie, drifting from Watch Next to Watch Next, hours and hours of splattering flesh and raw-throated screaming. It doesn’t scare me. It’s actually prettier than what I’m used to. A fantasy. How the other half thinks I live.
And, in the end, the hero is bloody-faced and exhausted and triumphant, pouring sweat and panting into the microphone. The killer, the monster, the madman; they’ve all been put down at last, or are crouching offscreen somewhere, hiding in the woods, waiting to come back better.
No matter how I choose to see myself, I can find an ending that doesn’t hurt. An ending I would gladly live or die with.
This, I have to believe.
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