2010

Revisit Death: Prompt 4 Surrealistic Folk Horror

This prompt is different, if you can figure which part happened to me in real time; I will give away a prompt for free. No way, you’ll be able to figure out the prompt.

It’s a special one for me; one is a partial screenplay I wrote in 2014, parts of the imagery. The other is fiction/non fiction overlapped. This is my first attempt at trying out GIFs. (Won’t show up on mobile).

Thanks M.P. Fitzgerald for telling me where to go.

The writer, Ian Patterson, I have finally had the opportunity to read during the end of my semester. He writes full of visualizations that stop me like a western folk song. Ghosts have highways, his ghosts are alive.

I recommend anything he writes.

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[Photography unknown, distorted by yours truly]
Stream of Consciousness POV, Zero Draft.
Screenplay from memories, lost that thing like a decade ago.

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Bullets control the world. Bullets demand power.

Metal burns the inner linings of my gums, iron gone stale. Towers are coming down. Its spiral layers, artifacts brushed with imagination weaved in and out of my iris. Dust fills on the ledges and corners, strays have found their way into my home. Holes, I thought, I kept on the outside, come in. I wish I could quietly slip away, into anhedonia, into isolation where I feel safe. Walls begin to close in.

Bullet wants a mother. Bullet wants a direction. A reason to kill.

Seppuku Saturday comes around the bend. Nowhere to go. Mouth spreads. It feels phallic. It tastes like chewing on raw peppercorn. When the bite hits, you still hate men who want to control. You’ll close your eyes to smell the sweat on their fingers. Wounded animal dreams cross through us. Summer light inching closer each Spring. Obsession, my body loses the shield of autonomy. Wolves tear themselves apart in packs, and we’re just two people. Machines eat and breathe survival. Machines weep and breathe, unrequited love.

Happy birthday, number 22.

Bullet betrays all sentiment. Bullet is a psychopath. There’s not enough gauze to fill the wounds.

Traded my erasure for some quarters. Trained to kill the Witch. Time feels everlasting when pleasure peaks euphoria. You refuse an audience to witness Bullet’s final act.

Bullets wished he was alive, no one really is. Not even him.

Click. Click. Russian Roulette.

I am a woman, I am the Witch.

Ocean breeze sends ice chips across my face. Body adjusts and becomes armor. My bare feet and toes curl at the edge, unable to achieve vertigo. Sonoma coast, fog thick you can drink the sea water down your throat. Wolves pretend to live in the darkness, but their teeth aren’t sharp like mine. Lost one of my wings, our angels sigh. I’ve forgotten how to fly.

Behind me are bodies, golems of unrequited love touched by addiction. Everyone’s got an artifact. Some are bones, rope, and pens without ink. Admirers live inside various pools that aren’t supposed to exist here. Voices blur the lines when they speak. Admirers have built temples for their fetish. Cult followings live on the surface. Entourages shallow of thought. Aliases scribe joy without suffering.

In my mirror there’s a darkness, depth hidden behind the flesh.

It doesn’t take me long to turn my back to fall. They say before you die, life flashes before your eyes.

I want to try.

Flurries of water push up past my face, as the eyes of lovers begin to fade into a blemish. I pretend they don’t exist. Refuse to remember their hands on my skin. Searching for holy artifacts that never existed. Their masks are tightly knitted on their faces; all they can do is pretend. They don’t want me as much as I am. Pressure of unrealistic expectations is a poison. It dissolves pieces of your brain that’s supposed to be stronger. Weighs you down with anxiety. Pangs of the heart. Paranoid, they fiend for display. It honors the fetish, it strips the woman and gives her whalebones. Shoots right to pleasure, instead of the heart, their mouths and their words they barely connect.

Tongues tread the past, and trapped in heartless ignorance. Protection without growth. Generic. Sold on cold indifference. Slips through the wind, hopes held on time.

All the suicidal attempts are collected like trading cards. I am halfway through a tarot deck.

When trauma sculpts around your life, nothing can get in. Your life force is a bomb. It waits to explode with your blood vessels ruptured on the surface.

I feel the suds touch the back of my head, the screams of the ocean get louder than my own thoughts. I’ll die before I drown.

People I’ve loved with every shade, every color of their eyes live inside of me. Jawlines. Lip texture. Hair colors. All rainbows. Birds want to be held, they don’t want to be destroyed.

It all fades quickly. I no longer fear the darkness.

Bullet is still trying to pull the trigger. I look into his eyes and see swirling pools of black, an abyss of licorice and rot. Medicinal herbs begin to grow up from his neck, they’re bright lights without sound.

He held his hand away from the trigger, palm holding it upright, left my teeth to carry the weight. Attempts to fight the demons that only he can see.

My mouth aches around the barrel. You’ve always imagined Bullets would come after a whiskey and a smoke. His hands scratch at his throat, tear his skin, red beads leave a mark. Bullet’s friends whisper untruths into his ears, it pierces my body with rage. Feed the demon validation without truth. Boys love that, it’s all the rage.

Hands over Bullets skin is cold to touch. A ghost in shells. Not enough to be robotic. Not enough to be real. Fingers on fingers make a prayer.

Bystanders, sit inside the windows of your home holding their breaths. Mouths sewn shut. Bets have been made.

Happy birthday, 22.

Bullet wants to win against me. He demands control, his voice breaks.

His eyes are golden brown.

Climbed from the ocean, to the sand, to the soil of the forest. Not alone. There’s lanterns in a forest floating up to the ceiling of the sky. At the middle of the mountain are strange people dressed in white. Rituals of light.

Stumbling over your dress you see a clearing. Old world spirits dress your body bare. Hands take what is no longer mine. Hands of old hard working people lead me to the stone slab, voiceless. It doesn’t feel menacing to be here. It feels like a memorial. An honorable moment in time.

“I don’t deserve this justice.” I whisper, voice hoarse.

Nobody responds.

I don’t think they’re people. I think they’re spirits that prepare the future.

When they lie me down naked on the cold slab, I don’t feel the shiver. Only that it has a temperature. Something to acknowledge from my former lives.

Spirits have human hands smooth like fresh clay. It blends with firmer objects until its distorted of originality. Highways of thoughts begin to flood my brain. Spirits begin to place beads over my face until they move down my neck. Gems black obsidian. Gold shavings for shape.

A spiral grows right beneath my collar bone. It’s the same one I’ve seen in dreams. There are two wolves inside of me, one grey and one black. They come for every version where they are needed to show me memories I’ve forgotten. When they trot away, I’m expected to follow. I’ll find myself in a redwood grove, a mercurial spiral lives in its open tree body. When I place my hands inside I expect to go somewhere else. Instead whatever lives in the tree goes inside of me. When I feel its strange power come within me, my wolves howl and I am awoken.

The spiral reminds me of my wolves. Will the spirits take them too?

Spirits are preparing for my burial, on an island where no one knows my name. Fate restored every part of my body to be covered in beads. It doesn’t itch like sequins. I close my eyes and the spirits have torches with chains. Expect to burn. When I don’t feel. Clumps of sand hit my body. Stay still. My eyes slowly open, I can hardly see what’s happening through the beads. Too close to the flame. The spirits are heard and watched through the groves of the trees. Red and gold dust floats over my body before it lands. Sulfur and sweetness.

Prepared for my burial, the mania in my head gets louder as I breathe deeply. A spirit locks my head in place. She’s wearing a white mask where I can’t see who she used to be.

“If you close your eyes, it won’t matter. You’ll burn all the same.”

“What’s the purpose?”

“There’s a festival of spirits. It’s the only time you’ll be allowed to walk amongst the living. You’re lucky it came now.”

“I’m ready.”

Spirits with long chains hold up lantern torches, oil reaches my skin, soft grease. Fire starts to scorch my old body, it cleanses me and provides shelter. Into oblivion, they close the door of my former life.

Here, time is endless. Flames reach four feet high. It doesn’t hurt. Its warmth fuses me into the moment where I’m allowed to belong. I taste every morsel of life sucked out of my lips into the flames. I hear it crackle and pop. Incense burns of sandalwood and cedar. This is more clear than I’ve ever felt my whole life.

Beasts of the heart are a useless and troublesome thing. Thief of quota and peace of mind. Rapture takes over my emotions as the body becomes weightless. Covered in blackish oil, the next version is to peel the char above my flesh.

A dead tomb is mercy. It undoes the burden of identity.

After the last piece of char hits the floor, they dress me in a white kimono. My grey wolf finds me and jumps toward my solar plexus, instead of a kitsune mask, his head turns into a white fox. He growls for me to hold him upright.

The city of monks guard the forest from those like us. One black wing pushes out from behind my shoulder.

All along my living life, I’ve felt invisible. I am consumed, I consume with strangers of errant hearts. Nowhere I had to lay my head.

My face feels closer to who I am. More than I’ve ever been. The spirits wait for me to follow them. They’re dressed special to memorialize all who were lost in time.

I’ll be visible. Send my peace for those lost before me.

The spirits mourn.

About the story of the Gun Devil.

Bullet presses the trigger. I taste the gunpowder before the smoke hits my mouth. No one closes their eyes.

My eyes lock with his, Gun Devil drops into my body. Punishment is the contract for being on the other side.

Normal bullets don’t do the same.

A velocity and atrocity I have never felt between worlds. Radiation and its anchor explodes everything within me that was once real, now two worlds lie together meshed and combined. I let it broil my spirit.

In one place I am protected, in another I am prey.

He doesn’t stop staring at my face as strawberry chunks of brain matter splatter the walls of my childhood home.

Happy birthday, 22.

No one turns away, no one stops.
I hear the drums of the other world fill my head in the spirit world.
It calls me back.
I release the gun from my teeth. Head slumped over, slid to the side.
One black wing curled close to my heart.
Bullet makes a contract with the dead. Punishment for all the years that were lost.

We’re the villains in someone else’s story.

Everything was beautiful.
Everything was how it was supposed to be.

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls
Original song for the Silent Film that never happened.