✧ reine's art n writing n stuff ✧

Pedal to the metal

Lead foot through the floor

A three-count,

held breath,

then a desperate roar

as the car

lurches forward,

uphill,

kicked horse.

A new hill looms

Lead foot, count to four

A long pause.

The car cries

and groans some more,

and gives a shudder,

right before

it dies

and veers off course.

A steady climb,

then downward glide.

It was only

a matter of time,

but it was

It's like a waterfall far underground

Your feet feel the roar

Your ears hear no sound.

Words crashing, tumbling, pouring

They flow deeper and deeper,

rather than out of our mouths.

I thought my eyes

might know

the words I sought.

All in vain,

for they did not--

and were dry,

miserably so,

when at last

I stood to go.

Now, here we are.

World firm at our feet

despite the faint tremor

from the current beneath.

Who has the words?

Not they.

Not I.

So we say:

"See ya later!"

when we know

Stephen stared at the grave and tried to imagine what exactly he was supposed to do.

OPHELIA JANE OBREMSKI

8.27.2004 - 4.16.2022

FLY FREE, SOPHIE.

WE LOVE YOU❤️

They'd actually had a little heart emoji carved into the stone and painted red. He'd never seen that before, an emoji on a gravestone.

It felt tacky.

This was wrong, all of it. They hadn't even gotten the type of stone right. It was dark and obsidian-like, heavy and grim as a raincloud.

Her favorite stone had always been amethyst. It was cheap, she had told him, easy to find in huge chunks, and hard enough to stand the test of time. If the unthinkable happened, she'd said, then they should have no problem making a piece of it into a headstone.

Oh, and she'd wanted a QR code too. She wasn't sure what she wanted it to lead to-- maybe a photo album of her doing stupid shit, or some funny cat video, or maybe even Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. The important thing to Sophie had been that her imaginary grave would be the first one in history to be not-depressing.

FLY FREE, SOPHIE.

WE LOVE YOU❤️

He felt something inside him give a little shudder, like a dam about to break.

An uncertain hand squeezed his shoulder-- Bromley's. When he spoke, it was alarmingly gentle. "I can't imagine."

Stephen thought back to the church pews earlier. The couple in front of them-- the man on the left had done and said the very same thing. He wanted to tell Bromley that he didn't need to force himself to act like that too. But at the moment the weight of Bromley's hand felt like it was the only thing anchoring him to anything at all. He felt frozen. He couldn't think.

Her family had texted him, after it happened. He'd never read any of it. It struck him then that one of those messages easily could have been about Sophie's grave. He could check right now. His phone, currently in his pocket, felt heavy as a stone.

Lyrics floated aimlessly through the vast tracts of emptiness in his brain.

Never gonna give you up.

Never gonna let you down.

Never gonna run around and desert you!

He shrugged Bromley's hand off his shoulder and turned away, uncomfortable. Stephen knew that your best friend's grave was one of the few places it was normal to cry. It was a cemetery; that was sort of the whole point. But, he could feel Bromley's eyes on him, curious and unsure.

the world washed away;

so the young fish of the ocean

swam up to the shallows

to shoal in

green hills, carefree,

while time passed.

The floods went;

the sunshine lent

a grisly sparkle to the grass.

The fish— forgetful things—

knew only the hills

where they died,

Tile.

Soap bar.

Thunder of rain.

I think I ought

to do that.

Pour myself,

liquid,

right down the drain.

I think maybe it's nice

down there in the pipes.

Probably quiet.

Or at least for a while,

anyway--

I guess for only

as long as the rainwater

runs beyond reach of the waves.

I think.

I think

A question!

One about me!

I put words in a line,

cobble a reply;

find little attention paid.

There are piles in my mind

and I confess I wasn't ready

to sort them into boxes

with sticker-titles

neat and tidy,

She looked young.

Had it really been so long? It was unclear how time worked here, but Sophie looked noticeably younger than him. They were no longer the same age, he realized. A heaviness began to gather in his chest. He wasn’t 17 anymore. It had been three years— more than three years. He was about to turn 21 and Sophie was still 17. 

It hadn’t been a nightmare. None of it. Everything that had happened, had happened. He was about to turn 21 and Sophie stood before him, alive and ostensibly still 17 years old. 

————————————————————

He looked old. 

How many years had it been? She hadn’t the vaguest idea. 

At any rate, they hadn’t been kind to him. Stephen had always been a twig of a boy, but now he was gaunt, sort of hollow-looking, in a way he’d never been before. His eyes receded back into their sockets and she could easily trace their baggy outline all the way around. He was still short (the same height as her), but he had stubble now, and lines on his face too, faint hairlines on each side of his mouth. They weren’t actual wrinkles, not yet. But they probably would be soon. 

Was this because of her? 

Had she really held the kind of significance to him that all this damage implied? 

Surely not. He looked like a bum now. A starving bum. Something else must have happened.

She took a step closer, reaching out— he inhaled sharply— but she didn’t quite…dare…to touch him. He really looked weak, physically. Every part of his face drooped a little bit, like it just didn’t have the energy to hold itself up anymore. She could relate to that. 

As a rule, Sophie hated giving hugs, and receiving them also. She felt strangely compelled to make an exception here. His clothing hung off his narrow frame, looser than ever; the sleeves of his ratty old hoodie looked like they were eating his hands alive. He looked ill, or like a skeleton. An ill skeleton. 

If she hugged him, would it just feel like bones? The possibility scared her. 

But then, would she feel anything at all? He might not even be real. She might have finally lost it completely. It didn’t make any sense that he was there. How could the real Stephen be there? 

Had he died, too? 

He must have. 

Pity gnawed at her insides. Shame, too, for what she had done to him, joined by other ugly feelings she didn’t care to name. She drew back her hand. As she did so Stephen’s gaze burned with an emotion, or emotions, that she could never hope to identify. 

So this was what love did to a person. 

She was glad she had never let herself love someone like that. She looked at him again, really looked at him. Sagging clothes, hollow cheeks, bleary eyes. He seemed totally broken. Like— like a vase that someone tried to mend with Elmer’s glue. There wasn’t much of anything at all holding all those sharp little pieces in their original shape. The lightest touch would shatter it for good.

Tell me, did you take any notes?  Would you be willing to share? There’s this class I must take and must pass,  for my degree.  I want to prepare. 

Could I borrow them—?  You’ve left them every-which-where. 

Things you have and have  no use for: The teenaged poetry, half-inked journal and letters in your drawer; napkin lyrics, unsung, messy scrawl; to-do lists undone  and scattered among  sun-faded photographs and those shitty paintings  leaned on your wall.  

What grade they gave  you I do not know. It doesn't matter.  The effort shows. 

May I borrow your notes?  Are you willing to share? I’ll take— take good care of them,  as you would were you there. 

One day Narcissus comes upon a pool of water in a cave which no animal has ever approached. (Unbeknownst to him, this is where heartbroken Echo wasted away.) 

Narcissus is parched from the heat of the day and prostrates himself to drink when a face without edges reveals itself before him. The darkness of the cave has rendered it monstrous and it is crossed by gashes of distortion at Narcissus’ breath and touch, so he does not recognize that the face wears his own features. 

Instead, in the familiar face Narcissus sees an old friend, or lover perhaps, gazing up at him— someone he cares for, or cared for, very much, though his memory quails at any attempts to interrogate it. 

Narcissus, despairingly, cries out: "What is this? Why can I not remember you?" 

At the sound of his voice, a disembodied revenant wakes from its slumber. It remembers nothing of besotted Echo but it knows that Narcissus must be made happy. 

And in response to Narcissus the cave resonates with a bouquet of vocal flotsam gathered through Echo's witness to mortal lives. In fragmented tones it speaks of things it does not remember and places it does not know, informed by the experiences of lives it has never lived. It speaks words more pleasing than any other and they are meant for Narcissus’ ears alone.  

Narcissus is entranced. That voice! (He does not realize some of the garbled words are his own!) 

A bighorn-sheep, freedom, and a stone wall between—

Above the sky arches up, down, and into

that great grassy green,

a world flush with life, and meaningful things.

There stands the wall, small, unremarkable,

and the ram:

too brain-damaged now

to notice how

the wall is harder

I made something.

When it ended,

you cried.

Thank you

for letting my

weird little something

Something about a candle burning down  to a stump, and then to nothing at all, there remaining only  a wisp of brown smoke— but someone nearby  was a little bit warmer for a little bit of time.

Something about a star burning fast bright and all too soon into  a drifting cloud of ash.   But, look carefully now: You will see new stars flicker and warm the world in the path  of the first one's wake. 

Is the candle-puddle happy?  Would the star smile at its own death's glow?

Her universe is 14 inches square with a lift-away sky. This does not frighten her, for when the sky goes away the world is then occupied by the Hand which descends. She loves the Hand. It feeds her, as it does all the rats, and this is of course a great good— but to her the Hand is especially kind. Sometimes, it caresses her fur. It is a joyful thing to have your fur caressed by the Hand. A universe that is 14 inches square with a lift-away sky is generally not a very good one at all until the Hand descends to comfort you and love you and remind you that everything will be all right.

Sometimes the Hand brings with it bright lights and a narrow platform and before it bestows its love it places these things around and beneath the rat, so that she cannot see and cannot retreat. Then it descends.

The Hand!— she loves the Hand. It feeds her; it caresses her fur. And who else would? Her universe is 14 inches square with a lift-away sky.

People in chairs survey the cards they have been dealt for as far as the eye can see, and as the distance goes on the people at the table become mere shadows in the gloom, flickering like a mirage, set ghostlike against a backdrop of increasingly dark black, until the most distant are completely consumed, and vanish in it.

When you arrive, a place has already been prepared for you. A hand of cards lies face down on the table.

Further down the line you see another pull up a chair. Those to either side turn and make delighted noises. There are high fives and back pats all around. It seems this other newcomer has friends here already.

It is a very large table. Surely there must be someone here that you know.

Alas…! No one responds to your searching gaze. It is the cards they hold that receive the laser-point sharpness of their desperate focus.

The newcomer’s neighbors speak with him in hushed tones. He spreads his cards in his hands. There are a lot of them. Is that good? One of the neighbors, leaning in, points at a card as a tinge of excitement momentarily raises the tempo of their whisper. They point at another, and whisper again. The newcomer’s shoulders drop with relief. He begins to examine his cards one-by-one now, with a new intensity. The game begins.

You have many cards as well. Though, it seems that most do, when you glance ‘round the table.

You gather them and hold them close.

Is this a competitive game?

You finally glance down at your cards, and find you cannot understand them.

Is it a disadvantage to reveal them to others? To ask for aid?

The other newcomer seems to be doing something strange now: Some of his cards lie face down on the table; others, face up; two seem to be tucked behind his right ear, and one between his teeth, but still most remain in his hands. They are arranged with some between the fifth and fourth fingers of his left hand and the others between the third and second. His right hand is preoccupied with placing a third card atop two others in a precarious tower as a neighbor to his right offers periodic whispers of encouragement.

No one else is building a tower. In fact, it seems that no one is doing any of the same things as anyone else. To your left, a woman nods and slides a card across the table. The woman on the other side nods back, then wordlessly consumes it.

You ask your neighbors to the left and right: what on earth are the rules here — what is the point of the game? And what do the cards even mean?

The answers they each provide to the first two questions are wildly different. To the third their paradoxical responses are identical: The cards mean everything. The cards mean nothing.

The cards mean everything. The cards mean nothing.

There are sudden claps and cheers, and through the gloom you can see that the newcomer has just discarded his old chair for a plush-looking new one, which he lowers himself into amidst the joyful applause of his neighbors to his left and to his right.

There is an empty space at the table near you, face-down cards and all, and suddenly there is a newcomer there. They sit, and, with a furtive look, slide their cards from the table to analyze them covertly in their lap. Then: Their chair leaps back, back into the darkness, as if pulled by an unseen rope, and it vanishes, occupant and all, as does a fumbled stone into the depths of the ocean.

New cards appear on the tabletop; the chair, now empty, glides back into place.

As a kid, Sophie never fit in, at all.

Eventually she decided she was okay with becoming someone else if it meant the other girls at her table would include her.

She wanted to be fun. Quirky. Loud. Opinionated, but funny. Loved.

And when she started 4th grade, she bleached her hair and discovered that if she pretended hard enough, she could be all of those things.