Snippets

A quick house keeping note: you might notice some slight changes here. I switched from Substack over to Beehiiv for my newsletter platform. While I liked Substack’s usability ultimately, their continued alignment with alt-right politics was just getting to me, especially in the current political climate. Anyways Beehiiv actually has a lot of cool features too, and they don’t charge me extra to use my domain name that I had already purchased.

If things look wonky, let me know as I’m getting used to a new platform. But onto the real meat of this week’s rambling: short snippets of fiction pieces I’ve been working on.

Heat

I felt the heat. My skin damp with sweat, my throat hoarse and dry, uncomfortably tightening and turning in and over on itself; attempting, in futility, to clear the ash from me. I couldn’t stand. I felt lightheaded and dizzy, and relied on K to carry me the rest of the way to his bedroom, my nervous body leaning tight against his own.

I could feel the flames encircling me: the ring of flickering red and yellow dancing closer and closer, threatening to turn us both into orange cinder and ghost white ash. And I wondered how anyone was expected to survive such a feeling.

K told me to lay down on his bed. He disappeared down into the quiet dark of the house, reemerging with a glass of water and two Tylenol. He urged me to finish both of them and to close my eyes and rest, but, in my state I wanted to writhe and wallow and scream out in a fit of anger. He undressed me and coaxed me to sleep. I did not find it all that odd. We had undressed in front of each other before. He had already seen the folds of my body and compared them to his newly pristine and fit form.

Hush, he whispered, and there was a joking sweetness to his voice; a light I had not noticed before but, which seemed to me, to find this whole thing amusing—too much really.

Snippets

He did this thing when he was younger and still interested in writing. Each time he read he’d underline the passages he liked: sentences or paragraphs he thought were worded well or sharp or felt like what a writer should be. Then he would re write each of those onto a slip of paper: his chicken scratch handwriting barely legible against the light lines of the ruled paper. When he was finally finished he’d rip the piece out and peg it to a cork board or to the wall or just anywhere visible. He liked looking at it, that constellation of scrapped paper: each of the jagged little pieces individually violent but powerful in their combined force. He imagined himself reflected in it, as if he could transfer their knowledge into his body simply through the art of imitation. Like K’s continual reps, this too could build a sort of muscle memory. At least that’s how his theory went. 

Fat

His body was different now: rolling curves and patches of stretch marks replaced the past veneer of thinness. He felt ashamed or confused and worried that L would not recognize his new form. When they were together, for that brief period, L would spend hours laying next to him, lightly caressing the soft thin skin draped over his ribs. He would clinch deep into the small muscle, his fingernails leaving red crescent mementos. J never said anything against fat people, he was prone to sex with all types and sizes. Still, he never stayed with someone bigger than himself, a fact, Chris thought, stemmed from his own fears of vulnerability. 

He supposed it didn’t matter. The point was not reunion but reconciliation anyways. There would be no change of L seeing him in an unclothed state. But the image still festered, sending beads of worried sweat across his forehead. He could imagine himself standing naked in front of L’s bed, his sagging body on full display. Would he welcome its embrace? Retrace the familiar grooves and plant kisses on the unchanged skin? Or would he reject the notion completely, finding all of it too foreign to be enticing. 

Rain

The man was hoping to catch a glimpse of the theater before the sun went down, but the trip there was not as simple as it had once been. What took minutes in the dry times now unfurled over hours. When he arrived the darkness was already germinating in the distance and his arms were sore and shaky and covered in deep red marks from the rowing. There was something he was forgetting—something buried deep inside of him he had hoped to release. But, with the exhaustion, he could not remember it. It rippled through him, dancing on the edge of his memory before returning his mind to a sheer stillness. The theater was still intact, good. The man relished the idea that a single thing could still remain, unsoiled by the rain.

Truthfully few places or things were still the same. The bright stone and warm wood of the dry times had all been replaced with sopping sorrow. The lights no longer worked—save a single flickering bulb way up high near the top of the marquee. The man was annoyed; he could feel the disease stir inside of him as he looked at the light, watching as it blinked unevenly into the night. He remembered the warm comforting neon that used to fill the sign, how it tossed its beams across his face, distorting the shadows beneath his feet. He had come here often, long ago, with someone and then another. He had been here before, with him before things had gone so wrong. But things were always going wrong and this no longer bothered him. There was comfort in the routine of decay: how all things followed the same process; how love could be compacted and distilled, dissolved and destroyed and how there would always be great lakes of space in between one’s loves.

In between these loves he filled the oceans of green emptiness with something normal and lasting: the ritual of daily dying. Handfuls of pills, coughing, scratching at the skin, and long hours spent writhing in white-capping misery which smashed his lips and left them cracked, salty, and ravenous. Now, he was certain he had long ago reached his last land, and obliviously he had forgotten to take notice of it’s sturdy grace. Here, rocking in the boat, he thought of the rough mountains of J’s shoulders, the valleys of his thighs, the pasture and hills of his torso and hips which spread and bent for comfort into the soft caverns of his own. He had lived always about to die, certain of his own demise and unwavering in his understanding that all things that would follow had followed before. And now? Well not, it was not so clear.