Week 1: Open Topic

[marlawentmad]

Startled, shaky hands shifted the papers back and forth, back and forth. The penmanship coiled and writhed across the page, making my eyes go cross. Throwing the papers down, I folded my arms firmly across my chest and squeezed my eyes shut. Little Rose’s letters came in stacks at the P.O. Box. He was so rarely away, and looking at the foreign words made me slightly nauseous. 

     They would start to keen and twist into my mind for the knowing to bloom. My mouth tasted like blood afterwards. The breath was coming too quickly, and my head swam. I stood up and stomped my feet, flailing my hands. It wasn’t enough, so I began to jump.

    The tears came then, streaming. I could hear them, the water over the rocks, like the day she held her brother's head under the water. Silent and tight-lipped. Her small hands, as delicate as a heron’s, but her eye twice as sharp. Even as she caught her mother’s gaze from up the hill, her focus remained unbroken. Her task undone, she held fast to him until…

     Black stone. Sea shell. Cicada husk. Garlic bulb. 

     I list the things on the windowsill in front of me. I peer out. 

     Oak. Bench. Bird feeder. Clothesline. 

     Tap my fingers together. One, two, three, four. Three times, which usually feels right, but it doesn’t this time, so I repeat it until six times. My breath comes easier and I wonder if the brother was under the earth somewhere, or if it is like a moth’s imaginal cells: Dormant plans for legs, antennae, and wings locked away in secret rooms of the flesh, until they woke up, ravenous and relentlessly gorging on the caterpillar, now a nutrient dense goo. A war inside the chrysalis begins with a feast, the immune cells attacking the transformational cells, until they are exhausted. Then the imaginal cells consume, become, born into something unrecognizable.

     When Little Rose cried about the gelatinous heap of her brother, was it the feast of those imaginal cells dreaming him into something new: longer, sharper, shrewder? 

 

Comments

[humanbeansradio]

Visceral... sharp. Well done.

[gardeningatnight]

The imagery of the imaginal cells was interesting.

[simplyn2deep]

This was unsettling in such an interesting way. I loved how the narrator’s experience of reading Little Rose’s letters isn’t simply intellectual, the words seem to force themselves into her mind until she knows what happened, and the physical reaction makes that knowledge feel almost invasive. Then the sudden shift into naming the objects around her and counting with her fingers gave the scene this desperate sense of trying to anchor herself back in the present.

And that final question, whether Little Rose’s brother might be becoming something “longer, sharper, shrewder”, left me with SO many questions. I have absolutely no idea what is happening yet, but I am thoroughly creeped out and very curious to find out. 😂

[halfshellvenus]

I can't figure out who the "he" in the first paragraph is? Is that someone who would otherwise have kept her from reading the letters?

I liked the focus on ordinary things as a way to pull back from the intensity of the horror over what happened. And the ending... if Little Rose regrets what she did, then yes-- did she think something entirely different and better was going to happen?

[penpusher]

This captures the chaos of a stream of consciousness yet manages a narrative form that is distinct and unique!

[ofearthandstars]

For some reason, this led me to think of vanishing twin syndrome (the drowning at the stream, the metamorphosis of the moth), but I feel the narrator's panic (and perhaps fear?) of Little Rose, who in some way still carries an echo of her brother, whose writing has suddenly bloomed forth in the foreign letters and reminded the narrator of the violence. I'm left wondering what images are real memories, and what may be imagined, and what other powers may explain the narrator's strong need to re-center themselves.

[lapis_lazuli615]

At first I thought this was going to be a Chthulhu story, from the wriggling squiggling writing, but then it went another - just as creepy - direction.

Nicely written.

[bleodswean]

You're still working with WATER / EARTH / BODY imagery, and I absolutely am here for that!!!

[muchtooarrogant]

This has an engaging style, especially since I'm left with the feeling that the narrator has just relived a murder, and yet everything also feels disconnected and unreal. I'm left with so many unanswered questions.

Dan