Vignettes
Vignettes, you say? That’s a concept…
If it’s dark enough, like maybe if you’re out in the country or someplace like the Midwest, the Milky Way will shine like diamonds across the sky and you’ll wish you could shine just as bright.
My mother kisses my cheek and tucks me in but she doesn’t read me a story. Instead, she says, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” I don’t sleep that night. I lay awake in terror, a cold sweat covering my body, because not only do I have to worry about the UFO’s taking me in the night I now have to guard myself from the bed bugs that threaten to eat me alive.
Delight became Delirium because too much of a good thing can, in fact be bad. This is what I’m told.
She cats about like some kind of village strumpet, saying this but doing that, fixed with a myriad of ailments she passes from lover to lover like a honey bee pollinating a flower. God took a shit and she came to be. We would curse her name and disrespect her, but she is not human so we don’t give it a thought.
My skull is filled with mucus and poison and though once there was a brain it now is replaced with decay. The walls are scoured with bleach and disease and the things that rule your nightmares. In the well of rotting liquid and virulent flesh the bad things will come, be born from fear, and in that moment you will know yourself.
At the end of the road at the bottom of the world is the dark cavern that we feared to enter. Our torches illuminated our faces and we could finally see how truly scared we were. The sweat stung our eyes, the cold wind our faces, but we had arrived at our destination. Our packs were full of the things we would need. We had weapons, but we should have had more, and the sky began to howl as we took our first steps into the black unknown.
Marilyn drowned her brother in a tub in the Summer of ‘32. “He was a wicked little cuss,” she would later explain to Judge Edwin, as if her sole opinion would provide any exoneration. She hung for her crime three weeks later. The local rag thought it a fitting end.
I spend more and more time in the pocket dimension that resides behind my eyes. The creatures there dance and sing and play at peculiar games. Colors shift with little regard. There is a garden made of stardust and dreams. The coffee tastes better and the women love greater, in the pocket dimension behind my eyes.
If I’m not writing then I’m not feeling, and right now I’m a black motherfucking hole etched into your core.
