oneword entries 2013

[prismaticbleed]

fatigue

Twilight, deep and heavy as the ocean, collapsed upon the barren land. A lone violet shadow rippled across waves of stone, parched white monuments that had not tasted rain in years.
Tiny pinpoints of blood marked his footprints like dying stars as his eyes desperately swept the heavens for familiar constellations. He found nothing but blue-- terrible, gasping depths of blue, flooding his eyes and lungs with smoke-thick shade.
The only spark of life for miles trudged on through the suffocating night. He imagined the thick clouds cracking open, pouring sweet light and water down upon his dusty face, but the air was silent as a tomb.
Morning would come again, eventually.
Another step. Another. Once more...
The landscape of bone shimmered wet with rubies.

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flailing

2AM. A dying yellow cathode buzzed above my head. The sick light slid down into the grimy bathroom mirror and sputtered backwards to catch in my hair like spiderwebs, painting my skin the color of last week’s obituaries.
I stood perfectly still. The mirror couldn’t see what my hands gripped desperately, shaking and white-knuckled, below the rim of the cracked ceramic sink, and although I would never admit it I was glad to not see it staring back at me.
My heart was flailing like a dying insect. I mentally told it to shut up, to stop making me sicker than I already was, but its frantic throes persisted.
The buzzing light was swallowing even the silence. It felt as if time had keeled over sideways. What was my name again? Did it even matter?
Cold metal shivered between my fingers. I closed my eyes.

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grasped

Reams of paper crashed onto the floor in sun-bleached waves as I struggled to swim through the thoughts that roared around me. A burble of strangled speech reached my ears but I was preoccupied with clutching my sandbar of a pen, praying that I could pull myself to shore. But the tide, the unrelenting tide, swept over my shaking hands and spilled incomprehensibly onto the shore, leaving great black stains that threatened to swallow what little I had left to hold on to.
The pen slipped from my fingers and I dived madly at it, choking on the saltwater that had suddenly slammed into my lungs, when I was suddenly yanked from the waves and tossed onto warm sand. I looked up, dazed, and met eyes like seashells.
“Why must you always overwhelm yourself with work like this?”
I wiped the ink from my shivering hands.
“It’s either that or drown.”

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returned

Seven days have passed since that fateful moment, seven aeon-long days, and my bones still ache with echoes of a lifetime scratched and forgotten.
True, those eternal hours had given me a new life, but they had first ended another, and the truth was that I had planned to die with it. Yet I had been snatched from the tar-blackened fingers of oblivion by aged hands touched with gold, begging me to breathe, to live. I had demanded that he let go, to let me fall into nothingness, but he refused, insisting that I understood neither the repercussions of what I had just wrought, nor the consequences that would splinter from my planned clockwork suicide. He insisted, in a voice painted silver, that I return.
I had sand in my eyes, snow in my hair, blood on my shirt. Time hung ragged and broken before me like a record snapped in two, like a velvet curtain tossed into a fireplace, dripping red notes that pooled around my bruised feet.
But I took his hand, and his smile shone with the promise of a future.

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bagel

“So I just learned that, I’ve got this extended cousin I never knew about, an’ everyone calls him “Bagel.” She laughed, running tiny candlestick fingers through her cotton candy hair, flashing a silver-studded smile. “An’ I said, if his name really is “Bagel,” why the hell haven’t we been introduced yet? Gotta be an interesting guy with a name like that.” She giggled again, like a kid at a birthday party, and shifted her perpetually shoeless legs. “Seriously! Who names their kid after breakfast food?”

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