Twilight Sad

I walked till I was tired.

Then I turned around

and walked right back

to a locked door

and a step, calling out my name.

The Light Shall Flicker Out

These are sounds made of the ectoplasmic iterations of a room from long ago, Of tired boots clearing snow off the edge of the mountain, and leaving behind the woes of a weary life.

-

"Sit."

"Don't want to. I've been sitting for the last eight hours. I want a rest."

"That's an awfully odd notion. Staying on your feet to take a break." She took a drag.

"When will you quit?"

"I'm in no rush, my love. Anyway, I smoke maybe thrice a day. I'm not dying any time soon." She flicked the ash out the window.

"I don't care if you die or not. That horrid smell doesn't sit well with me. Not in this house." Harsh words, but sensitivity was rotting in hell. He scraped the icicles off his beard.

"I do beg your pardon, Lord of the Manor, but I-"

"Do NOT patronize me, Laura."

She felt the stale air in the room seethe with his raw unbridled temper. How hard was something as simple as an escape? Having the world at your fingertips inadvertently meant your fingertips are the world, so how could you get away? For the life of her, she could not understand why coming here would make a difference but love was complicity, and she was the ball to his chain.

"Fine. Not while we are here. Now, come, so I may kiss you. And I, for one, do not want to stand."

He looked through her with a muted heat, and she shivered in the cold morning light of the mountains.

"Let me light a fire."

-

They twisted and turned, one way first, then the other. His hot breath soaked her body in sacred sweat, her quiet urging drawing a cloak around his strong shoulders. For just one moment, a single moment that was brilliant, horrifying, ecstatic, resilient, ethereal, their eyes met. The warmth melted her glaciers, and the waves extinguished his flames. Up against the wall, he pushed one last time before they collapsed in a heap. Still tangled in their own limbs, they panted till the embers hid themselves away.

"I want you to kiss me."

Constant Knot

The heart is an organ of trepidation and rage.

We fool ourselves to think love and devotion are its devices. It is far more attractive to falsibly love like a beast than to truthfully seethe as a man.

Oh My

I

Sigh

And say

It's

A

Fine Day.

Light The Lanterns

"I hate the way you smoke."

He exhaled, took a drag, and held it in his lungs. He always saw the smoke as water, rising up a column in laminar flow. If he didn't smoke the way he smoked, he didn't see it, and it didn't feel like smoking.

"Yeah, well. You smoke like a girl."

"....I am a girl."

"....So you are."

He blew out a string of smoke, and felt the wind's fingers push at his hair.

"I like your hair."

"Thank you. I thought you would."

"Hmm."

And so they stood there, staring at each other's feet, listening to the lock stream by, as the sunset turned the water a deeper shade of purple with every passing degree.

Arson

A thousand silences will not scrub you clean.

Toss your husks on for the roast.

When your house burns down to your ankles,

You will find a pail of water,

and think first of your thirst

and cinders will sink to the ocean floor.

This Perpetual Journey

She has a thing for losing things. She also has a thing for jewellery. It follows, of course, that she has a thing for losing jewellery. A nosepin down a drain, or a ring in the sewer, or earrings in the move. Yet she guards heirlooms with her life, holding them deep within the palm of her heart.

She saves them for a stormy night, and a cliff looking over the rocks below. She hopes they will help her find the voices she heard in the autumn, when the nights traded places amongst themselves, and time stretched and turned inside out.

To this day, she looks, but the nosepin, the ring, the earrings, they've all lost shelter in the rains and their mountains in the wind.