Burbles 'n Words

We run out of things to tell each other. We share second and even third-tier stories we'd never bother other people with. Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.

"[She] had a vision of the two of them stuck inside the tunnel, a bloated, veiny penis with googly eyes rising from the water."

Bad guys don't just die by themselves, I mean. Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in scream, her eyes white hot...

That is why we distance ourselves. That's why we make jokes. We don't do it because it's fun— we do it so we can get by... and sometimes because it's fun. But mostly it's the getting by thing.

In violence we are torn away from each other, and this world into the next... ... but BECOMING is always an agony.

And when she laughed, low like a note in a cello's long throat, it was as if she had been the one to teach the world the sound.

No artistry to the swoop of his arm but a knife is a knife is a knife is a sharp edge meant to split the seams of the skin, open up the torso and let in the light. I bayed like a wolf under the lunatic moon as blood gushed free.

I see her sometimes. Or at least, I think I do. Reflected in the windows, her face as wan as mine. But it is always my reflection, the eyes smudged of definition, the mouth blotted in shadow so it looks like there's nothing but blackened teeth.

'It's like noshing on the actual anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they'd got away with it,' [they] said. 'THAT heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze'...